Krispos the Emperor Read online

  "Phos have mercy," Krispos exclaimed, eyeing the big casserole dish with something far beyond mere respect. "Should we eat of it or worship it?" After Barsymes served Iakovitzes and him, he had his answer. "Both!" he said with his mouth full.

  The feast had stretched far into the night; every so often, Barsymes fed charcoal to a brazier that kept the dining chamber tolerably warm. Iakovitzes held up his tablet. "I hope you have a wheelbarrow in which to roll me home, for I'm certain I can't walk."

  "Something shall be arranged, I am certain," the vestiarios said. "Dessert will be coming shortly. I trust you will do it justice?"

  Iakovitzes and Krispos both groaned. The Avtokrator said, "We'll deal with it or burst trying. I'd say it's about even money which." He'd taken an army into battle many times with better odds than those.

  But the sweet scent of the steam gently rising from the pan Barsymes brought in revived his interest. "Here we have grated apricots cooked in milk until tender, then covered in honey and lightly dusted with ground cinnamon." The vestiarios bowed to Iakovitzes. "Eminent sir, the cooks apologize for their failure to include seafood in this one dish."

  "Tell them I forgive their lapse," Iakovitzes wrote. "I've not yet decided whether to sprout fins or tentacles from tonight's fete."

  The apricots tasted as good as they smelled. Krispos nonetheless ate them very slowly, being full far past repletion. He was only halfway through his portion when Barsymes hurried into the dining chamber. The Emperor raised an eyebrow; such a lapse was unlike the eunuch.

  Barsymes said, "Forgive me, your Majesty, but the mage Zaidas would have speech with you. It is, I gather, a matter of some urgency."

  "Maybe he's here to tell me Digenis dropped dead at last," Krispos said hopefully. "Fetch him in, esteemed sir. If he'd come sooner, he could have helped the two of us commit gluttony here, not that we haven't managed well enough on our own."

  When Zaidas came to the doorway, he started to prostrate himself. Krispos waved for him not to bother. Nodding his thanks, the wizard greeted Iakovitzes, whom he knew well. "Good to have you back with us, eminent sir. You've been away too long."

  "It certainly seemed too bloody long," Iakovitzes wrote.

  Barsymes carried in a chair for the mage. "Help yourself to apricots," Krispos said. "But first tell me what brings you here so late. It must be getting close to the sixth hour of the night. Has Digenis finally gone to the ice?"

  To his surprise, Zaidas answered, "No, your Majesty, or not that I know of. It has rather to do with your son Phostis."

  "You found a way to make Digenis talk?" Krispos demanded eagerly.

  "Not that either, your Majesty," the mage said. "As you know, till now I've had no success even learning the possible source of the magic that conceals the young Majesty from my search. This has not been from want of effort or diligence, I assure you. Till now, I would have described the trouble as want of skill."

  "Till now?" Krispos prompted.

  "As you know, your Majesty, my wife Aulissa is a very determined lady." Zaidas gave a small, self-deprecating chuckle. "She has, in fact, determination to spare for herself and me both."

  Iakovitzes reached for the stylus, but forbore. Krispos admired Aulissa's beauty and her strength of purpose while remaining content she was his mage's wife, not his own. The two of them had been happy together for many years, though. Now Krispos just said, "Go on, pray."

  "Yes, your Majesty. In any case, Aulissa, seeing my discontent at failing to penetrate the shield the Thanasiot sorcerers have thrown up to disguise Phostis' whereabouts, suggested I test that screen at odd times and in odd ways, in the hope of ascertaining its nature while it might be weakest. Having no more likely profitable notions of my own, I fell in with her plan, and this evening I saw it crowned with success."

  "There's good news indeed," Krispos said. "I'm in your debt, and in Aulissa's. Tell her when you go home that I'll show I'm grateful with more than words. But for now, by the good god, tell me what you know before I get up and tear it from you."

  Iakovitzes let out his gobbling laugh. "It's an idle threat, sorcerous sir," he wrote. "Neither Krispos nor I could rise for anything right now, in any sense of the word."

  Zaidas' smile was nervous. "You must understand, your Majesty, I've not broken the screen, merely peeked behind one lifted corner of it, if I may use ordinary words to describe sorcerous operations. But this I can tell you with some confidence: the magic behind the screen is of the school inspired by the Prophets Four."

  "Is it?" Krispos said. Iakovitzes' eyebrows were eloquent of surprise. The Avtokrator added, "So the wind blows from that quarter, does it? It's not what I expected. I'll say that. Knowing how the screen was made, can you now pierce it?"

  "That remains to be seen," Zaidas said, "but I can essay such piercing with more hope than previously was mine."

  "Good for you!" Krispos lifted the latest wine jar from its bed of snow. It was distressingly light. "Barsymes!" he called. "I'd intended to make an end of things here, but I find we need more wine after all. Fetch us another, and a cup for Zaidas and one for yourself. Tonight the news is good."

  "I shall attend to it directly, your Majesty," Barsymes said, and he did.

  Occasional sleet rode the wind outside the little stone house with the thatched roof. Inside, a small fire burned on the hearth, but the chill remained. Phostis chafed his hands one against the other to keep feeling in them.

  The priest who had presided over the Midwinter's Day liturgy at the main temple in Etchmiadzin bowed to the middle-age couple who sat side by side at the table where they'd no doubt eaten together for many years. On the table rested a small loaf of black bread and two cups of wine.

  "We are met here today with Laonikos and Siderina to celebrate their last meal, their last partaking of the gross substance of the world and their commencement of a new journey on Phos' gleaming path," the priest proclaimed.

  Along with Phostis, Olyvria, and Syagrios. the little house was crowded with friends and relatives; the couple's son and daughter and two of Laonikos' brothers were easy to pick out by looks. Everyone, including Laonikos and Siderina, seemed happy and proud of what was about to happen. Phostis looked happy himself, but he'd learned in the palaces how to assume an expression at will. In fact, he didn't know what to think. The man and woman at that table were obviously of sound mind and as obviously eager to begin with what they thought of as the last step of their earthly existence and their first steps toward heaven. How should I feel about that. Phostis wondered, when it's not a choice I'd ever make for myself?

  "Let us pray." the priest said. Phostis bent his head, sketched the sun-circle over his heart. Everyone recited Phos' creed. As he had at Etchmiadzin's temple, Phostis found the creed more moving, more sincere, here than he ever had in the High Temple. These people meant their prayers.

  They put fervor into a round of Thanasiot hymns, too. Phostis did not know those as well as the rest of the folk gathered here; he kept stumbling over the words and then coming in again a line and a half later. The hymns had different tunes—some borrowed from the orthodox liturgy—but the same message: that loving the good god was all-important, that the next world meant more than this one, and that every earthly pleasure was from Skotos and to be shunned.

  The priest turned to Laonikos and Siderina and asked, "Are you now prepared to abandon the wickedness in this world, the dark god's vessel, and to seek the light in the realm beyond the sun?"

  They looked at each other, then touched hands. It was a loving gesture, but in no way a sensual one: with it they affirmed that what they did, they did together. Without hesitation, they said, "We are." Phostis could not have told which of them spoke first.

  "It's so beautiful," Olyvria whispered, and Phostis had to nod. Dropping her voice still further, so only he heard, she added. "And so frightening." He nodded again.

  "Take up the knife," the priest said. "Divide the bread and eat it. Take the wine and drink. Never again shall the
stuff of Skotos pass your lips. Soon the bodies that are themselves sinful shall be no more and pass away; soon your souls shall know the true joy of union with the lord with the great and good mind."

  Laonikos was a sturdy man with a proud hooked nose and distinctive eyebrows, tufted and bushy. Siderina might have been pretty as a girl; her face was still sweet and strong. Soon, Phostis thought, they'll both look like Strabon. The idea horrified him. It didn't seem to bother Laonikos and Siderina at all.

  Laonikos cut the little loaf in half and gave one piece to his wife. The other he kept himself. He ate it in three or four bites, then tilted back the wine cup until the last drop was gone. His smile lit up the house. "It's done," he said proudly. "Phos be praised."

  "Phos be praised," everyone echoed. "May the gleaming path lead you to him!"

  Siderina finished her final meal a few seconds after Laonikos. She dabbed at her lips with a linen napkin. Her eyes sparkled. "Now I shan't have to fret about what to cook for supper any more," she said. Her voice was gay and eager; she looked forward to the world to come. Her family laughed with her. Even Phostis found himself smiling, for her manifest happiness communicated itself to him no matter how much trouble he had sharing it.

  The couple's son took the plate, knife, and wine cups. "The good god willing, these will inspire us to join you soon," he said.

  "I hope they do," Laonikos said. He got up from the table and hugged the young man. In a moment, the whole family was embracing.

  "We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind—" the priest began. Everyone joined him in prayer once more.

  Phostis thought the blue-robe had intruded himself on the family's celebration. He thought his own presence an intrusion, too. Turning to Olyvria, he whispered, "We really ought to go."

  "Yes, I suppose you're right," she murmured back.

  "Phos bless you, friends, and may we see you along his gleaming path," Laonikos called to them as they made their way out the door. Phostis put up his hood and pulled his cloak tight around him to shield against the storm.

  "Well," Olyvria said when they'd gone a few yards down the street, "what did you think of that?"

  "Very much what you did," Phostis answered. "Terrifying and beautiful at the same time."

  "Huh!" Syagrios said. "Where's the beauty in turning into a bag of bones?" It was the same thought Phostis had worried at before, if more pungently put.

  Olyvria let out an indignant sniff. Before she could speak, Phostis said, "Seeing faith so fully realized is beautiful, even for someone like me. My own faith, I fear, is not so deep. I cling to life on earth, which is why seeing someone choose to leave it frightens me."

  "We'll all leave it sooner or later, so why choose to hurry?" Syagrios said.

  "For a proper Thanasiot," Olyvria said, emphasizing proper, "the world is corrupt from its creation, and to be shunned and abandoned as soon as possible."

  Syagrios remained unmoved. "Somebody has to take care of all the bloody sods leavin' the world, or else they'll leave it faster'n they have in mind, thanks to his old man's soldiers." He jerked a thumb at Phostis. "So I'm not a sheep. I'm a sheepdog. You don't have sheepdogs, my lady, wolves get fat."

  The argument was ugly but potent. Olyvria bit her lip and looked to Phostis. He felt he was called to save her from some dreadful fate, even though she and Syagrios were in truth on the same side. He flung the best rhetorical brickbat he could find: "Saving others from sin doesn't excuse sins of your own."

  "Boy, you can talk about sin when you find out what it is," Syagrios said scornfully. "You're as milkfed now as when you came out from between your mother's legs. And how do you think you got in there to come out, eh, if there'd been no heavy breathing awhile before?"

  Phostis had thought about that, as uneasily as most people when making similar contemplations. He started to shoot back that his parents had been honestly married when he was conceived, but he wasn't even sure of that. And rumor in the palace quarter said—whispered, when he was suspected of being in earshot—Krispos and Dara had been lovers while the previous Avtokrator—and Dara's previous husband—Anthimos still held the throne. Glaring at Syagrios wasn't the response Phostis would have liked to make, but seemed the best one available.

  As wet will not stick to a duck's oiled feather, so glares slid off Syagrios. He threw back his head and laughed raucously at Phostis' discomfiture. Then he spun on his heel and swaggered away through the slush, as if to say Phostis wouldn't know what to do with a chance to sin if one fell into his lap.

  "Cursed ruffian," Phostis growled—but softly, so Syagrios would not hear. "By the good god, he knows enough of sin to spend eternity in the ice; the gleaming path should be ashamed to call him its own."

  "He's not a Thanasiot, not really, though he'll quarrel over the workings of the faith like any Videssian." Olyvria's voice was troubled, as if she did not care for the admission she was about to make. "He's much more a creature of my father's."

  "Why does that not surprise me?" Phostis freighted the words with as much irony as they would bear. Only after they had passed his lips did he wish he'd held them in. Railing at Livanios would not help him with Olyvria

  She sounded defensive as she answered, "Surely Krispos' also has men to do his bidding, no matter what it may be."

  "Oh, he does," Phostis said. "But he doesn't wrap himself in piety while he's about it." In some surprise, he listened to himself defending his father. This wasn't the first time he'd had good things to say about Krispos since he'd ended up in Etchmiadzin. He hadn't had many when he was back in the imperial capital under Krispos' eye—and his thumb.

  Olyvria said, "My father seeks to liberate Videssos so the gleaming path may become a reality for everyone. Do you deny it's a worthy goal?"

  He seeks power, like any other ambitious man, Phostis thought. Before he could say it aloud, he started to laugh. Olyvria's eyes raked him. "I wasn't laughing at you," he assured her quickly. "It's just that we sound like a couple of little squabbling children: 'My father can do this.' 'Well, my father can do that.'"

  "Oh." She smiled back, her good humor restored. "So we do. What would you rather talk about than what our fathers can do?"

  The challenging way she threw the question at him reminded him of the first time he'd seen her, in the tunnel under Videssos the city. If he was to become a proper Thanasiot, as Olyvria had put it in her argument with Syagrios, he ought to have forgotten that, or at most remembered it as a test he'd passed. But he'd discovered before he ever heard of Thanasios that he did not have a temper approaching the monastic. He did not remember just the test; he remembered her.

  And so he did not answer in words. Instead, he reached out and slipped an arm around her waist. If she'd pulled back, he was ready to apologize profusely. He was even ready to produce a convincing stammer. But she didn't pull back. Instead, she let him draw her to him.

  In Videssos the city, they would have been nothing out of the ordinary: a young man and a young woman happy with each other and not paying much attention to anything else. Even in Etchmiadzin, a few people on the street smiled as they walked by. Others, though, glowered in pious indignation at such a public display of affection. Crabs, he thought.

  After a few steps, though, Olyvria pulled away. He thought she'd seen the disapproving faces, too. But she said, "Strolling with you like this is very pleasant, but I can't feel happy about pleasure, if you know what I mean, just after we've come away from the celebration of the Last Meal."

  "Oh. That." As it has a way of doing, the wider world intruded itself on Phostis' thoughts. He remembered the joy Laonikos and Siderina had shown when they swallowed the last wine and bread they would taste on earth. "It's still hard to imagine that impinging on me. Like Syagrios, if in lesser measure, I fear I'm a creature of this world."

  "In lesser measure," Olyvria agreed. "Well, so am I, if the truth be told. Maybe when I'm older the world will repel me enough to make me want to leave it, but for now, even if ever
ything Thanasios says about it is true, I can't force my flesh to turn altogether away from it."

  "Nor I," Phostis said. The fleshly world intruded again, in a different way this time: He stepped up to Olyvria and kissed her. Her lips were for a moment still and startled under his; he was a little startled himself, because he hadn't planned to do it. But then her arms enfolded him as his did her. Her tongue touched his, just for a couple of heartbeats.

  At that, they broke apart from each other, so fast Phostis couldn't tell which of them drew back first. "Why did you do that?" Olyvria asked in a voice that was all breath.

  "Why? Because—" Phostis stopped. He didn't know why, not in the way he knew how mulberries tasted or where in Videssos the city the High Temple stood. He tried again: "Because—" Another stumble. Once more: "Because of all the folk in Etchmiadzin, you're the only one who's shown me any true kindness." That was indeed part of the truth. The rest Phostis did not care to examine quite so closely; it was as filled with carnality as the upper part of his mind was with the notion that carnality and sinfulness were one and the same.

  Olyvria considered what he'd said. Slowly she nodded. "Kindness is a virtue that moves you forward on the gleaming path, a reaching out from one soul to another," she said. But her eyes slipped away from his as she spoke. He watched her lips. They seemed slightly softer, slightly fuller than they had before his touched them. He wondered if she, too, was having trouble reconciling what she believed with what she felt.

  They walked on aimlessly for a while, not touching, both of them thoughtful. Then, over a low rooftop, Phostis saw the bulk of the fortress. "We'd better get back," he said. Olyvria nodded, as if relieved to have a definite goal for her feet.

  As if he were a conjured demon, Syagrios popped out of a wineshop not far outside the fortress' walls. He might have started shirking his watchdog duties, but he didn't want Livanios finding out about that. The ruffian glanced mockingly at the two of them. "Well, have you settled all the doings of the lord with the great and good mind?"