Harry Turtledove - Krispos Rising

"No, and I can't fling you into a horse for your foolish jokes, either, however much I wish I could," Krispos answered. "Was making that one the only reason you came? If it was, you've done your damage, so good-bye."

"Harumph." Mavros drew himself up, a caricature of offended dignity. "Just for that, I will go, and keep my news to myself." He made as if to leave.

Krispos and several stable hands quickly called him back. "What news?" Krispos said. Even here in Videssos the city, at the Empire of Videssos' heart, news came slowly in winter and was always welcome. Everyone who'd heard Mavros hurried over to find out what he'd dug up.

"For one thing," he said, pleased at the size of his audience, "that band of Haloga mercenaries under Harvas Black-Robe—remember, Krispos, we heard about them last winter back in Opsikion?—has plundered its way straight across Thatagush and out onto the Pardrayan steppe."

"It'll plunder its way right on back, then," Stotzas predicted. "The steppe nomads don't have much worth stealing."

"Who cares what happens in Thatagush, anyway?" someone else said. "It's too far away to matter to anybody." Several other people spoke up in agreement. Though he did not argue out loud, Krispos shook his head. Having known only his own village for so long, he found he wanted to learn everything he could about the wider world.

"My other bit of gossip you already know, Krispos, if you were at his Majesty's feast the night before last," Mavros said.

Krispos shook his head again, this time more emphatically. "No, I missed that one. Every so often, I feel the need to sleep."

"You'll never succeed till you learn to rise above such weaknesses," Mavros said with an airy wave of his hand. "Well, this also has to do with a Haloga, or rather with a Halogaina."

"A Haloga woman?" Two or three stable hands said it together, sudden keen interest in their voices. The big blond northerners often came to Videssos to trade or to hire on as mercenaries, but they left their wives and daughters behind.

Krispos tried to imagine what a Halogaina would look like. "Tell me more," he said. Again, his was not the only voice.

"Eyes the color of a summer sky, I heard, and the palest pink tips, and her hair gilded above and below," Mavros said. It would be, wouldn't it? Krispos thought; that hadn't occurred to him. The stable hands murmured, each painting his own picture in his mind. Mavros went on, "You could hardly blame Anthimos for trying her on then and there." The murmurs got louder. "I wouldn't blame him for keeping her for a week or a month or a year or—" Onorios was all but panting. He must have liked the picture his mind painted. But Krispos and Mavros said "No" at the same time. They glanced at each other. Krispos dipped his head to Mavros, who, he knew, was better with words. "His Majesty," Mavros explained, "only sleeps with a pleasure girl once. Anything more, he reckons, would constitute infidelity to the Empress."

That got the yowls and whoops Krispos had known it would. "Give me fidelity like that, any day," Onorios said. "Give it to me twice a day," someone else said. "Three times!" another groom added.

"The lot of you remind me of the rich old man who married a young wife and promised to kill her with passion," Krispos said. "He had her once, then fell asleep and snored all night long. When he finally woke up, she looked over at him and said, 'Good morning, killer.' "

The stable hands hissed at him. Grinning, he added, "Besides, if we spent all our time in bed, we'd never get anything done, and Phos knows there's plenty to do here." The men hissed again, but started drifting off toward their tasks.

"Not getting anything done doesn't seem to worry his Majesty," Onorios said.

"Ah, but he has people to do things for him. Unless you hired a servant while I wasn't looking, you don't," Krispos said.

"Afraid not, worse luck." Onorios sadly clicked his tongue and went back to work.

"Look at this—this bloodsucking!" Petronas slammed a fist down on the pile of parchments in front of him. They were upside down to Krispos, but that did not matter because the Sevastokrator was in full cry. "Thirty-six hundred goldpieces—fifty pounds of gold!—that cursed leech of a Skombros has siphoned off for his worthless slug of a nephew Askyltos. And another twenty pounds for the worthless slug's stinking father Evmolpos. When I show these accounts to my nephew—"

"What do you think will happen?" Krispos asked eagerly. "Will he give Skombros the sack?"

But Petronas' rage collapsed into moroseness. "No, he'll just laugh, curse it. He already knows Skombros is a thief. He doesn't care. What he won't see is that the Skotos-loving wretch is setting up his own relations as great men. Dynasties have died that way."

"If his Majesty doesn't care whether Skombros steals, why do you keep shoving accounts in his face?" Krispos asked.

"To make him care, by Phos, before the fox he insists on thinking a lapdog sinks its teeth into him." The Sevastokrator heaved a sigh. "Making Anthimos care about anything save his own amusement is like pushing water uphill with a rake."

Petronas' loathing for his rival, Krispos thought, blinded him to any way of dealing with Skombros but the one that had already shown it did not work. "What would happen if Skombros didn't amuse him, or amused him in the wrong sort of way?" Krispos asked.

"What are you talking about?" Petronas demanded crossly.

For a moment, Krispos had no idea himself. One of the lessons he should have learned from Tanilis was keeping his mouth shut when he had nothing to say. He bent his head in humiliation. Humiliation ... he remembered how he'd felt when he was just a youth, when a couple of village wits lampooned his wrestling in a Midwinter's Day skit. "How would Anthimos like the whole city laughing at his vestiarios? It's only a couple of weeks to Midwinter's Day, after all."

"What does that have to do with—" Petronas suddenly caught up with Krispos. "By the good god, so it is. So you want to make him look ridiculous, do you? Why not? He is." The Sevastokrator's eyes lit up. As soon as he saw his objective, he planned how to reach it with a soldier's directness. "Anthimos has charge of the Amphitheater skits. They entertain him, so he Pays attention to them. All the same, I expect I can slide a new one into the list without his noticing. Have to give it an innocuous title so that even if he does spot it, he won't think anything of it. Have to find mimes who aren't already engaged. And costumes—curse it, can we get costumes made in time?"

"We have to figure out what the mimes are going to do, too," Krispos pointed out.

"Aye, that's true, though Phos knows there's plenty to say about the eunuch."

"Let me get Mavros," Krispos said. "He has an ear for scandal."

"Does he?" Petronas all but purred. "Yes, go fetch him—at once."

"Now this," Mavros said, "is what I call an Amphitheater."

He craned his neck to peer around and up. "Only trouble is, I feel like I'm at the bottom of a soup bowl full of people," Krispos answered. Fifty thousand, seventy, ninety—he was not sure how many people the enormous oval held. However many it was, they were all here today. No one wanted to miss the Midwinter's Day festivity.

"I'd sooner be at the bottom than the top," Mavros said. "Who has better seats than we do?" They were in the very first row, right by what was a racecourse most of the time but would serve as an open-air stage today.

"There's always the people on the spine." Krispos pointed to the raised area in the center of the track.

Mavros snorted. "You're never satisfied, are you?" The spine was reserved for the Avtokrator, the Sevastokrator, the patriarch, and the chief ministers of the Empire. Krispos saw Skombros there, not far from Anthimos; the vestiarios was conspicuous for his bulk and his beardless cheeks. The only men on the spine who were not high lords or prelates were the axe-toting Halogai of the imperial guard. Mavros nodded toward them. "See? They don't even get to sit down. Me, I'd rather be comfortable here."