Harry Turtledove: Krispos Rising

The Videssian envoy drew out a single bright coin, gave it to Omurtag. "Let this goldpiece stand for all, as the boy does," Iakovitzes said.

Omurtag passed the coin to the enaree. He muttered over it; the hand that was not holding it moved in tiny passes. Krispos saw the Videssian priest scowl, but the man held his peace. The enaree spoke in the Kubrati tongue. "He declares it is good gold," Omurtag said to Iakovitzes.

"Of course it's good gold," Iakovitzes snapped, breaking the ritual. "The Empire hasn't coined anything else for hundreds of years. Should we start now, it would be for something more important than ransoming ragged peasants."

The khagan laughed out loud. "I think your tongue was stung by a wasp one day, Iakovitzes," he said, then returned to the pattern of the ceremony. "He declares it is good gold. Thus the people are yours." He gently pushed Krispos toward Iakovitzes.

The envoy's touch was warm, alive. He moved his hand on Krispos' back in a way that was strange and familiar at the same time. "Hello, pretty boy," Iakovitzes murmured. Krispos recognized the tone and realized why the caress had that familiarity to it: his father and mother acted like this with each other when they felt like making love.

Having lived all his life in a one-room house with his parents, having slept in the same bed with them, he knew what sex was about. That variations could exist, variations that might include him and Iakovitzes, had not occurred to him before, though. Now that it did, he found he did not much care for it. He moved half a step away from the Avtokrator's envoy.

Iakovitzes jerked back his hand as if surprised to discover what it had been up to. Glancing at him, Krispos doubted he was. His face was a mask that must have taken years to perfect. Seeing Krispos' eye upon him, he gave a tiny shrug. If you don't want it, too bad for you , he seemed to say.

Aloud, the words he spoke were quite different. "It is accomplished," he said loudly. Then he turned to the crowd of peasants gathered in front of the platform. "People of Videssos, you are redeemed!" he cried. "The Phos-guarded Avtokrator Rhaptes redeems you from your long and horrid captivity in this dark and barbarous land, from your toil under the degrading domination of brutal and terrible masters. Masters? No, rather let me call them robbers, for they robbed you of the liberty rightfully yours ..."

The speech went on for some time. Krispos was at first impressed and then overwhelmed with the buckets of big words Iakovitzes poured over the heads of the fanners. Over our heads is right , the boy thought. He was missing one word in three, and doubted anyone else in the crowd was doing much better.

He yawned. Seeing that, Omurtag grinned and winked. Iakovitzes, caught up now in the full flow of his rhetoric, never noticed.

The khagan waggled a finger. Krispos walked back over to him. Again Iakovitzes paid no attention, though Krispos felt the eyes of both priest and enaree upon him.

"Here, lad," Omurtag said—softly, so as not to disrupt Iakovitzes' speech. "You take this, as a reminder of the day." He handed Krispos the goldpiece Iakovitzes had given him to symbolize the Videssians' ransoming.

Behind Iakovitzes, the blue-robed priest of Phos jerked violently, as if a bee had stung him. He made the circular sun-sign over the left side of his breast. And Omurtag's own enaree grabbed the khagan and whispered harshly and urgently into his ear.

Omurtag shoved the seer aside, so hard that the enaree almost tumbled off the edge of the platform. The khagan snarled something at him in the Kubrati tongue, then returned to Videssian to tell Krispos, "The fool says that, since this coin was used in our ceremony here, with it I have given you the Videssian people. Whatever will you do with them, little farmer boy?"

He laughed uproariously at his own wit, loud enough to make Iakovitzes pause and glare at him before resuming his harangue. Krispos laughed, too. Past tunic and sandals—and now this coin—had never owned anything. And the idea of having a whole people was absurd, anyhow.

"Go on back to your mother and father," Omurtag said when he had control of himself again. Krispos hopped down from the platform. He kept tight hold of the goldpiece Omurtag had given him.

"The sooner we're out of Kubrat and the faster we're back in civilization, the better," Iakovitzes declared to whoever would listen. He pressed the pace back to Videssos harder than the Kubratoi had when they were taking the peasants away.

The redeemed Videssians did not leave by the same winding, narrow pass through which they had entered Kubrat. They used a wider, easier route some miles farther west. An old graveled highway ran down it, one that became broad and well maintained on the Videssian side of the mountains.

"You'd think the Kubrati road used to be part of this one here," Krispos remarked.

Neither of his parents answered. They were too worn with walking and with keeping Evdokia on her feet to have energy left over for speculation.

But the priest who had gone to Kubrat with Iakovitzes heard. His name, Krispos had learned, was Pyrrhos. Ever since Omurtag gave the boy that goldpiece, Pyrrhos had been around a good deal, as if keeping an eye on him. Now, from muleback, the priest said, "You speak the truth, lad. Once the road was one, for once the land was one. Once the whole world, near enough, was one."

Krispos frowned. "One world? Well, of course it is, sir priest. What else could it be?" Trudging along beside him, Phostis smiled; in that moment, son sounded very much like father.

"One world ruled by Videssos, I mean," Pyrrhos said. "But then, three hundred years ago, on account of the sins of the Videssian people, Phos suffered the wild Khamorth tribes to roll off the Pardrayan plain and rape away the great tracts of land that are now the khaganates of Thatagush, Khatrish—and Kubrat. Those lands remain rightfully ours. One day, when Phos the lord of the great and good mind judges us worthy, we shall reclaim them." He sketched the sun-symbol over his heart.

Krispos walked a while in silence, thinking about what the priest had said. Three hundred years meant nothing to him; Pyrrhos might as well have said a long time ago or even once upon a time. But sin, now—that was interesting. "What sort of sins?" the boy asked.

Pyrrhos' long, narrow face grew even longer and narrower as his thin-lipped mouth pursed in disapproval. "The same sins Skotos—" He spat in the roadway to show his hatred of the dark god. "—always sets forth as snares for mankind: the sin of division, from which sprang civil war; the sin of arrogance, which led the fools of that time to scorn the barbarians till too late; the sin of luxury, which made them cling to the great riches they had and not exert themselves to preserve those riches for future generations."

At that, Krispos' father lifted his head. "Reckon the sin of luxury's one we don't have to worry about here," he said, "seeing as I don't think there's above three people in this whole crowd with a second shirt to call their own."

"You are better for it!" the priest exclaimed. "Yet the sin of luxury lives on; doubt it not. In Videssos the city, scores of nobles have robes for each day of the year, sir, yet bend all their energy not to helping their neighbors who have less but rather only to acquiring more, more, and ever more. Their robes will not warm them against the chill of Skotos' ice."

His sermon did not have the effect he'd hoped. "A robe for each day of the year," Krispos' father said in wonder. Scowling angrily, Pyrrhos rode off. Phostis turned to Krispos. "How'd you like to have that many robes, son?"

"That sounds like too many to me," Krispos said. "But I would like a second shirt."