Harry Turtledove - Krispos Rising

"To the ice with my uncle, too!" Anthimos said. "He's not the Avtokrator, and I bloody well am!" But when he sent a squad of Halogai to arrest Trokoundos, sending a priest with them in case he resisted with magic, they found his house empty. "Knave must have fled to the hinterland," the Emperor declared with some satisfaction when they brought him the news. By then his usual good humor had returned. "I daresay that's worse punishment than any I could inflict."

"Aye, good riddance to bad rubbish," said Krispos, who had quietly sent word to Trokoundos to get out of the city for a while.

To Krispos' surprise and dismay, Anthimos did start recopying his tome of spells. He never quite quit transcribing, either, but before long the pace of his work slowed to a crawl. He turned one of his revels inside out with a spell that made cabbage intoxicating for a night and left wine mild as milk. "You see?" he triumphantly told Krispos the next morning. "I am a mage, even if that stinking Trokoundos tried to keep me from being one. Did you hear how they cheered me last night when the wizardry worked just as I said it would?"

"Yes, your Majesty," Krispos said. His stomach rumbled like distant thunder. He'd eaten too much cabbage the night before. Given a choice, he would far soon have got drunk on wine.

Had he got drunk on wine, he might have chewed cabbage leaves to ease his morning-after pains. He wondered if a cup of wine would cure a cabbage hangover. Laughing, he decided to find out.

Midwinter's Day came and went. One whole section of the Amphitheater was full of soldiers. As soon as the roads froze after the fall rains, Petronas had begun calling in levies from the eastern provinces for his war on Makuran. They made a raucous audience, drinking hard, then cheering and booing each skit as the fancy—or the wine—seized them.

The hangover that bedeviled Krispos the morning after Midwinter's Day had nothing to do with cabbage—and did not want to yield to it, either. The wines he drank now were smoother and sweeter than the ones he'd quaffed on holidays past, but that did not mean they were exempt from giving retribution.

Nor did it mean he wanted to go back to the rougher vintages he'd formerly known. Ypatios was far from the only prominent man willing, and eager, to pay for influence with the Emperor. Some he could not help; some he did not want to help. He refused their gold. What he took in from the rest made him well-to-do, even by the standards of Videssos the city.

He bought a horse. He took Mavros along when he went to the market not far from the Forum of the Ox. "Nice to know you have confidence in me," Mavros said. "Let's see what kind of horrible screw I can stick you with."

"I like that," Krispos said. "Is that your way of showing thanks for getting named chief groom?"

"Now that you mention it, yes. The job's too much like work; I liked lying around on my arse as a spatharios a lot better. If I weren't working with horses, I really would resent you."

"What would your mother say if she heard you talking so fondly of shirking?"

"What she usually says, I expect—stop complaining and get to it."

The first dealer they tried was a plump little man named Ibas whose eyes were so round and moist and trustworthy that Krispos grew wary at once. The horse trader bowed low, but not before he had checked the cut and fabric of their robes. "If you are seeking a riding animal, my masters, I can show you a magnificent gelding not above seven years old," he said.

"Yes, show us," Mavros said.

On seeing the animal, Krispos was encouraged. Magnificent was too fine a word for it, but he'd expected as much; sellers of horseflesh sucked in hyperbole with their mother's milk. But the horse's limbs were sound, its dark roan coat well tended and shining.

Mavros only grunted, "Let's see the teeth."

Nodding, Ibas walked with him up to the animal's head. "You see," he said while Mavros made his examination, "the four middle teeth in each jaw are nicely oval, and the mark—or cavity, as some call it—in the center of each tooth is quite as deep and dark as it should be."

"I see a horse with a mouth full of spit," Mavros complained.

He looked thoughtfully at the small gap between the horse's upper and lower incisors. "Perhaps we'll be back another day, master Ibas. Thank you for showing him to us." Politely but firmly, he steered Krispos toward another dealer.

"What was wrong with him?" Krispos asked. "I rather fancied his looks."

"Seven, Ibas claimed? That horse is twelve if he's a day. Good old master Ibas is what they call a prelate—he takes away his horse's sins, usually with a file. He has a nice touch; with the animal's mouth so wet, I couldn't quite be sure of the rasp marks. But if you file down a horse's front teeth to give them the proper shape for a young animal, they won't quite meet, because you haven't done anything to the teeth in the back of the horse's mouth. And if Ibas has one like that, he'll have half a dozen, so we don't want to do business with him."

"I'm glad you're with me," Krispos said. "I might have bought the beast, for I did like him."

"So would I, were he sold for what he was. But to try to knock five years off him—no. Don't look so glum, my friend. There's more horses to suit you than just that one. All we have to do is keep looking."

Look they did, all that day and part of the next. At length, with Mavros' approval this time, Krispos bought a bay gelding of about the same age as Ibas had claimed for the roan. "By the teeth, this one really is seven or eight," Mavros said. "Not a bad animal at all. He wouldn't be the worst-looking horse in Petronas' stable—a long way from the best, but not the worst either."

"The best-looking animal in that stable is Petronas' show horse, and I wouldn't race him against a donkey," Krispos said.

"Something to that, too." Mavros patted the bay's neck. "I hope he serves you well."

"So do I." Even if the gelding spent most of the time in the stable, as it might very well, Krispos was pleased just to have it. Owning a horse was another sign of how far he'd come. No one in his village had owned a horse till they beat the Kubratoi; afterward, the animals had been owned in common. In the city, he'd cared for other people's horses and borrowed them when he needed to ride.

Now he had one of his own, and the hands in the imperial stables could see to its day-to-day care. That wasn't the proper attitude for a noble, but he didn't care. Nobles tended animals because they wanted to, not because they had to. Having had to, he didn't want to, not any more.

"What will you call him?" Mavros asked.

"I hadn't thought." Krispos did. After a little while, he smiled. "I have it! The perfect name." Mavros waited expectantly. Krispos said, "I'll call him Progress."

Anthimos essayed a spell to keep snow off the path that led to the hall where he held his feasts. He only succeeded in turning the snow on the path bright blue. The miscarried magic left him undismayed. "I've always wanted to revel till everything turned blue," he said, "and here's my chance."

"As you say, your Majesty." Krispos sent men with shovels to clear the tinted snow from the path so the Emperor and his guests could get to their revel. He wondered if Anthimos had learned a spell to heat the hall; fireplaces only reached so far. He doubted it—a magic so practical was not one likely to have appealed to the Emperor, or to have stuck in his memory if he'd ever learned it.

The revel itself Krispos enjoyed, at least for a time. But a steady diet of such carouses had begun to pall for him. He looked round for Anthimos. The Emperor was enjoying the attentions of an astonishingly limber girl—one of the evening's acrobats, Krispos saw when she assumed a new position. There were times, Krispos had found out, when Anthimos did not mind being interrupted in such pursuits, but he did not think asking permission to leave was important enough to bother him over. He just handed the bowl of chances to another servitor, found his coat, and departed.