Harry Turtledove - Krispos Rising

"Hello, your Majesty," Mavros said, spotting Anthimos in one of the suddenly halted rings. "I thought it was a shame for your friend here to be missing all the fun." He clucked to the horse he was riding—one of Anthimos' favorites—and touched its flanks with his heels. Hooves clattering on the smooth stone floor, the horse advanced through the revelers toward the tables piled high with food.

"Don't just stand there, Krispos," Mavros called. "Feed this good fellow a strawberry or six."

Krispos felt like throwing something at Mavros for involving him in this mad jape. Reluctantly he stepped toward the tables. Refusing, he thought, would only look worse. He picked up the bowl of strawberries. Amid vast silence, the snuffling of the horse as it ate was the only sound.

Then Anthimos laughed. All at once, everyone else was laughing, too: whatever the Emperor thought funny could not be an outrage. "Why didn't you bring a mare in season?" Anthimos called. "Then he could share all the pleasures we do."

"Maybe next time, your Majesty," Mavros said, his face perfectly straight.

"Yes, well, all right," Anthimos said. "Pity there's no entertainment that really could amuse him."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that, your Majesty," Mavros answered blithely. "After all, he has us to watch—and if we aren't funny, what is?"

Anthimos laughed again. As far as he was concerned, Mavros' headlong style of wit was a great success. Thinking about it, though, Krispos wondered if his foster brother hadn't been telling the exact and literal truth.

The Emperor said, "One reward we can give him—if he's finished with those strawberries there, why don't you fill that bowl up with wine? Here, you can use this jar if you care to." Nodding, Mavros took the jar to which Anthimos had pointed. He brought it back to where the horse stood patiently waiting, upended over the bowl that still held a few mashed strawberries. The thick wine poured out, yellow as a Haloga's hair. "Your Majesty!" Krispos exclaimed. "Is that jar from one of the missing amphorae from Petronas' cellars?"

"As a matter of fact, it is." Anthimos looked smug. "I was hoping you'd notice. The spell I employed worked rather well, wouldn't you say? It took my men right to the missing jars."

"Good for you." Krispos eyed the Avtokrator with more respect than he was used to giving him. Anthimos had stuck with his magic and worked to regain it with greater persistence than he devoted to anything else save the pleasures of the flesh. As far as Krispos could tell, he still botched conjurations every so often, but none—yet—in a way that had endangered him. If only he gave as much attention to the broader concerns of the Empire, Krispos thought. Whenever he wanted to be, he was plenty capable. Too often, he did not care to bother.

Krispos wondered how often he'd had that identical thought, Enough times, he was sure, that if he had a goldpiece for each one, the pen-pushers in the imperial treasury could lower the taxes on every farm in Videssos.

They wouldn't, of course; whenever new money came along, Anthimos always invented a new way to spend it. As now: the thought had hardly crossed Krispos' mind before the Avtokrator sidled up to him and said, "You know, I think I'm going to have a pool dug beside this hall, so I can stock it with minnows."

"Minnows, your Majesty?" If Anthimos had conceived a passion for fishing, he'd done it without Krispos' noticing, "Trout would give you better sport, I'd think."

"Not that sort of minnows." Anthimos looked exasperated at Krispos' lack of imagination. He glanced toward a couple of the courtesans in the crowded room. " That sort of minnows. Don't you think they could be very amusing, nibbling around the way minnows do, in lovely cool water on a hot summer evening?"

"I suppose they might," Krispos said, "if you—and they—don't mind being mosquito food while you're sporting." Mosquitoes and gnats and biting insects of all sorts flourished in the humid heat of the city's summer.

The Emperor's face fell, but only for a moment. "I could hold the bugs at bay with magic."

"Your Majesty, if a bug-repelling spell were easy, everyone would use it instead of mosquito netting."

"Maybe I'll devise an easy one, then," Anthimos said.

Maybe he would, too, Krispos thought. Even if the Emperor no longer had a tutor, he was turning into a magician of sorts. Krispos had no interest whatever in becoming a wizard. He was, however, a solidly practical man. He said, "Even without sorcery, you could put a tent of mosquito netting over and around your pool."

"By the good god, so I could." Anthimos grinned and clapped Krispos on the back. He talked for the next half hour about the pool and the entertainments he envisioned there. Krispos listened, enthralled. Anthimos was a voluptuary's voluptuary; he took—and communicated—pleasure in talking about pleasure.

After a while, the thought of the pleasure he would enjoy later roused him to pursue some immediately. He beckoned to one of the tarts in the hall and took her over to an unoccupied portion of the pile of pillows. He'd hardly begun when he got a new idea. "Let's make a pyramid of our own," he called to the other couples and groups there. "Do you think we could?" They tried. Shaking his head, Krispos watched. It wasn't nearly so fine as the acrobats' pyramid, but everybody in it seemed to be having a good time. That was Anthimos, through and through.

"Minnows," Dara hissed.

Krispos had never heard the name of a small, nondescript fish used as a swear word before, and needed a moment to understand. Then he asked, "How did you hear about that ?"

"Anthimos told me last night, of course," the Empress answered through clenched teeth. "He likes to tell me about his little schemes, and he was so excited over this one that he told me all about it." She glared at Krispos. "Why didn't you stop him?"

"Why didn't I what?" He stared at her. Anthimos was out carousing, but the hour was still early and the door from the imperial bedchamber to the hall wide open. Whatever got said had to be said in a tone of voice that would attract no notice from anyone walking down the corridor. Remembering that helped Krispos hold his temper. "How was I supposed to stop him? He's the Avtokrator; he can do what he likes. And don't you think he'd wonder why I tried to talk him out of it? What reason could I give him?"

"That that cursed pool—may Skotos' ice cover it all year around—is just another way, and a particularly vile one, for him to be unfaithful to me."

"How am I supposed to tell him that? If I sound like a priest, he's more likely to shave my head and put me in a blue robe than to listen to me. And besides ..." He paused to make sure no one was outside to hear, then went on, "Besides, things being as they are, I'm hardly the one to tell him anything of the kind."

"But he listens to you," Dara said. "He listens to you more than to anyone else these days. If you can't get him to pay heed, no one can. I know it's not fair to ask you—"

"You don't begin to." Krispos had thought defending Anthimos to Dara was curious. Now she wanted him to get Anthimos to be more faithful to her so she would have less time and less desire to give to him because she would be giving more to her husband. He had not been trained in fancy logic at the Sorcerers' Collegium, but he knew a muddle when he stepped into one. He also knew that explaining it to her would be worse than a waste of time—it would make her furious.

Sighing, he tried another tack. "He listens to me when he feels like it. Even on the business of the Empire, that's not nearly all the time. When it comes to ... things he really likes, he pays attention only to himself. You know that, Dara." He still spoke her name but seldom. When he did, it was a way to emphasize that what he said was important.