Krispos the Emperor (2 page)

He sanded the letter dry, lit a stick of sealing wax at one of the candles on the desk, let several drops fall on the letter, and pressed his ring into the blob of wax while it was still soft. A courier would take the letter north tomorrow; Balaneus ought to have it in less than a week. Krispos was pleased with the prelate and his work. He was also pleased with his own writing; he hadn't done much of it before he became Emperor, but had grown fluent with a pen since.

Another tax report followed, this one from a lowland province in the westlands, across the strait called the Cattle-Crossing from Videssos the city. The lowland province yielded four times as much revenue as Kubrat. Krispos nodded, unsurprised. The lowlands had soil and climate good enough for two crops a year, and had been free of invasion for so long that many of the towns there had no walls. That would have been unimaginable—to say nothing of suicidal—in half-barbarous Kubrat.

The next report was sealed; it came from the latest Videssian embassy to Mashiz, the capital of Makuran. Krispos knew he had to handle that one with careful attention: the Kings of Kings of Makuran were the greatest rivals Videssian Avtokrators faced, and the only rulers they recognized as equals.

He smiled when he broke the seal and saw the elegant script within. It was almost as familiar as his own hand. "Iakovitzes to the Avtokrator Krispos: Greetings," he read, moving his lips slightly as he always did. "I trust you are cool and comfortable in the city by the sea. Were Skotos' hell to be charged with fire rather than the eternal ice, Mashiz would let the dark god get a good notion of what he required."

Krispos' smile broadened. He'd first met Iakovitzes when he was nine years old, when the Videssian noble ransomed his family and other peasants from captivity in Kubrat. In the more than forty years since, he'd seldom known the plump little man to have a kind word for anyone or anything.

Warming to his theme (if that was the proper phrase), Iakovitzes continued, "Rubyab King of Kings has gone and done something sneaky. I have not yet learned what it is, but the little waxed tips to his mustaches quiver whenever he deigns to grant me an audience, so I presume it is something not calculated to make you sleep better of nights, your Majesty. I've spread about a few goldpieces—the Makuraners coin only silver, as you know, so they lust for gold as I do after pretty boys—but without success as yet. I keep trying."

The smile left Krispos' face. He'd sent Iakovitzes to Makuran precisely because he was so good at worming information out of unlikely places. He read on: "Other than his mustaches, Rubyab is being reasonably cooperative. I think I shall be able to talk him out of restoring that desert fortress his troops won in our last little skirmish for the donative you have in mind. He also seems willing to lower the tolls he charges caravans for permission to enter Videssos from his realm. That, in turn, may, should, but probably will not, enable those thieves to lower their prices to us."

"Good," Krispos said aloud. He'd been after Makuran to lower those tolls since the days of Rubyab's father Nakhorgan. If the King of Kings finally intended to yield there, and to restore the fortress of Sarmizegetusa, maybe Iakovitzes was reading too much into waggling waxed mustachios.

Another cadaster followed Iakovitzes' letter from Makuran. Krispos wondered if Barsymes deliberately arranged the parchments to keep him from being stupefied by one tax list after another. The vestiarios had served in the palaces a long time now; his definition of perfect service grew broader every year.

After scrawling
I have read it—Krispos
at the bottom of the tax document, Krispos went on to the parchment beneath it. Like Balaneus' missive, this one also came from an ecclesiastic, here a priest from Pityos, a town on the southern coast of the Videssian Sea, just across the Rhamnos River from Vaspurakan.

"The humble priest Taronites to Krispos Avtokrator: Greetings. May it please your Majesty, I regret I must report the outbreak of a new and malignant heresy among the peasants and herders dwelling in the hinterlands of this Phos-forsaken municipality."

Krispos snorted. Why that sort of news was supposed to please him had always been beyond his comprehension. Formal written Videssian, he sometimes thought, was designed to obscure meaning rather than reveal it. His eyes went back to the page.

"This heresy strikes me as one particularly wicked and also as one calculated as if by the foul god Skotos to deceive both the light-minded and those of a certain type of what might in other circumstances be termed piety. As best I can gather, its tenets are—"

The more Krispos read, the less he liked. The heretics, if Taronites had things straight, believed the material world to have been created by Skotos, not Phos. Phos' light, then, inhabited only the soul, not the body in which it dwelt. Thus killing, for example, but liberated the soul from its trap of corrupting flesh. Arson was merely the destruction of that which was already dross. Even robbery had the salutary effect on its victim of lessening his ties to the material. If ever a theology had been made for brigands, this was it.

Taronites wrote, "This wickedness appears first to have been perpetrated and put forward by a certain Thanasios, wherefrom its adherents style themselves Thanasioi. I pray that your Majesty may quickly send both many priests to instruct the populace hereabouts on proper doctrine and many troops to lay low the Thanasioi and protect the fearful orthodox from the depredations. May Phos be with you always in your struggle for the good"

On the petition, Krispos wrote,
Your requests shall be granted.
Then he picked up stylus and tablet and scribbled two notes to himself, for action in the morning: to see Oxeites the ecumenical patriarch on sending a priestly delegation to Pityos, and to write to the provincial governor to get him to shift troops to the environs of the border town.

He read through the note from Taronites again, put it down with a shake of his head. A naturally argumentative folk, the Videssians were never content simply to leave their faith as they had found it. Whenever two of them got together, they tinkered with it: theological argument was as enjoyable a sport as watching the horses run in the Amphitheater. This time, though, the tinkering had gone awry.

He used the third leaf of the waxed tablet for another self-reminder: to draft an imperial edict threatening outlawry for anyone professing the doctrines of Thanasios.
Patriarch, too,
he scribbled. Adding excommunication to outlawry would strengthen the edict nicely.

After that, he was relieved to get back to an ordinary, unthreatening tax register. This one, from the eastern province of Develtos, made him feel good. A band of invading Halogai from the far north had sacked the fortress of Develtos not long after he became Avtokrator. This year, for the first time, revenues from the province exceeded what they'd been before the fortress fell.

Well done,
he wrote at the bottom of the register. The log-othetes and clerks who handled cadasters for the treasury would know he was pleased. Without their patient, usually unloved work, Videssos would crash to the ground. As Emperor, Krispos understood that. When he'd been a peasant, he'd loved tax collectors no better than any other kind of locust.

He got up, stretched, rubbed his eyes. Working by candlelight was hard, and had grown harder the past few years as his sight began to lengthen. He didn't know what he would do if his eyes kept getting worse: would he have to have someone read each petition to him and hope he could remember enough to decide it sensibly? He didn't look forward to that, but had trouble coming up with any better answer.

He stretched again, yawned until his jaw creaked. "The best answer right now is some sleep," he said aloud. He lit a little lamp at one of the candles, then blew them out. The smell of hot wax filled his nostrils.

Most of the torches in the hallway had gone out. The guttering flames of those that still burned made Krispos' shadow writhe and swoop like something with a life of its own. The lamp he carried cast a small, wan pool of light around him.

He walked past Barsymes' chamber. He'd lived there once himself, when he'd been one of the rare vestiarioi who were not eunuchs. Now he occupied the room next door, the imperial bedchamber. He'd slept there longer than in any other quarters he'd ever had. Sometimes that just seemed a simple part of the way his world worked. Tonight, though, as often happened when he thought about it, he found it very strange.

He opened the double doors. Inside the bedchamber, someone stirred. Ice ran up his back. He stooped to pluck a dagger from his scarlet boot, filled his lungs to shout for help from the Haloga guards at the entranceway to the imperial residence. Avtokrators of the Videssins too often died in unpeaceful ways.

The shout died unuttered; Krispos quickly straightened. This was no assassin in his bed, only one of the palace serving maids. She smiled an invitation at him.

He shook his head. "Not tonight, Drina," he said. "I told the esteemed sir I intended to go straight to sleep."

"That's not what he said to me, your Majesty," Drina answered, shrugging. Her bare shoulders gleamed in the lamplight as she sat up taller in bed. The lamp left most of the rest of her in shadow, making her an even greater mystery than woman ordinarily is. "He said to come make you happy, so here I am."

"He must have misheard." Krispos didn't believe that, not for a minute. Barsymes did not mishear his instructions. Every so often he simply decided not to listen to them. This seemed to be one of those nights. "It's all right, Drina. You may go."

In a small voice, the maid said, "May it please your Majesty, I'd truly sooner not. The vestiarios would be most displeased if I left you."

Who rules here, Barsymes or I?
But Krispos did not say that, not out loud. He ruled the Empire, but around the palaces what was pleasing to the vestiarios had the force of law. Some eunuch chamberlains used their intimacy with the Avtokrator for their own advantage or that of their relatives. Barsymes, to his credit, had never done that. In exchange, Krispos deferred to him on matters affecting only the palaces.

So now he yielded with such grace as he could: "Very well, stay if you care to. No one need know we'll sleep on opposite sides of the bed."

Drina still looked worried but, like any good servant, knew how far she could safely push her master. "As you say, your Majesty." She scurried over to the far side of the bed. "Here, you rest where I've been lying. I'll have warmed it for you."

"It's not winter yet, by the good god, and I'm no invalid," Krispos said with a snort. But he pulled his robe off over his head and draped it on a bedpost. Then he stepped out of his sandals, blew out the lamp, and got into bed. The warm silk of the sheets was kind to his skin. As his head met the down-filled pillow, he smelled the faint sweetness that said Drina had rested there before him.

For a moment, he wanted her in spite of his own weariness. But when he opened his mouth to tell her so, what came out was an enormous yawn. He thought he excused himself, but fell asleep so fast he was never sure.

He woke up some time in the middle of the night. That happened more and more often as the years went by. He needed a few seconds to realize what the round smoothness pressed against his side was. Drina breathed smoothly, easily, carefree as a sleeping child. Krispo envied her lack of worry, then smiled when he thought he was partly responsible for it.

Now he did want her. When he reached over her shoulder to cup her breast in his hand, she muttered something drowsy and happy and rolled onto her back. She hardly woke up as he caressed her and then took her. He found that kind of trust strangely touching, and tried hard to be as gentle as he could.

Afterward, she quickly slipped back into deep sleep. Krispos got out of bed to use the chamber pot, then lay down beside her again. He, too, was almost asleep when he suddenly wondered, not for the first time, whether Barsymes knew him better than he knew himself.

The trouble with the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, Phostis thought, was that the windows were too big. The ceremonial hall, named back in the days when Videssian nobles actually ate reclining, was cooler in summer than most, thanks to those large windows. But the torches, lamps, and candles needed for nighttime feasts were lodestones for moths, mosquitoes, water bugs, even bats and birds. Watching a crisped moth land in the middle of a bowl of pickled octopus tentacles did not inflame the appetite. Watching a nightjar swoop down and snatch the moth out of the bowl made Phostis wish he'd never summoned his friends to the feast in the first place.

He thought about announcing it was over, but that wouldn't do, either. Inevitably, word would get back to his father. He could already hear Krispos' peasant-accented voice ringing in his ears:
The least you could do, son, is make up your mind.

The imagined scolding seemed so real that he whipped his head around in alarm, wondering if Krispos had somehow snuck up behind him. But no—save for his own companions, he was alone here.

He felt very much alone. One thing his father had succeeded in doing was to make him wonder who cared for him because he was himself and who merely because he was junior Avtokrator and heir to the Videssian throne. Asking the question, though, often proved easier than answering it. so he had lingering suspicions about almost everyone he knew.

"You won't need to look over your shoulder like that forever, your Majesty," said Vatatzes. who was sitting at Phostis' right hand. He trusted Vatatzes further than most of his friends; being only the son of a mid-level logothete, the youth was unlikely to have designs on the crown himself. Now he slapped Krispos on the shoulder and went on, "Surely one day before too long, you'll be able to hold your feasts when and as you like."