Krispos sighed. 'As for Phostis, well, I just don't know what Phostis is up to right now.'
He sighed again. Phostis, his eldest, his heir—his cuckoo's egg? He'd never known for sure whether Dara had conceived by him or by Anthimos. whom he'd overthrown. The boy's— no, young man's now—looks were no help, for he looked like Dara. Krispos' doubts had always made it hard for him to warm up to the child he'd named for his own father.
And now ... Now he wondered if he'd been so nearly intolerable as he was growing into manhood. He didn't think so, but who does, looking back on his own youth? Of course, his own younger years were full of poverty and hunger and fear and backbreaking work. He'd spared Phostis all that, but he wondered if his son was the better for it.
He probably was. There were those in Videssos the city who praised the hard, simple life the Empire's peasants led. who even put into verse the virtues that life imbued into those peasants. Krispos thought they were full of the manure they'd surely never touched with their own daintily manicured fingers.
Barsymes said, 'The young Majesty will yet make you proud.' Fondness touched his usually cool voice. Since he could have no children of his own, he doted on the ones he'd helped raise from infancy.
'I hope you're right,' Krispos said. He worried still. Was Phostis as he was because of Anthimos' blood coming through? The man Krispos had supplanted in Dara's bed and then in the palaces had had a sort of hectic brilliance to him, but applied it chiefly in pursuit of pleasure. Whenever Phostis did something extravagantly foolish, Krispos worried about his paternity.
Was Phostis really spoiled from growing up soft? Or, asked the cold, suspicious part of Krispos that never quite slept and that had helped keep him on the throne for more than two decades, was he just getting tired of watching his father rule vigorously? Did he want to take the Empire of Videssos into his own young hands?
Krispos looked up at Barsymes. 'If a man can't rely on his own son, esteemed sir, upon whom can he rely? Present company excepted, of course.'
'Your Majesty is gracious.' The vestiarios dipped his head. 'As I said, however, I remain confident Phostis will satisfy your every expectation of him.'
'Maybe,' was all Krispos said.
Accepting his gloom, Barsymes picked up the tray and began to take it back to the kitchens. He paused at the doorway. 'Will your Majesty require anything more of me?'
'No, not for now. Just make sure the candles in the study are lit, if you'd be so kind. I have the usual pile of parchments there waiting for review, and I can't do them all by daylight.'
'I shall see to it,' Barsymes promised. 'Er—anything besides that?'
'No, eminent sir, nothing else, thank you,' Krispos said. He'd had a few women in the palaces since Dara died, but his most recent mistress had seemed convinced he would make her relatives rich and powerful regardless of their merits, which were slender. He'd sent her packing.
Now—now his desire burned cooler than it had in his younger days. Little by little, he thought, he was beginning to approach Barsymes' status. He had never said that out loud and never would, for fear both of wounding the chamberlain's feelings and of encountering his pungent sarcasm.
Krispos waited a couple of minutes, then walked down the hall to the study. The cheerful glow of candlelight greeted him from the doorway: As usual, Barsymes gave flawless service. The stack of documents on the desk was less gladsome. Sometimes Krispos likened that stack to an enemy city that had to be besieged and then taken. But a city had to be captured only once. The parchments were never vanquished for good.
He'd watched Anthimos ignore administration for the sake of pleasure. Perhaps in reaction, he ignored pleasure for administration. When the pile of parchments was very high, as tonight, he wondered if Anthimos hadn't known the better way after all. Without a doubt, Anthimos had enjoyed himself more than Krispos did now. But equally without a doubt, the Empire was better served now than it had been during Anthimos' antic reign.
Reed pens and the scarlet ink reserved for the Avtokrator of the Videssians alone, stylus and wax-covered wooden tablets, and sky-blue sealing wax waited in a neat row at the left edge of the desk, like regiments ready to be committed to battle against the implacable enemy. Feeling a moment's foolishness, Krispos saluted them, clenched right fist over his heart. Then he sat down and got to work.
Topping the pile was a tax report from the frontier province of Kubrat, between the Paristrian Mountains and the Istros River, north and east of Videssos the city. When Krispos' reign began, it had been the independent khaganate of Kubrat, a barbarous nation whose horsemen had raided the Empire for centuries. Now herds and farms and mines brought gold rather than terror south of the mountains. Solid progress there, he thought. He scrawled his signature to show he'd read the cadaster and approved its revenue total.
The second report was also from Kubrat. Even after most of a generation under Videssian rule, the prelate of Pliskavos reported, heresy and outright heathenism remained rife in the province. Many of the nomads would not turn aside from their ancestral spirits to worship Phos, the good god the Empire followed. And the folk of Videssian stock, subject for centuries to the invaders from the steppe, had fallen into strange usages and errors because they were so long cut off from the mainstream of doctrine in Videssos.
Krispos reinked the pen, reached into a pigeonhole for a blank parchment.
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.
