Krispos the Emperor

He landed heavily, staggering. One of the guardsmen grabbed his arm and steadied him. 'Thanks,' he said. His heart pounded, his breath came quick. A run and a jump—was that exerting himself? When he first took the throne, he'd have laughed at the idea. Now it seemed less funny. He shrugged. The only alternative to getting older was not getting any older. This wasn't perfect, but it was better.

A couple of bonfires over, a young man stooped to ignite a torch. He waved it over his head. Sparks flew through the night. The young man weaved among slower-moving people in the square. Still waving his torch, he shouted, 'The gleaming path! Phos bless the gleaming path!'

For a moment, the cry did not register with Krispos. Then he stopped in midstride, stared, and pointed toward the young man. 'That is a Thanasiot. Arrest him!'

Thinking back afterward, he realized he could have handled things better. Some of his guards dashed after the Thanasiot. So did some people in the crowd. Others, mistaking Krispos' target, chased the wrong man—several wrong men—and got in the way of those pursuing the right one. Shouts and fistfights erupted.

The young heretic kept right on running and kept right on chanting the Thanasiot war cry. To Krispos' horror, he cast his torch into one of the wood-and-canvas market stalls that were closed for the Midwinter's Day celebration. Flames clung and began to grow.

All at once Krispos, a lump of ice in his belly, wished the holiday had seen a blizzard or, better yet, a driving rainstorm.

Rain in the westlands when I didn t want it, he thought wildly, but none now when I can really use it. The weather was not playing fair.

Neither were the Thanasioi. That first arsonist, no longer obvious for what he was as soon as he'd thrown his torch, vanished into the crowd. But others of his kind dashed here and there, waving torches and yelling acclaim for the gleaming path. In fewer than half a dozen minutes, more than half a dozen fires began to burn.

The people in the plaza of Palamas surged like the sea in storm, some toward the blazes but many more away from them. Fire in Videssos the city—fire in any town—was a great terror, for the means of fighting it were so pitifully few. Great fires, with winds whipping walls of flame ahead of them, had slain thousands and burned out whole quarters of the city. Most of those—all of them, as far as Krispos knew—sprang from lightning or accident. To use fire in a city—in the city—as a weapon ... Krispos shivered. The Thanasioi were not playing fair, either.

He tried to pull himself together. 'Bucket and siphon men!' he yelled to one of the chamberlain. 'Fetch them on the double!'

'Aye, your Majesty.' The eunuch pelted into the palace compound. A company of firemen was stationed there, attached to the imperial guards. Several other companies had bases in other parts of the city. They were brave, they were skilled, they were even useful if they could get to a fire before it went wild. But if the Thanasioi were throwing torches around in the Forum of the Ox as well as the plaza of Palamas, and in the coppersmiths' district, and over by the High Temple, some of those blazes would surely get loose.

Krispos shouted, 'Twenty goldpieces for every arsonist slain, fifty for every one taken alive!' With luck, the price differential would keep cutthroats from murdering innocent bystanders and then claiming a reward.

'Will you retire to the palaces, your Majesty?' Barsymes asked.

'No.' Krispos saw he'd surprised the vestiarios. He explained, 'I want to be seen fighting this madness. I'll do it from the plaza here.'

'As you say, your Majesty,' Barsymes answered in the peculiarly toneless voice he used when he thought Krispos was making a mistake.

Before long, Krispos, too, wondered if he hadn't made a mistake. Messengers who ran to the palaces didn't find him there. Because of that, he learned later than he should have that not only arson but also full-scale rioting had broken out in some of the poorer districts of the city. The two went hand in hand in every Avtokrator's nightmares: arson might leave him without a capital to rule, while riots could keep him from ruling at all.

But setting up his headquarters out where the people could see him had advantages, too. Not only did he shout for men to form a bucket brigade from the nearest fountain, he pitched in and passed buckets himself. 'This is my city as well as yours,' he told anyone who would listen. 'We all have to work together to save it if we can.'

For a while, that looked anything but certain. A bucket brigade was hopelessly inadequate to put out a fire once it got going. Even if some excited citizens didn't know that much, Krispos did. At his direction, the fellows at the far end of the brigade concentrated on wetting down the buildings and market stalls around the growing blaze to try to keep it from spreading.

He was beginning to think even that would be beyond their power when someone yelled, 'Here's the fire company!'

'Oh, Phos be praised,' Krispos panted. Already his shoulders ached from unaccustomed exertion; tomorrow, he suspected, he would be stiff and sore all over. Well, he'd worry about that tomorrow. Tonight, fighting the fire counted for more. He silently thanked the good god that, while he'd put on weight since he came to the throne, he hadn't got so fat as to kill himself if he had to do physical labor.

Instead of a hand bucket, the fire crew carried a great wooden tub on poles like those of a sedan chair. They filled it at the fountain, then—with shouts of 'Gangway!'—dashed to the fire. Instead of dumping the big bucket on the blaze, two of the men worked a hand pump mounted in the bucket, while a third directed the stream of water that issued from the nozzle of an oiled canvas hose.

The bucket brigade shifted its efforts to keeping the tub full. Even so, it emptied faster than they could pour water into it.

The firemen snatched it up by its cradle, filled it at the fountain again, then lugged it back with much swearing and grunting. The pumpers worked like men possessed; the fellow at the hose, a gray-haired veteran named Thokyodes, played his stream right at the heart of the blaze.

That second tubful began to give the fire company the upper hand. The blaze had eaten two or three stalls and damaged a couple of others, but it would not turn into a conflagration. Thokyodes came over to Krispos and greeted him with a crisp military salute, clenched fist over heart. 'You called us in good time, your Majesty. We've managed to save this lot.'

'Not the first service you've done the city—or me,' Krispos answered; Thokyodes had served on the fire crews for longer than Krispos had been Emperor. 'I wish I could tell you to stand easy the rest of the night, but I fear we'll have more fires set.'