Krispos the Emperor

'Well, yes, that he is.' Phostis scratched his head. Back in Videssos the city, he'd despised the temple hierarchy for wearing bejeweled vestments and venerating Phos in temples built by riches taken—stolen—from the peasantry. Better, he'd thought, a simple but strong worship, one that sprang from within and demanded nothing of anyone save the single pious individual.

Now before him he saw personified, and indeed taken to an extreme he'd never imagined, an example of such worship. He had to respect the religious impulse that had led Strabon to make himself into a collection of twigs and branches, but he was less sure he considered it an ideal.

Yet such self-destruction was implicit in Thanasiot doctrine, for those who had the courage to follow where logic led. If the world of the senses was but a creation of Skotos', what course more logical than to remove one's precious and eternal soul from that swamp of evil and corruption?

Rather hesitantly, he turned toward Olyvria. 'However holy he may be, I'd not care to imitate him. Granted, the world is not all it might be, but leaving it this way strikes me as—oh,

I don't know—as running away from the fight against wickedness rather than joining it.'

'Ah, but the body itself is evil, boy,' Strabon said. He hadn't been asleep after all. 'Because of that, any fight is foredoomed to failure.' His eyes closed again.

Olyvria spoke in a low voice. 'For the many, there may be much truth in what you say, Phostis. As I told you back on Midwinter's Day, I'd not have the bravery to do as Strabon does. But I thought you ought to see him, to celebrate and admire what the soul can do if it so wills.'

'I see it,' Phostis said. 'It is indeed a marvel. But something to celebrate? Of that I'm less certain.'

Olyvria looked at him severely. Had she been standing, her hands would have gone onto her hips. As it was, she breathed out in exasperation. 'Even the dogma you grew up with has room for asceticism and mortifying the flesh.'

'That's true,' he said. 'Too much care for this world and you have fat, contented priests who might as well not be priests at all. But now, seeing Strabon here, I think there may be too little care for the world, as well.' His voice fell to a whisper, so he would not disturb the fitfully sleeping relic of a man. This time, Strabon did not respond.

Phostis listened to himself with some surprise. I sound like my father, he thought. How many times, back at the palaces, had he watched and listened to Krispos steering a middle course between schemes that might have proved spectacular successes or even more spectacular disasters? How many times had he sneered at his father for that moderation?

'What he does affects no one but himself,' Olyvria said, 'and will surely earn him eternity in communion with Phos.'

'That's true,' Phostis repeated. 'What he does by himself affects him alone. But if one man and one woman in four, say, decided to walk the gleaming path in his exact footprints, that would affect those who declined to do so very much indeed. And Strabon's way, if I rightly understand it, is the one Thanasiot doctrine favors.'

'For those whose spirits let them take it, yes,' Olyvria said. Phostis looked from Strabon to her, then back again. He tried to envision her features ravaged by starvation, her bright eyes writhing blindly in their sockets. He'd never been the most imaginative of young men. More often than not, he felt that to be a lack. It seemed a blessing now.

Strabon coughed himself awake. He tried to say something, but the coughs went on and on, deep wet ones that wracked the sack of bones he had become. 'Chest fever,' Phostis whispered to Olyvria. She shrugged. If it was, he thought, the Thanasiot zealot might be dead by evening, for how could he have any strength in his body to fight off illness?

Olyvria stood to go. Phostis was far from sorry to get up with her. When he no longer saw the wasted figure lying on the bed, he felt more alive himself. Maybe that was illusion sprung from the animal part of him and from Skotos; he could not say. But he knew he would have trouble overcoming that animal part. Was his soul a prisoner of his body, as the Thanasioi proclaimed, or a partner with it? He would have to think long and hard on that.

Outside Strabon's hut, Syagrios paced up and down the muddy street, whistling a tune and spitting through his uneven teeth. Phostis watched him grin and swagger. When he tried to visualize the ruffian starving himself, his thoughts ran headlong into a blank wall. He simply could not see it happening. Syagrios was an ugly specimen, but a vivid one for all that.

'So what did you think of the boneyard?' he asked Phostis, spitting again.

Olyvria rounded on him, tight black curls flying in fury. 'Show proper respect for the pious and holy Strabon!' she blazed.

'Why? Soon enough he'll be dead, and then it'll be up to Phos, not to the likes of me, to figure out what he deserves.'

Olyvria opened her mouth, then closed it again. Phostis made a mental note that Syagrios, while indubitably uncouth, was far from stupid. Too bad, he thought. Aloud, he said, 'If a few people choose to make their end that way, I don't see that it much matters to the world around them—and, as Olyvria says, they are pious and holy. But if many decide to end their lives, the Empire will shake.'

'And why shouldn't the Empire shake, pray?' Olyvria asked.

Now Phostis had to pause and consider. An unshaken Empire of Videssos was almost as much of an article of faith for him as Phos' creed. And why not? For seven centuries and more, Videssos had given folk in a great swathe of the world reasonable peace and reasonable security. True, there had been disasters, as when steppe nomads took advantage of Videssian civil war to invade the north and east and form their own khaganates in the ruins of imperial provinces. True, every generation or two fought another in the long string of debilitating wars with Makuran. But, on the whole, he remained convinced life within the Empire was likelier to be happy than anywhere outside it.

But when he said as much, Olyvria answered, 'So what? If life in this world is but part of Skotos' trap, what matter if you're happy as the jaws close? Better then that we should be unhappy, that we should recognize everything material as part of the lure that draws us down to the ice.'

'But—' Phostis felt, himself floundering. 'Suppose— hmm—suppose everyone in the westlands, or most people, starved themselves to death like Strabon. What would happen after that? The Makuraners would march in unopposed and rule the land forever.'