still laughing, set down his bow, made an extravagant salute from the saddle. 'Anything you say, little khagan, anything you say.' He chuckled, wiping his face with the back of his hand. Then he raised his eyes to meet those of Krispos' father, who had hurried up to do what he could for the boy. 'Not need to shoot now, eh, farmer- man?'
'No,' Krispos' father agreed bitterly. 'You've caught us, all right.'
Along with his parents and Evdokia, Krispos walked slowly back to the village. A couple of horsemen stayed with them; the other two rode ahead so they could get back to doing whatever Kubratoi did. That, Krispos already suspected, was nothing good.
He remembered the strange word the rider with the bow had used. 'Father, what does 'khagan' mean?'
'It's what the Kubratoi call their chieftain. If he'd been a Videssian, he would have called you 'Avtokrator' instead.'
'Emperor? That's silly.' Even with his world coming apart, Krispos found he could still laugh.
'So it is, boy,' his father said grimly. He paused, then went on in a different tone, as if beginning to enjoy the joke himself: 'Although there's said to be Vaspurakaner blood on my side of the family, and the Vaspurs all style themselves 'prince.' Bet you didn't know your father was a prince, eh, son?'
'Stop it, Phostis!' Krispos' mother said. 'The priest says that nonsense about princes is heresy and nothing else but. Don't pass it on to the boy.'
'Heresy is what the priest is supposed to know about,' his father agreed, 'but I won't argue about the nonsense part. Who ever heard of a prince going hungry?'
His mother sniffed, but made no further answer. They were inside the village by then, back where other people could hear them—not good, not if they wanted to talk of heresy. 'What will they do with us?' was a safer question to ask, though not one, necessarily, with a surer answer. The villagers stood around under the bows of the Kubratoi, waiting.
Then more riders came up, these leading not people but the village's herds and flocks. 'Are the animals coming with us, Father?' Krispos asked. He had not expected the Kubratoi to be so considerate.
'With us, aye, but not for us,' was all his father said.
The Kubratoi started shouting, both those who spoke Videssian and those who did not. The villagers looked at one another, trying to figure out what the wild men meant. Then they saw the direction in which the cattle and sheep were going. They followed the beasts northward.
For Krispos, the trek to Kubrat was the best adventure he'd ever had. Tramping along all day was no harder than the chores he would have been doing had the raiders not descended on his village, and he always had something new to see. He'd never imagined, before, how big the world was.
That the march was forced hardly entered his mind. He ate better on it than he had at home; the Kubrati he'd defied that first night decided to make a pet of him and brought him chunks of roast lamb and beef. Soon other riders took up the game, so the 'little khagan' sometimes found himself with more than he could eat.
At his father's urging, he never let on. Whenever the Kubratoi did not insist on having him eat in front of them, he passed their tidbits on to the rest of the family. The way he made the food disappear earned him a reputation as a bottomless pit, which only brought more his way.
By the end of the third day on the road north, the raiders who had descended on his village met with other bands bringing captives and booty back to Kubrat. That took Krispos by surprise. He had never given any thought to the world beyond the fields he knew. Now he saw he and his family were caught up in something larger than a local upheaval.
'Where are those people from, Father?' he asked as yet another group of bewildered, bedraggled peasants came stumbling into the larger stream.
His father shrugged, which made Evdokia giggle—she was riding on his shoulders. 'Who can say?' Phostis answered. 'Just another village of farmers that happened to be unlucky like ours.'
'Unlucky.' Krispos tasted the word, found it odd. He was enjoying himself. Sleeping under the stars was no great handicap, not to a six-year-old in summer. But his father, he could tell, did not like the Kubratoi and would have hit back at them if he could. That made Krispos ask another question, one he had not thought of till now. 'Why are they taking farmers back to Kubrat?'
'Here comes one.' His father waited till the wild man rode by, then pointed at his back. 'Tell me what you see.'
'A man on a horse with a big bushy beard.'
'Horses don't have beards,' Evdokia said. 'That's dumb, Krispos.'
'Hush,' their father told her. 'That's right, son—a man on a horse. Kubratoi hardly ever come down from their horses. They travel on them, go to war on them, and follow their flocks on them, too. But you can't be a farmer if you stay on your horse all the time.'
'They don't want to be farmers, though,' Krispos said.
'No, they don't,' his father agreed. 'But they need farmers, whether they want to farm themselves or not. Everybody needs farmers. Flocks can't give you all the food you need and flocks won't feed your horses at all. So they come down into Videssos and steal folk like—well, folk like us.'
'Maybe it won't be so bad, Phostis,' Krispos' mother said. 'They can't take more from us than the imperial tax collectors do.'
'Who says they can't?' his father answered. 'Phos the lord of the great and good mind knows I have no love for the tax collectors, but year in, year out they leave us enough to get by on. They shear us—they don't flay us. If the Kubratoi were so fine as all that, Tatze, they wouldn't need to raid every few years to get more peasants. They'd be able to keep the ones they had.'
There was a commotion among the captives that night. Evidently a good many of them agreed with Krispos' father and tried to escape from the Kubratoi. The screams were far worse than the ones in the village the night the wild men came.
