with irritation.
Krispos did not answer. If Iakovitzes wanted to see stubbornness, he thought, all he needed to do was peer at his reflection in a stream. In the month they'd taken to ride east from Videssos the city to Opsikion, he'd tried seducing Krispos every night and most afternoons. That he'd got nowhere did not stop him; neither did the several times he'd bedded other, more complacent, partners.
Iakovitzes pulled alongside again. 'If I didn't find you so lovely, curse it, I'd break you for your obstinacy,' he snapped. 'Don't push me too far. I might anyhow.'
Krispos had no doubt Iakovitzes meant what he said. As he had before, he laughed. 'I was a peasant taxed off my farm. How could you break me any lower than that?' As long as Iakovitzes knew he was not afraid of such threats, Krispos thought, the peppery little man would hesitate before he acted on them.
So it proved now. Iakovitzes fumed but subsided. They rode together toward Opsikion.
As they were in none-too-clean travelers' clothes, the gate guards paid no more attention to them than to anyone else. They waited while the guards poked swords into bales of wool a fuzzy-bearded Khatrisher merchant was bringing to town, making sure he wasn't smuggling anything inside them. The merchant's face was so perfectly innocent that Krispos suspected him on general principles.
Iakovitzes did not take kindly to waiting. 'Here, you?' he called to one of the guards in peremptory tones. 'Stop messing about with that fellow and see to us.'
The guard set hands on hips and looked Iakovitzes over. 'And why should I, small stuff?' Without waiting for a reply, he started to turn back to what he'd been doing.
'Because, you insolent, ill-smelling, pock-faced lout, I am the direct representative of his illustrious Highness the Sevastokrator Petronas and of his Imperial Majesty the Avtokrator Anthimos III, come to this miserable latrine trench of a town to settle matters your eparch has botched, bungled, and generally mishandled.'
Iakovitzes bit off each word with savage relish. As he spoke, he unrolled and displayed the large parchment that proved he was what he claimed. It was daubed with seals in several colors of wax and bore the Avtokrator's signature in appallingly official scarlet ink.
The gate guard went from furious red to terrified white in the space of three heartbeats. 'Sorry, Brison,' he muttered to the wool merchant. 'You've just got to hang on for a bit.'
'Now there's a fine kettle of crabs,' Brison said in a lisping accent. 'Maybe I'll pass the time mixing my horses around so you won't be sure which ones you've checked.' He grinned to see how the gate guard liked that idea.
'Oh, go to the ice,' the harassed guard said. Brison laughed out loud. Ignoring him, the guard turned to Iakovitzes. 'I—I crave pardon for my rough tongue, excellent sir. How may I help you?'
'Better.' Iakovitzes nodded. 'I won't ask for your name after all. Tell me how to reach the eparch's residence. Then you can go back to your petty games with this chap here. I suggest that while you're at it, you sword his beard as well as his wool.'
Brison laughed again, quite merrily. The gate guard stuttered out directions. Iakovitzes rode past them. He kept his eyes straight ahead, not deigning to acknowledge either man any further. Krispos followed.
'I put that arrogant bastard in chain mail in his place nicely enough,' Iakovitzes said once he and Krispos got into town, 'but Khatrishers are too light-minded to notice when they've been insulted. Cheeky buggers, the lot of them.' Failing to get under someone's skin always annoyed him. He swore softly as he rode down Opsikion's main street.
Krispos paid his master little attention; he was resigned to his bad temper. Opsikion interested him more. It was a little larger than Imbros; a year ago, he thought, it would have seemed enormous to him. After Videssos, it reminded him of a toy city, small but perfect. Even Phos' temple in the central square was modeled after the great High Temple of the capital.
The eparch's hall was across the square from the temple. Iakovitzes took out his frustration over leaving Brison in good spirits by baiting a clerk as mercilessly as he had the gate guard. His tactics were cruel, but also effective. Moments later, the clerk ushered him and Krispos into the eparch's office.
The local governor was a thin, sour-looking man named Sisinnios. 'So you've come to dicker with the Khatrishers, have you?' he said when Iakovitzes presented his impressive scroll. 'May you get more joy from it than I have. These days, my belly starts paining me the day before I talk with 'em and doesn't let up for three days afterward.'
'What's the trouble, exactly?' Iakovitzes asked. 'I presume we have documents to prove the land in question is ours by right?' Though he phrased it as a question, he spoke with the same certainty he would have used in reciting Phos' creed. Krispos sometimes thought nothing really existed in Videssos without a document to show it was there.
When Sisinnios rolled his eyes, the dark bags under them made him look like a mournful hound. 'Oh, we have documents,' he agreed morosely. 'Getting the Khatrishers to pay 'em any mind is something else again.'
'
'Bolkanes' is probably the best,' Sisinnios said. 'It's not far.' He gave directions.
'Good. Krispos, go set us up with rooms there. Now, sir—' This he directed to Sisinnios, '—let's see these documents. And set me up a meeting with this Khatrisher who ignores them.'
Bolkanes' inn proved good enough, and by the standards of Videssos the city absurdly cheap. Taking Iakovitzes literally, Krispos rented separate rooms for his master and himself. He knew Iakovitzes would be irked, but did not feel like guarding himself every minute of every night.
Indeed, Iakovitzes did grumble when he came to the inn a couple of hours later and discovered the arrangements Krispos had made. The grumble, though, was an abstracted one; most of his mind remained on the fat folder of documents he carried under one arm. He took negotiations seriously.
'You'll have to amuse yourself as best you can for a while, Krispos,' he said as they sat down to a dinner of steamed prawns in mustard sauce. 'Phos alone knows how long I'm liable to be closeted with this Lexo from Khatrish. If he's as bad as Sisinnios makes him out to be, maybe forever.'
