Krispos Rising

then.

Krispos' father took no notice of them. Quietly he said, 'The next time things aren't the way you expect, son, think before you talk, eh?'

Krispos nodded. He felt foolish now himself. One more thing to remember, he thought. The bigger he got, the more such things he found. He wondered how grown people managed to keep everything straight.

Late that afternoon, the canyon opened up. Green land lay ahead, land not much different from the fields and forests around Krispos' home village. 'Is that Kubrat?' he asked, pointing.

One of the wild men overheard him. 'Is Kubrat. Is good to be back. Is home,' he said in halting Videssian.

Till then, Krispos hadn't thought about the raiders having homes—to him, they had seemed a phenomenon of nature, like a blizzard or a flood. Now, though, a happy smile was on the Kubrati's face. He looked like a man heading home after some hard work. Maybe he had little boys at that home, or little girls. Krispos hadn't thought about the raiders having children, either.

He hadn't thought about a lot of things, he realized. When he said that out loud, his father laughed. 'That's because you're still a child. As you grow, you'll work through the ones that matter to you.'

'But I want to be able to know about all those things now,' Krispos said. 'It isn't fair.'

'Maybe not.' No longer laughing, his father put a hand on his shoulder. 'But I'll tell you this—a chicken comes out of its egg knowing everything it needs to know to be a chicken. There's more to being a man; it takes a while to learn. So which would you rather be, son, a chicken or a man?'

Krispos folded his hands into his armpits and flapped imaginary wings. He let out a couple of loud clucks, then squealed when his father tickled his ribs.

The next morning, Krispos saw in the distance several—well, what were they? Neither tents nor houses, but something in between. They had wheels and looked as if animals could pull them. His father did not know what to call them, either.

'May I ask one of the Kubratoi?' Krispos said.

His mother started to shake her head, but his father said, 'Let him, Tatze. We may as well get used to them, and they've liked the boy ever since he stood up to them that first night.'

So he asked one of the wild men trotting by on his pony. The Kubrati stared at him and started to laugh. 'So the little khagan does not know of yurts, eh? Those are yurts you see, the perfect homes for following the flocks.'

'Will you put us in yurts, too?' Krispos liked the idea of being able to live now one place, now another.

But the horseman shook his head. 'You are fanner folk, good only for raising plants. And as plants are rooted to the ground, your houses will be rooted, too.' He spat to show his contempt for people who had to stay in one spot, then touched the heels of his boots to his horse's flanks and rode off.

Krispos looked after him, a little hurt. 'I'll travel, too, one day,' he said loudly. The Kubrati paid no attention to him. He sighed and went back to his parents. 'I will travel!' he told his father. 'I will.'

'You'll travel in a few minutes,' his father answered. 'They're getting ready to move us along again.'

'That's not what I meant,' Krispos said. 'I meant travel when I want to, and go where I want to.'

'Maybe you will, son.' His father sighed, rose, and stretched. 'But not today.'

Just as captives from many Videssian villages had joined together to make one large band on the way to Kubrat, so now they were taken away from the main group—five, ten, twenty families at a time, to go off to the lands they would work for their new masters.

Most of the people the Kubratoi told to go off with the group that included Krispos' father were from his village, but some were not, and some of the villagers had to go someplace else. When they protested being broken up, the wild men ignored their pleas. 'Not as if you were a clan the gods formed,' a raider said, the same scorn in his voice that Krispos had heard from the Kubrati who explained what yurts were. And, like that rider, he rode away without listening to any reply.

'What does he mean, gods?' Krispos asked. 'Isn't there just Phos? And Skotos,' he added after a moment, naming the good god's wicked foe in a smaller voice.

'The Kubratoi don't know of Phos,' his father told him. 'They worship demons and spirits and who knows what. After they die, they'll spend forever in Skotos' ice for their wickedness, too.'

'I hope there are priests here,' Tatze said nervously.

'We'll get along, whether or not,' Phostis said. 'We know what the good is, and we'll follow it.' Krispos nodded. That made sense to him. He always tried to be good—unless being bad looked like a lot more fun. He hoped Phos would forgive him. His father usually did, and in his mind the good god was a larger version of his father, one who watched the whole world instead of just a farm.

Later that day, one of the Kubratoi pointed ahead and said, 'There your new village.'

'It's big!' Krispos said. 'Look at all the houses!'

His father had a better idea of what to look for. 'Aye, lots of houses. Where are the people, though? Hardly any in the fields, hardly any in the village.' He sighed. 'I expect the reason I don't see 'em is that they're not there to see.'

As the party of Kubratoi and captives drew near, a few men and women did emerge from their thatch-roofed cottages to stare at the newcomers. Krispos had never had much. These thin, poorly clad wretches, though, showed him other folk could have even less.

The wild men waved the village's new inhabitants forward to meet the old. Then they wheeled their horses and rode away ... rode, Krispos supposed, back to their yurts.

As he came into the village, he saw that many of the houses stood empty; some were only half thatched,