Not having grapes made life different in small ways as well as large. One day Krispos' father brought home a couple of rabbits he had killed in the field. His mother chopped the meat fine, spiced it with garlic—and then stopped short. 'How can I stuff it into grape leaves if there aren't any grape leaves?' She sounded more upset at not being able to cook what she wanted than she had over being uprooted and forced to trek to Kubrat; it made the uprooting hit home. Phostis patted her on the shoulder, turned to his son. 'Run over to Roukhas' house and find out what Ivera uses in place of grape leaves. Quick, now!'
Krispos soon came scampering back. 'Cabbage,' he announced importantly.
'It won't be the same,' his mother said. It wasn't, but Krispos thought it was good.
Harvest came sooner than it would have in the warmer south. The grown men cut first the barley, then the oats and wheat, going through the fields with sickles. Krispos and the rest of the children followed to pick up the grains that fell to the ground. Most went into the sacks they carried; a few they ate. And after the grain was gathered, the men went through the fields again, cutting down the golden straw and tying it into sheaves. Then the children, two to a sheaf, dragged it back to the village. Finally, the men and women hauled buckets of dung from the middens to manure the ground for the next planting.
Once the grain was harvested, it was time to pick the beans and to chop down the plants so they could be fed to the pigs. And then, with the grain and beans in deep storage pits—except for some of the barley, which was set aside for brewing—the whole village seemed to take a deep breath.
'I was worried, when we came here, whether we'd be able to grow enough to get all of us through the winter,' Krispos' father said one evening, taking a long pull on a mug of beer. 'Now, though, Phos the lord of the great and good mind be praised, I think we have enough and to spare.'
His mother said, 'Don't speak too soon.'
'Come on, Tatze, what could go wrong?' his father answered, smiling. 'It's in the ground and safe.'
Two days later, the Kubratoi came. They came in greater numbers and with more weapons than they'd had escorting the new villagers away from the mass of Videssian captives. At their shouted orders, the villagers opened one storage pit in three and loaded the precious grain onto packhorses the wild men had brought with them. When they were done, the Kubratoi trotted off to plunder the next village.
Krispos' father stood a long time, staring down into the empty yard-deep holes in the sandy soil back of the village. Finally, with great deliberation, he spat into one of them. 'Locusts,' he said bitterly. 'They ate us out just like locusts. We would have had plenty, but we'll all be hungry before spring comes.'
'We ought to fight them next time, Phostis,' said one of the younger men who had come from the same village as Krispos and his family. 'Make them pay for what they steal.'
But Krispos' father sadly shook his head. 'I wish we could, Stankos, when I see what they've done to us. They'd massacre us, though, I fear. They're soldiers, and it's the nature of soldiers to take. Farmers endure.'
Roukhas was still Phostis' rival for influence in the village, but now he agreed with him. 'Four or five years ago the village of Gomatou, over a couple of days west of here, tried rising up against the Kubratoi,' he said.
'Well? What happened to it?' Stankos asked.
'It's not there any more,' Roukhas said bleakly. 'We watched the smoke go up into the sky.'
No one spoke of rebellion again. To Krispos, charging out against the Kubratoi with sword and lance and bow and driving them all back north over the Astris River to the plains from which they'd come would have been the most glorious thing in the world. It was one of his playmates' favorite games. In truth, though, the wild men were the ones with the arms and armor and horses and, more important still, both the skill and will to use them.
The village got through the winter, which was fiercer than any Krispos remembered. Even the feast and celebrations of Midwinter's Day, the day when the sun finally turned north in the sky, had to be forgotten because of the blizzard raging outside.
Krispos grew to hate being cooped up and idle in the house for weeks on end. South of the mountains, even midwinter gave days when he could go out to play in the snow. Those were few and far between here. Even a freezing trip out to empty the chamber pot on the dung heap or help his father haul back firewood made him glad to return to the warm—if stuffy and smoky—air inside.
Spring came at last and brought with it mud almost as oppressive as the snow had been. Plowing, harrowing, sowing, and weeding followed, plunging Krispos back into the endless round of farm work and making him long for the lazy days of winter once more. That fall, the Kubratoi came to take their unfair share of the harvest once more.
The year after that, they came a couple of other times, riding through the fields and trampling down long swathes of growing grain. As they rode, they whooped and yelled and grinned at the helpless farmers whose labor they were wrecking.
'Drunk, the lot of 'em,' Krispos' father said the night after it happened the first time, his mouth tight with disgust. 'Pity they didn't fall off their horses and break their fool necks—that'd send 'em down to Skotos where they belong.'
'Better to thank Phos that they didn't come into the village and hurt people instead of plants,' Krispos' mother said. Phostis only scowled and shook his head.
Listening, Krispos found himself agreeing with his father. What the Kubratoi had done was wrong, and they'd done it on purpose. If he deliberately did something wrong, he got walloped for it. The villagers were not strong enough to wallop the Kubratoi, so let them spend eternity with the dark god and see how they liked that.
When fall came, of course, the Kubratoi took as much grain as they had before. If, thanks to them, less was left for the village, that was the village's hard luck.
The wild men played those same games the next year. That year, too, a woman who had gone down to the stream to bathe never came back. When the villagers went looking for her, they found hoofprints from several horses in the clay by the stream-bank.
Krispos' father held his mother very close when the news swept through the village. '
