One dawn late in the third spring after Krispos came to Kubrat, barking dogs woke the villagers even before they would have risen on their own. Rubbing their eyes, they stumbled from their houses to find themselves staring at a couple of dozen armed and mounted Kubratoi. The riders carried torches. They scowled down from horseback at the confused and frightened farmers.
Krispos' hair tried to rise at the back of his neck. He hadn't thought, lately, about the night the Kubratoi had kidnapped him and everyone else in his village. Now the memories—and the terror—of that night flooded back. But where else could the wild men take them from here? Why would they want to?
One of the riders drew his sword. The villagers drew back a Pace. Someone moaned. But the Kubrati did not attack with the curved blade. He pointed instead, westward. 'You come with us,' he said in gutturally accented Videssian. 'Now.'
Krispos' father asked the questions the boy was thinking: 'Where? Why?'
'Where I say, man bound to the earth. Because I say.' This time the horseman's gesture with the sword was threatening.
At nine, Krispos knew more of the world and its harsh ways than he had at six. Still, he did not hesitate. He sprang toward the Kubrati. His father grabbed at him to haul him back, too late. 'You leave him alone!' Krispos shouted up at the rider.
The man snarled at him, teeth gleaming white in the torchlight's flicker. The sword swung up. Krispos' mother screamed. Then the wild man hesitated. He thrust his torch down almost into Krispos' face. Suddenly, astonishingly, the snarl became a grin. The Kubrati said something in his own language. His comrades exclaimed, then roared laughter.
He dropped back into Videssian. 'Ha, little khagan, you forget me? Good thing I remember you, or you die this morning. You defy me once before, in Videssos. How does farmer boy come to have man's—Kubrati man's—spirit in him?'
Krispos hadn't recognized the rider who'd captured him and his family. If the man recognized him, though, he would turn it to his advantage. 'Why are you here? What do you want with us now?'
'To take you away.' The scowl came back to the Kubrati's face. 'Videssos has paid ransom for you. We have to let you go.' He sounded anything but delighted at the prospect.
'Ransom?' The word spread through the villagers, at first slowly and in hushed, disbelieving tones, then louder and louder till they all shouted it, nearly delirious with joy. 'Ransom!'
They danced round the Kubratoi, past hatred and fear dissolved in the powerful water of freedom. It was, Krispos thought, like a Midwinter's Day celebration somehow magically dropped into springtime. Soon riders and villagers were hoisting wooden mugs of beer together. Barrel after barrel was broken open. Little would be left for later, but what did that matter? They would not be here later. A new cry took the place of 'Ransom!'
'We're going home!'
Evdokia was puzzled. 'What does everyone mean, Krispos, we're going home? Isn't this home?'
'No, silly, the place Mother and Father talk about all the time is our real home.'
'Oh.' His sister barely remembered Videssos. 'How is it different?'
'It's ...' Krispos wasn't too clear on that himself, not after almost three years. 'It's better,' he finished at last. That seemed to satisfy her. He wondered if it was true. His own memories of life south of the mountains had grown hazy.
The Kubratoi seemed in as big a hurry to get rid of their Videssian captives as they had been to get them into Kubrat in the first place. Evdokia had trouble keeping up; sometimes Krispos' father had to carry her for a stretch, even if it shamed her. Krispos made the three days of hard marching on his own, but they left his feet blistered and him sleeping like a dead man each night.
At last the villagers and hundreds more like them reached a broad, shallow valley. With an eye rapidly growing wiser to the ways of farming, Krispos saw that it was better land than what his village tilled. He also saw several large and splendid yurts and, in the distance, the flocks by which the Kubratoi lived. That explained why the valley was not farmed.
The wild men herded the Videssians into pens much like those in which the peasants kept goats. They posted guards around them so no one would even think of clambering over the branches and sneaking off. Fear began to replace the farmer's jubilation. 'Are we truly to be ransomed,' someone shouted, 'or sold like so many beasts?'
'You keep still! Big ceremony coming tomorrow,' yelled a Kubrati who spoke Videssian. He climbed up onto the fencing of the pen and pointed. 'See over there. There tents of Videssos' men, and Empire's banner, too. No tricks now.'
Krispos looked in the direction the man's arm had given. He was too short to see out of the pen. 'Pick me up, Father!'
His father did, then, with a grunt of effort, set the boy on his shoulders. Krispos saw the tops of several square tents not far from the yurts he'd noticed before. Sure enough, a sky-blue flag with a gold sunburst on it snapped in front of one of them. '
'Aye, it's ours,' his father said. 'The tax collector always used to show it when he came. I'm gladder to see it now than I was then, I'll tell you that.' He put Krispos down.
'Let me see! My turn! Let me see!' Evdokia squealed. Phostis sighed, then smiled. He picked up his daughter.
The next morning, the peasants got far better fare than they'd had on the trek to the valley: roasted mutton and beef, with plenty of the flat wheatcakes the Kubratoi baked in place of leavened bread. Krispos ate till his belly felt like bursting from joy and he washed down the meat with a long swig from a leather bucket of mare's milk.
'I wonder what the ceremony the wild man talked about will be like,' his mother said.
'I wish we could see more of it,' his father added. 'Weren't for us, after all, it wouldn't be happening. Not right
