Krispos Rising

to leave us penned up while it's going on.'

A little later, the Kubratoi let the farmers out of the pens. 'This way! This way!' the nomads who spoke Videssian shouted, urging the crowd along toward the yurts and tents.

Krispos spotted the wild men he had yelled at on the day he was captured and on the day he started back to freedom. The Kubrati was peering into the mass of peasants as they walked by him. His eye caught Krispos'. He grinned. 'Ho, little khagan, I look for you. You come with me—you part of ceremony.'

'What, me? Why?' As he spoke, though, Krispos cut across the flow of people toward the Kubrati.

The now-dismounted rider took him by the shoulder, as his father did sometimes. 'Khagan Omurtag, he want some Videssian to talk to envoy from Empire, stand for all you people in magic, while envoy paying gold to get you back. I tell him about you, how bold you are. He say all right.'

'Oh. Oh, my!' Excitement ousted fear. Khagan Omurtag, in Krispos' imagination, was nine feet high, with teeth like a wolf's. And an envoy from the Avtokrator should be even more magnificent—tall, handsome, heroic, clad in gilded chain mail, and carrying an enormous sword... .

Reality was less dramatic, as reality has a way of being. The Kubratoi had built a little platform of hides stretched across timbers. None of the four men who stood on it was nine feet tall, none wore gilded chain mail. Then the wild man lifted Krispos, and he was on the platform, too.

'Pretty boy,' murmured a short, sour-faced man in a robe of green silk shot through with silver threads. He turned to the Kubrati standing across from him. 'All right, Omurtag, he's here. Get on with your miserable heathen rite, if you think you must.'

Krispos waited for the sky to fall. No matter that the khagan of Kubrat was neither especially tall nor especially lupine—was, in fact, quite an ordinary-looking Kubrati save that his furs were of marten and sable, not fox and rabbit. He was the khagan. Talking that way to him had to cost a man his head.

But Omurtag only threw back his head and laughed. 'Sweet as always, Iakovitzes,' he said. His Videssian was as smooth and polished as the envoy's, and a good deal more so than Krispos'. 'The magic seals the bargain, as well you know.'

'Phos watches over all bargains from above the sun.' Iakovitzes nodded to the man in a blue robe behind him. Dim memories stirred in Krispos. He'd seen such men with shaved heads before, though not in Kubrat; the fellow was a priest.

'So you say,' Omurtag answered. 'My enaree here knows the spirits of ground and wind. They are closer than any lofty god above the sun, and I trust them further.'

The enaree was the first grown man Krispos had ever seen who cut off his beard. It made him look like an enormous little boy—till one looked into his eyes. They saw farther than boys' ... farther than men's had any business seeing, too, Krispos thought nervously.

The khagan turned to him. 'Come here, lad.'

For a split second, Krispos hung back. Then he thought that he had been chosen for his boldness. He straightened his back, put his chin up, and walked over to Omurtag. The tight-stretched hides vibrated under his feet, as if they were an enormous drumhead.

'We have your people,' Omurtag intoned, taking hold of Krispos' arm with his left hand. His grip was firm and hard. His right hand plucked a dagger from his belt, set it at the boy's throat. Krispos stood very still. The khagan went on, 'They are ours, to do with as we will.'

'The Empire has gold and will pay for their safe return.' Iakovitzes sounded, of all things, bored. Krispos was suddenly sure he'd performed this ceremony many times before.

'Let us see that gold,' the khagan said. His voice was still formal, but anything but bored. He stared avidly at the pouch Iakovitzes withdrew from within a fold of his robe.

The Videssian envoy drew out a single bright coin, gave it to Omurtag. 'Let this goldpiece stand for all, as the boy does,' Iakovitzes said.

Omurtag passed the coin to the enaree. He muttered over it; the hand that was not holding it moved in tiny passes. Krispos saw the Videssian priest scowl, but the man held his peace. The enaree spoke in the Kubrati tongue. 'He declares it is good gold,' Omurtag said to Iakovitzes.

'Of course it's good gold,' Iakovitzes snapped, breaking the ritual. 'The Empire hasn't coined anything else for hundreds of years. Should we start now, it would be for something more important than ransoming ragged peasants.'

The khagan laughed out loud. 'I think your tongue was stung by a wasp one day, Iakovitzes,' he said, then returned to the pattern of the ceremony. 'He declares it is good gold. Thus the people are yours.' He gently pushed Krispos toward Iakovitzes.

The envoy's touch was warm, alive. He moved his hand on Krispos' back in a way that was strange and familiar at the same time. 'Hello, pretty boy,' Iakovitzes murmured. Krispos recognized the tone and realized why the caress had that familiarity to it: his father and mother acted like this with each other when they felt like making love.

Having lived all his life in a one-room house with his parents, having slept in the same bed with them, he knew what sex was about. That variations could exist, variations that might include him and Iakovitzes, had not occurred to him before, though. Now that it did, he found he did not much care for it. He moved half a step away from the Avtokrator's envoy.

Iakovitzes jerked back his hand as if surprised to discover what it had been up to. Glancing at him, Krispos doubted he was. His face was a mask that must have taken years to perfect. Seeing Krispos' eye upon him, he gave a tiny shrug. If you don't want it, too bad for you, he seemed to say.

Aloud, the words he spoke were quite different. 'It is accomplished,' he said loudly. Then he turned to the crowd of peasants gathered in front of the platform. 'People of Videssos, you are redeemed!' he cried. 'The Phos- guarded Avtokrator Rhaptes redeems you from your long and horrid captivity in this dark and barbarous land, from your toil under the degrading domination of brutal and terrible masters. Masters? No, rather let me call them robbers, for they robbed you of the liberty rightfully yours ...'

The speech went on for some time. Krispos was at first impressed and then overwhelmed with the buckets of