The Tale of Krispos Read Online Free PDF

asked. Try as he would, he could not recall it.
    “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.
             
    T HE 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 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