Krispos the Emperor (29 page)

Besides, Syagrios would make a eunuch of him—and enjoy doing it—if he got himself into trouble of that sort.

The ruffian broke off his disputation with Olyvria, saying, "However you care to have it, my lady. You know more about this business than me, that's for sure. All I know now is that this here poor old smashed nose of mine is going to freeze off if I don't get to somewheres with a fire."

"There I cannot disagree with you," Olyvria said.

"Let's us head back to the keep, then," Syagrios suggested. "It'll be warm—well, warmer—in there. 'Sides, I can dump his Majestyhood here back in his room and get me a chance to relax a bit."

To the ice with you, Syagrios.
The thought stood pure and crystalline in the center of Phostis' mind. He wanted to scream it. Only a healthy regard for his own continued survival kept him from screaming it. He was, then, at most an imperfect Thanasiot. Like Olyvria, he remained enamored of the fleshly envelope his soul wore, no matter what the source of that flesh.

The narrow, muddy lanes of Etchmiadzin were almost pre-ternaturally dark. Night travel in Videssos the city was undertaken with torchbearers and guards, if for any legitimate purpose. Only footpads there cherished the black of night. But no one in Etchmiadzin tonight carried a light or seemed concerned over becoming a robber's victim. Cries rose into the dark sky, but they were only the lamentations the priest had commanded of his congregants.

The bulk of the fortress and the stars it obscured helped mark the path back from the temple. Even the torches above the gates were out. Livanios went that far in adhering to the tenets of the Thanasioi.

Syagrios grumbled under his breath. "Don't like that," he said. "Just anybody could come wandering in, and who'd be the wiser till too late?"

"Who's in the town save our own folk and a few Vaspurakaners?" Olyvria said. "They have their own rites and leave ours alone."

"They'd better," Syagrios replied. "More of us than there is of them."

Only inside the keep did light return. Livanios' caftan-wearing advisor sat at a table gnawing the leg of a roasted fowl and whistling a cheery tune Phostis did not know. If he'd heard the order for fasting and lamentation, he was doing a good job of ignoring it.

Syagrios lit a candle from a torch set in a soot-blackened sconce. With it in one hand and his knife in the other, he urged Phostis up the spiral stairway. "Back to your room now," he said. Phostis barely had time to nod to Olyvria before the twist of the stairs made her disappear.

The corridor that led to his little chamber was midnight black. He turned to Syagrios, pointing at the candle. "May I light a lamp in my room from that?"

"Not tonight," Syagrios said. "I got to watch you instead of roisterin', so you get no more enjoyment than me."

Once inside, Phostis drew off his cloak and put it over the blanket on his pallet. He did not take off his tunic as he got

under them both and huddled up in a ball to try to warm himself as fast as he could. He looked back toward the door, beyond which Syagrios surely lurked. "Roistering, is it?" he whispered. He might be a poor Thanasiot himself, but he knew a worse one.

The man's eyes twitched back and forth in their sockets.
It was like no motion Phostis had ever seen before; watching made him queasy. Voice calm but weak, the man said, "I can't see you, not really, but that's all right. It goes away in a few days, I'm told by those who have come this way before me."

"That's g-good." Phostis knew he sounded shaky. It shamed him, but he couldn't help it.

"Fear not," the man said. He'd been introduced to Phostis as Strabon. He smiled radiantly. "Soon, I know, I shall join the lord with the great and good mind and cast aside this flesh that has too long weighed me down."

Strabon had, Phostis thought, already cast aside almost all of his flesh. His face was a skull covered with skin; his neck seemed hardly thicker than a torch. Withered branches might have done for his arms, and claws for his hands. Not only had he no fat left on his bones, he had no muscle, either. He was bone and tendon and skin, nothing more. No, one more thing: the joy that lit his blind eyes.

"Soon," he repeated. "It's been six weeks, a few days over, since last I polluted my soul with aliment. Only a man who was fat to begin with will last much above eight, and never was I in the habit of glutting myself. Soon I shall fare beyond the sun and look on Phos face to face. Soon."

"Does—does it hurt?" Phostis asked. Beside him, Olyvria sat calmly. She'd seen these human skeletons before, often enough so now she was easy with the husk of Strabon.

Syagrios had not come into the hut; Phostis heard him pacing around outside the door.

Strabon said, "No, boy, no; as I told you, fear not. Oh, my belly panged in the early days, I'll not deny, as Skotos' part of me realized I had determined to cut my essential self free of it. But no, I feel no pain, only longing to be free." He smiled again. Save for the faintest tinge of pink, his lips were invisible.

"But to linger so—" Phostis shook his head, though he knew Strabon could not see that. Then he blurted, "Could you not also have refused water, and so made a quicker end of it?"

The corners of Strabon's gash of a mouth turned down. "Some of those who are most holy do as you say. Sinner that I am, I had not the fortitude for it."

Phostis stared at him. Never in his comfortable life back at the palaces had he dreamed he'd be talking with a man in the last stages of deliberately starving himself to death. Even if he had dreamed that, could he have imagined the man would reproach himself for lack of fortitude? No; impossible.

The lids fell over Strabon's twitching eyes; he seemed to doze. "Is he not a miracle of piety?" Olyvria whispered.

"Well, yes, that he is." Phostis scratched his head. Back in Videssos the city, he'd despised the temple hierarchy for wearing bejeweled vestments and venerating Phos in temples built by riches taken—stolen—from the peasantry. Better, he'd thought, a simple but strong worship, one that sprang from within and demanded nothing of anyone save the single pious individual.

Now before him he saw personified, and indeed taken to an extreme he'd never imagined, an example of such worship. He had to respect the religious impulse that had led Strabon to make himself into a collection of twigs and branches, but he was less sure he considered it an ideal.

Yet such self-destruction was implicit in Thanasiot doctrine, for those who had the courage to follow where logic led. If the world of the senses was but a creation of Skotos', what course more logical than to remove one's precious and eternal soul from that swamp of evil and corruption?

Rather hesitantly, he turned toward Olyvria. "However holy he may be, I'd not care to imitate him. Granted, the world is not all it might be, but leaving it this way strikes me as—oh,

I don't know—as running away from the fight against wickedness rather than joining it."

"Ah, but the body itself is evil, boy," Strabon said. He hadn't been asleep after all. "Because of that, any fight is foredoomed to failure." His eyes closed again.

Olyvria spoke in a low voice. "For the many, there may be much truth in what you say, Phostis. As I told you back on Midwinter's Day, I'd not have the bravery to do as Strabon does. But I thought you ought to see him, to celebrate and admire what the soul can do if it so wills."

"I see it," Phostis said. "It is indeed a marvel. But something to celebrate? Of that I'm less certain."

Olyvria looked at him severely. Had she been standing, her hands would have gone onto her hips. As it was, she breathed out in exasperation. "Even the dogma you grew up with has room for asceticism and mortifying the flesh."

"That's true," he said. "Too much care for this world and you have fat, contented priests who might as well not be priests at all. But now, seeing Strabon here, I think there may be too little care for the world, as well." His voice fell to a whisper, so he would not disturb the fitfully sleeping relic of a man. This time, Strabon did not respond.

Phostis listened to himself with some surprise. I
sound like my father,
he thought. How many times, back at the palaces, had he watched and listened to Krispos steering a middle course between schemes that might have proved spectacular successes or even more spectacular disasters? How many times had he sneered at his father for that moderation?

"What he does affects no one but himself," Olyvria said, "and will surely earn him eternity in communion with Phos."

"That's true," Phostis repeated. "What he does by himself affects him alone. But if one man and one woman in four, say, decided to walk the gleaming path in his exact footprints, that would affect those who declined to do so very much indeed. And Strabon's way, if I rightly understand it, is the one Thanasiot doctrine favors."

"For those whose spirits let them take it, yes," Olyvria said. Phostis looked from Strabon to her, then back again. He tried to envision her features ravaged by starvation, her bright eyes writhing blindly in their sockets. He'd never been the most imaginative of young men. More often than not, he felt that to be a lack. It seemed a blessing now.

Strabon coughed himself awake. He tried to say something, but the coughs went on and on, deep wet ones that wracked the sack of bones he had become. "Chest fever," Phostis whispered to Olyvria. She shrugged. If it was, he thought, the Thanasiot zealot might be dead by evening, for how could he have any strength in his body to fight off illness?

Olyvria stood to go. Phostis was far from sorry to get up with her. When he no longer saw the wasted figure lying on the bed, he felt more alive himself. Maybe that was illusion sprung from the animal part of him and from Skotos; he could not say. But he knew he would have trouble overcoming that animal part. Was his soul a prisoner of his body, as the Thanasioi proclaimed, or a partner with it? He would have to think long and hard on that.

Outside Strabon's hut, Syagrios paced up and down the muddy street, whistling a tune and spitting through his uneven teeth. Phostis watched him grin and swagger. When he tried to visualize the ruffian starving himself, his thoughts ran headlong into a blank wall. He simply could not see it happening. Syagrios was an ugly specimen, but a vivid one for all that.

"So what did you think of the boneyard?" he asked Phostis, spitting again.

Olyvria rounded on him, tight black curls flying in fury. "Show proper respect for the pious and holy Strabon!" she blazed.

"Why? Soon enough he'll be dead, and then it'll be up to Phos, not to the likes of me, to figure out what he deserves."

Olyvria opened her mouth, then closed it again. Phostis made a mental note that Syagrios, while indubitably uncouth, was far from stupid.
Too bad,
he thought. Aloud, he said, "If a few people choose to make their end that way, I don't see that it much matters to the world around them—and, as Olyvria says, they are pious and holy. But if many decide to end their lives, the Empire will shake."

"And why shouldn't the Empire shake, pray?" Olyvria asked.

Now Phostis had to pause and consider. An unshaken Empire of Videssos was almost as much of an article of faith for him as Phos' creed. And why not? For seven centuries and more, Videssos had given folk in a great swathe of the world reasonable peace and reasonable security. True, there had been disasters, as when steppe nomads took advantage of Videssian civil war to invade the north and east and form their own khaganates in the ruins of imperial provinces. True, every generation or two fought another in the long string of debilitating wars with Makuran. But, on the whole, he remained convinced life within the Empire was likelier to be happy than anywhere outside it.

But when he said as much, Olyvria answered, "So what? If life in this world is but part of Skotos' trap, what matter if you're happy as the jaws close? Better then that we should be unhappy, that we should recognize everything material as part of the lure that draws us down to the ice."

"But—" Phostis felt, himself floundering. "Suppose— hmm—suppose everyone in the westlands, or most people, starved themselves to death like Strabon. What would happen after that? The Makuraners would march in unopposed and rule the land forever."

"Well, what if they did?" Olyvria said. "The pious men and women who'd abandoned the world would be safe in Phos' heaven, and the invaders would surely go to the ice when their days were done."

"Yes, and the worship of Phos would go out of the world, for the Makuraners reverence their Four Prophets, not the good god," Phostis said. "No one who worshiped Phos would be left, and Skotos would have the victory in this world. The realm beyond the sun would gain no new recruits, but the dark god would have to carve new caverns into the ice." He spat in ritual rejection of Skotos.

Olyvria frowned. The very tip of her tongue poked out of her mouth for a moment. Her voice was troubled as she said, "This argument has more weight than I would have looked for."

"No it don't," Syagrios said with a raucous laugh. "The two of you's quarreling over whether you'd like your cow's eggs better poached or fried. Truth is, a cow ain't about to lay no eggs—and whole flocks of people ain't about to starve themselves to death, neither. Come to that, is either one o'
you
ready to stop eatin' yet?"