Tale of Krispos Krispos Rising Krispos of Videssos Krispos the Emperor

Chapter 1 The thunder of hoofbeats. shouts in a harsh tongue. Krispos opened one eye. It was still dark. It felt like the middle of the night. He shook his head. He did not like noise that woke him up when he should have been asleep. He closed the eye and snuggled down between his mother and father on the straw palliasse he and they and his little sister used for a bed. His parents woke, too, just when he was trying to go back to sleep. Krispos felt their bodies stiffen on either side of him. His sister Evdokia slept on. Some people have all the luck, he thought, though he'd never thought of Evdokia as particularly lucky before. Not only was she threehalf his ageshe was a girl. The shouts turned to screams. One of the screams had words: "The Kubratoi! The Kubratoi are in the village!" His mother gasped. "Phos save us!" she said, her voice almost as shrill as the cries of terror in the darkness outside. "The good god saves through what people do," his father said. The farmer sprang to his feet. That woke Evdokia, where nothing else had. She started to cry. "Keep her quiet, Tatze!" Krispos' father growled. His mother cuddled Evdokia, softly crooned to her. Krispos wondered whether he'd get cuddled if he started crying. He thought he'd be more likely to get his father's hand on his backside or across his face. Like every farm boy from anywhere near the town of Imbros, he knew who the Kubratoi were: wild men from north of the mountains. "Will we fight them, Father?" he asked. Just the other day, with a stick for a sword, he'd slain a dozen make-believe robbers. But his father shook his head. "Real fighting is for soldiers. The Kubratoi, curse 'em, are soldiers. We aren't. They'd kill us, and we couldn't do much in the way of fighting back. This isn't play, boy." "What will we do, Phostis?" his mother asked above Evdokia's sniffles. She sounded almost ready to cry herself. That frightened Krispos more than all the racket outside. What could be worse than something bad enough to frighten his mother? The answer came in a moment: something bad enough to frighten his father. "We run," Phostis said grimly, "unless you'd sooner be dragged north by the two-legged wolves out there. That's why I built close to the forest; that's why I built the door facing away from most of the houses: to give us a chance to run, if the Kubratoi ever came down again." His mother bent, rose again. "I have the baby." In her arms, Evdokia said indignantly, "Not a baby!" Then she started to cry again. No one paid any attention to her. Krispos' father took him by the shoulder, so hard that his flimsy nightshirt might as well not have stood between man's flesh and boy's. "Can you run to the trees, son, fast as you can, and hide yourself till the bad men go away?" "Yes, Father." Put that way, it sounded like a game. Krispos had played more games in the forest than he could count. "Then run!" His father threw open the door. Out he darted. His mother followed, still holding Evdokia. Last came his father. Krispos knew his father could run faster than he could, but his father didn't try, not tonight. He stayed between his family and the village. Bare feet skimming across the ground, Krispos looked back over his shoulder. He'd never seen so many horses or so many torches in his life before. All the horses had strangers on themthe fearsome Kubratoi, he supposed. HTurtledove, Harry is the author of 'Tale of Krispos Krispos Rising Krispos of Videssos Krispos the Emperor', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345467201 and ISBN 0345467205.