The Tale of Krispos Read Online Free Page B

didn’t like just enduring. He wondered if that meant he shouldn’t be a farmer. What else could he be, though? He had no idea.
             
    T HE VILLAGE GOT THROUGH THE WINTER, WHICH WAS FIERCER than any Krispos remembered. Even the feast and celebrations of Midwinter’s Day, the day when the sun finally turned north in the sky, had to be forgotten because of the blizzard raging outside.
    Krispos grew to hate being cooped up and idle in the house for weeks on end. South of the mountains, even midwinter gave days when he could go out to play in the snow. Those were few and far between here. Even a freezing trip out to empty the chamber pot on the dung heap or help his father haul back firewood made him glad to return to the warm—if stuffy and smoky—air inside.
    Spring came at last and brought with it mud almost as oppressive as the snow had been. Plowing, harrowing, sowing, and weeding followed, plunging Krispos back into the endless round of farm work and making him long for the lazy days of winter once more. That fall, the Kubratoi came to take their unfair share of the harvest once more.
    The year after that, they came a couple of other times, riding through the fields and trampling down long swathes of growing grain. As they rode, they whooped and yelled and grinned at the helpless farmers whose labor they were wrecking.
    “Drunk, the lot of ’em,” Krispos’ father said the night after it happened the first time, his mouth tight with disgust. “Pity they didn’t fall off their horses and break their fool necks—that’d send ’em down to Skotos where they belong.”
    “Better to thank Phos that they didn’t come into the village and hurt people instead of plants,” Krispos’ mother said. Phostis only scowled and shook his head.
    Listening, Krispos found himself agreeing with his father. What the Kubratoi had done was wrong, and they’d done it on purpose. If he deliberately did something wrong, he got walloped for it. The villagers were not strong enough to wallop the Kubratoi, so let them spend eternity with the dark god and see how they liked that.
    When fall came, of course, the Kubratoi took as much grain as they had before. If, thanks to them, less was left for the village, that was the village’s hard luck.
    The wild men played those same games the next year. That year, too, a woman who had gone down to the stream to bathe never came back. When the villagers went looking for her, they found hoofprints from several horses in the clay by the streambank.
    Krispos’ father held his mother very close when the news swept through the village. “
Now
I will thank Phos, Tatze,” he said. “It could have been you.”
    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