"Then why take the army out?" Evripos asked.
Krispos sighed. "Because sometimes it's needful, as you know very well. If I don't go to the fighting this summer, it will come to me. Given that choice, I'd sooner do it on my own terms, or as nearly as I can."
"Aye, that makes sense," Evripos said after a moment's thought. "Sometimes the world won't let you have things all as you'd like them."
He was probably speaking from bitterness at not being first in line for the throne. Nonetheless, Krispos was moved to reach out and set a hand on his shoulder. "That's an important truth, son. You'd do well to remember it." It was, he thought, a truth Phostis hadn't fully grasped—but then Phostis, as firstborn, hadn't had the need. Each son was so different from the other two ... "Where's Katakolon? Do you know?"
Evripos pointed. "One of the rooms down that hallway: second or third on the left, I think."
"Thanks." Later, Krispos realized he hadn't asked what his youngest son was doing. If Evripos knew, he kept his mouth shut, a useful ploy he might well have picked up from his father. Krispos walked down the hallway. The second chamber on the left, a sewing room for the serving women, was empty.
The door to the third room on the left was closed. Krispos worked the latch. He saw a tangle of bare arms and legs, heard a couple of horrified squawks, and shut the door again in a hurry. He stood chuckling in the hall until Katakolon, his robe rumpled and his face red, came out a couple of minutes later.
He let Katakolon steer him down the corridor, and was anything but surprised to hear the door open and close behind him. He didn't look back, but started to laugh. Katakolon gave him a dirty look. "What's so funny?"
"You are," Krispos answered. "I do apologize for interrupting."
Katakolon's glare got blacker, but he seemed confused as well as annoyed. "Is that all you're going to say?"
"Yes, I think so. After all, it's nothing I haven't seen before. Remember, I was Anthimos' vestiarios." He decided not to go into detail about Anthimos' orgies. Katakolon was too likely to try imitating them.
Looking at his youngest son's face, Krispos had all he could do to keep from laughing again. Katakolon was obviously having heavy going imagining his rather paunchy, gray-bearded father reveling with an Avtokrator who, even after a generation, remained a byword for debauchery of all sorts.
Krispos patted his son on the back. "You have to bear in mind, lad, that once upon a time I wasn't a creaking elder. I had the same yen for good wine and bad women as any other young man."
"Yes, Father," Katakolon said, but not as if he believed it.
Sighing, Krispos said, "If you have too much trouble picturing me with a zest for life, try to imagine Iakovitzes, say, as a young man. The exercise will do your wits good."
He gave Katakolon credit: the youth visibly did try. After a few seconds, he whistled. "He'd have been something, wouldn't he?"
"Oh, he was," Krispos said. "He's still something, come to that."
All at once, he wondered if Iakovitzes had ever tried his blandishments on Katakolon. He didn't think the old lecher would have got anywhere; like his other two sons, his youngest seemed interested only in women. If Iakovitzes had ever tried to seduce Katakolon or one of the other boys, they'd never brought Krispos the tale.
"Now let me tell you why I interrupted you at a tender moment—" Krispos explained what he had in mind for the most junior Avtokrator.
"Of course, Father. I'll come with you, and help as I can," Katakolon said when he was done; of the three boys, he was the most tractable. Even the stubborn streak he shared with his brothers and Krispos was in him good-natured. "I don't expect I'll be busy every moment, and some of the provincial lasses last summer were tastier than I'd have expected away from the capital. When do we start out?"
"As soon as the roads are dry." Dry himself, Krispos added, "You won't be devastating the local girls by leaving quite yet."
"All right," Katakolon said. "In that case, if you'll excuse me—" He started down the hall, more purpose in his stride than on any mission for his father. Krispos wondered if he'd burned that hot at seventeen. He probably had, but he had almost as much trouble believing it as Katakolon did in placing him at one of Anthimos' revels.
Livanios addressed his assembled fighters: "Soon we fare forth, both to fight and to advance along the gleaming path. We shall not go alone. By the lord with the great and good mind, I swear our trouble will not be raising men but rather making sure we are not overwhelmed by those who would join us. We shall spread across the countryside like a fire through grassland; no one and nothing can hold us back."
The men cheered. By their look, a good many of them were herders from the westlands' central plateau: lean, weatherbeat-en, sunbaked men intimately acquainted with grass fires. Now they carried javelins in their hands, not staves. They were not the best-disciplined troops in the world, but fanaticism went a long way toward making up for sloppy formations.
Phostis cheered when everyone else did. Standing there silent and glum would have got him noticed, and not in a way he wanted. He was trying to cultivate invisibility, the way a farmer cultivated radishes. He wished Livanios would forget he existed.
The heresiarch was in full spate: "The leeches who live in Videssos the city think they can suck our life's blood forever. We'll show them they're wrong, by the good god, and if the gleaming path leads through the smoking ruins of the palaces built from poor men's blood, why then, it does."
More cheers. Phostis didn't feel quite such a hypocrite in joining these: the ostentatious wealth the capital held was what had made him flirt with the doctrines of the Thanasioi in the first place. But Livanios' speech was a harangue and nothing more. If any Avtokrator of recent generations was sensitive to the peasant's plight, it was Krispos. Phostis was sick of hearing how his father had been taxed off his land, but he knew the experience made Krispos want not to visit it on anyone else.
"We'll hang up the fat ecclesiastics by their thumbs, too," Livanios shouted. "Whatever gold the Emperors don't get, the clerics do. Has Phos the need for fancy houses?"
"No!" the men roared back, and Phostis with them. In spite of everything, he still had some sympathy for what Thanasios had preached. He wondered if Livanios could truly say the same. And he wondered still more just how much hold Artapan had on the rebel leader. He was no closer to knowing that for certain than he had been on the day when he and Olyvria first became lovers.
Whenever she crossed his mind, his blood ran hotter. Digenis would have scolded him, or more likely given up on him as an incorrigible sinner and sensualist. He didn't care. He wanted her more with every passing day—and he knew she also wanted him.
They'd managed to join twice more since that first time: once late at night up in his little cell while the guard snored down the hall and once in a quiet corridor carved into the stone beneath the keep. Both couplings were almost as hurried and frantic as the first had been; neither was what Phostis had in mind when he thought of making love. But they inflamed him and Olyvria for more.
Was what he felt the love of which the romancers sang? He knew little firsthand of love; around the palaces, seduction and hedonism were more often on display. His own father and mother seemed to have got on well, but he'd still been a boy when Dara died. Zaidas and Aulissa were called a love match, but the wizard—aside from being Krispos' crony, which of itself made him suspect—had to be close to forty: could an old man really be in love?
Phostis couldn't tell if he was in love himself. All he knew was that he missed Olyvria desperately, that when they were apart every moment dragged as if it were an hour, that every stolen hour together somehow flashed by like a moment