He dropped back into Videssian. "Ha, little khagan, you forget me? Good thing I remember you, or you die this morning. You defy me once before, in Videssos. How does farmer boy come to have man's—Kubrati man's—spirit in him?"
Krispos hadn't recognized the rider who'd captured him and his family. If the man recognized him, though, he would turn it to his advantage. "Why are you here? What do you want with us now?"
"To take you away." The scowl came back to the Kubrati's face. "Videssos has paid ransom for you. We have to let you go." He sounded anything but delighted at the prospect.
"Ransom?" The word spread through the villagers, at first slowly and in hushed, disbelieving tones, then louder and louder till they all shouted it, nearly delirious with joy. "Ransom!"
They danced round the Kubratoi, past hatred and fear dissolved in the powerful water of freedom. It was, Krispos thought, like a Midwinter's Day celebration somehow magically dropped into springtime. Soon riders and villagers were hoisting wooden mugs of beer together. Barrel after barrel was broken open. Little would be left for later, but what did that matter? They would not be here later. A new cry took the place of "Ransom!"
"We're going home!"
Evdokia was puzzled. "What does everyone mean, Krispos, we're going home? Isn't this home?"
"No, silly, the place Mother and Father talk about all the time is our real home."
"Oh." His sister barely remembered Videssos. "How is it different?"
"It's ..." Krispos wasn't too clear on that himself, not after almost three years. "It's better," he finished at last. That seemed to satisfy her. He wondered if it was true. His own memories of life south of the mountains had grown hazy.
The Kubratoi seemed in as big a hurry to get rid of their Videssian captives as they had been to get them into Kubrat in the first place. Evdokia had trouble keeping up; sometimes Krispos' father had to carry her for a stretch, even if it shamed her. Krispos made the three days of hard marching on his own, but they left his feet blistered and him sleeping like a dead man each night.
At last the villagers and hundreds more like them reached a broad, shallow valley. With an eye rapidly growing wiser to the ways of farming, Krispos saw that it was better land than what his village tilled. He also saw several large and splendid yurts and, in the distance, the flocks by which the Kubratoi lived. That explained why the valley was not farmed.
The wild men herded the Videssians into pens much like those in which the peasants kept goats. They posted guards around them so no one would even think of clambering over the branches and sneaking off. Fear began to replace the farmer's jubilation. "Are we truly to be ransomed," someone shouted, "or sold like so many beasts?"
"You keep still! Big ceremony coming tomorrow," yelled a Kubrati who spoke Videssian. He climbed up onto the fencing of the pen and pointed. "See over there. There tents of Videssos' men, and Empire's banner, too. No tricks now."
Krispos looked in the direction the man's arm had given. He was too short to see out of the pen. "Pick me up, Father!"
His father did, then, with a grunt of effort, set the boy on his shoulders. Krispos saw the tops of several square tents not far from the yurts he'd noticed before. Sure enough, a sky-blue flag with a gold sunburst on it snapped in front of one of them. "Is that Videssos' banner?" he 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.
The 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 split second, Krispos hung back. Then he thought that he had been chosen for his boldness. He straightened his back, put his chin up, and walked over to Omurtag. The tight-stretched hides vibrated under his feet, as if they were an enormous drumhead.
"We have your people," Omurtag intoned, taking hold of Krispos' arm with his left hand. His grip was firm and hard. His right hand plucked a dagger from his belt, set it at the boy's throat. Krispos stood very still. The khagan went on, "They are ours, to do with as we will."
"The Empire has gold and will pay for their safe return." Iakovitzes sounded, of all things, bored. Krispos was suddenly sure he'd performed this ceremony many times before.