“They’re so poor,” he whispered. The green fields were brave with growing barley and beans, but pitifully narrow. And the crops, by Videssian standards, could not help being small. Under the smiling southern sun, some favored provinces brought in two harvests a year. Here in the north, getting one was by no means guaranteed. The kine were small, the pigs scrawny; only the sheep seemed as fine and woolly as he remembered. They had need for fine wool here, wool to ward against winter.
Even the longhouse was at the same time a match for his memories and less than he had looked for it to be. This chief was richer than Kveldulf’s father had dreamed of being; his home was bigger and stronger than that from which Kveldulf had fled, nose running and throat raw from smoke, as the imperials set it ablaze. Yet beside a score of homes, palaces, temples in Skopentzana, beside a score of scores in Videssos the city, it was but a hovel, and a filthy hovel at that.
The chief himself still stumped toward the priests. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with the same pale hair, fair skin, and light eyes as Kveldulf’s. The massive gold brooch that closed his cloak also declared his rank. But his baggy wool trousers had dirt-stained knees, perhaps from stooping in the fields but as likely from the earthen floor of the longhouse. Recalling his father’s holding burning over his head made Kveldulf notice the chief’s red-tracked eyes, the soot forever ground into the lines of his forehead: the Halogai knew of chimneys, but in winter they often chose not to let heat flee through them.
The chief paused about ten feet in front of the priests, spent a full minute surveying them. Then he said, “Why came you here, where you know your kind are not welcome?” His deep, slow voice, the sonorous, mouth-filling words he spoke, made Kveldulf shiver. Not since boyhood had he heard anyone save himself speak the pure Haloga tongue; he had taught it to his comrades here, but they gave it back with a staccato Videssian intonation.
Just the sound of the chief’s voice set Kveldulf’s heart crying to reply, but that was not his proper place. Modestly, he cast his eyes to the ground as Tzoumas, senior and most holy of the four, answered in the northern speech: “We come to tell you of the good god Phaos, the lord with the great and good mind, whom you must worship for the sake of your souls.”
“Here is a new thing,” the chief said, raising straw-colored eyebrows. Suddenly, he shifted into Videssian: “Not a few of us know your language, but few southern men have bothered learning ours.”
Behind Kveldulf, Nephon nudged Antilas, whispered, “Few of Videssos would waste their time on this barbarous jargon.” Antilas grunted agreement. The Haloga chief could not have heard him. Kveldulf frowned anyhow, though Nephon was far from wrong; only a direct order from the patriarch had produced even three to learn the northern tongue and the ways of the Halogai. Most Videssians assumed anyone unwilling to take on their own ways was not worth saving.
The chief went on, still in Videssian, “I dare say this decoy duck taught it to you.” His gaze swung to Kveldulf and he returned to his birthspeech as he asked, “Who are you, and how came you among the southrons?”
“By your leave, holy sir?” Kveldulf murmured to Tzoumas, who dipped his head in assent. Only then did Kveldulf speak directly to the Haloga: “I am Kveldulf, a priest of Phaos like any other.”
“Not like any other, by the gods,” the chief said. “And Kveldulf what? Are you a slave or a woman, that you have neither ekename nor father’s name to set beside your own?” He thumped his chest with a big fist. “Me, I am Skatval the Brisk, otherwise Skatval Raud’s son.”
“Honor to you and yours, Brisk Skatval,” Kveldulf said, giving the chief proper greeting. “I am—Kveldulf. It is enough. If you like, I am a slave, but a willing slave to the good god, as are all his priests. We have no other titles, and need none.”
“You—own yourself a slave?” Skatval’s sword slid from its sheath. “And you would fain enslave the free folk of Halogaland?”
“To the good god, yes.” Kveldulf knew death walked close. Among themselves, the Halogai kept no slaves. Videssos did. Kveldulf had been a slave of the most ordinary sort, until his fervent love for the god of whom he learned within the Empire persuaded his master, a pious man himself, to free him to serve Phaos. He unflinchingly met Skatval’s glare. “Slay me if you must, sir. I shall not flee, nor fight. But while I live, I shall preach.”
The Haloga chief began to bring up his bright blade. Then, all at once, he stopped, threw back his head, and roared laughter till it echoed from the hills. “Preach as you will, where you will, nithing of a priest. Let us see how many northern men would willingly shackle themselves forever to anything, even a god.”
Kveldulf felt angry heat rise from his throat to the top of his head. With his pale, almost transparent skin, he knew how visible his rage had to be. He did not care. Of themselves, his hands curled into clumsy, unpracticed fists. He took a step toward Skatval. “Hold!” Tzoumas said sharply.
Skatval laughed still, threw aside his sword. “Let him come, Videssian. Perhaps I can pound sense into his shaven head, if it will enter there in no other way.”
“Hold, holy sir,” Tzoumas told Kveldulf again, and waited for him to obey before turning back to Skatval. To the chief, he said, “Pick up your weapon, sir, for in the battle about to be joined, you will find Kveldulf well armed.”
“Well armed? With what?” Skatval jeered.
“With words,” Tzoumas answered. Skatval suddenly stopped smiling.
Kveldulf preached in a pasture, a clump of cow dung close by his sandals. From everything Skatval knew of Videssians, that in itself would have been plenty to put them off stride. But Kveldulf noticed no more than any of the chief’s smallholders might have. And too many of those smallholders to suit Skatval stood in the field to listen.
Skatval watched from the edge of the woods that lay by the pasture. He had called Kveldulf a woman for bearing an unadorned name. Now, as if in revenge for that taunt, women flocked to hear the Haloga unaccountably turned Videssian priest. When he thought to be so, Skatval was just enough. Much as he despised Kveldulf, he could not deny the blue-robe made a fine figure of a man, save for his naked skull. And even that, repulsive as it still seemed on the Videssian clerics, might be reckoned but an exotic novelty on a man who was in every other way a perfect northerner. By the sighs from the womenfolk, they reckoned it so, which only annoyed Skatval the more.
Among those womenfolk was his own daughter Skjaldvor; he saw her bright gold hair in the second row of the crowd around Kveldulf. He rumbled something discontented, down deep in his throat. If Skjaldvor took this southron nonsense seriously, how could he hope to rid himself of Kveldulf when the time came for that? He rumbled again. His daughter should have been wed two years ago, maybe three or four, but he’d indulged, indeed been flattered by, her wish to stay in his own longhouse. Now he wondered what sort of price he would have to pay for that indulgence.
He could all but hear his own stern, bloodthirsty gods laughing at him. They knew one always paid for being soft. He scowled. Would they willingly let themselves be supplanted, just for the sake of teaching him a lesson he already knew by heart? They might. Halogai who went after vengeance pursued it for its own sake, without counting coins to see if it was worth the cost.
The summer breeze, so mild as to befool a man who did not know better into thinking such fine days would last forever, blew Kveldulf’s words to Skatval’s ears. The priest had a fine, mellow voice, a man’s voice, and was no mean speaker: to northern directness he married a more sophisticated Videssian style, as if he were holding up ideas in his hands and examining them from all sides.