"I may grow desperate enough to do a great many things," Rhavas said with as much dignity as he had in him. "By the lord with the great and good mind, I will never grow desperate enough to run away to Halogaland."
A time would come when he'd wish he had never said that.
Skopentzana went on about its business as if the civil war convulsing most of the Empire were happening in distant Makuran. That was the one advantage Rhavas had ever found in living in a city so far from the imperial heartland. Interesting things passed Skopentzana by, but so did troubles.
The prelate could walk through any of the city's markets and watch Videssians and tall, blond Halogai and even a few swarthy, stocky, bushy-bearded Khamorth haggling over amber and furs and wine and jewelry and horseflesh and weapons and a thousand other goods. Everything seemed the way it had the year before, when peace pervaded Videssos. He wished the reality matched the seeming.
As days grew longer with astonishing speed when spring burgeoned here, so the hours of light shrank quickly as autumn approached. Birds began flying south. Nights grew chilly. Days had never got hot, not to a man used to the scorching, muggy summers of Videssos the city. Now they had trouble feeling anything but cool.
On the farms around Skopentzana, peasants began bringing in the harvest of barley and rye and oats. Few dared plant wheat here, for the growing season proved long enough to let it ripen only about every other year. Autumn harvests still sometimes made Rhavas feel as if the world had turned upside down and inside out. Down around Videssos the city, fall and winter were the rainy seasons, and farmers brought in their crops in the springtime.
He often grew tired of rye bread and oatmeal and chewy barley cakes. He drank wine whenever he could. For a man of wealth, that was most of the time. Because he could drink wine so much, he didn't have to grow tired of the beer the locals brewed from barley. He could tolerate it, but he'd never got a taste for it. After wine, it was nasty, sour stuff. He and Zautzes didn't agree on everything, but they were in perfect accord there. Even praying for a good crop of barley smacked of hypocrisy to him.
Ingegerd, now, took barley altogether for granted. In conversations in the narthex, Rhavas learned she'd bought a lot of barley for brewing: more than for baking. "In Halogaland, beer was all we had," she told him. "I do not think I tasted wine above once or twice before I came down into the Empire. Wine was—is—only for the chieftains, the big men, there."
"What a benighted place!" Rhavas burst out, and only later hoped he hadn't offended her.
Fortunately for him, she answered with a matter-of-fact nod. "I know that now," she said. "I did not know it then. How could I? Halogaland was all I had seen. If one place is the whole world to you, you cannot think it fine or dreadful, not in any real way. Would we know how good Phos is if we did not have Skotos to compare him to?" She spat.
So did Rhavas, for whom the gesture was almost as ingrained as breathing. He didn't answer at once. She'd framed the question in a way that hadn't occurred to him. As far as he knew, it hadn't occurred to any other Videssian theologians, either. After his pause for thought, he said, "Phos is goodness absolute. We deny that at peril to our souls."
"I do not deny it, very holy sir," Ingegerd said steadily. "But would we understand how good he is if we did not see what went on in the world where goodness is not? I have seen horrors. Surely you have as well."
Rhavas hadn't, or not many; he'd lived a sheltered, prosperous life. He nodded even so; he followed where she was going. He said, "You believe good seems sweeter after evil, as wine seems sweeter after a taste of, uh, salt fish." He'd started to compare it to beer. That would have been fine in the capital, but not even with most Videssians born in Skopentzana.
"Yes, that is what I mean," Ingegerd agreed.
"The wine would be as sweet even without the fish," Rhavas said.
"My point is not what it would be but how it would seem," she replied.
To Rhavas, things were what they were. How they seemed mattered much less. He and the woman from Halogaland eyed each other in exasperation tinged with respect. He was the one who changed the subject, asking, "Have you had word of your husband?"
She shook her head. Her unbound hair flew like a shower of gold. "Nothing," she said. "And, with the turning of the seasons, I doubt I will hear, not till spring. I pray he is safe."
"So do I," said Rhavas, who had indeed offered up prayers for Himerios.
"I thank you for that, very holy sir." With Haloga fatalism, Ingegerd added, "In any case, it will be as it is."
"It will be as the lord with the great and good mind wills it to be," Rhavas said, a touch of sternness in his voice.
Hearing him take that tone would have made any of the priests who served under him quail. Ingegerd only nodded, equal to equal. "We said the same thing with different words, I think."
"Well, maybe we did." Rhavas found he didn't want to get into an argument with her. She was no trained theologian. The prelate didn't know whether she could read and write. But she had a formidable native intelligence. She thought straight, too, which many couldn't do. She would follow her logic wherever it took her, and she would face without fear whatever she found at the end.
Would I challenge her more directly if she were a man? Rhavas wondered. He couldn't remember the last time he'd backed away from a dispute. Backing away wasn't usually in his nature. Slowly, he shook his head. It wasn't that she was a woman. He'd got into disputations with women who fancied themselves theologians both back in Videssos the city and here in Skopentzana. He'd sent more than a few of them off in tears, too; when he did argue, he pulled no punches.
What, then? Before he could find anything that might be an answer, Ingegerd dipped her head to him and swept out of the temple. A man who smelled of onions came up and bent his ear about something or other. He made responses that seemed to satisfy the odorous Videssian, and then forgot about him as soon as he took himself and his smell away.
When Rhavas got back to his residence, he found he couldn't remember any of the conversations he'd had after Ingegerd left. He'd been thinking about her, and about why he didn't want to argue with her, to the exclusion of almost everything else.
The answer, though, came to him as he was drifting toward sleep, when he wasn't thinking about it at all. He sat bolt upright in his dark bedchamber. "Phos!" he exclaimed, and sketched the sun-circle over his heart.
He'd asked himself the wrong question back in the narthex. It should have been, Would I challenge her more directly if I didn't want her?
There in the blackness—a blackness that reminded him too much of Skotos—he prayed and prayed and prayed, sleep forgotten. Celibacy had never been too hard for him, never till now. He'd scorned those who let their fallible flesh come between themselves and their devotion to the good god. Now, all unawares, he'd fallen into the same trap himself.
"She must never know," he whispered in the darkness. "No one must ever know." But the person who most needed not to know was himself, and he had no idea how to make that so.
Some of the troop of men who rode south through Skopentzana were Videssians: soldiers of a sort Rhavas had seen many times. Some were Halogai, with whom he was also familiar—big, burly blond men with their hair swinging in thick braids behind them. They wore mailshirts and carried long-handled war axes. And some could have been one or the other or both—as on any frontier, there were men of mixed blood along the border between the Empire of Videssos and Halogaland.