"Happy to do it, very holy sir," answered the man who'd caught him. "Here—have a swig of this." He handed Rhavas a wineskin.
The prelate drank. The wine was sweet and strong. "A blessing from the good god," he said, and gave the skin to the woman who'd leaped just before him.
Another man jumped over the bonfire, and a woman with a wart on her cheek. Then it was Ingegerd's turn. She raced forward, arm's pumping like a man's as she ran. She soared high over the crackling flames. "Burn, ill luck!" she called, and came to earth again.
Rhavas stepped forward to make sure she didn't fall, but she needed no help, straightening on her own.
He drew back a pace, disappointed—and disappointed at himself for being disappointed. Ingegerd dropped him a curtsy. "I thank you for the thought, very holy sir."
"Yes." Rhavas didn't thank himself for some of his own thoughts.
Ingegerd could not see that. She looked to the east, murmuring, "Another Sunturning come and gone."
"Yes," Rhavas said again, but the unfamiliar word piqued interest of a different sort. "Is that what they call Midwinter's Day in Halogaland?"
"It is." The yellow-haired woman nodded. Then she laughed. "I have not called it that, especially not in this tongue, for many years. Sunturning." She said something in the language she'd learned as a baby; Rhavas would have guessed it was the same word.
"How do the Halogai celebrate the day?" he asked—the scholar in him never slept for long.
"With great horns of beer and blood sacrifices and even more fornication than is the custom here," Ingegerd answered.
"I . . . see." Rhavas coughed a couple of times. He'd asked. She'd told him. She had a pagan—or at least a most un-Videssian—directness to her.
"What you Videssians do . . . This is all right," Ingegerd said.
"So glad you approve," Rhavas said dryly.
She laughed at him. He smelled wine on her breath. "As if it matters in Videssos what I think," she said. "You people here have your customs, as the Halogai have theirs. You think yours best because you are used to them, they think theirs best for the same reason."
Ours are hallowed by the worship of the lord with the great and good mind. Though Rhavas thought it, he didn't say it. Ingegerd was too likely to come back by saying her birthfolk thought their gods hallowed what they did. Anything could happen on Midwinter's Day, but a religious argument wasn't what he had in mind.
Ingegerd went on, "I do like the mime troupes who perform. We have nothing like that in Halogaland." Then, more girlish than Rhavas had ever seen her, she laughed and clapped her hands. "Here they are! I spoke of them, and here they are! Am I not a great wizard?"
Rhavas made himself nod, though the magic she'd worked on him was as old as mankind and had nothing to do with what anyone normally thought of as wizardry. He hoped he kept a sour expression off his face. No matter what Ingegerd thought of the mime troupes, he didn't much like them. To his way of thinking, they turned Midwinter's Day liberty into license. That everyone cheered when they did it meant nothing to him. There was a difference between popularity and right and wrong—and if there wasn't, there should have been.
The first troupe was a group of women dressed in men's clothes, which would have been scandalous—to say nothing of illegal—any other day of the year. They swaggered out, pretended to work for a couple of minutes, and then repaired to what was obviously supposed to be a tavern. There they got drunk with miraculous haste. When the barmaid came over, she proved to be a woman not only dressed as a woman but wearing little enough to threaten her with chest fever—and frostbite—in a climate like Skopentzana's. The women dressed as men gaped at her as if they'd never seen such a marvelous creature before.
Among the people in the square, the women laughed and applauded while the men jeered lewdly. Their skit done, the mimes hurried off onto a side street. A troupe of men dressed as women took their place. The men still wore beards and showed off hairy legs. That made their effeminate gestures and prancing all the funnier—to the men in the crowd, anyhow. Their skit was almost the mirror image of the one that had gone before it. From housework, they quickly switched to gossip and to pouring down improbable amounts of beer. The more they pretended to drink, the more licentious their gossip seemed to get, at least by the way they gestured and wagged their hips. The men watching them howled laughter. The women rained catcalls down on their heads. Everyone cheered as they minced off at the end of the skit.
A troupe of swarthy Videssians in mailshirts and blond wigs came out next. Everybody roared at them—they imitated drunken Halogai. They looked for love and looked for fights and ended up in a terrific free-for-all with one another.
Rhavas glanced over at Ingegerd. She was laughing as hard as any of the Videssians around her. She caught his eye, which he hadn't expected. "Halogai do act like that when they drink," she said, "and they do drink."
"You admit it?" he said.
"Why would I deny it, when it is true?" she answered. "Usually, though, we are not so funny as this."
The next troupe skewered Zautzes the eparch as a pompous fool. Zautzes did what he had to do: he laughed twice as loud as anyone else.
On every day of the year but one, lampooning the prelate would have been at least as risky for the person rash enough to do it as insulting the eparch. The rules changed on Midwinter's Day. No—the rules disappeared on Midwinter's Day. The mime troupe that came out after the one that mocked Zautzes mocked Rhavas. The man who played him wore a blue robe; he had a bald head that let him look tonsured. On his head he had a gold—more likely (much more likely) polished brass—coronet, to remind everyone of the prelate's imperial connections.
He also had a permanent frown, one doubtless enhanced by greasepaint to be visible from a greater distance. He used it to disapprove of everything he saw, from a sausage seller to a pretty girl. He also thundered—silently, of course—from the pulpit. By the way the man impersonating Rhavas kept pointing to his coronet and sometimes even taking it off and pounding with it, he had to be thundering against Stylianos.
Zautzes' method made sense to Rhavas. Like the eparch, he laughed uproariously. He'd been doing it for years, ever since the first time a mime troupe went after him. Men in public life had to have, or at least to show, a thick skin. Those who couldn't got hounded the whole year through, not just on Midwinter's Day. Videssians were like wolves. When they scented blood, they hunted without rest and without mercy.
Out of the corner of his eye, Rhavas glanced at Ingegerd again. He might have hoped she would disapprove of watching a holy man mocked. He might have hoped that, but he was doomed to disappointment. She laughed at the teasing he got, just as she'd laughed at what the troupe before had done to Zautzes. Laughing when you were grinding your teeth was hard, but Rhavas managed.
He clapped and cheered when the mimes sashayed out of the square. If he was clapping and cheering because they were leaving . . . well, that was his business. No one else would know. No one else could prove it, anyhow, which was what really mattered.
Sure enough, anyone and everyone was fair game on Midwinter's Day. The next group of mimes that came out was enormous. It included not one but two men wearing imperial regalia. Each marched at the head of an army of men in armor: some ancient and rusty, the rest made from cheap sheet tin for the occasion.
Rhavas needed a moment to notice that the two rival Avtokrators were identical twins. They strode out in front of their armies to fight with each other. Somehow, the fight turned into a dance. One went back to one army, the other to the other. Had each man gone back to the army he'd had before? Had he traded armies with the other? Did it matter?