Rhavas still stared at the crumpled corpse. He didn't remember calling on the good god when he cursed Toxaras. He'd just retaliated for the mason's curse on him. He said, "I have prayed to the lord with the great and good mind to send the barbarians far away. I will go on praying for that, you may be sure."
"That's not enough. That's not anywhere close to enough," Voilas insisted. "You have to curse them, very holy sir. Then we'll be rid of them."
"You think I can do more than I can," Rhavas told him.
"I know you can do more than you think." Voilas pointed to Toxaras' body. "Doesn't that tell you anything?"
"Phos! Don't just leave it lying there. Have some men take it away," Rhavas said. They wouldn't bury Toxaras for some time—not till the ground thawed out. "Does he have family? They'll need to know."
"He has a wife and four little ones," Voilas replied. "It won't be easy for them without him."
He was bound to be right about that. Even so, Rhavas said, "It's not my fault. I had nothing to do with it. I'm sorry he's dead. You can't blame me for that, and neither can his family." A wife and four children! They would have had a hard time without their breadwinner even if the Khamorth weren't prowling outside Skopentzana.
Voilas said, "Everybody knows you cursed him, very holy sir. You can say whatever you want now, but everybody knows. Everybody will know how he died, too. It's no secret."
"You told me himself how he died—he slipped on ice or snow. What has that got to do with me?" the prelate demanded.
"How many times had he been up and down those stairs before you cursed him? Did he fall down them then? Nooo." Voilas stretched the word. "Did anybody else fall down them? Nooooo." He stretched it even further.
"How many times was he up and down them after I cursed him?" Rhavas said frantically. "He didn't slip right away. This is all madness, I tell you."
"Yes, very holy sir." That wasn't Voilas agreeing with him. That was the potter being too afraid to contradict him.
The prelate stared at the body one more time. Toxaras' blood had stopped steaming now. There should have been flies. So Rhavas told himself, anyway. But Skopentzana in winter had no flies. Insects knew better than to venture out in this weather. Had they tried, they would have frozen.
Did Toxaras think the curse had struck home, too? Had his last horrified moments been spent in blaming Rhavas? No one would ever know.
No news came up from the south. News in Skopentzana was often sketchy in the wintertime, but this winter it was not sketchy. It was, in a word, nonexistent. How widely had the Khamorth spread through Videssos? Rhavas couldn't know, but he could make guesses, and he liked none of them.
Zautzes began reducing the grain ration as winter wore along. It got small enough to pinch, though not to threaten people with actual starvation. Not yet, Rhavas thought gloomily. He prayed every day for the Khamorth to abandon the city. They didn't. The not-quite-siege dragged on.
The militia sent a mounted party out through a postern gate. If Skopentzana didn't know what was happening in the wider reaches of the Empire, odds were the rest of the Empire didn't know what was going on here in the northeast, either. The militiamen hoped a garrison in some nearby city would come to Skopentzana's rescue.
Rhavas suspected that was a forlorn hope. If Skopentzana's garrison had marched off to fight in the civil war, wouldn't others have done the same? It only stood to reason, or so it seemed to him. With Voilas leading them, though, how much did the militiamen care about reason? Not much—that was how it looked to the prelate, anyhow.
He prayed for the riders' success all the same. Bad odds didn't make things impossible, just unlikely.
Day followed day. No imperial soldiers marched or rode into Skopentzana from the south. None of the men who'd ridden away from the city ever came back. No one could be sure what had happened to them. No one could be sure—but, again, Rhavas liked none of the guesses he made.
People began talking behind his back. They would point at him when they thought he wasn't looking, then quickly turn away when they thought he was. Some people who'd attended the divine liturgy at his temple for years suddenly began worshiping elsewhere. Some he'd never seen before began coming to the services he led. He reckoned the trade a bad bargain. The new worshipers eyed him as if hoping he would curse someone else so they could watch the luckless victim expire before their eyes.
He felt like cursing them. He didn't do that, either. Curses were a serious business, even if they didn't seem to understand that. Or if curses weren't a serious business, then they were of no account at all, which also wasn't what the newly arrived ghouls in the congregation wanted to hear.
Rhavas tried to keep his preaching and his prayers as close to what they would have been without the civil war and the irruption of the Khamorth as he could. It wasn't always possible. He did have to keep mentioning the peasant refugees and to keep reminding his audience that the peasants were just as much Videssians as were people whose forebears had lived in Skopentzana for the past 150 years.
Not everybody appreciated being reminded. Militiamen would sometimes get up and walk out in the middle of a sermon. So would some of the more prosperous merchants and landowners in the city. When Rhavas went out to the narthex to talk informally with people after the divine liturgy, he would notice that some of the women had also left their gallery earlier than they might have.
Ingegerd was never one of those. Because of her sun-bright hair, he would have noticed if she'd been among the missing. "You do well," she told him after one of his more impassioned sermons.
He bowed as if she and not he were the one with the imperial connections. Did her good opinion matter so much to him? Plainly, it did. "I thank you very much," he told her, doing his best not to show how much that came from the heart.
"We would be fools to stir up strife inside the city when the barbarians outside trouble us so," she went on.
Some in Skopentzana would have called her a barbarian, even though she was married to a Videssian. Before he got to know her, Rhavas might have done that himself. That people would be fools to stir up strife inside Skopentzana had never occurred to the prelate, which didn't mean Ingegerd was mistaken. Rhavas said, "We would be wrong to seek to cast out the refugees."
"Well, yes. That, too, of course," Ingegerd said. The practical issue mattered more to her than the moral one.
That disappointed the prelate. Ideally, Ingegerd should have thought just the way he did. He said, "If we do not help one another, who will help us when we need help the most?"
"Even so." She nodded briskly. "I wish Phos would have made the rebel and the Avtokrator ask this same question of themselves."
She had to know Rhavas was Maleinos' cousin. He couldn't remember speaking about it, but it was anything but a secret in Skopentzana. Yet she did not hesitate to criticize Maleinos and Stylianos in the same breath. Did that make her naïve or simply confident in her own sense of what was fitting?
Not everything Maleinos had done since the rebellion broke out was something Rhavas would have done had he worn the red boots in his cousin's place. He couldn't possibly have claimed otherwise. He said, "It is sad but true that a man will do what he thinks to be to his advantage, and then will find—or invent—all manner of reasons to explain why what he did was the only possible moral thing to do."
"Phos will judge those who act so." Ingegerd sounded as stern as the grimmest theologian Videssos the city had ever spawned.