He shook his head and swore as foully as he knew how. If he were lucky, the Khamorth never would have broken into Skopentzana at all. If he were lucky, they never would have surged across Videssos' frontiers, either. If he were lucky, Stylianos never would have rebelled against Maleinos. What he had here wasn't good luck. It was only luck a trifle less disastrously bad than it might have been.
Still Skotos' luck, he thought. He shook his head and spat in the snow. The Khamorth were welcome to the dark god. "Phos!" Rhavas said. "I follow Phos, and none other." By the way he spoke, someone might have claimed he did.
More bodies lay in the snow. A few were plainsmen. More, far more, were Skopentzanans. Shouts and curses said fighting still went on here and there. And despairing screams said the Khamorth were amusing themselves in other ways besides simple slaughter.
Rhavas squeezed the shovel more tightly. If that happened to Ingegerd . . . "No," he muttered. He'd told Himerios he would protect her from such things.
An arrow thudded into the door of a house behind him and stood there thrilling. He waited for another one to pierce his heart or his belly. But the plainsman who'd shot at him just rode on by. Why not? The barbarian would have plenty of other targets later.
Here was Ingegerd's street. Three Videssians lay dead in it, their blood staining the snow. One was a woman. Her skirt was hiked up to her waist. Rhavas bit his lip and turned away. He was not supposed to see such things.
He knocked on the door. Only silence answered him. He knocked again. A little panel in the center of the door swung open. For a moment, he stared into one of Ingegerd's pale eyes—so startling to a man used only to brown.
The panel shut. The door opened. "Come in, very holy sir, and quickly!" Ingegerd said. "What are you doing here? It's madness in the streets."
He went inside. She closed the door behind him and set the bar in place to hold it closed. He said, "I told Himerios I would do what I could for you if things went wrong. Things have gone wrong. Here I am. What I can do, I will."
She looked at him. For a moment, he thought she would say she was likelier to be able to look out for him than the other way around. Had she said that, she might well have been right. That would have made it more humiliating, not less. But what she did say after that quick appraisal was, "There's blood on your robes, and on the spade as well."
He looked down at himself. Yes, he was splashed with red. He shrugged. "It's not mine." He told the the story of the fight with the nomad in a few bald sentences.
When he was through—even before he was through, in fact—Ingegerd's eyes lit with more warmth than he'd ever seen in them before. "That was bravely done, very holy sir, bravely done indeed."
"Was it?" Rhavas only shrugged. He hadn't thought about bravery. He hadn't thought about anything, except that the Khamorth would kill the people he was pursuing and then that the barbarian would kill him.
"Here. Wait." Ingegerd opened a chest of polished cedarwood. Out of it she drew something wrapped in oily rags—a sword, Rhavas saw when she removed the swaddling. "Take this. Himerios had his best blade on his hip when he hied southward, but this spare will serve you better than a spade."
Even when she spoke Videssian, she did so with the cadences and rhythms of the Haloga language she'd left behind. She held the sword out to Rhavas. The hilt fit his hand as if made for it. Men had been making tools for murder as long as any other sort, and had turned that trade into art no less than any other.
"Thank you," Rhavas said, even though he was no swordsman. Then, as he would not have with a Videssian woman, he added, "But what of you?"
"Here is another blade," she said, reaching into the chest once more. "If need be, we shall battle back to back." By the way she held the sword, she knew what to do with it. She might not have a man's strength, but she would not lack for skill.
"For now, perhaps the best thing we can do is stay where we are and hope the barbarians will not trouble this house," Rhavas said.
"Yes, that is wisdom—for a while," Ingegerd said bleakly. "If the Khamorth gain mastery of the city, though, they will leave no home unravaged."
"They will have to slay me before they trouble you," Rhavas declared.
That was the strangest sort of gallant speech a priest of Phos might give. Again, he waited for Ingegerd to mock him. She did nothing of the sort. Her eyes warmed again. "You are gracious, very holy sir," she said. "Maybe it will not come to that. I hope it will not come to that." She didn't say she thought it would not come to that.
As if to explain why she would not say such a thing, several horsemen thundered down the street past the barred front door. They shouted to one another in their throaty, guttural tongue. Though Rhavas could not understand what they were saying, their tone of voice told him they were having the time of their lives. More than anything else, he hated them for the obvious pleasure they took in destruction.
Ingegerd's face twisted. "So much for the militia. A fine set of heroes they turned out to be."
"It is . . . not quite so simple as that," Rhavas said. On my head be it. He told her how the peasant had opened the postern gate and let in the Khamorth.
"Oh," she said in a flat, almost dead, voice when he finished. "And it was at your urging that the peasants stayed in the city."
"Yes." Rhavas answered with one pained word of his own. He might have known she had the wit to cut straight to the heart of his anguish. On my head be it. Those words, he feared, would torment him to the end of his days. He bowed his head. If Ingegerd chose to swing that sword, he would accept the stroke from her with a sort of despairing joy. It would free him from the blame, from the curse, he'd called down on himself.
But she said, "Very holy sir, you could not have known ahead of time how it would turn out. We have to do what we can now for Skopentzana and for ourselves."
It wasn't absolution. No one save possibly the ecumenical patriarch could give him that. But it came closer than anything else he was likely to find in Skopentzana. "Thank you," he whispered.
"For what?" Ingegerd spoke in honest perplexity. "You did what you thought best. What else could you do?"
More Khamorth galloped past outside, shouting in their own language. More screams and cries of pain and shrieks rose from all over the city, and the ones that had words were in Videssian. Rhavas bit the inside of his lower lip till he tasted blood. No, he would not find absolution in Skopentzana, if he ever found it anywhere. And what he had thought best had proved worst. How could he forget that? How could he pretend it was not so? He couldn't, and he knew it. A talent he lacked was the one for self-deception.
And then he stopped worrying about what he had done, what he hadn't, and what he might have, for a new cry rang through the city: "Fire!"
Ingegerd's eyes went very wide. Rhavas suspected his did, too. They both said the same thing at the same time: "We can't stay here now." Flames would race through Skopentzana. Fire was always a dreadful danger because it was so hard to fight once it got loose. If anything, it was worse in winter. Some wells would be frozen, which mattered little when people could make do with melted snow but a great deal in fighting flames. The drifts in the street would thwart bucket brigades, too—and so would rampaging barbarians with swords and bows. To the Khamorth, fire was a tool for driving their quarry from its hiding places. And it was all too likely to prove a brutally effective tool, too.
"What food do you have that we can take with us?" Rhavas asked. Then he bowed his head again. "If you care for my company, I should say. If not, I will find my own way as best I can."
"Two together are better than one alone," Ingegerd said—not a ringing endorsement, but an endorsement. She turned away. "Let me see what I can bring—for you are right, and we will have to flee the city if we can." When she came back, she had a blanket slung over her shoulder—a makeshift knapsack. "Bread. Cheese. Sausage."