And Ingegerd shook her head. "No, very holy sir. You should not say such a thing. You should be proud. Phos has given you great power. See the vengeance you have visited upon the vandals. Relish the revenge you have worked."
Rhavas shook his head. Before he could answer, another aftershock rumbled through and rocked him. He had to fight to hold himself upright. So did Ingegerd. Seeing her swaying there made him wish she would fall into his arms. But the trembling stopped, and she straightened.
"It is not Phos' power," Rhavas said stubbornly. "I have prayed to the lord with the great and good mind, again and again, beseeching him on bended knee. Had he hearkened to my prayers, Skopentzana would stand yet, and the plainsmen would wander well away from her walls."
Like many people, he often spoke in the style of those who impressed him. When he heard himself alliterating like that, he realized yet again how deeply Ingegerd had got under his skin.
She said, "It is a great power. Surely even you will not deny that. If it comes not from Phos, whence comes it?"
"I do deny, and will deny, that it is anything past happenstance." Rhavas denied that more to himself than to the yellow-haired woman standing beside him. If he denied it, he did not have to think where that power might come from.
Ingegerd made an impatient noise—more than a sigh, less than a word. But she let it rest there, as she might have if Rhavas had insisted on talking about fashions in tunics and nothing else. She was very pointedly putting up with an eccentricity, not agreeing with anything the prelate said.
Instead, she looked back toward the battered barn. She said, "Will it be safe to shelter there, or is it likely to come down on our heads while we sleep tonight—if we sleep tonight?"
Rhavas eyed the barn, too, with more than a little relief. "I think we will need shelter tonight. Do you not agree? Also, even now I would not care to start a fire in the open so close to Skopentzana. It might bring us more company than we would care to have."
She thought for a moment, then nodded crisply. "Very true. There are risks of one sort as well as risks of another. Shelter it shall be."
The barn still smelled like a barn. There was no livestock inside. Had there been, the animals would have burst out during or right after the earthquake. But the Khamorth or Videssian stragglers had plundered the place after the owners abandoned it or were killed—or maybe the owners drove the animals into Skopentzana. In that case, the quake might have done what raiders hadn't.
A hatchet no one had bothered to steal lay almost at Rhavas' feet when he ducked into the damaged barn. It had probably been hanging on a wall and escaped notice in the gloom. He gladly grabbed it now and used to to chop up some of the barn's planking for a fire. That was when he realized he had nothing with which to start one. He had never made fire by rubbing sticks together. All he knew about the operation was that it required more patience than any three normal human beings possessed.
As if she camped out in battered barns every day, Ingegerd took flint and steel from her blanket-knapsack along with the food she'd brought from Skopentzana. "O pearl among women!" Rhavas exclaimed.
She didn't even answer that. She just gathered straw from the dirt floor of the barn for tinder and began striking the flint and steel together above it. Before long, sparks made the straw catch. She and Rhavas both fed first splinters and then real pieces of wood into the growing fire.
Except for what came from his own exertions, the heat from the flames was the first Rhavas had felt since escaping Skopentzana. He and Ingegerd toasted chunks of sausage over the flames, then ate them and some of the bread and cheese she had brought. She looked at what was left. "This will serve for tomorrow, and maybe the day after," she said. "Past that . . ."
"We are free of the city," Rhavas said. "We are luckier than most who were in it when the barbarians broke in and when the earthquake struck."
"When the earthquake struck . . ." Ingegerd shook her head. "Say rather, when your curse struck."
"I will say no such thing." Rhavas pointed to the flames. "I will say, with regret, that we should let this die out after all. If it shines through the night, it is only too likely to draw two-legged wolves this way. The barn does not shield the light well enough to hide it."
Ingegerd considered, then nodded. "Like as not, you are right. Well, it was not large enough to give us much warmth. Here in a partly closed space, we will do well enough in all our clothes and under the blanket."
"Yes," Rhavas said, though he was thinking, No. Lying down with a woman, even if they were both fully clothed, even if there was neither lovemaking nor any intention of it, bent his vows somewhere close to the breaking point. How close? He would have to discuss that with some other ecclesiastic one of these days. But if the only way to survive to discuss it was by lying down with the woman now . . . Then I will, that's all.
And he did. By then, the fire had already shrunk to embers that gave no more than a dull red glow. Under the thick, scratchy wool, he and Ingegerd turned their backs to each other. But they still touched. They needed to, to share each other's warmth. Trying to pretend it wasn't happening, trying to pretend everything was normal, he murmured, "Good night."
"Good night," she answered. They both started to laugh. It might have been the worst night either one of them had ever known—and things would get no better when morning came. But they stayed polite just the same.
Rhavas wondered whether he would sleep at all. Then exhaustion coshed him. Every Khamorth in the world could have paraded by the tumbledown barn in the next few hours. Every Videssian ecclesiastic in the Empire could have peered into the ruin, stared disapprovingly at the spectacle of a respected prelate under a blanket with a woman, and gone off muttering. Rhavas would never have known any of it. Every aftershock in the world could have . . .
But that turned out not to be quite true after all. No matter how weary he was, no matter what horrors he'd seen, endured, and escaped the day before, some of the aftershocks might have wakened a dead man. And one of them eventually succeeded in waking him.
Even after his eyes flew open, he wasn't sure they had. The fire was out, so he lay in darkness absolute, as if Skotos had conquered the world. The ground shook beneath him. The stones of the barn's lower walls groaned around him. The partly tumbled timbers creaked above him. For a long, horrid moment, he had no idea where he was. The eternal ice seemed the likeliest explanation.
To make things worse, or at least stranger, someone was breathing in his face from very close range. A hand and arm were draped across his shoulder. His own hand rested on a smooth curve under rough wool. He jerked it away with a gasp of horror—that could only be a woman's hip.
"It's all right, very holy sir," Ingegerd said softly. "I know you meant nothing by it. We twisted around while we slept, that's all."
Full memory returned to Rhavas at last. "Yes, so we did," he answered, and hoped his own voice sounded less shaky to her than it did to him. Another quake, a smaller one, made him put shaky in a new perspective. "The aftershock woke me."
"I know. You slept through two or three that roused me," Ingegerd said. "You must be more used to them than I am."
"I don't believe anyone ever gets used to them," Rhavas said. He wanted to roll away from her, but the only warmth anywhere was where they touched. She didn't roll away from him onto her other side, either. They were left with each other, and nothing else. He shook his head. This was not how things should have been, but he was powerless to change it. "We should try to go back to sleep." If he was asleep, he wouldn't have to think about what he was doing here.