Ingegerd shook her head, too. "That will not do. You want to . . . to care for me in ways only Himerios should."
"Is that the thanks I get?" Rhavas demanded.
"You have my thanks. You have all my thanks," Ingegerd said. "But I see you want more than that now, and more than that I cannot give."
She started to pull away from him. His arms tightened around her. It took him almost as much by surprise as it did her. "One kiss—one proper kiss," he heard himself say.
Ingegerd's eyes opened very wide. She started to move toward him—and then brought up a knee toward his crotch. No doubt she intended to leave him writhing in pain, and to take a horse and leave before he could do anything about it.
And that would have worked, except he was also bringing up a leg, and her knee banged into his instead of going home. He realized exactly what she'd intended, and his anger turned to rage. "Is that the thanks I get?" he growled.
"You get what you deserve," Ingegerd retorted. "Now let go of me!"
"What I deserve? By the good god, I'll take what I deserve!" Rhavas said, everything but his own fury and his own fever forgotten.
Ingegerd tried to knee him again, then hit him in the face. She was a large, strong woman. The blow hurt. It made him see stars. But it also made him angrier yet. He hit her, too, as hard as he could. Her head snapped back. She kept on fighting, but after that she was slightly woozy, slightly slow.
"I'll take what I deserve," Rhavas repeated, and flipped up her long wool skirt. The sight of her legs only inflamed him, though she went on trying to kick him and knee him. He might have been a man in the grip of fever or madness as he hiked up his own robes.
Ingegerd screamed, but there was no one to hear her cries. She and Rhavas tumbled out of the narrow bed. Straw-stuffed mattress or bare earth—it mattered not at all to him. However much she thrashed, he poised himself over her. "Ahhh!" he said as he began, an exhalation more of triumph than of pleasure.
She bit his hand. He screamed then, and hit her with the other one till she let go. His blood was on her face, and so was hers. He didn't know what she called him in the Haloga language. He doubted the words were endearments. He doubted it, but he didn't really care, not while he thrashed above her.
"Ahhh!" This time, the cry meant he had spent himself. It was less than he had thought it would be and more, both at the same time. What it was for Ingegerd . . . did not cross his mind until after delight blinded him.
Now the fever he might have had was gone. He pulled away from her and set his robes to rights. She lay huddled on the ground, her skirt still drawn up, her legs still bare. He looked down at his hand. It was still bleeding. He shook his head in wonder. Had she really done that to him? Had he really done that to her? The answer seemed only too obvious.
"Maybe you are right," Rhavas said. "We would do better traveling separately." It was as close to an apology as he could come. He knew he had sinned, but he did not feel as if he had sinned. Even with the pain from his hand to remind him of exactly what he'd done, he felt fine, or better than fine.
Ingegerd rolled away from him. In a voice like ashes, she said, "Who shall make you pay for your folly?"
"Folly?" Some of Rhavas' anger returned. Couldn't she see why he'd done what he'd done? "It was a . . . a compliment to your womanliness."
Her head came up. "Did I not ask you to slay me before you let the Khamorth pay me such compliments?"
"I am no Khamorth!" Rhavas said indignantly.
"No, indeed. You are worse than a Khamorth. They would only have done what they did. You not only did it, but tell lies about it, too. Truly Skotos has his claws deep in your soul."
"That is not so!" Rhavas' voice went as high as hers, and much shriller. She'd put a finger on his greatest secret fear. But it could not be true. It must not be true. If he'd cursed, it must have been through some other power, any other power, than the dark god's. "I will not hear your lies," he added, and strode away from her.
Her voice pursued him. "There will be vengeance, in this world or in the world to come."
"No! Liar!" His back still turned, he heard Ingegerd get to her feet. Then he heard something else: a small sound. She might have lifted something. He turned back. She had a knife in her hand, and advanced on him with terrible purpose.
"There will be vengeance," she repeated.
"No!" Rhavas flung out his bitten hand, perhaps only to ward her off, perhaps for some other reason he did not care to admit even to himself till the moment was there—or past. Fear and fury filling his voice, he cried, "No! Curse you, no!"
Ingegerd's eyes rolled up in her head. The knife fell from nerveless fingers. Her own rage faded from her face, replaced by a dreadful blankness. She swayed, tottered . . . crumpled. Rhavas knew death when he found himself in its presence. He knew death now.
"No!" he screamed, trying to cast out not just the moment but everything that had led up to it. But where to begin? When he'd raped Ingegerd?—for that was what it had been. When they'd escaped Skopentzana together? When he'd called down curses on his own head if the peasant refugees harmed the city? When the Khamorth swarmed into Videssos? When Himerios charged him with watching over Ingegerd? When Maleinos and Stylianos went to war?
The woman he'd cared for—the woman he'd imagined he'd loved—lay at his feet, not only dead but ravished. And how had she died? When he cursed her, of course. And how could he have cursed her—how could he have cursed anyone—save through the power of the dark god?
Skotos heard me, he thought. Yes, Skotos heard me, and showed he heard me. Maybe Phos has heard me, but he never gave any sign of it. Which, then, truly is the stronger god? Yes—which indeed?
VII
Rhavas rode away from the farmhouse by himself. It was still snowing, but not so hard. That didn't matter; he would have ridden away had the blizzard got worse instead of easing. He hoped riding away would let him leave his sins and his mistakes behind.
He didn't need long to find what a forlorn hope that was. Ingegerd's body lay in the farmhouse—yes. Rhavas hadn't had the heart to touch it again, even to drag it out and cover it over with snow. But the memory of what he'd done to her—both the rape and the curse—still burned inside his mind. However much he wished he could, he couldn't escape his sins so simply. He took them with him wherever he went.
She had it coming, he told himself. If she'd only yielded to me, the way she should have, none of this would have happened.
He knew he was trying to salve his conscience. Knowing it didn't stop him from getting angry at Ingegerd as well as himself. Before long, it didn't stop him from getting angry at her instead of himself.
When he realized as much, he sketched the sun-sign over his heart. "Phos!" he exclaimed. "Don't let me behave this way!"
But the prayer seemed feeble and useless and empty, the way all his prayers sent up to the lord with the great and good mind had seemed lately. What had Phos done to answer his increasingly desperate petitions? Anything? Anything at all? Not so far as he could see.
And what did that mean? He'd asked himself the question again and again, and shied away from the answers that sprang to mind. Now, jouncing south aboard a steppe pony across a snow-covered plain, he began to grapple with them, really for the first time.
This world was the battleground for the struggle between Phos and Skotos, between light and dark, between good and evil. So he had been trained to believe since childhood, and so he did believe now. Not a Videssian from the borders of Makuran to those of Halogaland would have failed to agree with him.