And the thaw was almost here. Rhavas could feel it. One day soon there would be a snap! in the air, and all the winter's snow would start to melt. After that, the going would be slow till the land dried out again, but then, for a few weeks, glory would shine out over the world. Spring in the northlands was much more dramatic than it was down by the capital.
Rhavas noticed he was traveling with his head cocked to one side, listening for that snap! Trouble found him before he found it. A troop of nomads rode toward him across a broad, snow-covered expanse that would probably be a meadow once the thaw began. He wasn't unduly afraid of the Khamorth, but they could be a nuisance, maybe a dangerous nuisance.
To them, he was just a Videssian they'd caught out in the open. He could tell when they got close enough to realize he was riding a steppe pony and leading another. They booted their mounts up from a trot to a gallop. They assumed—rightly—that he must have killed other Khamorth to get their horses, and it looked as if they intended to pay him back.
He pointed at the closest nomad, who was still well out of archery range. The Khamorth tumbled off his horse and sprawled in the snow. The rest of the barbarians kept coming. Rhavas pointed at another one. He fell, too. So did another, and then another. If the plainsmen came any farther, he realized he would have to kill them all. Otherwise, they would be able to shoot at him with their fearsome, horn-strengthened bows, a prospect he relished not at all.
But they reined in then. They had to see he was a wizard of sorts, and that he could go on killing them if he chose. He waited as they put their heads together. At last, after some argument, one of them ostentatiously threw his bow down in the snow. For good measure, he also threw down the leather case in which the nomads carried their bow and arrows. Then he slowly rode toward Rhavas, plainly doing his best not to seem threatening.
Rhavas pointed at him nonetheless, but did not form the killing thought in his mind—not yet. "That's close enough!" he shouted. If the barbarian turned out not to understand Videssian or just ignored him, the fellow was a dead man.
But the nomad stopped. And he not only understood Videssian, he also spoke it after a fashion. "How you do?" he shouted back.
"How did I do what?" Rhavas said.
"Kill." The Khamorth came straight to the point.
"By the power of my god," Rhavas answered.
"You lie." The plainsman's voice was full of scorn. "Phaos do nothing. Phaos sit there like horse turd on ground. Videssos—wizards all bad. But not you. How you do?"
"My god is not Phos." There. Rhavas had said it. He waited for the world to fall to pieces around him. All he'd believed since he was a boy . . . That had already fallen in ruin. Despite his words, nothing special happened now. The breeze tugged at his beard—that was all. He licked his lips and said the rest of what needed saying: "Skotos is my god."
Even after saying it, he had to fight the urge to spit, for he'd spat for so many years every time he named the dark god. "Skotos?" the Khamorth echoed. He nodded, a plain token of respect. "This is strong god. We leave you be." He wheeled his horse and rode back to his comrades. They listened to him. Then, after rounding up the horses of the fallen men and heaving the corpses up onto them, they trotted off. Rhavas watched them, fearing some trick, but there was none. They were gone.
He rode on, too, tasting fear and exultation and a kind of helpless contempt for his own folk. Videssians could not see what was right in front of their faces. The Khamorth had no trouble grasping it. Didn't the world make plain that Skotos was mightier than Phos? So it seemed to Rhavas, and so it seemed to the barbarians as well.
And Rhavas had named Skotos as his god, and the sky had not fallen. Phos had not smitten him with a lightning bolt from the heavens. Things went on as they always had. Was Phos too busy elsewhere to pay attention to his blasphemy? Priests never tired of proclaiming that Phos saw everything everywhere. Rhavas couldn't guess how many times he'd hammered that point home himself, down in Videssos the city and then in Skopentzana.
If the lord with the great and good mind wasn't busy elsewhere, why didn't he punish Rhavas? Was he too weak? If he was, didn't that mean Skotos was the more powerful of the two? Everything else Rhavas had seen lately led him to believe it did. Wasn't this one more fagot on the funeral pyre of good?
"And my own folk, purblind fools that they are, will not see it," Rhavas muttered, his breath making puffs of fog around him. "The barbarians know the truth. Who would have imagined that?" He shrugged. "Well, those who do not care to see will just have to be shown." He rode on, leaving the meeting with the Khamorth behind him. He did not think that troop would trouble him again, and he proved right. He usually did.
When spring came up around Skopentzana, road traffic stopped dead for several weeks. All the snowdrifts seemed to melt at once, turning the landscape into bogs and swamps. The mud time, people called it. Hard on its heels came the mosquito time; bugs of all sorts bred in the countless puddles and ponds the yearly thaw spawned.
By the time the spring thaw came this year, Rhavas was a long way south of Skopentzana. Snow still covered the ground, but not to the depth it would have had up there. Though roads turned muddy, they remained roads. His travel slowed, but it did not stop.
That was all to the good. He would not have wanted to get stuck in some provincial town for most of a month. The priests there would have wanted to discuss matters theological with him, as Tryphon had in Podandos. They would have ended up regretting it—again, as Tryphon had. Rhavas had been able to leave Podandos. If the thaw kept him in some other town . . . That could be difficult.
He might have solved the problem by wearing ordinary clothes, letting his hair grow out, and trimming his long, shaggy beard. Later, he was amazed at how long that took to occur to him. He kept his blue robe. He paused in one town so a barber could shave his head. He'd been on the road for a couple of days afterward before he paused and wondered why he'd done it.
The answer didn't take long to find. "I am a priest," he said, as if someone had denied it. Plenty of people would deny it before long. He knew that. Once he started preaching, he probably would not persuade everyone of what he saw as the new truth.
But if I persuade the ecumenical patriarch, if I persuade the leading prelates in Videssos the city . . . They were the ones who made doctrine for the whole Empire. If they saw things as he did, before long everyone in Videssos would see them that way, too. That was what he aimed for. And that is what I will have.
As he rode toward the capital, the land turned green around him. Trees cloaked themselves in leaves. New grass sprang up from fields and meadows. Woods were suddenly silent no more. Insects buzzed—there were mosquitoes in these parts, too. And birds, newly arrived from the strange lands beyond the Sailors' Sea, sang to seek mates as they hunted the mosquitoes and other flying things. They caught them by the thousands, by the tens of thousands. But the bugs bred by the millions.
Mountains rose on Rhavas' right as he got farther south. They weren't tall, jagged peaks, but low and round and smoothly curved. They might almost have been women's breasts. The snow that clung near their summits after it had melted farther down their slopes only added to the impression. Rhavas wondered if that would have occurred to him before . . . Before things changed, he thought, and nodded to himself. Yes, that sounded right.