Even after so much time, the stench of death still floated above that field. Rhavas could tell where most of the soldiers had fallen, for that was where the grass grew tallest and most luxuriantly—the rotting bodies had manured it well. Through the rich green, white bones leered out.
Rhavas looked up and down the dirt road along which he was riding. No one but him was on it now. One army must have come up the road, the other down it, till they met here. Eyeing the boneyard the field had become, he could not tell which force had supported which rival Avtokrator. That went a long way toward explaining the monumental unimportance of the civil war—but not to the men who fought it.
"Fools," Rhavas muttered. He dismounted and tethered his steppe pony and the packhorse to a bush not far from the side of the road. Maybe that was the point. As he walked through the grass and looked at the bones from close at hand, he grew ever more convinced of it. Here lay a skull that had been split, there a rib cage with an arrow through the breastbone. What were men but wicked fools who slaughtered one another for the fun of it and for no better reason?
Were they anything more than that? Not so far as Rhavas could see.
He bent and picked up a rusting saber. The hand bones of the corpse that held it came apart as he took it from the dead grip. The useful pattern they had once made fell back into randomness. As do all useful patterns, the proof of which I see before me, he thought.
He hefted the sword, then let it fall once more. It clanged off a stone hidden in the grass. The blade snapped in two. Rhavas nodded to himself, as if that also proved his point.
Both the horse he was riding and his packhorse were grazing when he went back to them. Except perhaps for the smell surrounding it, the field meant nothing to them. Being only beasts, they did not know when they were well off.
Remounting, Rhavas rode on toward the mountains. How many mournful fields like that one were scattered across the Empire of Videssos? How many more of them would fatten vultures and ravens and crows before the civil war finally ended, if it ever did? On both sides, warriors had gone and would go into battle shouting Phos' name, sure that it was holy.
But how could the good god's power coexist with savagery such as this? It seemed impossible. Slowly, Rhavas nodded. What else could it be but impossible? Good, if it existed at all, had to be nothing more than a lucky accident, one sure to shatter when struck by evil. For evil surely endured forever.
As far back as written records in the Empire of Videssos went, Phos' priests had inveighed against evil, against Skotos. Was the world any better now than it had been when they started their denunciations? Rhavas laughed all the more harshly because the smell of death still lingered in his nostrils. If he didn't laugh over that question, he would have to burst into tears on account of it.
Somewhere not too far away, a band of Khamorth off the steppe was probably encamped, grazing their horses and cattle and sheep on the rich green grass in these meadows. Some of that grass was all the richer for being fertilized by Videssian corpses. And what did the barbarians think of Phos and what Videssos called good? Rhavas laughed again. He'd seen what the Khamorth did when they got in among his folk.
And had the so-called lord with the great and good mind punished them for it? Not likely! They were raping away province after province from Videssos. Phos could not favor that. If the good god couldn't, who did? Could the question have more than one answer?
Toward evening, Rhavas camped inside the edge of a stand of trees. While the light still held, he took Koubatzes' grimoire from a saddlebag and paged through it to a spell of summoning. It involved a lodestone—also plundered from the mage—and, here, some fresh clover. Rhavas was not sure if the passes he made with the chanted spell were the ones the sorcerous tome described; it didn't go into detail. As with much of the magic inside, he had to do his best to figure out how the spell should be shaped.
It worked, though. Two rabbits hopped toward the clover, which seemed to draw them irresistibly. Had Rhavas had to knock them over with stones, the spell of summoning might not have been enough to assure him of a tasty supper. But he had other ways to tend to such things. He pointed a finger at the rabbits, and they quietly died.
The supper was tasty indeed. After roasting the rabbits, Rhavas drowned and buried his fire. He wrapped himself in a blanket and slept on the ground. He didn't need to fear freezing, not here. Before Skopentzana fell, the idea of sleeping in the open would have dismayed him. Since then, he'd done it often enough to take it for granted.
No one and nothing troubled him in the nighttime. So he thought, anyway, till he woke to discover a fresh mosquito bite on the back of his left hand. That only made him shrug; the mosquitoes here were not nearly so bad as the ones farther north. One bite? One bite might as well have been nothing.
He had some bread in his saddlebags from the last town where he'd stopped. It was getting stale, but he ate it anyway, and with good appetite. Water from a nearby stream washed it down. Then he went back to the road and on toward the imperial capital.
Once the road got into the mountains, it writhed and twisted like a worm on a hot paving stone. Sometimes it ran through valleys or over hilltops. Climbing some of those slopes was hard work for the horses, but they managed. Rhavas had come to have enormous respect for the steppe ponies he'd taken from the Khamorth. The rough-coated beasts would never win any beauty contests, but they never flagged, either, which counted for more.
Sometimes, though, the slopes in the Paristrian Mountains were too steep for roads to climb conveniently. In those places, the way forward had been hacked out of the mountainside. Rhavas rode along narrow tracks with gray stone to his right and nothing but air to his left. A misstep would have sent his mount tumbling off the road, and him with it. The beast made no missteps. He was positive the steppe ponies had never faced mountains like these before, but they took them—literally—in stride.
When he met travelers going north in a narrow stretch, which happened a couple of times, one of them had to retreat to a place where two animals could get by each other without having one of them go over a cliff. It was a complicated dance, and often a bad-tempered one, but altogether necessary.
Rhavas wondered how the Khamorth had got through the mountains into the lands on the other side. There were so many places along this road where a handful of men could hold off an army.
He was picking his way through a series of switchbacks so narrow and rugged that even the steppe ponies had trouble when he suddenly realized he was a fool. As always, the realization was unpleasant. But this couldn't be the only way to the far side of the mountains, and it was probably far from the easiest. If he'd asked anyone he'd met on the road, he might well have heard where the better routes lay. He sighed, wishing he'd thought of that before getting deep into the mountains on this road. Turning around and going back now would cost him more time than just going ahead would.
Once, when all the mountains and passes ahead aligned for a moment, he got a glimpse of the lower country to the south. Then the road bent again, and everything more than a furlong or so ahead disappeared. And once, looking down into a valley, he saw a hawk soaring below him. He kept that memory for a long time.
He was back on a less precipitous stretch of road—though one passing through a forest of tall pines—when he found the way ahead blocked by a barricade of tree trunks. From behind it, someone called out the age-old Videssian bandits' warning: "Stand and deliver!"