"I've been trying not to," Rhavas answered, which was nothing but the truth.
The drunken monk needed a bit to realize he might have been insulted. "What's that supposed to mean?" he asked angrily once the idea had sunk in. "Are you trying to put us in disgrace?"
"I could not," Rhavas said, hoping the monk would take that for an apology and go back to his swilling.
For a moment, the fellow seemed on the point of doing just that. But then Rhavas' odd turn of phrase sank in. "Eh? You couldn't do that, you say? And why couldn't you?" the monk demanded.
"Because you already disgrace yourselves," Rhavas replied—yes, he still had all his old stern discipline, even if now turned to a new cause.
The monks shouted furiously. Three or four of them surged to their feet. "Now you're for it, holy sir," said a man at a table next to Rhavas'. "They like to brawl as much as they like to drink, and they like to drink a lot."
Rhavas also rose. "Any man who troubles me will pay dearly," he said in tones that permitted no contradiction. "Does your holy abbot know that you come into this low place looking for tavern brawls?"
One of the monks, the biggest one, took a single step toward Rhavas. Then he noticed his friends weren't following him. He looked at them. He took another look at Rhavas. The monk was almost as tall as Rhavas, and much wider through the shoulders and thicker through the chest. He took another half step forward, then stopped again. "What's the matter with you?" he shouted at his comrades. "What are you afraid of?"
"That fellow's trouble, Garidas," one of the others said.
"Trouble?" Garidas laughed a theatrical laugh. "I could break him in half without any help from the lot of you."
He took another half step forward. None of the other monks followed him. Rhavas stood waiting. He did not know what the monks saw in him, but he did know he'd meant what he said. If they attacked him, it would be the last thing they ever did. Whatever explaining he had to do afterward, he would.
Garidas started to take another step toward him, but then awkwardly swung around so it turned out to be a step back toward the rest of the monks. "Cowards!" he bawled at them. None of them said anything. "Cowards!" he shouted again. "You're all nothing but a bunch of spineless cowards! He's got a priest's robes. So what?" He shook his fist at them.
They neither moved nor spoke. Cursing more like a stevedore than a monk, Garidas stormed out of the taproom. More quietly, the other monks followed in his wake.
Rhavas sat down. The man at the table next to his stared in disbelief. "Phos!" he said. "How did you do that, holy sir?"
"If they know you'll cause trouble, sometimes you don't have to," Rhavas answered.
"No offense, but how much trouble could you cause? There they all were, and they were drunk and mean. That Garidas is one nasty customer. He likes brawling in here—you were dead right about that. And I looked to see you dead, or halfway dead, anyways. But they walked out instead. How come?"
"Don't you think you would do better asking them?" Rhavas said.
The man at the next table looked at him. Again, Rhavas didn't know what the fellow saw, but whatever it was, it was plenty to make him grab for his cup and drain it in a hurry. "Maybe I've got some kind of notion after all," he said. Leaving a coin on the table, he too made a hasty exit.
He hadn't even got to the door before Rhavas ran a hand over his face. No blood stained his palm. He bore no brand of which he hadn't been aware. But something must have shown to both the bad-tempered Garidas and to the inoffensive man at the next table, something that said, If you trouble this man, you'll be the one who's sorry.
What was it? Had Rhavas' new knowledge done something to him? He felt his face again, and again found nothing out of the ordinary. Mirrors were few and far between, but he resolved to stop when he passed by a calm pond and to look down into it. He'd often thought himself a fairly formidable fellow, but more intellectually than physically. Maybe he'd been wrong.
"I don't know whether to thank you or to tell you to go to the ice, holy sir," the tapman said from behind the bar.
"How's that?" Rhavas asked.
"Well, we didn't have a fight, and that's good, on account of it would have torn up the place," the man answered. "But you couldn't have cleared the room any better if you'd tossed a polecat into the middle of it. Can't make any money if there's no people here, now can I?"
"I suppose not," Rhavas admitted. "I can't say I'm too sorry, though, all things considered.
"Didn't figure you could," the tapman said, "seeing as how you were going to be on the bottom end of it."
Monks who battered anyone presuming to disagree with them had featured prominently in several synods. Establishing doctrine by knocking people over the head worked at least as well as doing so through reasoned argument. Rhavas didn't necessarily approve of that, but recognized its reality. He wouldn't have cared for rowdy monks pounding on him, though.
He started to tell the local what a peaceable fellow he was. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in a brawl. But how many men had he killed since the Khamorth swarmed into Videssos? He couldn't have put a number on it. And one woman, he added to himself. I've killed one woman.
A man who looked like a farmer come to town to sell asparagus stuck his head into the tavern and blinked a couple of times when he saw Rhavas was the only customer in the place. After blinking, he came in himself. "Looks like I won't have to wait for a cup of wine," he remarked.
"That's the truth, friend. You won't," the tapman told him.
"There. You see? Nothing permanent," Rhavas said.
"A good thing, too," said the man behind the bar.
"It could have been worse," Rhavas said, and the tapman had no idea how right he was.
Rhavas rode out of Develtos with nothing but relief. Neither Garidas nor any of the bruiser's fellow monks troubled him anymore; if they got drunk and quarreled while he was in the town, they did it in some other tavern. But the combination of such aggressive devotion to Phos and such aggressive devotion to Stylianos oppressed him.
He did his best to spend all the coins with Stylianos' face on them. Having them wouldn't be illegal when he came to country that favored Maleinos; their quality was as good as that of the money the legitimate Avtokrator issued. But they might prove embarrassing. He didn't want to give the impression that he favored the rebel.
The road west from Develtos was a real highway. By comparison, all the roads north of the Paristrian Mountains were nothing but rutted tracks. Rhavas understood why, too. The road west from Develtos ran straight to Videssos the city. Those north of the mountains went nowhere in particular. So it looked to a man born and raised in the capital, anyhow.
Before long, he sniffed and wrinkled his nose. He recognized that smell of old corruption; he'd run into it on the other side of the mountains. Here, though, the reek was stronger, which meant the battlefield was bigger. This had to be where Maleinos beat Stylianos. When word of that fight came up to Skopentzana, Rhavas had thought everything would be fine.
He laughed hoarsely. That only showed how foolish he'd been.
Some of the corpses on the field had been tumbled into hasty graves—mounds that grass and shrubs and flowers still covered incompletely. Others lay where they had fallen. Those would be rebels, of course; the victors would have buried their own. No one had bothered with either side's dead horses. Their larger skeletons were more readily visible through the burgeoning new growth than those of men.
Rhavas frowned a little. On the field north of the Paristrians, neither side had buried its dead. What did that mean? Probably that neither side had won anything even close to a victory. They'd killed till they got sick of killing, and then they'd gone away.