Something like that never would have happened in Skopentzana. People there wouldn't have expected a reward for anything so small and simple. They would have gone out of their way to help, in fact. Had folk by the capital always been like this? Thinking back on it, Rhavas decided they had. Why would anyone come to Videssos the city or stay there if he didn't have his eye on the main chance?
What would a peasant do if a priest expected payment for a blessing? Fork over? Maybe. But Rhavas thought most of the peasants he'd seen were more likely to break a hoe handle over a greedy cleric's head than to cough up a copper, let alone give over gold.
Toward evening, another peasant called to him as he rode by: "Want supper and a bed here, holy sir? Better and cheaper than what you'd get in town."
That, now, that was legitimate business. Rhavas swung his horse toward the man. "I thank you very much, and I'll take you up on it."
The peasant hadn't been lying. His plump wife served up a fine chicken stew. He had a son whose beard was just beginning to sprout and a daughter a year or two younger than that. People told jokes about peasants' daughters. Rhavas wondered if any of them were true. Eyeing her, he didn't think so—not in her case, anyhow. Too bad, he thought.
Were he a more accomplished wizard, he might have brought her to his bed while the rest of the family slept. He might have arranged it so she either didn't remember what had happened or liked it—was made to like it—so well she never told her kinsfolk. He might have . . . but he didn't know how. That grimoire of Koubatzes' would repay more study.
As things were, he tried to take a spot near the hearth and leave the peasant family to their beds. They wouldn't hear of it. The young man curled up on the floor by the fire. Rhavas slept in his bed. It was more comfortable than what he was likely to have got at an inn, just as the stew made a better supper than most inns would have served up.
Next morning, the peasants woke at dawn. Rhavas wasn't far behind them, not because they were noisy but because only the very wealthy and the very degenerate stayed in bed for long after the sun came up. Daylight was for living; lamps couldn't really push darkness back far enough to make a proper substitute.
"Thank you kindly, holy sir," the farmer said when Rhavas paid the scot. "We enjoyed having you here, and that's the truth. Would you be kind enough to set a blessing on us, too, before you ride away?"
Rhavas looked up to the heavens. "Give these generous people what they truly deserve, and may they truly deserve well of you," he said, a prayer that did not name Phos. He finished with the usual, "So may it be," and hoped the farmer and his family wouldn't notice what was missing.
Luck—or perhaps some power—was with him, for they did not. Maybe they so expected to hear Phos' name, they thought they did even when they didn't. That made as much sense to him as anything else.
He swung up into the saddle and rode away. As he did, the farmer of the farm family headed for the fields, a hoe on his shoulder like a foot soldier's spear. The son went to the barn to tend the livestock. The mother walked back into the farmhouse to start the day's baking and washing and spinning and weaving. The pretty daughter went down on her hands and knees in the vegetable plot by the house and began weeding.
Rhavas sighed. So many better things she might be doing, he thought. In his mind, the better things were all lewd. He sighed again, at the waste. But he shrugged and kept on riding. It wasn't as if she were the only pretty girl ever born. He would find plenty more—he was sure of that.
Thus heartened, he rode on for most of the morning. He didn't suppose he should have been surprised when his thoughts came back to Ingegerd, but somehow he was. She hadn't been a pretty girl; she'd been a beautiful woman. She'd admired him and trusted him—and what had it got her? Ravaged at his hands; slain by his curse.
He wondered if her death was part of the curse he'd called down on his own head. Did it count as part of the fall of Skopentzana? It certainly sprang from that fall. He'd never dreamt the Khamorth would get into the city. He'd never dreamt one of the peasants he'd helped to stay in the city would open it to the barbarians. No matter what he'd dreamt, though, the black hour had come, and he'd made it his responsibility.
Here under the warm southern sun, he shivered as if caught in a Skopentzana blizzard. He'd cursed others, and they'd fallen. There stood a shepherd watching his sheep and lambs. If I point a finger at him, he dies, Rhavas thought. Beyond a doubt, that was true. But he had pointed at himself, up there in Skopentzana. He still lived. He still breathed. Even though he did, he could not believe—however much he wished he could—that he would escape unscathed.
Here came a merchant riding a swaybacked horse and leading three donkeys with thick canvas sacks lashed onto their backs. "May the good god bless you, holy sir," he said as he went by.
"The same to you," Rhavas replied. Up in the north—and, for that matter, in the westlands, too—traders commonly grouped themselves into caravans and hired guards to keep themselves safe from bandits and raiding barbarians. Here, close to the capital, this fellow felt safe enough to travel on his own.
Ideally, that should have been the way things worked all through the Empire. If the civil war and the Khamorth invasions went on much longer, it might not be true anywhere—Rhavas remembered all too well the pair of barbarians in the middle of the meadow not far north of here. They would cheerfully despoil this fellow here, and even more cheerfully murder him.
Slowly, Rhavas nodded to himself. Was that not yet another sign of what he'd first seen up in the north? Was a new might not rising in the land? If Phos had been the leading power, as so many theologians had believed for so long, he was no more. So it seemed to Rhavas, at any rate, and so he intended to show the whole world.
Being so close to the capital, he hurried toward it like a lover hurrying to his beloved—not a priestly comparison, perhaps, but not an inapt one, either. Scribblers wrote romances that largely consisted of the roadblocks fate and villains put in the way of a lover hurrying to his beloved. Rhavas had always looked down his long nose at romances; they were frivolous, and he'd never had time for frivolity.
Now, though, fate seemed to be putting obstacles in his way. When he stopped in a town achingly close to Videssos the city, he found himself waylaid by a local priest. He couldn't even tell the man to go to the ice and leave him alone, not without stirring up scandal; he'd taken his vows together with Arotras.
"By the good god, Rhavas, is that really you?" Arotras exclaimed when he saw Rhavas buying some sausages from a man in the market square.
Rhavas needed longer to recognize his old friend than Arotras had to know him. The other man had a big, comfortable belly, a much rounder face than he'd owned all those years before, and a beard that tumbled in gray waves past his chins and down his chest.
But his voice rang a bell. That hadn't changed so much. "Arotras!" Rhavas said. They embraced: the man who'd kept his faith and the man who'd seen his change.
"You were up—somewhere in the north," Arotras said. Rhavas hid his annoyance: to a man who'd never gone far from Videssos the city, even a town as important as Skopentzana was nothing but a part of the distant, trackless wilderness, and not such a big part, either. Arotras went on, "Phos, you must have needed a wagonload of miracles just to get down here in one piece!"
"Well, so I did," Rhavas allowed. If he didn't think those miracles came from Phos, Arotras didn't need to know that.
His old friend took him by the arm. "Come on, then. You're not going to disappear into Videssos the city—you can't fool me; I know where you must be bound—without sitting down and drinking with me and telling me your story. Come on, I say! I don't aim to take no for an answer."