The only way Rhavas could have detached himself was by making Arotras fall over dead in the street. He didn't want to do that. He didn't suppose he wanted to do that, anyhow. And so he let the priest steer him into a tavern and order wine for him. Along with the wine, Arotras ordered olives and pickled asparagus and almonds and a honey cake topped with candied apricots. By the way he and the taverner chaffed each other, he came in here often.
"You live well," Rhavas remarked.
"Not too bad," Arotras said. "No, not too. I can't screw, but there's nothing in the holy laws that says I can't stuff myself." He ate one of the asparagus stalks, then popped an olive into his mouth and spat the pit on the floor.
Priests were supposed to control all fleshly impulses, not just sensual lust. Rhavas was in a poor position to criticize Arotras, though. He ate an olive himself, savoring the rich, vinegary brine. "How have things been down here?" he inquired.
Arotras raised a bushy eyebrows. "I thought you'd rip me up one side and down the other for letting myself run to fat," he said. "You were always like that in the old days—not an ounce of give anywhere."
"I still am," Rhavas said. "But if you don't think I've seen worse things than a fat priest lately, you're wrong."
"Well, I believe that," Arotras admitted. "You asked how things were? They're bad. I suppose they're worse up north, with the barbarians running everywhere, but they're pretty cursed rotten here, too."
"It's . . . not good up there," Rhavas said. "Skopentzana—the place is dead, I think, and I doubt it will come back to life. The Khamorth were sacking it when an earthquake knocked it flat." He didn't tell Arotras he'd had anything to do with either of those disasters.
The other priest clucked sympathetically. "You were lucky to get away with a whole skin. We'd heard something about all this here, but you know how news is when it's come a long way. Who can tell what to believe and what not to, especially when you hear four different stories?"
"I certainly do know," Rhavas said. "With news from the north, though, it's pretty simple: the worse things sound, the more likely they are to be true."
"That's a bad business. It's what I was afraid of, but it's a very bad business." Arotras waved for more wine. When the tapman filled his cup again, he raised his hands to the heavens and spat on the floor. Then, in a low voice, he went on, "Things are just about as bad down here. The civil war goes back and forth. The soldiers slaughter each other and plunder the peasants. I tell you, Rhavas, it's enough to make you wonder whether Phos is looking the other way."
Rhavas stared at him in astonishment. That a priest of Phos should say such a thing—and to another priest! Rhavas himself had had such thoughts, of course, but he hadn't dreamt anyone else had.
Arotras turned red. "I knew I shouldn't have told you anything like that," he muttered, misunderstanding why Rhavas was amazed. "You always took to doctrine the way ducks take to water. If you want to flay the hide off me now, you can go ahead and do it."
If Rhavas spoke in the right ears in Videssos the city, he could do worse than that. He and Arotras undoubtedly both knew it. He could cost the other priest his place here. He could have him tortured for heresy, maybe even for apostasy, and exiled to Prista, the lonely outpost across the Videssian Sea from which the Empire kept an uneasy eye on the Pardrayan steppe.
Much good that did us, Rhavas thought bitterly. But Prista was far from the border between the Empire and the nomads. No one there could have known of the frontier disaster till too late.
Now he had to think about what Arotras had said. He picked his own words with care: "As it happens, some of the things I have seen have also made me wonder about what the lord with the great and good mind is doing—and whether he is doing anything at all."
"You?" Arotras sounded as if he couldn't believe his ears. "Forgive me for saying so, very holy sir, but you are perhaps the last person from whom I would have expected to hear that."
Rhavas shrugged. "A year ago, I would have said something different. A year ago, I would have thought differently. With what I have seen since then . . . A man might reasonably wonder, I believe, who holds the greater power in this world."
He waited. He hadn't said he thought Skotos was mightier than Phos. But even saying there was room to wonder, room to doubt, made him a heretic, subject to anathema and, in the eyes of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, bound for the ice. If Arotras wanted to shout curses at him now, how could he answer—except with curses of his own, curses that would show where the strength lay?
Arotras still eyed him as if unable to believe what he was hearing. "You say this, very holy sir? You, who were always such a pillar of perfect orthodoxy?"
"I say it. I mean it. With what I have seen, the only thing I do not see is how I could say anything else," Rhavas replied. If Arotras shouted of heresy . . . well, so what? When Rhavas got to Videssos the city, ecclesiastics far more prominent than Arotras ever dreamt of being would shout the same thing, and shout it louder and more ferociously.
"You sound like a man . . . Meaning no offense, Rhavas, but you sound like a man who has lost his faith," the other priest said.
Rhavas shook his head. "I have not lost it. I have had it turned into a new channel. Faith abides. Faith always abides." Some of his earliest lessons also abided, lessons so early he had no conscious memory of them.
Now Arotras looked around nervously and lowered his voice. "Do you say you would sooner reverence . . . him?" He did not name Skotos, but spat on the floor to show whom he meant.
"I have not said anything of the sort," Rhavas told him. "And I have said more than a little, and you not nearly so much. How do you feel about these things? What do you think about them, I should say? For it is only through thought that we can hope to come to understanding."
Arotras looked unhappy. He hadn't wanted to be put on the spot. Rhavas had a hard time blaming him for that—who did? But the other priest said, "Answers for answers—only fair, I suppose. How can anyone look at everything that's happened lately and say the lord with the great and good mind surely rules the world and just as surely will triumph at the end of days? Other things"—he spat on the floor once again—"are bound to be going on."
"I agree," Rhavas said crisply. "We have been blind and deaf to this for too long. If we cannot see it after the madness of civil war and the barbarian invasions, though, when will we?"
He'd jolted Arotras again. The other priest glanced fearfully toward Videssos the city. "If we say that there, very holy sir, they will make us sorry we ever opened our mouths."
"I am not afraid," Rhavas said, which overstated the case more than a little. "If we tell them the truth, they will have to see it."
"Nobody has to do anything." Arotras spoke with great and mournful certainty.
"Coward!" Rhavas said scornfully. "I have the truth behind me, and those stodgy ecclesiastics can tell me otherwise until they are blue in the face. They will not persuade me."
"They won't care, either." The other priest sounded even more mournful—and even more certain—than before. "They'll anathematize you, they'll scourge you, they'll excommunicate you, and they'll burn you. That's what happens when they decide you're a heretic—especially when they decide you're that kind of heretic."
"They will not do that to me," Rhavas declared.
"You think they won't? You think they won't on account of you're the Avtokrator's cousin?" Arotras was given to repeating himself. "They won't care, not if you're that kind of heretic."