"Thank you," Rhavas said. "I don't know if that will help, but I don't see how it could hurt."
Lardys dipped up a mugful. "What's eating you, anyway?" he asked, and held up a hasty hand. "You don't want to talk about it, you don't have to. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it's nobody's business."
"I don't mind talking." Rhavas explained, as he had on the floor and in the narthex of the High Temple.
When he finished, the innkeeper whistled softly. "You don't think small, do you?" He paused, considering. Doing what he did, he'd seen a lot of the world's evils here in this taproom. "Makes a deal of sense when you think about it, eh?"
"Seems that way to me," Rhavas said. "The ecumenical patriarch, you understand, has a different opinion."
"Well, curse the ecumenical patriarch," Lardys said gaily.
"Yes, curse him," Rhavas agreed. He suddenly finished the wine at a gulp, wondering what he'd done, wondering if he'd done anything. He hadn't intended to, but what did that prove? One way or the other, he would know before very long.
"Dig up his bones!" Lardys added, pouring wine for himself. That was the traditional Videssian cry of riot and rebellion. More often than not, it was aimed at the Avtokrator, but anyone who got on the wrong side of the city mob could face it.
"Dig up his bones," Rhavas echoed. Would Kameniates' bones need digging up before long? If they did, would people make the connection between him and Rhavas? Would a mob gather in the street here shouting, Dig up Rhavas' bones!? Before long, again, Rhavas would find out. "Let me have another," he told the tapman. This time, he set a coin on the bar.
"Here you go." Lardys finished his own cup and poured another for himself after giving Rhavas a refill. "I've got a question for you, holy sir: if things are the way you say they are, does that mean we all go to the ice after we die?"
"I haven't worked that out yet," Rhavas said uncomfortably—it was a better question than he'd expected. "It would seem to follow, though, wouldn't it?"
"Ah, well." The man behind the bar shrugged. "The company's bound to be better there than up above, then, isn't it?"
Eternity didn't seem to bother him. Maybe the idea of it was too big for him to grasp. Maybe, on the other hand, he hoped to find a loophole so that he would end up in Phos' heaven even if everyone else went to the ice. Rhavas didn't think either Phos or Skotos had loopholes like that; each was, in his own way, perfect.
"If bad is good and good is bad, so to speak, we're going to have to change a lot of the way we behave," Lardys observed. "You see a pretty girl you want, you just go ahead and jump on her. Why not? What difference will it make?"
He had a way of penetrating to the essence of things. Rhavas wished he would have chosen a different example. What had happened with Ingegerd still weighed on his conscience. Logically, it shouldn't have. Rhavas knew that. His own reasoning had already followed the innkeeper's. He wasn't comfortable with it, though, no matter how logical it was. He hadn't grown up thinking that way. Once he'd reformed the temples' doctrine, others would. They would think and feel the way they were supposed to under the new dispensation.
How to put that into words? Rhavas did his best: "I expect things will sort themselves out. It will take time, that's all."
"Ah, well," Lardys said again. "What doesn't?" He gestured toward Rhavas' mug. "Drink up, holy sir, and I'll pour you some more. Next one's on me. You've given me something new to chew on, and that doesn't happen every day."
"Thank you very much," Rhavas answered gravely. "You are a clever man. You might have done well to go into the priesthood so you could use your wits to best advantage."
"No, thanks." Lardys shook his head. "You use your wits plenty keeping an inn going, believe you me you do. And—meaning no offense, mind you—I don't reckon I'd make much of a priest on account of I like using my prick too well."
Having become acquainted with the pleasures of the flesh, Rhavas found that hard to gainsay. He wondered how he'd done without for so much of his life. The only answer he could see was that he hadn't known what he was missing. He supposed that was why priests took their vocations as youths. If they got experience first, they wouldn't want to abandon women—or, some of them, boys.
"The rules there will likely change, too," he said.
"I bet they would!" The innkeeper's laugh was raucous and lewd and rude. He eyed Rhavas with a strange, almost a morbid, curiosity. "Do you really think you can make the temples turn everything upside down, holy sir, or are you just talking to hear yourself talk?"
"What I say I can do, I can do," Rhavas declared, maybe a little louder than he needed to. "The truth is the truth. If I see it more clearly than others, I can make them see it, too—and I have a duty to make them see it."
"Better you than me, pal. That's all I've got to tell you." Lardys whistled: a low, mournful note. "Yeah, better you than me. You take on something that big, you're bound to lose whether you're right or you're wrong. You understand what I'm telling you? If the mouse runs into the tree or the tree falls on the mouse, the mouse loses either way."
"I am not a mouse," Rhavas said, and plucked at his bushy beard. "You can tell because my whiskers are different."
The taverner laughed louder than the joke deserved; he'd been drinking, too. The next round, Rhavas bought for both of them. They ended up killing a good part of the afternoon, and tried to solve the secrets of the universe while they were at it.
Out in the streets, people started yelling about something or other. "I wonder what's going on," Rhavas said, more than a little blearily.
"To the ice with 'em." Lardys giggled. "To the ice with everybody who doesn't come in and buy some wine. To the ice with . . . everybody." He giggled again.
But then someonedid come in, and they both demanded, "What's all the fuss about?"
"You haven't heard yet?" the man said in amazement. He rolled his eyes when they both shook their heads. He rolled his eyes, but he told them: "The patriarch is dead!"
Rhavas woke with a hangover the likes of which he hadn't had since . . . He couldn't remember when, if ever, he'd woken with such a thick head.Yes, curse him, he'd said, not meaning very much by it—and Kameniates breathed no more.
Groaning, Rhavas stood up. That made his head hurt more. So did bending to reach under the bed for the chamber pot. He tried to piss away all the wine he'd drunk the day and the night before, but it was still working its will on him. "Coming out!" he called—croaked, really—and threw the slops out the window. An irate screech from below said he hadn't given the people in the street long enough to get clear. That was a hazard of city life anywhere. It happened—well, it had happened—in Skopentzana, too.
He was none too steady on his feet as he went down to the taproom. He blinked and squinted. It was no brighter in there than it had been the day before—less so, if anything, for the morning was cloudy—but it certainly seemed as if it were. Lardys was already down there behind the bar. He looked more than a little the worse for wear, too.
"Wine," Rhavas said in a ghastly voice. "A cup of wine and some raw cabbage, if you have any. Maybe that will get some of the thunder out of my head."
"I have cabbage, if you want it." The taverner didn't doubt he would want a hair of the dog that had bitten him. A mug already stood in front of the man. As he dipped up another, he went on, "Or I have tripe soup. A bowl eased me—some."
"Tripe soup and cabbage, maybe," Rhavas said. "But wine. Oh, yes. Wine." Automatically, he went through the proper Videssian ritual. Several other people were having breakfast in there. A hungover priest was one thing—something to smile at, in fact. A hungover priest who didn't seem to reject Skotos . . . Rhavas didn't want to have to start killing so early in the day.