But that thought led him away from the mark he had set for himself. He peered further, sought once more for strangeness, something small, something subtle …
“By the gods,” he said softly, “it’s the very shadows.” The northern men, who had to contend with the wild seas and savage storms of the Bay of Haloga, always built their boats clinker-style, each plank overlapping the one below and pegs driven through both for surer strength. The planks on the dromon were set edge to edge, so its sides seemed indecently smooth—rather like the Videssians themselves, Skatval thought with a thin smile.
The men he led could fill half a dozen war galleys. The arrogant dromon had already sailed past the inlets where four of them rested. Let the fightfire be kindled—and torches lay always to hand—and that brash captain would never hie back to his hot homeland. Skatval had but to say the word.
The word went unsaid. For one thing, in the bow of the dromon stood a white-painted shield hung on a spearshaft, the Videssian sign of truce. For another, the dromon was alone. If he sank it and slew its sailors, a swarm would sally forth for vengeance. Stavrakios, the man who sat on the Empire’s throne, was very like a Haloga in that.
The dromon halted perhaps a furlong from the end of the fjord. Skatval watched the loincloth-clad sailors (his lips twisted in a scornful smile as he imagined how they would fare in such garb here, more than a month either way from high summer) lower a boat into the gray-blue water. Four men scrambled down a rope into that boat. The ragged way they worked the oars told him at once they were no sailors. Now the corners of his mouth turned down. What were they, then?
As they moved out of the dromon’s shadow, the sun shone off their shaven pates. For a moment, Skatval simply accepted what he saw. Then he cursed, loud, long, and fierce. So the Videssians were sending another pack of priests to Halogaland, were they? Had they not yet learned the northern folk cared nothing for their god? Or was it that their Phaos sometimes demanded blood sacrifice?
Skatval chewed on the new thought some little while, for it made the Videssian god more like those he venerated. But in the end he spat it out. He had seen imperials at worship. They gave their effete god hymns, not gore.
With the boat gone, the dromon turned almost in its own length (there was oarwork worth respect) and made for the outlet of the fjord. Skatval frowned again. Not even the bloodless Videssians were in the habit of leaving priests behind to perish.
Instead of beaching, the boat paused half a bowshot from shore. The blue-robed priests began to chant. One stood, looked up at the sun, and sketched a circle above his left breast. Skatval knew that was a gesture of respect. The other priests raised their hands to the heavens. The chant went on. The standing blue-robe sketched the sun-circle again, then made a quick pass, and another, and another.
A broad bridge of sunlight suddenly sprang from boat to beach. The priests swung knapsacks over their shoulders and strode across it as confidently as if they walked on dry land. When the last of them had crossed, the bridge vanished. The boat bobbed in the fjord, lonely and forgotten.
So, Skatval thought, they are sorcerers. The magic, which likely awed any watching crofters, impressed him as well, but only so far: he would have thought more of it had it brought the boat in, too. Still, the Halogai also boasted wizards, though their craft was earthier, often bloodier, than this play with light itself. Skatval refused to be awed. He had no doubt that was what the blue-robes sought, else they simply would have rowed ashore.
“Like to brag of themselves, do they?” he muttered. “I’ll choke their brags in their throats, by the gods.”
He set hand on swordhilt and strode shorewards. Should he slay the blue-robes now, he wondered, or was that Stavrakios’ purpose, to seek to incite him and give the Empire excuse to turn loose its ships and soldiers? Videssos played a slipperier game of statecraft than most. Perhaps it were wiser to let the priests first commit some outrage, as they surely would, to justify their slaughter.
The unwelcome newcomers saw him tramping down the track from the longhouse. As one, they turned his way. As one indeed, he thought. Videssian priests were like as so many peas in a pod. Before he drew near enough to make out faces, he was sure what he would find. Some would be older, some younger, but all small and slight and swarthy by his standards.
Three of the four priests fit the expected pattern. Even their ages were hard to judge, save by the grayness of their untrimmed beards: as much as their matching robes, their naked, gleaming skulls made them seem all the same.
Perhaps because he foresaw uniformity, Skatval needed longer than he should have to note that the fourth man out of the boat broke the mold. Robed he was like his companions, and shaven, but the beard that burgeoned on cheeks and chin was neither black nor gray, but rather a golden tangle that reached halfway down his chest. His face was square; his nose short; his eyes not dark, heavy-lidded, and clever but open, friendly, and the exact color of the waters of Lygra Fjord.
Skatval’s firm step faltered. He tugged at his own beard, more neatly kept than that of the fourth priest but of the same shade. Here was something unlooked for. How had Videssos made a Haloga into a priest of Phaos? More to the point, what sort of weapon was he?
All the priests had been praying since they left Merciless for the boat that had brought them to this inhospitable shore. But now Antilas, Nephon, and Tzoumas stood silent, watching the barbarian approach. They knew martyrdom might lie only moments away, knew their fate rested in Phaos’ hands alone, knew the good god would do with them as he willed.
Kveldulf knew all those things, knew them as well as his brethren. Nevertheless, he recited the creed yet again: “We bless thee, Phaos, lord with the great and good mind, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.”
“Your piety, as always, does you credit, Kveldulf,” Tzoumas said. Like all imperials, the old priest pronounced Kveldulf’s name as if it were a proper Videssian appellation: Kveldoulphios. He had grown so used to hearing it thus that it was nearly as if he’d borne it that way since birth. Nearly.
Not wishing to contradict his superior, he modestly lowered his eyes. He’d spoken Phaos’ creed not so much to beg favor from the good god as to anchor himself, to recall what he’d willed himself to become, in a world where he needed such anchor as much as a shipwrecked sailor needed a spar to support himself in a sea suddenly turned all topsy-turvy.
Though he’d not set foot in Halogaland for twenty years and more, everything here smote him with a familiarity the stronger for being so unexpected: the way the land sloped sharply up from the sea; the grim gray of bare rock; the air’s cool salt tang; the dark cloaks of arrow-straight fir and pine that covered the shoulders of the hills; the turf walls of the chief’s longhouse and the way those walls turned in toward each other to accommodate the shape of the roof, which was not in fact a roof by original intention, but rather an upside-down boat outworn for any other use. He’d passed his boyhood in just such a longhouse.
But he was boy no more. Taken back to the Empire as prize of war, he’d grown to manhood—grown to priesthood—in its great cities, in golden Skopentzana and in the mighty imperial capital, Videssos the city itself. Now he saw through the eyes of a man who better knew a different world what he had taken for granted as a child.