“What else would you have me do?” he asked, honestly curious.
“Were it not for your beard, I should guess the southrons made you a eunuch when they set the blue robe upon you.” Skjaldvor took a deep breath, let it hiss out through flaring nostrils. “What else would I have you do? This, to start.” As she stepped into his arms, her expression might have been that of a warrior measuring a foe over sword and shield.
The gold of her brooches pressed against him through his robe, then the softer, yielding firmness that was herself. His arms still hung by his sides, but that mattered little, for she held him to her. From the sweat that prickled on his forehead and shaven pate, the cool wood might suddenly have become a tropic swamp. Then she kissed him. Not even a man of stone, a statue like one of those in Skopentzana’s central square, could have remained unroused.
She stepped back and eyed not his red face but his groin to gauge her effect on him. That effect was all too visible, which only made his face grow redder. But when she reached out to open his robe, he slapped her hand aside. “No, by the good god,” he said harshly.
Now she reddened too, with anger. “Why ever not? The Videssians do not stint themselves; why should you, when you are not of their kindred nor born to their faith?”
“That they do wrong is no reason for me to follow them. Were they murdering instead of fornicating, would you bid me do likewise?”
“How can anything so full of joy be wrong?” Skjaldvor tossed her shining hair in scorn at the very idea.
“It is forbidden to Phaos’ priests, thus wrong for them,” Kveldulf declared. “And though I was not born to faith in Phaos, in it I am a son fostered to a fine father. Whatever I was by birth, Phaos’ is the house wherein I would dwell evermore.”
All he said was true, yet he knew it was incomplete. As a foster son in Phaos’ household, he was held to closer scrutiny than the Videssians who entered it by right of birth: they might be forgiven sins that would condemn him, the outsider who presumed to ape their ways. Another man might have grown resentful, struggling against that double standard. But it spurred Kveldulf. If extra devotion was required of him, extra devotion he would give.
“You will not?” Skjaldvor said.
“I will not,” Kveldulf answered firmly. Never since donning the blue robe had he known such temptation; the memory of her body printed against him, he knew, would remain with him till his last breath. He still throbbed from wanting her. But priests were taught to rule their flesh. Over and over he repeated Phaos’ creed to himself, focusing on the good god rather than his fleshly lust, and at length that lust began to lessen.
Skjaldvor drew near him again. This time, he thought, he would be proof against her embraces. But she did not embrace him. Serpent-swift, she slapped his left cheek, then, on the backhand, his right. He cherished the sudden pain, which seared the last of his desire from him.
“May the lord with the great and good mind keep you in his heart until you place him in yours,” he said. “I shall pray that that time be soon, as you have seemed better disposed than most of your fellows to learning of his faith.”
She tossed her head again and laughed, an ugly sound despite the sweetness of her voice. Then she spat full in his face. “This for your Phaos and his faith.” She spat again. “And this for you!” She spun on her heel and stormed away.
Kveldulf stood and watched her go while her warm spittle slid down into his beard. Very deliberately, he bent his head and spat himself, down between his feet in the age-old Videssian gesture that rejected Skotos. He recited Phaos’ creed once more. When he was through, he walked slowly back toward the tents by the shore.
Skatval watched the small crowd of crofters and herders raise hands to the heavens. The sound of their prayers to Phaos reached him faintly. Save for the name of the Videssian god, the words were in the Haloga tongue. Skatval had heard worse poetry from bards who lived by traveling from chief to chief with their songs. Kveldulf’s work, no doubt, he thought; the blond-bearded priest was proving a man of more parts than he had looked for.
Absent from the converts’ conclave was Skjaldvor. For that Skatval sent up his own prayers of thanks to his gods. He had not asked what passed between her and Kveldulf, but where before she had gone to his services, looked on him with mooncalf eyes, now all at once the sight of him made her face go hard and hateful, hearing his name brought curses from her lips. She was in no danger of coming to follow Phaos, not any more.
But the priests from the Empire had won more folk to their faith than Skatval expected (truth to tell, he’d thought his people would laugh Kveldulf and the rest away in disgrace, else he would have slain them as soon as they set foot on his soil). That worried him. Followers of Videssos’ faith would mean Videssian priests on his land henceforward, and that would mean … Skatval growled wordlessly. He stalked toward the prayer meeting. He would show his people what that meant.
Kveldulf bowed courteously as he drew nigh. “The good god grant you peace, Skatval the Brisk. May I hope you have come to join us?”
“No,” he said, biting off the word. “I would ask a couple of questions of you.”
Kveldulf bowed again. “Ask what you will. Knowledge is a road to faith.”
“Knowledge is a road around the snare you have set for my people,” Skatval retorted. “Suppose some of us take on your faith and then fall out over how to follow it. Who decides which of us is in the right?”
“Priests are brought up from boyhood in Phaos’ way,” Kveldulf said. “Can newcomers to that way hope to match them in knowledge?”
Skatval grimaced. The Haloga priest—no, the blond Videssian, that was the better way to think of him—was not making matters easy. But the chief bulled ahead regardless: “Suppose the blue-robes disagree, as they may, men being what they are? Who then says which walks the proper path?”
“The prelates set over them,” Kveldulf said, cautious now. Skatval had probed at him before, but in private, not in front of the people.
“And the priest against whom judgment falls?” the chief said. “If he will not yield, is he then an outlaw?”
“A heretic, we name one who chooses his own false doctrine over that ordained by his elders.” Kveldulf considered the question, then added, “But no, he is not to be outlawed—excommunicated is the word the temples use—yet, for he has right of appeal to the patriarch, the most holy and chiefest priest, the head of all the faith.”
“Ah, the patriarch!” Skatval exclaimed, as if hearing of the existence of a supreme prelate for the first time. “And where dwells this prince of piety?”
“In Videssos the city, by the High Temple there,” Kveldulf answered.
“In Videssos the city? Under the Avtokrator’s thumb, you mean.” Skatval showed teeth in something more akin to a lynx’s hunting snarl than to a smile. “So you would have us put to Stavrakios’judgment aught upon which we may disagree, is that what you say?” He turned to the converts, lashed them with wounding words: “I reckoned you freemen, not slaves to Videssos through the Empire’s god. Your holy Kveldulf here is but the thin edge of the wedge, I warn you.”
“The patriarch rules the church, not the Avtokrator,” Kveldulf insisted. Behind him, his Videssian colleagues nodded vigorously.
Skatval ignored them; without Kveldulf, they were nothing here. At Kveldulf, he snapped, “And if your precious patriarch dies, what then?”
“Then the prelates come together in conclave to choose his successor,” Kveldulf answered.
Skatval quite admired him; without lying, he had twisted truth to his purposes. Against many Halogai, even chiefs, his words would have wrought what he intended. But Skatval, mistrusting the Empire more than most, had learned more of it than most. “By the truth you hold in your god, Kveldulf, who names the three men from whom the prelates pick the patriarch?”