"Any buzzard that ate this horse would puke afterward," Rhavas replied. He waited to see whether Kolaksha would get that. When the barbarian threw back his head and laughed, Rhavas knew he had.
"Funny man. Funnnny." Kolaksha stretched that out as he had puny. He eyed Rhavas' mount again. "Horse funnnny, too." The chieftain plucked at his beard, which was full and curly to the point of shagginess. "Skotos . . . Skotos is god who fight Phos?"
"That's right." Rhavas nodded. "Skotos is the god who is beating Phos. And Skotos is using the Khamorth, using your people, to beat Videssos."
Kolaksha scowled. "But Skotos wicked god, yes? Khamorth not wicked. Khamorth good. I good." He jerked a thumb at his own broad chest again. "Videssos have it coming." He added something in his own language. If it wasn't more of the same, Rhavas would have been amazed.
He almost laughed in the plainsman's face, as Kolaksha had laughed at his sardonic crack. Only worry about angering the chieftain held him back. No one was ever a villain in his own eyes. That seemed as true among savage steppe nomads who robbed and raped and killed for the fun of it as it was among suave, sophisticated Videssians . . . who robbed and raped and killed for the fun of it.
Rhavas wasn't a villain in his own eyes, either. He was a reformer, a man denied his rightful place by the willful blindness of those with a vested interest in keeping things as they were. Videssos . . . had it coming. He was no more able to look at the black things he'd done than Kolaksha was to examine his deeds—and he was also no more able to realize that he couldn't look at them.
The Khamorth chieftain eyed him, eyed the dead horses, eyed the vultures and ravens already starting to circle above the carrion. Kolaksha nodded to himself. One way or another, he'd made up his mind. "You come," he said, and waved back toward the nomads' camp. "Come, yes. You fight Lipoksha. Why not? After he kill you, we go on."
"A truce until he and I fight?" Rhavas asked.
"Yes, yes." Kolaksha nodded impatiently, as if to a little boy who was nagging him about something unimportant. "We not bother you before. Let Lipoksha take care of you."
His certainty was daunting. But I can't let him daunt me, not now, Rhavas thought. His head came up. He stared at—stared through—the chieftain. "And if I take care of him?"
"Then we listen to you." Kolaksha laughed. "But you not do that."
"We'll see. My god supports me," Rhavas said. The Khamorth chieftain laughed again, louder this time, as if Rhavas had told him a funny story. Rhavas didn't think it was funny. Angrily, he went on, "Bring me to this Lipoksha. And look well on him when you do, for you will not see him again." His bragging only made Kolaksha laugh even more.
When Lipoksha emerged from his tent, he was not at all what Rhavas had expected. Instead of being an even rougher, hairier, more barbarous version of Kolaksha, Lipoksha could almost as easily have been a woman as a man. His face was scraped smooth, and his dark hair flowed down over his shoulders. Moreover, the Khamorth shaman moved with a woman's grace and delicacy. He wore tunic and trousers of deerskin adorned with fringes on the chest and back and at the elbows and wrists and knees and ankles—and at the crotch.
When he spoke in his own language, his voice was high and light: not quite a woman's voice, but not quite a man's, either. Rhavas snapped his fingers. Something he'd read a long time before came back to him. "You're an enaree!" he exclaimed. The last word sprang from the plainsmen's language, for Videssian had no equivalent.
Lipoksha did not seem to know any Videssian. Kolaksha, who did, jerked in surprise at hearing a word in his speech from Rhavas' mouth. "How you know of this?" he demanded, his voice hard with suspicion.
"I've read of it," Rhavas answered. But that made no sense to the nomad, who did not know the Videssian words for reading or writing or books. A barbarian indeed, Rhavas thought. Do I really want to live among these people? A moment later, he bleakly answered himself. What choice have I got? I cannot live in Videssos any more, not until the Empire falls.
Finally, Kolaksha gave up trying to understand. Lipoksha spoke again, in that epicene, effeminate voice. Effeminate. Rhavas nodded to himself. That was the word he remembered—an account of a trader's journey deep into the Pardrayan steppe used it to speak of enarees . The chieftain translated for his shaman: "He say, you not like Videssian wizards, not like Videssian priests."
"That is true," Rhavas agreed gravely. He supposed Lipoksha meant he was not like them. But if the enaree had actually said Rhavas did not like them, that would have been no less true.
Lipoksha said something else. Were those high, thin tones natural for him, or had he acquired them by practice? Rhavas could not ask, for Kolaksha's gruff, surely natural baritone followed: "You want his place, yes?"
"Yes," Rhavas said.
More twittering from Lipoksha. More growls, more or less in Videssian, from Kolaksha: "You want to be like Khamorth, you fight in Khamorth way, he say. You go together into felt tent. You fight there." The chieftain frowned. That wasn't what he'd wanted to say. His heavy features looked surprisingly thoughtful for a moment. Then they lightened. He'd found the words he needed. "The of-you spirits fight." He'd made hash of the Videssian possessive, but his meaning came through. Casually, he added, "One come out of felt tent. The other . . ." His gesture needed no words to get the meaning across.
"How do our spirits fight in the felt tent?" Rhavas asked. The trader's tale had spoken of this ritual, too, but he couldn't bring back the details.
Kolaksha blinked. When he translated Rhavas' words into his own language, Lipoksha seemed startled, too. "Ignorant foreigner," Kolaksha said scornfully. He might almost have been a Videssian sneering at barbarians. "All folk know of the tent where breathe in hemp smoke." He flared his nostrils and inhaled noisily to show what he meant.
"Not all folk do, for I did not," Rhavas said with ponderous precision. That only made both Kolaksha and Lipoksha sneer more, which annoyed him. He asked, "What can breathing in hemp smoke possibly do?"
After the chieftain translated, the enaree spoke volubly in his guttural language, waving his hands for emphasis. Kolaksha turned his words, or some of them, into Videssian: "Put you in spirit world. You want magic fight, should be there."
"Ah." Rhavas fought down a stab of unease. Maybe hemp smoke was some sort of drug, then—or maybe the plainsmen, with barbarous ignorance, imagined it was. Lipoksha plainly wanted the sorcerous duel on his terms, not Rhavas'. Are you confident in what you are doing, or not? Rhavas asked himself. He nodded. He was. And even if he weren't, it was much too late to back out now, and he had nowhere else to go if he did. As firmly as he could, he nodded again. "Let it be as you say, then. The felt tent."
The Khamorth eagerly set up the felt tent. It was smaller than the rest of the tents in the encampment, for it was not meant as a dwelling place, only as one of ritual. Unlike the tents in which the nomads lived, this one had no smoke hole at the top; the smoke inside was supposed to be trapped. Rawhide lashings could tightly close the tent flap, also to keep smoke from escaping.
The flap had lashings on both inside and outside. From Kolaksha's bits of Videssian, Rhavas gathered breathing in hemp fumes was entertainment as well as the stuff of sorcerous confrontations. Today, though, only the interior lashings would be used. The winner of the duel would have to untie them when he emerged.