Budin licked his lips. "I think we will not stay behind. I think Takshaki also thinks this. But he wants grazing space and wine and riches and plunder. You want endless war against Videssos. These are not the same thing."
What would you have been if you'd grown up in Videssos and truly been trained in how to think? Rhavas wondered. With your native shrewdness, you would have been formidable. You are wasted as a nomad shaman. Budin was bound to be right again. Rhavas thought it better not to come out and admit as much. "If you want to take what should be yours, you will need to fight to seize and to hold it," he said. "That suits me, and should suit you as well."
"Time will tell if it does," Budin said—yes, he was shrewd.
Here, though, he was not shrewd enough. When he thought of time, he thought of one year, or five years, or ten. No man was likely to think in terms longer than those. Rhavas did. He was starting to think in terms of generations, of lifetimes. Had he not been promised years, many years, to bring his hopes and those of his new master to fruition? He had, or he was convinced he had, and he intended to take advantage of it.
A broad ditch with fortresses spaced every couple of miles along the eastern edge of it had protected the Empire of Videssos from incursions off the steppe. It had. It did not anymore. The fortresses stood empty. The edges of the ditch had begun to fall in on themselves. Takshaki's tribe had no trouble getting its flocks and herds across to the other side. No one challenged them. No Videssians were in any position to challenge them, nor had they been since the fortresses emptied so their soldiers could go fight in the civil war.
As for the Khamorth—well, the new land was wide. There was plenty of room for them to spread across it as they pleased. So none of them challenged Takshaki's entrance into what had been Videssos, either.
Sometimes the nomads guided their animals. Sometimes they simply let them wander where the grazing was good. Takshaki preferred the latter way. His cattle and sheep ambled north and east. That disappointed Rhavas; the plainsmen headed into an area far from any place where the writ of Stylianos and Sozomenos ran these days. He thought about leaving them and attaching himself to another tribe more actively engaged against Videssos. It would be easier now that he'd picked up some of the barbarians' language.
Rhavas thought about it, but then abandoned the idea, at least for a while. Takshaki's herds and flocks moved east along a river valley—snowy now, as it had been the last time Rhavas traveled along it—that grew more familiar the farther he went. It was the valley of the Anazarbos, and the livestock and the tribe were on their way to Skopentzana.
They reached the burned and battered ruins about a week later. "This was a large, fine place once," Budin said, as if he were speaking of centuries in the past and not something less than a year. Takshaki's men started combing through the wreckage, and they were rewarded. Earlier plunderers had not found everything worth stealing.
"So it was," Rhavas said. Dead weeds poked up through the snow between cobblestones now. Bushes had begun to cover the downfallen, tumbled stones that had made up the wall. He too went into the city, though what he was looking for had nothing to do with loot.
He started toward the chief temple and the prelate's residence beside it, but checked himself before he got there. That was a past life, a mistaken life, a failed life. He hadn't grasped what mattered then.
Instead, he sought out what was left of Himerios' house, where he'd first set eyes on Ingegerd, where he'd first set out on the path that made him what he was today. After some effort, he found the street. It was the fourth house. He went inside: not hard, not when the walls had fallen in on themselves. He looked out at what had been Skopentzana and slowly nodded to himself. This was where it had started, and this was how he aimed to make it end. He nodded again. Why not? Didn't he have all the time in the world?
THE END