Amika learns something of Samaren's religious views (post-GotBL)

[guardiansverse]

"You," Amika said, "are appallingly drunk."

"Take it up with Father Sun." Samaren raised the bottle half a toast skywards, half for another long swallow. He leaned back against the chapel wall and closed his eyes, smiling at the midwinter sunshine falling across his face, poured golden through the stained glass window. "It's a holy day. I am permitted."

There was no way into the main hall except to step over his outstretched legs. She did so casually. She noted that he was barefoot, which was madness for a man in this season, and bareheaded, which was the same and also sacrilege. "Where is the chapel's Guardian?"

"Gone off when she saw me come. To complain to you, I suppose."

"She was right. You are being hideously immodest."

"Only by the Western practice."

"This is a Western chapel."

"And the only chapel in the town. It's a holy day," he said again, with a loose, drunken shrug. "I make do."

Amika felt the queerest urge to kick him with her heel as she turned around to make her way to the sun-disk. He seemed in an inordinately good mood for a man disgracing a chapel, though perhaps it was just the way the light brushed his face, brought a glow to his tawny skin, the gold of his hair. In both Eastern and Western Covenants, a sunny midwinter's day was a sign of great blessing for the year to come. It glinted similarly off the sun-disk at the heart of the chapel, and she remembered that she had many prayers to say: in thanks for the lasting peace with Schervo, for her own deliverance across the Eisenhorn, for courage, for insight.

It would be awkward to say them with any man sprawled inebriated in the doorway, never mind the Rogue Guardian.

"Does your faith approve of making do?" she mused, glancing back as she knelt on the cushion by the dais. Much of her own praying was by rote, but she had always known him to be sincerely devout.

Samaren took a deep drink. "It's the same Sun, doma."

"Were it so simple, there would be no war in Ilyiga," she said, ten times as brutal as any kick.

She hadn't quite meant it; it happened this way between them, those flash-fires, and she kept her head turned to see his response. But all he did was raise the bottle back to his mouth and tip it up until it was empty.

Perhaps it was the light of Mother Sun glaring at her through the reflection in the disk that made her feel repentant. "That was ill-spoken. I apologize."

"Why, when it's the truth?" The bottle made a soft sound against the scented wood of the floor when he put it down. He pushed off the wall, wobbled for a moment before finding his customary grace, and shuffled up to the dais to stand next to her where she knelt. He looked at the sun-disk, the Western sigil, squinting in consideration and against the glare. "It seems simple enough from here. I believe that all Westerners are going to freeze in hell - "

"Even me?"

"To a man. But that seems punishment enough. No man changes his faith at sword-point. He only lies." His voice was drawling, his accent so heavy now she struggled a little to follow his otherwise fluent Hyemi. "It's a pointless war."

Amika finally looked to the sun-disk. A small one, in this small town, but gilded with great art and attention nonetheless. She had heard that the temple in Tezzei had an Eastern sunburst the height of a grown man, worked from gilded glass, inscribed with holy writ. Samaren's hometown had been famous for its glasswork, its goldwork, its calligraphy.

Low, but not soft, she said: "I've not known you to need a point for war."

He did not answer. Perhaps he didn't hear; perhaps he didn't listen. Slowly, he raised a hand to the golden disk, stopped a finger's breadth away, barely enough to stop committing sacrilege ten times greater than all he already had. "The sunburst in my hometown's temple was too large for this room," he muttered, the course of his own thoughts perhaps mirroring hers. "They melted it down to pay for guns. The Unconquered Sun did nothing. I don't think he cared. I will kill any man for any reason, or for none at all, but who am I to say that the reason is the god's will?"

He dropped a step back, his hand falling back to his side. His head dropped also, down onto his chest, and for a moment she thought he was flagging in his drunkenness. Then she realized that, clumsy, off-ritual, it was a bow.

She raised a hand, tugged at the wing of his coat. "If you mean to pray, do it properly."

Samaren half-turned to stare at her: quiet, as clouded, as eerily touched as he had seemed looking at the holy symbol. Then he said "hah," and knelt beside her - on one knee only, forehead to raised kneecap, Eastern style.

Amika did not correct him, and the goddess did not seem to care. The shy, budding sunshine of turning midwinter flowed on in, unmindful, filling the small room along with the hum of their voices, the indistinct running-water murmurs of Ilyigan and Hyemi prayer. Into the light, thrown into glittering eyes across the walls by the gold of the sun-disk, Amika whispered the names of the cherished living and blessed dead.

On the final name she stumbled, paused, confounded by the thought of invoking and blessing Festus Detrich's name while his killer prayed at her side. In her silence she could make a note or two of Samaren's words. She heard him come to the end of the Eastern litany for midwinter, and pause himself with lips still open, a pregnant silence, unfinished, uncertain. The Western prayer opened on blessing temple, city, and country, and finished on the names; the Eastern, she recalled, was reversed.

Their eyes met.

"I cannot finish with you here," she said.

Softly, he said, "neither can I."

"There will be a proper service later. I will come again, to lead it as Land's Own... I will be go in a moment. Let me only... I wish to say a prayer for peace."

She felt quite foolish, saying this to him. To him of all men, and to say prayer might matter, here and now. She thought that he would scoff at her, or laugh with his wolf-grin, that too seemed likely.

But he said, "go on, Doma Amika," and bowed his head back down into the light.