Divisions of faith in the worship of Jad had led to burnings and torture and war almost from the beginning. The doctrine and liturgy of the sun god, emerging from the promiscuous gods and goddesses of Trakesia during the early years of the Empire of Rhodias, had not evolved without their share of schisms and heresies and the frequently savage responses to these. The god was in the sun, or he was behind the sun. The world had been born in light, or it had been released from ice and darkness by holy light. At one time the god was thought to die in winter and be reborn in the spring, but the gentle cleric who had expounded this had been ordered torn apart between cavalry horses by a High Patriarch in Rhodias. For a brief time, elsewhere, it had been taught that the two moons were Jad’s offspring-a belief more than halfway to the doctrines of the Kindath, who named them sisters of the god and equal to him in disturbing ways. This unfortunate fallacy, too, had required a number of deaths to extirpate.
The varying forms of belief in Heladikos-as mortal son, as half-mortal child, as god-were only the most obdurate and enduring of these conflicts waged in the holy name of Jad. Emperors and Patriarchs, first in Rhodias and then Sarantium, wavered and grew firm and then reversed their positions and tolerance, and Heladikos the Charioteer moved in and out of acceptance and fashion, much as the sun moved in and out of cloud on a windy day.
In the same way, amongst all these bitter wars, fought with words and iron and flame, the rendered image of Jad himself had become a line of demarcation over the years, a battlefield of art and belief, of ways of imagining the god who sent life-bringing light and battled darkness every night beneath his world while men slept their precarious sleep.
And this modest, beautifully made old chapel in a quiet, isolated place on the ancient Imperial road in Sauradia was that dividing line.
He’d had no warning at all. Crispin took some steps forward in the subdued, delicate light of the chapel, noting, absently, the old-fashioned mosaics of intertwined flowers on the walls, and then looked up.
A moment later, he found himself lying on the cold stones of the floor, struggling to breathe, gazing up at his god.
He ought to have known what was waiting for him in this place. Even setting out from Varena it had crossed his mind that the road through Sauradia would take him past this chapel at some point-he wasn’t certain exactly where, but he knew it was on the Imperial road-and he’d even been looking forward to seeing what the old craftsmen had done in their primitive fashion, rendering Jad in the eastern way.
But the intensity and the terror of what had happened this morning in the fog and the wood had driven that thought so far from him that he was wide open, defenceless, utterly exposed to the force of what had been done by mortal men on this dome. After the Aldwood and the bison and Linon, Crispin had no barriers within himself, no refuge, and the power of the image above hammered into him, driving all strength from his body so that he fell down like a pantomime grotesque or a helpless drunk in an alley behind a caupona.
He lay flat on his back staring up at the figure of the god: the bearded face and upper torso of Jad massively rendered across virtually the entirety of the dome. A gaunt image, battle-weary and grim, weighted down- he registered the heavy cloak, the bowed shoulders-by his burdens and the stern evils of his children. A figure as absolute and terrifying as the bison had been: another dark, massive head, against the pale, golden tesserae of the sun behind him. A figure seeming as if it would descend in overwhelming judgement from above. The image encompassed the head and shoulders, both lifted hands. No more, no room on the dome for more. Spreading across the softly illuminated space, gazing down with eyes large as some figures Crispin had made in his day, it was so out of scale it should never have worked, and yet Crispin had not in all his life seen anything made that touched the strength of this.