They got up early the next day, before the other pilgrims stirred. Darius asked a local goat herder for directions, and an hour after that they got to the designated fork in the road. The path sloped up to where a crude stone tower dominated the sky line. The early morning was already teeming with travelers, but they all stuck to the main road. In fact several people turned their face away from the path up to the tower, and avoided even glancing at it.

Darius stopped the horses and looked up the dusty winding way with a certain lack of enthusiasm.

"What the hell," he finally muttered, pulling at the bridle to turn the horse's head. "Inder, watch out for this favored child of battles, and for this magian too while you're at it."

"Uh, is there some risk?" Ryou looked all around the empty path and the hill, but couldn't see anything that warranted this caution.

Darius didn't answer - hardly reassuring - and led the way up the slope of shale and beaten earth. Ryou could feel his horse's muscles coil beneath him as it climbed, the slant of its ears a silent reproof to the idiot humans who'd left the nice, flat road behind and picked this path instead.

It wasn't a tower but rather a solid monticule as high as two men, made of piled stones without mortar. The top was flat and paved, with knee-high edges. It wasn't inhabitable, and it was surely too low to be a watchtower. "What is that?" Ryou asked.

"Tower of Silence," Darius answered shortly.

"What's that?"

"If you don't know, you're better off. It's not my religion." He muttered something about crow-bait and nudged the horses by faster.

So it was some sort of religious artifact. Ryou nodded to himself. He'd figured out by now that, for all Darius's hard-headed practicality and fearlessness, the man was deeply superstitious. The supernatural worried him more than the natural, probably because the natural could be attacked with a sword.

The majority of the population shared this proclivity. There'd been a plethora of small temples back in the city, more than seemed reasonable for a place that size. And that wasn't the end of it; Ryou had seen a dozen small ceremonies throughout yesterday, in town or along the side of the road, near fords in the river or at roadside altars. People prayed out loud, bowed ritualistically, got down on their knees, or stood with their arms outstretched or even laid on the ground in the case of a filthy man in a loincloth who'd made Ryou think of an Indian swami. That was the small end of the scale, the larger end comprising the sacrifice of a hundred bulls and a countrywide truce and games in honor of the gods.

"Religion seems to be very important here," he said, raising his voice to talk above the crunch of hooves over the shale cluttering the dirt path.

That got him an odd look, one of many he'd gotten when he asked Darius a question that didn't make it across the cultural gap. "I guess."

"How many gods do these people have?"

"Here in Palis? Only five." Darius shook his head in commiseration. "I think some king decreed it a few centuries ago, so they only have five; two gods, two goddesses and the Path Maker, who they consider the God of Trade and head of their pantheon as a result. Bunch of merchants..."

"But I saw dozens of different symbols and statues."

"That's everybody else."

"What?"

"Palis is a Free City and a big center of trade, there's a lot of foreigners living here, as well as Ionians and people fleeing the Imperium."

"Oh, so you mean there's freedom of religion here?"

"Huh?"

"Palis doesn't force them to worship their five gods?"

"Anybody living in Palis has to tithe to the temples, if that's what you mean," said Darius, puzzled.

"But they don't ask people to convert to their religion? Give up their gods for Palis'?" he added when it still seemed his meaning wasn't getting across.

Darius finally got it and looked honestly shocked. "What kind of land do you come from? Just because I live somewhere, I don't expect to have to give up worshiping the gods of my fathers. That'd be- why would any other god listen to me in the first place?"

So proselytism didn't exist here? For the hundredth time, Ryou wished he'd paid more attention in history class, instead of memorizing facts that looked likely to come up during a test and then doing Life and Death Go problems under his desk. True, antiquity in the west and middle east were not subjects that had come up in school anyway, but if only he'd just grabbed a book at the library one day...Ryou's notion of the history in the west was one of massive religious wars leading to missionaries cropping up everywhere in the world; it'd not occurred to him that Darius's Outlands took a stance towards religion that more closely approached those of Ryou's home country and civilization. Wasn’t antiquity a much harsher place?

"So all these religions co-exist peacefully? There's never any strife amongst the communities?"

"Oh, all the time."

Ryou rubbed his forehead. Darius had gotten them straw hats to protect them from the sun, but he still had the impression one of them had gotten heatstroke. "Isn't that seen as a problem?"

"I suppose, but some things are just inevitable," said his companion with a shrug. "The Khaldini are the worst when it comes to rioting. They believe it's wrong to tithe to any other god than their own. They do it anyway, right, but then they riot about it. In Assyria, we chased them all out hundreds of years ago, but there's still a lot of them in the Free Cities and in Aksum. The Nurebens will stone a man who seduces one of their women, and that always leads to a lot of tensions and reprisals. And there are a plenty of ancestral dislikes between sects. Back when I was a child, some worshippers of Marduk up and decided to attack this group from the Tribes of Judea inside Sura itself. That was a mess. The guards hung dozens of the buggers from the ramparts as a warning to just resolve their differences with a foot race or a wrestling match next time."

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Did none of the guards worship Marduk?" Ryou couldn’t help asking, his mind dwelling on religious repressions that'd taken place not too far back in Japan's past. "If they did, didn't that cause dissension in the ranks?"

"Huh? No, of course not. Only Assyrian free men can serve in the army. You really have some funny ideas," he was told with an amused smile.

"Didn't you say you worked with a lot of mercenaries?"

"Sure, but they're not part of the army, they just fight for us because we pay them," Darius informed him kindly. Ryou rubbed his forehead again.

"The Hounds are a bit different," Darius conceded, not noticing the other's reaction. "We're a weight's worth of all kinds of grain mixed together. Assyrian, Aksumite, Free Cities...That's kind of new, but I tell you one thing, there's only one altar in camp, and that's to Inder. Well, and Hygeia of course," he muttered with a pious glance at his arm-braces. "So, what gods do you worship?"

"Oh, Shinto is a religion of Kami, of, uh, elemental spirits and gods," Ryou evaded. He'd always been a confirmed atheist, and he was pretty sure he still was. The world has proven itself considerably stranger and less logical than he'd believed, but he didn't think he needed to resort to spirituality to keep his grip.

"At least you're not a one-god man, then. Not that I mind as such," Darius immediately added with a placating gesture directed at nobody present, "but I just don't understand it, and I had it force-fed to me for five years during the Roman occupation."

"So the Romans did try to convert Assyrians to their religion," said Ryou, now thoroughly confused.

"Convert? I'm not sure what you mean, but I don't think so," answered Darius, not faring much better. "They did try to teach His way to us children, and that was like swallowing goat piss, let me tell you. But I guess that's fair. Since they invaded us, their God must have won the heavenly battle over ours that day. So they got tribute and the temples for their god, and we had to make do with house altars for ours."

But the Romans had not tried to dominate or wipe out Assyria's religion. Heavenly battles...Gods of our Fathers...Ryou nodded to himself. Wars were fought for the reason Darius enounced frequently when he talked of past conquests: for livable land to expand beyond the small pockets of country Zaratusra had originally designated, or for goods, trade routes, cities, slaves or even sacrifices. Religion just followed as a matter of course, the way the culture would; it wasn't a cause in itself.

"So Romans are monotheistic," Ryou finally concluded, catching up on the import of the conversation.

"Uh, yeah," Darius said in his 'even my horse knows that much' tone of voice.

"I didn't realize these Romans were already Christians." His grasp of European history was weak, but even he knew about the Roman Empire and its relation to Christianity.

"What's a Christian?"

Or not.

"Christian?" Darius mused. "I think I've heard that before, but that's from much, much further away; a bunch of city-states that call themselves the Dukedoms. I think our cannoneer is from there. But they worship three gods, don't they? A man, a woman and a spirit?"

"I couldn't say," said Ryou weakly, not even willing to guess anymore. "So who do the Romans worship?"

"Their Sun God, Aten, of course. Ever since they destroyed the Egyptians a thousand years ago and took their god home like some kind of trophy. Crazy Imperials. We've added gods to our pantheon through conquest, sure, but we don't throw out the old ones. Come on." They were far past the Tower of Silence now, the road had flattened, they were riding through hills full of short, dry shrubs, lone trees and olive groves, and Darius was obviously in a much better mood. He touched his heels to the flanks of his horse and picked up some speed, smiling in the sunshine.

---

Darius was swearing, using some very inventive terms that the Gift of Zaratusra managed to handle, and some untranslatable words that nonetheless scalded the humid air. "Move - you miserable - beast!"

The baggage gelding made an unconvincing effort to get out of the mud, and then settled down again with an ill-tempered snort.

Darius gasped and stepped away from the haunch he'd been trying to push. Ryou stopped pulling the animal's bridle and gave the creature a disapproving look. Their mounts had gotten through the boggy ground with only a minor struggle, and the gelding wasn't carrying much more than spare clothes, bedrolls, food and a pot; it was hardly overloaded. Ryou didn't know much about horses, but he had the feeling this one was not so much stuck in the mud as reluctant to give its back hooves the good pull needed to free them. The puny humans shouting at it, pulling at it and thwacking it with a stick weren't about to change its mind.

"Fuck it," Darius muttered, leaning against a tree. "Furies plow this bloody country. When it doesn't parch your throat with dust, it tries to fucking drown you."

"It was pleasant to start with..." It'd been so stifling hot these past two days. But now the air was tepid, the big fat drops had soaked them to the bone, and the entire countryside had turned to mud.

"Here, Ryou, come around and help me push the damned mule."

Ryou gamely threw the horse's reins onto its withers, circled it and squelched into the mud, barefoot. That spared his shoes, but who knew how he was ever going to get the bottom of his trousers clean. This was where having a knee-length tunic like Darius would come in handy. Though not particularly right now, Ryou thought, trying not to smile at the mud-man beside him.

"Can we lift it out?" he asked, looking dubiously at the horse's rear end. How heavy was a horse anyway?

"No, we just need to give him a good shove here, near the stifle. Make him take an instinctive step forward and the daft bugger will realize he can move. Then we'll probably have to chase him," Darius grumbled, and added a couple of ancient Assyrian curse words Ryou hadn't heard yet.

Ryou put his shoulder gamely to the horse's rear end, imitating Darius's gesture-

The horse whinnied and stepped forward.

"Whoa!"

They both staggered. Ryou managed to hold himself against the horse's backside, Darius slid off and landed on his knees in the mud.

The horse took another nervous step forward, and then a longer stride. Ryou lunged after it, to grab its bridle and stop it from fulfilling Darius's prediction-

It felt like both his feet were stuck in cement. He gasped, windmilled, and ended up doing a belly flop into the muck.

He scrabbled around the mix of heavy mud and water, shook some of it out of his eyes as well he could.

A hand landed on his shoulder. "You okay?"

Ryou pushed himself up to his knees, breath coming back again. Darius was beside him. He looked at a mud-plastered Ryou, and his mouth opened as if he was about to say something funny, but then he broke down laughing instead. He tried to catch himself and laughed all the harder, shaking helplessly, hands and knees in the mire.

The object of all that mirth contemplated dumping some mud down his companion's neck, but he'd probably not do well against the retaliation, and Darius was already so mucky there really wasn't much point. He wiped his face - Darius's laughter redoubled. Ryou looked down at his hand and sleeve, which looked like he'd borrowed them from The Swamp Creature. He gave up and let Darius's laughter infect him, because that was really the only possible reaction to the situation.

Up on firm ground, the baggage gelding stared at the pair of loons laughing wildly in the muck.