The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  CHAPTER XI

  From the Chronicle of Nikeh Gen’Emras

  I was born in the lands of the princess of Emrastepse, child of a tribe of the coastal mountains who had once been the folk of the goddess Emras of the spring and the waterfall. We worshipped the memory of the goddess, and of the mountain demon her lover, who was man and woman and golden eagle in one. They had died in the wars, as had the empire of which we had been a part, almost seventeen hundred years before, when the gods perished and Tiypur fell into darkness. Few stories of those days survived, carried by the rhapsodists who travelled among the lands, from market to market and tower to tower, reciting verses grown almost incomprehensible with the wear of years. A prince’s tower might preserve a collection of such tales in a scroll or two, precious things copied and recopied, but few other than the rhapsodists themselves could read them. They were the priests of our collective memory, but it was a memory worn thin like an old coin.

  More recent memory held other tales. In the year that my father was born, it was said a great wave came out of the west and swept away four villages of the coast to the south. Houses, folk, boats, cattle…all that land was scoured to bare rock and sand and grew wild with thistles, unpeopled, in after years, and in the same great disaster the island of Corsanal, where once there had been a god’s sanctuary, was split in two. Emrastepse was spared. We sat high on a clifftop. Only the fishing boats in the little harbour below were smashed to kindling.

  My father said that when he was a boy, you could see the ribs of a great ship of the southlands that had been cast inland still lying in a sandbank where once they had grown grapes, but that the timbers were taken to build the new threshing-barn and other works about Emrastepse. He showed me how the roof-beams curved. I never quite believed, then, that the barn roof had been a ship.

  Now I think it was true. Certainly there was a great sandy hill with the princess’s vineyards about it below the cliffs, beyond the harbour, and there was a green mound where we were not supposed to play, because there were foreign sailors buried there and no one knew their names.

  This was, of course, taken by some as a sign of our own state of damnation, in that we were godless, and as a warning, that we should give our faith to the teachings of the red priests. Perhaps it was even then that the seeds of treachery were sown.

  My parents were folk of the princess’s own household. We lived within the walls of the village at the foot of the royal tower, not in the outlying hamlets, and I remember being in the tower as often as not. My father was one of the cousins of the tower, as the nobles of the tribe were called for their descent, down to the third degree, from a prince themselves. I remember he wore a golden circlet, on some occasion, though what those occasions were I doubt I ever understood. This did not give us a manor, tenants, a swarm of serving-folk—that was not the custom of our tribe, nor anything the land could support. They worked a smithy, my parents, and Aunty, an old woman who was some kin to one of them, cared for my brother and me. My father’s name was Philon; my mother’s was Hecta. My brother was too young for anything but a baby-name yet. We called him Birdy. He was small and thin and lively as an eel.

  It was the princes and princesses who led the tribes of the west, as once they had headed the clans of valleys and the hills, and with the magistrates of the cities, formed the council that advised the emperors. There were no more emperors and for long years, no more cities in what had been the empire of Old Tiypur, only ruins gone to green. Tiypur itself was centuries a dead place, dust and ash, foundations tracing memory amid broken pillars. It was only when the cult of the nameless god made the old island temple of the river-goddess Tiy the heart of its worship and established a settlement among the ruins on the south bank opposite it that life began to return there in creeping weeds and sprouting windblown seeds. Maybe that was the slow healing of the natural world come at last, but they claimed it to be the blessing of their god.

  There were many mystery cults in the west, their secret knowledge and their rituals kept for the initiates alone. It was how we of the tribes preserved memory of our own lost gods and demons outside of the formal tales of the wandering poets, how we kept our hearts in faith, godless as we knew ourselves to be. I do not know the rites of the cult of Emras, the goddess of my folk; when my child’s world ended I was still too young to be initiated. I only remember the torches carried through the village at the winter solstice, and the excitement of my mother and father, who would follow them, the reminiscent regret of my great-aunt—I think she must have been that—who stayed behind with Birdy and me and several cousins—here meaning children and kindred, not lords. There was music. It drifted down from the headland. I knew there was dancing, and that the folk wore animal-faced masks and wild, bright, ragged robes stitched all over with fluttering ribbons. My mother a hare, that one year of which I can recall such details, and my father a badger. (The masks, I think, were burnt in the hearth-fire the following day, never reused.) They returned only with the dawn, hand in hand, and maybe there were many tender-headed adults the next day and little work got done, but it was a time of joy, I remember that much, hangovers or not.

  Orgy and sacrifice and perversion, the red priests taught, men and women lying with one another without regard for marriage vows or as they liked to say, the fit and natural pairing of the sexes, as though humankind are cattle to come together only for the making of children and should have no pleasure and delight in one another, or find satisfaction together where the heart leads. The priests also tell that among the heathen folk who observed such mysteries, the blood of bastard infants born of one year’s rite was offered as a pledge to draw the attention of the devils at the next. Maybe there was a spate of babies born around the height of the harvest—I think my birthday fell then, and I know my little brother’s did—but there never seemed any fewer of them, save from the many usual causes that mean we do not name babies with a true name till their fifth year is past.

  The red priests taught lies from their very beginning. That it was a sinful empress and folk who brought about the calamitous years that broke the empire and blighted the land. That despite our great past sin the Old Great Gods had an especial love for us folk of the shattered west. That we must prove ourselves worthy of that love, win it back, by changing our lives, turning away from worship of the memories of our weak and failed and dead, so very dead, gods and goddesses, and devoting ourselves to the purification of our souls. This could only be done through living our lives according to the teachings of the nameless god, servant of the Old Great Gods themselves. At first these teachings were revealed in oracles, dreams coming to the chosen among his priests. They were set down in holy books, six of them. I have studied them. Know your enemy, my teacher used to say. They describe the torments of the long road to the Old Great Gods, which the souls of the dead must traverse. We know that the journey is not for torment, but for knowledge, and truth, for revelation and redemption, purification. We must face ourselves, and know ourselves, and acknowledge our sins and repent of them, in order to be fit to come to the Gods. But one book of the red priests teaches that it is punishment of even the least of failings. Another, the last and most recent, declares, in contradiction which they do not attempt to reconcile, that the road brings suffering because it is broken. The devils of the north, it says, laid waste to it in hatred of human-folk and Great Gods alike as they went down into their final defeat—which we know was not so final—and the road of the dead no longer brings us to the peace of the Old Great Gods. It is not a journey of self-knowledge and purification, but of unending torment and despair. It is a road without end, a hopeless journeying in which the souls of the dead are trapped, doomed, and from which they finally fade to nothing in a second death, unable to reach the Gods, more damned even than a ghost trapped unblessed and unburied in the world.

  It is from this that their nameless god, who has no body, no place, no presence in the world but his voice whispering his wisdom into the dreams of his priests, was
sent to save us. If the folk of the west lived true and pure lives, the red priests taught in the early years of the mystery, a messenger would come, and a way would be found to save us all, the lost of the road and those not yet dead alike. And the years passed, and two centuries. And a new oracle spoke for the nameless god. He wrote no book. A stranger in our land, a traveller who was said to have slept in the holy sanctuary beneath the ruins of the temple of Tiy one night, where the spirit of the nameless god had entered into him.

  One would have expected the priests to have denied him as a heretic, or at least recognized an opportunistic charlatan, but such was the force of his presence and the power of his words that he quickly gathered many disciples, and though there are stories of fighting, both in words and with knives, their teaching after that was that his holiness had been made evident by many signs.

  His immortality was not least among these.

  The All-Holy became the absolute ruler of the mystery, and of the tribe of the prince of the valley folk who scraped a hard living from the sickly soil about the ruins of Tiypur. The red priests and the cult of the nameless had always been strongest there, the island of Tiy being the heart of their mystery. Now the prince gave his only daughter in marriage to the All-Holy, and died soon after. When the princess died childless, the widowed All-Holy, who had been named prince and co-ruler, continued in the rule of that folk, and folk and faith became one. Where before, the red priests had gone out among the folk of the tribes with their words and their tattooing needles—because initiates into the mystery were marked with the sign of the nameless god on the wrist—and had found welcome in some places and derision in others, now they came with warnings not only of doom to follow death, the curse of the Old Great Gods, the slow annihilation of souls on the road, but of punishment in life. The lands of the west must unite, for a great war was coming. The seven devils of the north had awoken and were gathering the sinful kings and the decadent cities and the earth-bound gods and goddesses of the east to their service, and they were moved by a hatred of the Old Great Gods, as they ever had been, and of the folk of Old Tiypur, the folk of the west, who were the beloved and chosen of the Great Gods. A prince who did not submit to the guidance of the All-Holy and his red priests condemned his or her folk to damnation, and that damnation was earthly as well as spiritual.

  The army of Tiypur made it so.

  They were small raids, at first. Princes and princesses who defied the priests were killed, by murder or in battle, and usually there was some cousin of the tower who had been initiated into the mystery and who would emerge as the prince of the tribe—never a princess, because following some revelation in their fourth book, the red priests taught that women were unsuited to rule, being different in nature and in mind from men, looking inward and downward to their children, not outward to the folk or upward to the Gods—a prince with a counsellor of the red priests at his side. And some of the folk would already have become initiates, because for almost two centuries there had been missionaries, teachers of the red priests, wandering all the lands west of the Kara Mountains, finding their way into every corner of the old empire. Now many more folk joined the mystery, learning to recite the answers to the ritual questions of the catechism. undergoing the ritual tattooing, forswearing their past reverence for the lost gods of their ancestors. There were punishments for those who did not: fines that must be paid, traditional rights denied, labour services that were owed to the prince and those who had the favour of the priests and new ranks within the cult.

  That was at first.

  Children of all stations in life were taken from their parents to be taught by priests and teachers of the cult in schools, and the parents forced to pay a tithe of all they produced, or to work in service to the prince and the priests, for their own children’s support. Three years, five years, eight—it varied how long the children were kept away. But when they were returned, they were, on the whole, good and devout servants of the priests and the All-Holy, tattooed and initiated into the first or second circles of the mystery, and, if their parents were not already of the faith themselves, horrified by their heathen ways, terrified for their souls and fearing their damnation. That was if they had any love left for their parents at all. And to initiate someone into one of the old mysteries of the gods and goddesses and demons became punishable by death.

  The rhapsodists were driven out of such lands, or stoned, or burnt alive.

  The faith of the red priests and the rule of the All-Holy spread throughout the tribes of the lowlands of Tiypur in this manner. In the mountains of the north and the coast and among the savage, desperate tribes who clung to life in the worst-blighted lands—the Dead Hills where the soil itself leached the life from humankind and beasts and all growing things, so that few people lived past their fortieth year, if they reached it at all before strange wasting diseases took them—the old mysteries and the old ways survived.

  There came a time, twenty years before my birth, when the All-Holy declared that the war was nearly upon the west, that the devils gathered their forces and that the continued sin and depravity of the heathen tribes would deny Tiypur the blessing of the Old Great Gods when the great war came.

  All the folk of the princes who acknowledged the All-Holy as their overlord and spiritual guide must devote themselves fully to the nameless god. Those who would not, and there were still, after generations, those few who kept to their old faith despite all the burdens of fines and tax and service placed on them, would be cleansed from the land. Exile, it was thought the decree meant.

  It did not. Accusation or the lack of a tattoo was enough—and a tattoo was not salvation if there was accusation by one who had the ear of the priests. Sometimes there would be a trial, a tribunal of priests. Sometimes not, from accusation to sentence. Mostly, they were burned. The red priests were fond of fire. It cleansed the world.

  Those were the years of terror all up and down the broad lowlands along the Tiy. There was the siege of the port Tiyosti, princeless and free and largely heathen, and the great bonfires of the living and the dead in flames called down from the heavens by the All-Holy—or perhaps it was missiles of pitch and sulphur set alight by forbidden wizardry—when finally it fell and all who had been unable to flee by sea and who survived the desperate fighting in the streets surrendered. They were not given the option of conversion.

  After the massacre of Tiyosti, which left the port in ruins, the All-Holy turned his gaze to the coast and to the mountains.

  All the west must serve the nameless god, the messenger of the Old Great Gods, who dwelt now in the ageless and immortal All-Holy. All the west must be his, true in their hearts and faithful, and the heathen, the perverse, the corrupt, must be purged from the land, that it might be pure and worthy of the blessing of the Gods, and stand against the terror that the devil-led hordes of the east would bring upon us.

  Thus the priest-led armies of the All-Holy brought their terror to us, to save us.

  CHAPTER XII

  …some twelve years or so before the All-Holy crossed to the east of the Karas

  In the depths of the river, he dreams. A mother, a goddess searches. Children, lost.

  Children, not children. Not a goddess. Only a shape made in the dreaming, a metaphor, to be understood.

  It is a wholeness, and it is not whole. That which should be of it, in it, is lost.

  Is taken. Held away.

  Hoarded, sterile.

  Ghu draws himself together. Wakes, in the deep water. Wondering.

  Far in the east of the world, beyond Nabban and eastern sea, beyond the vibrant cities and the fertile plains and the broad river valleys of Pirakul, the hermit waited, empty of all thoughts but one, empty of all but the need, the message he would have understood. He lay on his bed, which was only a frame strung with rope and a thin mattress stuffed with coarse heather. Eyes were open on the darkness, hands folded on his chest. Eyes open, and soul. Every night. As the darkness thinned, dawn seeping around the cowhide
curtain that was all the door he had, he would rise and kindle a new fire in the clay stove, brew his morning tea and set his barley porridge to simmer. He might walk down to the scattered cabins of the village, where he would tend the sick and receive gifts of food and the greater gift of human warmth and kindliness. Or he might walk on the mountain, climb through the forest until he was above the highest trees and could see the peaks unfold, blue and white to the horizon. Every night, he lay down again and emptied himself of the day, to fill his soul with one thought, one message, if only it might be heard, be answered.

  I want to come home.

  Over him, the stars turned in their cycle, and the fleeting years passed.

  Always, Nikeh remembered the fear. It never left her, marking her like a secret tattoo, a colour sunk deep that she could not alter or scrub away.

  It was, perhaps, her eighth summer. She was never certain quite how old she was. Such things were mangled, discarded as unimportant, in after years, and by the time they were important again, she had forgotten. She called it her eighth and counted from there when people asked her age. It would do.

  Her parents worked dawn till dusk in their smithy that summer. Heads for arrows and spears they made, mostly. Smiths from outlying villages brought what they could. Her father’s gold circlet went, and much of the small treasure of the princess’s tower, for iron ingots off a Northron ship. She always remembered how the big sailors fascinated her, so tall in their bright-coloured tunics, their eyes so pale in faces ruddy from the sun, wild and shaggy like bears, the men unshaven. Even their speech sounded like growls and barks. There was one woman who carried her brother Birdy piggyback all up and down the cliff-path, neighing like a horse and making him laugh.

  Aunty did not approve.

  “Take the children away,” she whispered to papa. “Foreigners steal children, and Northrons trade with the caravan road. They sell children in the east, even for…” and her whisper went even lower.