The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  For what? Nikeh wanted to know. She hated secrets. Wanted to know, to understand.

  Later, she would understand that by that time there had been no slaves in Nabban for almost two centuries. She would write that the tribes of the west were ignorant and even among the heathen folk, it was the red priests who shaped their view of the world beyond the Kara Mountains, seeing it through fearful eyes.

  “Take Birdy and go back to the house,” papa said.

  In her memory, she did not fuss or argue. This seemed improbable. Most likely she had. Likely she had even earned a swat on the bottom. The Northrons were so appealingly bright and loud and free of fear.

  Better if that copper-haired woman had stolen Birdy away when their high-prowed ship sailed, taking with it all the remaining gold and silver of Emrastepse, and a goodly share of the last harvest’s olive oil and of the year’s salt production as well.

  The defensive ditches were dug deeper, the earthworks built higher and new ones added, making angles and traps. Even Nikeh and the other children helped, using adzes to strip bark from tree-trunks, as ox-teams dragged in logs from the chestnut forest lower down for the building of new palisades.

  Hannothana further down the coast had fallen, and its prince had been captured. They burned him alive on a great pyre, with his crippled wife. Their daughters had died in the fighting. Some of that tribe’s surviving folk fled to seek shelter among the folk of Emrastepse; it was impossible to keep their stories from the children’s ears. Folk of outlying villages mostly submitted. They learnt and recited their catechism under the tutelage of the red priests; they swore great oaths to serve the All-Holy, and they endured the tattooing that marked them of his faith. They gave up their children to the tutelage of the priests in the new dormitory which conscript labour began, before the ashes of Hannothana itself were even cool, to build at the foot of the new prince’s tower. Folk of the prince’s town themselves were slaughtered even after their surrender, in a blood-hungry fury.

  Those were the stories that came to Emrastepse, like tales of long ago and far away, except that mama’s own father had been a man of Hannothana. It was a real place.

  “Like sharks,” a woman whispered, in tears. She was sitting at table with the family of the smiths. Nikeh did not remember her, other than that one incident, as though it was a little scene carved in relief on an old tomb, a moment frozen in stone. Perhaps she was kin of mama’s. “Like sharks. They tore my nephew to pieces and cried he was a devil-worshipper. I saw. I saw. This is truth.”

  More refugees came, hungry, dirty, desperate folk, carrying little or nothing with them. But only a few. Papa and mama spoke low-voiced and sometimes sent Nikeh out of the house, or took themselves away to the smithy to whisper together. They had frightening things to talk about in secret, which was more terrifying than if they had just told her. She imagined, every day, how the red priests would come. She had nightmares. In her dreams the red priests were red all over—their hair, their skin, their eyes red like blood. She knew that was not how it was. Missionaries of the cult of the All-Holy had come to Emrastepse in past years, usually around the time of the harvest festival, when there was communal feasting and a welcome for all. They won few converts. They were only ordinary men and women. She knew that. Muddy red was merely the colour of their robes.

  There was a new prince in Hannothana, a cousin of the tower. The new prince was the puppet of the counsellor appointed by the All-Holy, and the counsellor was the real ruler. Nikeh considered, and decided for herself she understood. She was not a baby like Birdy, to think this meant the prince wore strings and sticks to move his limbs.

  The other cousins of the tower had been burnt or hanged, if they survived the fighting. But some had killed themselves. They had jumped from the tower roof as its doors were forced.

  Papa was a cousin of the tower of Emrastepse.

  The forces of the All-Holy were coming.

  An envoy, first. Red-robed priest riding a fine horse, with a dozen soldiers on foot about him, all in bronze scale shirts and leather kilts. Their helmets bore a knot of red ribbon for their god. Nikeh climbed like a squirrel up the palisade and hung there, arms hooked around a pointed log, bare toes braced against the wood, to look down on them. Her mother was with the princess and her young son, up on the watchtower by the gate. The priest spoke very arrogantly. His words did not stay with Nikeh, only his tone. She would never speak to the princess so. The princess would never speak so to her own folk.

  He demanded the princess come with him, to learn the creed of the All-Holy and forswear the perverted worship of demons and devils and dead gods on behalf of all her folk.

  Nikeh was indignant. It was right to honour the memory of the dead goddess of Emrastepse and her demon lover and they did not worship devils, nobody worshipped devils, they weren’t real, only winter-tale real, story-real, not true like the goddess Emras and the woman-man-eagle Melnarka who had fought at her side and died with her in the war that destroyed the gods and the empire together. Everyone knew that, unless they were an utter fool.

  The priest stood with his mouth open. His horse pranced in place, its ears back, tossed its head. The breast of his red robe grew dark, as if in drinking he had spilt his wine. Nikeh looked over to the watchtower again. Her father was there too now, standing at the princess’s side. Just standing, a bow in his hands. She could see how he looked down, his head bowed, the great sigh that moved his chest and shoulders, as if he had finished some taxing labour, but he was a strong, strong man and drawing a bow was no great feat. She did not understand. The princess put her hand on his back, as if she comforted him.

  Thus Emrastepse answered the All-Holy.

  The All-Holy did not come himself, not for a campaign against such small tribes as lived along the coast. His divine magic was not needed to overrun Emrastepse’s walls, as it had not been for Hannothana’s.

  Perhaps it was some traitor within the village, some secret convert to the cult who had hidden the tattoo on their wrist and had not been driven from the village when news of Hannothana first came to them. Perhaps soldiers of the All-Holy somehow climbed over the wall undetected. Someone killed the watch and the gate-guards and took their place, to open the gate in the dawn even as the alarm was sounded from the roof of the princess’s tower.

  Nikeh saw, as the night’s dark washed away. She had gone looking for her mother. Few adults, warriors of the tower or not, had slept in their own beds that night, so the children had roamed, escaping the care of the elderly or their slightly-older cousins.

  Thus she was on the roof of the princess’s stone tower, which was castle and storehouse and meeting-place for all the folk. She saw how the dark thinned, and thinned, and suddenly there were dead men and women where there should not have been, on the ground all about the watchtower. Others, in plain tunics like any other person of Emrastepse, only one wearing a short-sleeved coat of dull scale armour, were pulling open the leaves of the gate.

  “Go back to Aunty!” mama shouted, shoving her at the stairs. “Look after Birdy.”

  That was the last Nikeh ever saw of her. Mama had a place among those who would guard the princess and the little heir, who was a few years older than Birdy, not yet named.

  When she thought back, trying to remember, she thought the princess’s husband was killed on the wooden watchtower. Already dead. Papa may have been as well. They were close friends, he and the husband of the princess. They would have kept watch together.

  Beyond the tower’s forecourt Nikeh stopped in the lane to stare. There was fighting at the gate. She had never, in all the words of all the stories she had ever heard, imagined such a sight, such a sound. So many people packed so close, as if by their bodies alone they would block the way. The mass seethed and heaved and did not, to her eyes, seem to be made of individuals at all. An amorphous sea-beast, limbless, headless, writhing and pulsing.

  It broke apart in a din of shout—scream—hammer-blow—thunder.

  Perhaps
she imagined the thunder.

  She fled to the house behind the smithy.

  “What’s happening?” Aunty demanded. She seized Nikeh by the shoulder and shook her, which she resented greatly. She was angry, as if that might burn fear away.

  “The red priests,” Nikeh told her, and some of what she had seen, all jumbled, words spilling. Birdy began to wail. Nikeh grabbed him and shook him, as Aunty had her. “Be quiet,” she told him. “Be quiet or they will come and kill us all.”

  Aunty heaved him to her hip and took Nikeh by the hand.

  “Quickly,” she said.

  There was a cellar under the back room of the smiths’ house, where oil and cheeses and wine were kept. A small, low-ceilinged, close place, dry and dusty, full of spiders. They went down, Birdy first and Nikeh following, careful and one-handed on the ladder fixed below the opening, carrying a clay lamp that Aunty must have lit at the hearth and given to her. She did not remember, only it was there, in her hand, in her memories. The flame flickered with her breath. Above her, there was noise, which made her moan in fear, but it was only Aunty throwing things about as if she had gone mad—a crash of jars, a thump as the lid of a wooden chest was thrown back, a clatter of who knew what. In the cellar were already blankets, and the smaller water-jar, and a loaf of bread. Aunty came partway down the ladder. “Sit,” she told Nikeh, pointing at the blankets. “Hold your brother. Don’t go crawling around and knocking things over.”

  Nikeh took Birdy and sat, obedient, dragging a blanket over both of them.

  “Want mama,” Birdy said. “Don’t want Nini. Don’t want Aunty.”

  “Nini’s all you’ve got,” she said. “Hush. We’re hiding. Mama will come find us, but we have to be quiet and hide. You can do that. You’re a good boy.”

  Aunty still stood on the ladder, her head and shoulders lost to view, doing something.

  Nikeh was suddenly terrified. “Come down,” she begged. “They’ll see you. They’ll find us. I don’t want to be burned!” Her voice rose to half a scream, of which she was immediately ashamed.

  “Quiet, fool child.” Aunty leaned at a strange angle, dragging something up the slope of the half-opened trap door, gripping its edge. She bent almost backwards and fumbled her way down the ladder, dropped the door.

  “Perhaps that’s covered it,” she said, not to the children, but for her own reassurance, it seemed. “If they just glance in they won’t see the cellar door at once, only a disordered room. Maybe they’ll think someone’s already searched.”

  Nikeh was silent, hugging Birdy.

  Aunty came to sit beside her. There was a spear on the floor, and a long knife. Aunty touched them, to be sure of finding them in the dark, and then she blew out the lamp.

  In the dark, blacker than any night, they sat. The cellar began to seem cold. The air felt damp. Nikeh ached with sitting. She shivered. Aunty beside her was warm, but she shivered, too, and whispered a brief prayer. “Memory of Emras, give us strength.”

  Birdy squirmed and fretted. He needed to go pee-pee, he said.

  Nikeh took him over to the corner behind the ladder, groping her way.

  Birdy squirmed some more. He was hungry. They ate bread and cheese and water with a splash of wine in it for the warmth. She needed to use the corner herself. Aunty did. Birdy began to fuss. He wanted mama. He wanted papa. He wanted out. He was tired of hiding.

  They could hear nothing from above, until there were muffled shouting voices. Not words, just the noise of them.

  Nikeh hugged Birdy and put her hand over his mouth. He squirmed and tried to pull the hand away.

  “Quiet,” she whispered in his ear. “Quiet, or the bad men will come and kill us all.”

  He was still, a little. There were heavy feet on the floor above. Something fell and crashed. Birdy clung to her. Aunty dragged Nikeh close to her, whispered, “Sh!” as if she had made some noise, which she had not. Nikeh could feel the old woman shaking.

  The footsteps left the floor above. Birdy was beginning to gasp, not from her hand, but the trembling deep breaths that worked up to a fit of bawling.

  “Mama!” Her hand did nothing to stop that cry.

  “Quiet!” A whisper like a shout.

  “Old Great Gods have mercy, give him to me,” Aunty said, and dragged him from Nikeh’s arms, squirming and whimpering.

  “Hush,” she said. “Hush, hush, Aunty’s got you, be still, be still.”

  But his gulping sobs gathered again. Nikeh heard him. She knew how he could shriek to be heard over even papa’s greatest hammer, once he began in earnest.

  “Old Great Gods, Great Gods, child, be still.” Aunty sounded as if she would wail herself, and she seemed to be thrashing around. Trying to cover Birdy’s mouth, muffle him with her body, Nikeh thought.

  A strange sound, as if she swallowed a cry, or Birdy did. She panted, wheezed.

  “Don’t!” Nikeh whispered urgently. Don’t what, she did not know, but she was suddenly terrified. She reached to take her brother from Aunty. Aunty was shuddering and Birdy was in Nikeh’s arms, Aunty was letting go of him, pushing herself away.

  He was warm, and heavy, and soaking. Nikeh thought he had wet himself. He was only just beyond diapering, after all, and he was afraid.

  It wasn’t his little bottom on her lap that was sodden. It was his torso, hugged to her own.

  Wet. Hot. The smell of a headless goose. He was limp against her, and his head flopped, and his arms hung loose.

  She screamed.

  “Be quiet!” Aunty screamed back at her. “They’ll come. They’ll hear him and come.”

  They were not going to hear Birdy. No one was, ever again.

  Hear Nikeh, all too likely. Aunty reached for her. Nikeh did not know if she meant to cut her throat as well or merely shake her into sense, but she jerked away from the old woman’s grasp and flung her brother’s body at her, banged into the ladder and swarmed up, banged her head on the trap door and heaved it back, and the straw mattress that had partially covered it, and scrambled on hands and knees through the mess Aunty and the soldiers of the All-Holy between them had made of the furnishings of the room. She found her feet and ran through the main room of the house, out the door, which stood open, unthinking as the hare with the hounds behind her, into the yard. The smithy was aflame, burning as though it were the heart of a furnace. Men saw her. Mouths gaped and yelled and she ran and scrambled away over the drystone yard wall. Little Squirrel had been her baby-name, because she began to climb and clamber as soon as she could crawl. Over the wall—her secret shortcut to the sloping rough ground where geese and goats strayed, behind the smiths’ house and the tower, walled not by palisades but by the rising cliff against which the village set its back.

  Blackthorn shrubs that even the goats did not devour. People there. Struggling. Or clutching close in screaming, wailing knots and the blades rose and fell. A man with a red surcoat over his armour who watched one such butchery wheeled his pony, whirled a hand-axe and came after her.

  The pony did not like the rough ground. There were fissures and boulders and middens. Nikeh evaded it, flung herself into thorns by the cliff-foot, scrambled along behind them shredding clothing, tearing skin and hair. Later, she would find a thorn broken off in one heel and one piercing like a nail through the palm of her hand. Then, she felt nothing. Fortunate that she did not lose an eye. Along the cliff and to where a near-vertical seam rose, like a ditch climbing the cliff. Forbidden, very forbidden. In every generation, some foolhardy youngster died trying to make that climb. She had been halfway up and safely down, and gotten her bottom justly tanned for it, only a month before.

  Up. No higher than the top of the concealing blackthorns. She wedged herself into the crack, perched like a swallow’s nest on a ledge of stone so small even her child-toes were not supported. They curled to grip the edge.

  The soldiers of the All-Holy searched along the bottom. They even looked up. The rising crack was crooked, shadowed. They did not see.
Maybe a branch obscured her. They went to look for easier game.

  Nikeh could not see. She could only hear. She could smell the smoke. She could smell the blood. That was most likely her own tunic, sodden, slowly cooling and gluing itself to her skin.

  She could hear, all the long day. What she heard—

  She would never think of that. Never.

  There was smoke. The sky, for a time, was dark with it.

  Her joints seemed slowly to freeze. They ached for a while, but then they stopped feeling. Assorted cuts and scratches and punctures throbbed. Tears, silent, ran down her face, dried there. Her heel was very bad, though she did not then know why. She used her teeth to worry the thorn out of her hand when she finally noticed it. At some point as the sun lowered she had to wet herself. There was no other choice. She was bizarrely ashamed. So small a thing.

  Night came, but it was not dark. It was red-lit, hungry.

  She moved. Fingers first. Toes. Wiggling. Stretching, carefully. One arm, another, leg and leg, unfolding, keeping her balance. She pulled her soiled drawers off in disgust and dropped them down into the branches. To be rid of them seemed important, if irrational.

  Then she began to climb.

  Memory, and feel. Mostly slow, crawling, going by touch. Not caring much if she fell. It would be a clean and good death and she would find herself on the road to the Old Great Gods. Each one travels the road to the Gods alone and the innocent child is gathered swiftly into their arms, but regardless, she pictured in her mind how she would find Birdy there and take his hand. They would find mama and papa, and they would all walk the road together. Aunty would not be with them. Aunty’s would be a long and grim road. She had done something terrible. Nikeh would not think of her. Nikeh would die, and Birdy would be waiting for her, and the Gods would welcome them into their land of light.

  Or she would make it to the top, and the wilderness of the mountains. And she would find a weapon, and a teacher, and she would learn to kill. She would kill the red priests wherever she found them, and she would kill the All-Holy, because it was a lie he was blessed by the Old Great Gods. She would burn him in a furnace, like raw ore being smelted, till he was ash.