by K. Johansen
She slipped, more than once, and always caught herself again, though her wounded hand and her foot were burning. Little Squirrel. The cliff did not so much reach a plateau as merely become less steep, wild fig and gorse and more blackthorn growing in cracks. She went blind into unknown terrain, crawling as much as she limped, and perhaps the memory of the goddess Emras was truly with her, some ghost-shadow familiar with these mountains taken into her bones with the water of the sacred spring from which she had drunk all her life, that she did not plunge into a ravine or an old copper-pit. In the distance, human voices made animal sounds of savagery and pain. Dogs barked and howled and were brutally silenced. Farther and farther away. At some point she simply fell asleep, like an animal, unable to go on.
Light woke her. Nikeh cried, but her mouth was dry and there were few tears. Her hand was red and puffy, front and back, and she found the broken thorn in her heel, which she could not dig out. She limped onwards, lost, now, among unfamiliar stones, but keeping the sun, which was high, almost to the noon, on her right. She found rainwater held in a depression in the rock and sucked it dry. She wandered on.
Not that day but perhaps the next or the one after, Nikeh found herself in a small green valley, enclosed on all sides, but with the shadow of a track running through it, a long forgotten pack road from the days when there was still copper to be found in the coastal mountains. There was a tarn, and narrow paths showed where ibex came down to drink. There were no trees, only grass and brambles and stones. She could go no further. She had nothing. No sandals, no belt, no knife, no flint and firesteel, not a cape or a blanket to cover her back, only the sloe-dyed tunic, so pretty she had thought it, faded blue as the sky. It was brown now with her brother’s blood, stiff and ragged. She was a child who had only been given her grown name and learnt her letters a few years previously, too young, too small to be any use to a great warrior even to hold their horse. Not that one would ever stumble into this lost valley. Not even in a winter’s hero-tale of the ancient wars. All she could do was weep and die and with her death feed the foxes and the vultures.
To be a hero does not mean one lives, her teacher would tell her. It means that, among other things, one does not lie down and die while there is still any means of going on. But that, of course, was later.
Nikeh did not lie down and die. She drank from the tarn. She threw stones at rabbits and birds and perhaps bruised one or two, but killed none. She was not a farmer’s child, to have been set to driving off birds with a sling. There were no fish in the tarn. Once she caught a frog. It looked at her from golden eyes. She looked at it. It blinked. She could not stand to kill it, to hold it dead in her hands as she had held her brother. She let it go. She ate watercress and mint from the shores of the tarn, and the leaves of dandelions and daisies, brambles and sorrel, along with other greens that were perhaps not so wholesome, because once she vomited for what seemed half the night. Her hand and her foot both swelled and oozed and were hot. She could not drink enough water, it seemed. She curled up beneath a tangle of brambles, no fruit on them yet, and did not crawl out but to drink and pee, and then not even for that. She could not stand.
Her mother came and picked her up. Mama smelt like horses and roses. She gave Nikeh drink, sweet and bitter, and cool towels for her aching head, and wrapped her in warm blankets. There was searing pain in her hand, her foot, but then much of the aching went away.
Aunty came and tried to cut her throat and she screamed and struck and kicked at her. Mama rocked her in her arms and sang, but her words were nonsense. Birdy came and looked at her and stretched out his arms to be picked up, and his head flopped over showing the cords of his neck all raw and severed, like a slaughtered sheep. She screamed and screamed some more, and mama sang.
She dreamed of the wind, roaring, roaring, and fire. She dreamed of the sea. She dreamed of snow, which came once or twice in the winter. She dreamed the shape of a woman spun of flickering pale light, white and gold and bluey-green. She woke up, because it was not her mother singing to her.
There was a fire and it was night. Nikeh was naked, clean and dry and wrapped in blankets. Her hand was stiff, and her foot, and her throat hurt. She felt all strange and hollow. Someone sat by the fire. Her singing stopped, as if she knew Nikeh was awake, though she had not moved nor made any sound.
“Go back to sleep, child,” the woman said. There was a difference in her way of speaking that was foreign, but not the accent of the Northron traders. “You’re safe here.” She smoothed the hair back from Nikeh’s forehead as her mother or father might have done. “Sleep now, without dreaming. Grow strong and well.”
The next time Nikeh woke it was daylight. There was a horse grazing nearby. She lay and watched how its yellow teeth sheered through grass and dandelions, how its lips and tongue somehow avoided the daisies. It was a big horse, white speckled with brown, not one of the mountain ponies. A horse like the one the emissary of the All-Holy had ridden, tall and solid, a horse of the Nearer Grass, though she did not know it then, nor how the red priests began to build waystations across the Dead Hills along the ancient highway to the east and the pass over the Kara Mountains, nor how they brought back sometimes from their scouting horses and eastern spices and other rare and valued things for the All-Holy’s favourites. She muffled her cry in the blanket, lest the priest she feared see her, but the priest was dead, papa had killed him, and the horse raised its head and gave her a somewhat wondering look out of a big purple-brown eye. And then it took a step, two, three, four, and began to snuffle over her. It started at the top of her head, great nostrils flaring, whiskers tickling over her face, and went down the length of her blanket-cocooned body to the lump of her feet. She had a confused terror it might eat her.
“Let her be, Specky.”
Nikeh sat up then. She had not dreamed the woman, and she did not know her, and the stranger had a foreign horse like the priest. Nikeh was prepared to kick and scream and bite and whatever she must. She raised her arms to defend herself. Her left hand, which had been pierced by the thorn, was wrapped in linen bandages. Her arms felt strange and light, feeble as little sticks and as though they did not properly belong to her at all.
The woman squatted down by her and smiled, so kindly. Nikeh did not hit or kick, or scream. She only lay back and stared. She had never seen such a person before. The woman was not someone from Emrastepse. Nikeh knew enough to know she was not likely to be someone from the tribes of the west at all. Her eyes were narrow and thick-lashed, the darkest brown in colour, and her hair was black, black as a raven’s feather, falling sleek and long about a face more lovely in its shape than any marble relic of the empire preserved in the hall of the princess’s tower. Her nose was small and her cheekbones broad. She was lighter-skinned than most folk of Emrastepse but not so pink and sun-ruddy as a Northron off the ships. In truth, Nikeh thought her a goddess, though how she herself had crossed so many mountains that she had come into the land of a foreign goddess Nikeh could not have said.
The woman wore unfastened a rough, hairy coat, striped dull blue and black, but under it she flashed bright as a butterfly’s wing, all rose and green and crimson.
“What’s your name, child?” she asked.
Nikeh only stared at her. Tears began leaking down her face. She could never, in after years, understand why she could find no answer, only that she hurt so, and could find no way to say it.
“Well, there, it doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “Did you come from the village?”
Nikeh managed a twitch of her head. The woman nodded, patted her unbandaged hand and tucked both back under the blankets again. “You rest a little longer, and then you can sit up and eat some soup.”
Later, Nikeh would learn how Teacher had found her curled dying under the blackberry canes as she followed the ancient miner’s road through the mountain wilderness, coming by a circuitous route to spy upon what the priests did at Emrastepse, where already the surviving folk had made their professions o
f faith to the priests and been tattooed with the sign of the All-Holy. They were rebuilding the village to a new plan, with a great hall for the priests and a school for the children, and a tower for the new prince, who was not a traitor of their own folk but the son of the new prince of Hannothana, a boy of fourteen named Dimas.
Teacher had been to Emrastepse afoot, following Nikeh’s trail by wizardly means, once she had dealt with the fever and the infection that raged through her blood. Curious where the child had come from, what she might be. She had watched, hidden by more than human hunter’s cunning, from the clifftop, as the bodies were thrown into the sea off the headland where the tide might take them out into a current. She would not, once Nikeh was able to stand, let her go back.
They took the old pack-road. Nikeh was dressed in a long-sleeved smock of some fabric which was not linen, but very like it, and wrapped in Teacher’s striped coat, held before her on the big horse at first, and then, as she grew stronger, clinging behind.
Teacher wore a sword on her back with a tassel of scarlet and sky-blue ribbons trailing from the pommel. Among the few burdens the horse carried was a long coat of armour like nothing Nikeh had ever seen, black, all the glossy plates fastened with cords of sky blue, blue ribbons fluttering from the shoulders. There was a helmet like a demon fox-mask with a crest of more sky-blue ribbon. Teacher put in on to show her, because she was curious, but in those days Nikeh never saw her don it in earnest.
Teacher was a warrior and a wizard. Nikeh had by improbable miracle run and limped and crawled and stumbled her way into the winter’s tale of the heroic avenger she had sought. Now she need only grow big enough and strong enough to wear such armour and wield such a sword herself. Then let the red priests fear her.
Children dream. Dreams carry them on, one foot after another, when despair clings close and smothering.
“Child,” Teacher called her, kindly enough. She never said what Nikeh should call her, so Nikeh thought of her as her teacher, the one she had sought. She would wonder, when she grew older, if that was why she could find no words in those first months—to speak that dream would be to destroy it in an adult’s laughter, whether derisive or only gently mocking.
Teacher talked to her all the time, telling her things about the land, about the weather. Small things. Keeping the world real to her. Teacher was wise in the lore of the wilderness. Nikeh learnt to set snares and to tickle small fish into her hands in the mountain streams, to flip them out and kill them swiftly, to gut them and to cook. She learnt which plants were wholesome to eat, and which were not, and which had other properties useful to know. She learnt to brush as much of Specky as she could reach and clean his great hooves. He was a very gentle, patient horse, an intact stallion but sweet as an old pet tomcat. Once Teacher left her hidden and went away for an entire day and a night, and returned with a tunic and drawers only a little too large, an oily felt cape against rain and cold, sandals. Best of all was a knife for her very own, and a small bow with arrows, fit for a child. She began to learn to hunt. Sometimes Teacher would fall without thinking into other languages, which even Nikeh’s ear could tell were not one and the same, and she began to pick out meanings. Thus she began to learn Nabbani, not as it is spoken on the eastern caravan road but the true Imperial, and also the tongue that belongs to no one folk but is the language of the western road.
It was autumn before she spoke at all herself, one evening, only to whisper, “My name’s Nikeh. Nikeh. Not ‘child,’“ before bursting into tears. She cried for a long, long time. Teacher held her close and did not mind how the child’s anguish beslubbered her silk brocade.
There had always been a hermit on the mountain. Sometimes he came to the village unasked, knowing that some child had fallen ill, some hunter had struggled home with a broken bone or a wounded dog. Dogs, ponies, men, women, the little red cattle—he was physician to them all. He knew the secrets of herbs and of the compounding of drugs. He knew the cleaning and stitching of wounds and the setting of bones. Sometimes he did nothing but lay his hands on them. There was healing in his hands. And when there was nothing else to be done, there was the easing of the unbearable pain; there was a quiet passage to the road to the Old Great Gods.
Sometimes he walked among the trees. At other times he sat in meditation, or perhaps it was in prayer, in the ruins of the old temple above the valley. It had fallen in the great earthquake, in the days of a queen only remembered because it was in her time that the great earthquake came. The fall of the mountainside changed the course of the river, which had no goddess. The royal seat moved to another valley, the farmers followed, and a new temple was built there to honour the god of the mountain. For the hunters who lived under the eaves of the forest, little changed but the distance to the queen’s court and the market of the town.
The hermit had come after that. He was not a priest of the mountain god, but he was a holy man, and he was theirs. Sometimes priests or priestesses came from the king’s town to seek his insight. Sometimes a scholar from the lowlands. He knew the languages of all the folk of the land. His skin was dark brown, his hair was long and black and curling, but his eyes were a brilliant green.
Once, he danced. It was a bad winter, and the snows were deep. The river in its new course—the old had been overgrown with great trees by then—was dammed by ice, and the rising waters threatened the valley. They went up the mountain to the hermit, and he danced, and in his dancing the ice shifted and cracked and stones rolled, and the river flowed, and even in the worst years it did not dam itself there again.
Stories began to come into the mountains, carried by the clans of wandering, godless entertainers who were dedicated to—and perhaps descended from—patron demons of the mountains and the plains, and carried as well by the scholars and the god-dedicated heralds of the city temples, who carried the messages of the kings and queens and were less prone to tell tall tales. The seer-priests in the temples dreamed, and the goddesses cried out at their visions. In the west, far, far in the west, maybe even beyond the rising of the caravan-road, war was coming. Not between folk and folk or land and land.
War against the gods.
And even gods may die.
CHAPTER XIII
…early in the spring, a year before the armies of the All-Holy began to move east
They found him with the dawn. At first Mikki paid them no mind; wolves might drink at the river’s edge as well as he. Almost too late he felt it, smelt it on them, ash and stone, nothing animal, nothing belonging to that forest, to that dawn. The birds went suddenly silent and the small goddess of the river coiled away hidden into her depths. He turned on them roaring, broke the back of the first to leap at him, swatting it away into the trunk of a massive chestnut like a child playing ball, tore the belly out of the next and the throat of the third, but they took no warning from that, had no thought for self—no self left to them. They swarmed him and he went into the river, cold and high with snowmelt, still striking and biting. The waters gave him what help they could; they were cousins of the forest, she and he, river-goddess and demon. Her current tore and rolled and pulled them under and he broke free of the jaws that gripped like traps, swam with that current until the scent of them was no longer in the air, before he angled towards the farther shore, clambered out, bloody water sheeting from his pelt.
No wolf-corpses broke the surface to drift past him.
Ice held her close, a web of frost grown thick. Even against summer’s heat, what there was of it under the overhanging rocks of this broken hillside, it held its own, and after six months of winter it had merged and woven itself into the coiling drifts. Below, the Shikten’aa snaked its way to the northern sea, still and white, the ice not yet breaking. It divided and braided. Islands of gravel and sand shifted with every spring. She had seen them change through eighty springs now, eighty short summers when the sun barely ducked below the northern horizon at midsummer, eighty early autumns, the land painted in streaks of red and amber by the turning l
eaves of the low mat of dwarf willow and blueberries. Eighty long winters, when the wind howled and the drifts coiled around her, encircling like arms that did not quite dare touch, and the sun left the sky and the fires of the distant heavens danced and sang. Promises. Threats. Neither. They did not see her. She was lost. She had tried and failed to be lost, years, decades wandering purposeless, in the south, the east, even in Pirakul and the lands beyond that had no name in any language she had spoken till she came to them and went among the folk. Angry. Pointless. Drowning herself in wandering as another might drown herself in drink, maybe, and no more effective, either. Only now, in her stillness, in the ice that spread like a slow flood from the sheathed blade laid across her knees, she had found, at last, a place within herself beyond the reach of the Old Great Gods. Beyond everything.
Yet self…still clung to her. She would shed it too, in time, if she only stayed still, thought fading, heartbeat slow as that of the creatures that slept the winter through, fires of her conjoined souls burning low, like embers banked beneath turf and ashes. And in time, maybe, to cool, to fade.
The wolves were on Mikki’s trail again by midday; they ran him, remorseless, all the long afternoon. He could outrun them for a time, but he bled and the wounds burned. They did not begin to heal, although the forest of his birth was all about him, root and branch, earth and water, stone and air. Always when he slowed to walk, head hanging, ribs heaving, he would begin to feel the wolves behind him again, a heavy presence—begin to jog again, and then to gallop. Cold behind him, and fire in the veins.
They knew him. Someone’s miscalculation, that they had not come before the dawn, or maybe that was deliberate and they hunted through the day for his torment and their pleasure. For someone’s pleasure. Not their own.
