The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  The ship was a tiny thing, a leaf, a shell.

  To shift her course to the north-west would put her broadside to the waves. To turn and run before the storm took her far out of her way and into northern waters where there might even yet be floating mountains of ice, moon-pale, savage, drifting silent.

  No steering oar but a tiller, a rudder beneath the sternpost. Not the ships she had known. Well, the world moved on. She had already reefed the sail to give her just enough of the oxblood-red canvas for steerage-way as the wind strengthened and gusted; now, with a rope on the tiller to keep some mastery of where the vessel headed, she hauled the sail up to its boom. She had lost the wooden sea-anchor while riding out a bad blow a week before. The fishers she had bought the vessel from—with a handful of gold more than its worth, and if the rings were plundered from a barrow, well, it was far inland; they would not be accused and Viga’s reckless son was long gone to the Great Gods’ road, his fingers did not need the ornament—had kept their nets, which might have served. She bundled up the waxed leather awning and knotted a walrus-hide rope about it. The knots were spells of binding and enduring, wizardry of the Great Grass. She would not lose this one. Made the rope fast at the stern and paid it out as she let the ship come about into the wind; it wallowed unnervingly at first, took the next wave under its breast and climbed it straight. Moth lashed the tiller with a turn of rope and a hitch she could free with a single tug, and took a knife. Journey, she cut, on the stem, which was a plain thing, unornamented. Water. And hail, for destruction, interlaced with the rune of negating. Journey, on the tiller itself, as the ship climbed and climbed upward, and plunged down as if it would turn whale, dive beneath the green-black wall that rolled and rolled and caught them up again, she and the ship together. Journey, and sun for protection, and land, which, here, in this moment, meant home. Journey, on the mast, and boar for strength, and sun for protection again. She cut her finger, coloured each line with blood, the ship flinging itself down another long slope. The back of the sea humped and they rose again. Moth went back to the tiller, sucking her finger. It had scabbed over by the time they climbed the next wave. No leaving nature to do its work; enough nature to contend with here.

  And she did not want to exert herself, to disperse it. Should not interfere, even confining her working to human wizardry, which there were few could hope to bring to bear with any effect against such a storm, but of those few Ulfhild was one. What she set herself to do was so great a thing, an unmaking and a making…she wanted…needed, all the world about clean and pure, raw, no lingering threads of power, no stain of other thought or other desire or other will, to taint it.

  And she was so close now.

  Which was not a good thing.

  Night had fallen in southern lands. Even here, the light thickened into a heavy twilight, the hidden sun sinking in the northwest. It would drown itself and rise again soon, but the moon was following it close. There would be no light even if the clouds were to break.

  More likely to break was her hull. She might be advancing, might be holding position, might be retreating, plaything of the waves.

  She could feel the wave-path to the place she sought, like a thread of warmth under her hand, when she concentrated. A pulling, as if she gripped an angler’s line.

  The next wave flung them skyward, and staring, owl’s eyes, the dark made light…

  A splash of white to the north-west. A darkness, thicker, harder than the waves. And another combing line of white, more darkness. Nearer.

  Not good. Not at all.

  At least now she knew where she was, and the ship had all the blessings she could give it. Her. All the protections, save a name.

  An ill thing, not to name a ship, it had always been said in the north.

  She came to it a bit late.

  “Swift,” she told it, told her, and had to lean back hard, fighting some force that seemed to seize the rudder, would have flung Swift sidelong. To founder now…

  Currents, beneath the waves. The water coiled and chopped.

  Banks. Shoals. Reefs of savage young stone. Nothing was certain here, and no fishers ever came so far; there had been no one to question as to such things. One did not sail to the Drowned Isles, the lost lands, from which the folk of the first kings in the north had come. The songs said the land was not the same from season to season.

  She should know. She had written some of them.

  They had come out of the further west before that. Driven out. War in some forgotten homeland. East of Pirakul, west of the sea? Their songs had preserved that memory, till a second fleeing, their green isles broken and burning behind them, gave them new lost lands to sing of. She hadn’t found any place in all her wanderings where the speech of the folk was anything akin to the language of the north. Perhaps they had all gone, sailing east to come to what she now sailed west to find, every last grandmother and child, none remaining.

  White foam, a long line of it. Was that the ghost of Ertholey, and Ravnsfjell rising to the south? Ghost. Memory. Nothing there, south.

  Beyond though, a flicker, more distant. Night-searing scarlet, the colour of iron heating in the furnace. Holy Ulvskerrig. Perhaps. The Wolf-Smith’s isle was not the only one where the broken land belched burning stone. Lost against as the water dropped them into another black valley.

  The sense of time washed away in the night, in the heave and fall, the wind-roar darkness. She was soaked to the skin and bailing, the tiller’s rope around a pin for leverage and fast in her fist against the capricious roiling beneath. Gradually, that lessened. Swift was being pushed away, no bad thing. The glimpses of the angry white breakers over the ruins of the sunken land when they climbed to the crest of a wave grew more distant and were lost, even as the brief night thinned to a grey morning, the east burning sullen.

  They rode it out, Moth and Swift. Another long day, another short night, and the waves calming sometime after the dawn, the wind growing gentle.

  Muscles ached. Her hands felt raw, and looked it. Rope-burns, broken blisters. Shoulders felt as if her arms had been wrenched half out of them at some point. She was shiveringly cold, which was human memory. She stretched, slowly, painfully. Bent, stretched again, reaching to the cloud-hidden sun.

  The wind was freshening out of the south-east again and the clouds were tearing. Flash of blue.

  Laughing. A fair fight well-fought. Wrung out her hair and braided it once more. Bailed out again, the wooden pail tethered to a cleat, good thing. All she carried was secured, and the ship—a boat but for the use she put it too—had no covered deck, only the awning turned sea-anchor, which she was currently dragging behind and which had made them gradually nose around with the changing wind so that now the dawn was on her left shoulder. Moth let the waves continue to have their way with Swift while she took a quick inventory. Jars still intact and sealed, and waxed cheeses would take no harm from the sea. The anvil was still securely bound, had done no damage and would take little, though the last of the salt seawater still sloshed about it. Everything.

  Save her boots, which she had shoved under a thwart when the rough weather blew up, thinking as it worsened there was no slight chance of her going overboard and old habit…

  No boots. Damnation.

  She might walk barefoot in snow without regard for frostbite. Didn’t mean she wanted to spend six months, ten months, so. Well, she’d be caught between the fire and the ice for as long as it took, booted or bootless, and that was no new thing.

  Moth hauled in the dripping rope of the sea-anchor, coiling it as it came, the awning damnably heavy in the sea’s grip. Once upon a time Ulfhild, doughty king’s sword though she was, would have had a struggle getting that back aboard or even hauled in close enough to grab. She might have, hah, cut her losses, cut it away. No need now. It came aboard pouring water. She spread it to dry best it might, still keeping her nose to the wind, and bailed once more. Only then turned Swift, slow and dead and little answer to the tiller, wave buffeted,
lowering the sail from the high boom. Felt her come to life again, a tug as the sail filled, taking the wind.

  Nose to the west and the sea creaming cheerfully under her bow. Turned out she hadn’t been pushed so far back as she thought; it was not full dark when she saw the warning white breakers again, and this time, a black hill rising behind them. Too far north. That would be Nordholm, where the yearly midsummer gathering had been held. The god’s presence was something she could feel, but he was changed, terribly changed. Something of stone, and only half-aware, like a winter-dreaming beast. No words. No thoughts. Broken by the savage breaking of his land, so many of his folk dead in so small a time, and their beasts, and the wild birds, and the very vegetable life.

  Not the work of wizards or devils. Not the anger of gods or even the Old Great Gods. Only the crust of the earth cracked from within like a hatching egg. It was not a place human-folk should ever have planted themselves, to spread shape and thought and words into the half-formed god, to give him what he had not grown to hold. But even their wizards had not understood the flaws in that land, till too late.

  Starlight. Enough for devil’s eyes. Rocks beneath, flowing shelves and broad staircases of it, and razor-sharp ridges like the spines of Holy Ulvskerrig. Sail, or oars? Shame to lose the anvil in some channel now. Caution was called for. Moth furled the sail to the boom again, drifting as she unshipped the rudder, then unlashed the oars and set them between their pins. Rowed without glancing over her shoulder, eyes closed, feeling her way instead. Stone, water—deep wave and shallow current pouring— like colours, woven beneath, around her, she and Swift one form, swimming them.

  But damn, her shoulders ached.

  Feeling your age, my wolf? Mikki would say, and shove a cold nose against the back of her neck, grinning. Though since it was dark night and he would be in his human form, she would point out he was the sailor born, the sea-raider’s son who’d gone coasting with his cousins, not all of whom had been honest traders, and set him to the oars in her place. Put those hard muscles to good use. And they wouldn’t have shipped the rudder; she’d be at the tiller, where she could steer and steer him, and if she let her eye enjoy the view and the straining of his tunic, if he had one, over his chest and belly, better view if he did not, the pelt of barley-gold curls—well, he’d be grinning at that, knowing where her eye tended, too, and all the more eager to put his back into it, to have them where they were going and free to think of other matters.

  She had gone back to him. That was after Ivah had died, not her daughter but holding somehow a piece of that place in her heart. She had left her far wanderings too late and so she had gone to the empress’s tomb and found there the god of Nabban, the strange and yes, beautiful creature she had first met in Marakand, not knowing precisely what he was. A vessel resonating with the distant chord of godhead, there in that city foreign to him. He had been whole, in his own land. So much more strongly of and in himself. Terrifyingly so, even though it would be she who in the end prevailed if ever they came to battle, being what she was and he only a god of the earth, however great; it nonetheless felt like standing before a mountainside of snow, knowing it might fall upon one at a wrong word, a wrong step. A mass that warped the world about it.

  And his man. She knew a fellow hunter when she met one, but that one was more. Or rather, less. Predator. Missing something a sane and whole human should have. But his god made for him that missing piece, completed him, and that he was some tangled thing of necromancy and not exactly a living man did not trouble her over much. What freedom, if one did not have the disposition of one’s own soul, in the end? Even to give it away to another. He was no captive bound against his will; not the Old Great Gods themselves had right to meddle there, in her opinion.

  Theirs, of course, might differ.

  Opinionated bastards.

  “Go to the one who helps you remember who you are,” the god of Nabban had said. And she had.

  And Mikki had sent her away.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Mikki had said. “I won’t follow that damned sword. Moth…” And he had shaken his head, naked with the first snow falling around him, slow and drifting in the dark, the Hardenwald, near the ancient long barrow, overgrown with beeches, that had been his demon-mother’s den. “Be rid of it. Refuse them.”

  “I can’t.”

  “And I can’t,” he had said, hopeless. “You never told me. You lied to me. With or without words, you did. This hunt was never your atonement, never your own will. They’ve made you their executioner.”

  “They’ve made you their hostage.”

  “They told you so. You’re the one who says the Old Great Gods lie. They’ve done nothing while you’ve been gone, wherever you’ve been hiding. You weren’t seeking Dotemon or Jasberek, were you? Or even Jochiz, who at least well deserves killing. And if they do not lie in holding some threat over me, and only wait in patience yet to see if you go back to their road, still I won’t be used to compel you. I won’t.”

  Had she said the Old Great Gods could, would lie? She did not know. She did not even know what she believed.

  “I can’t let Lakkariss go. To come to the hand of Jochiz? No.” Sword of the cold hells. Weapon to kill the devils, to destroy them and what they had made themselves, tear them from the world. No. Not in the hands of Sien-Shava Jochiz. What else might a shard of the cold hells sever from existence?

  “I won’t come with you,” Mikki said. “Minrulf, I’m sorry.”

  She had only stood in silence, having no arguments that had weight even in her own ears, save that one, that Lakkariss could not fall into the hands of Jochiz, and to keep it from him, she had still to carry it, and walk her road. Mikki had turned his back and walked away. She had stayed, till the snow covered his tracks in the frost. Then she had flown.

  Holy Ulvskerrig, or the ruin of it. A plume of steam rose somewhere beyond, hissing like a winged dragon’s warning, then died. Her keel touched. Miscalculation. She held her breath, as if that would lighten them, and Swift rolled forward, free. A beach, of sorts, before her. There was even sand, a thin blanket of it, the black rock ground down.

  There was nothing to recognize in the landscape. Might have been the mouth of the little melt-water stream from the yearly summer ebb of the ice on the peak.

  No stream. No small mountain ever-iced on its northern heights.

  No wolf-demon. The Wolf-Smith—he had no other name—had come with their ancestors out of the west, following the sacred ravens. He had not joined them when they took to the ships again, fleeing along the routes they had followed east and back since ever they settled, timber being one vital thing which the green islands lacked and the great forested land to the east had in plenty. Ships were life.

  There had always been a thought that they should follow that road over the waves anyhow, and seize some portion of the coast for their own. But the gods and goddesses of that land were not their own. An argument that ceased to hold them back, once their homes were gone.

  The Wolf-Smith had remained behind when the last ship sailed, that the god of the isles not die alone. But the god had been alone, before ever they came, and some echo of him remained, while the smith was gone.

  Chill reminder. Even the demons died. And Mikki was only a halfling.

  Moth pulled Swift up scraping over stone. No driftwood to use for rollers. She did not expect to sail her again, but she was averse to sleeping in the rain when she did not have to. She was not here to lose herself in the earth, to forget self, and that meant some acknowledgement of human needs.

  “You did well,” she told the ship. One did so. A ship had no soul, but she had…something, at least in the minds of those who sailed her. One acknowledged that.

  The isle rose from the sea in black stone steps, up to a ridge like a jagged spine. A sleeping dragon curled almost nose to tail, like a horseshoe. She unloaded the ship to spare her keel as much as possible and hauled her more than halfway up the slope, to where, Moth hoped, not e
ven the worst autumn storms might fling the waves. Lugged up jars and sea-heavy awning, sail, ropes, cheeses, tools swathed in waxed leather, and the anvil last of all. Climbed on unburdened to the top of the ridge. The stone was rough on her feet, and warmer than it should have been. Not a wasteland, though. Some white-flowering cresses were rooted in cracks in the rocks, and lambsquarters, too. Seeds that had clung to birds, perhaps. Puffins, terns, gulls might still come to the cliffs, though the season was too late for eggs. Dawn would wake them to a raucous chorus. A little relief from a diet of fish—greens and birds both. And there would be dulse, quahogs, though not in the cove below.

  Sheltered water, that cove, but not sheltering. She doubted there would be many fish down there, either. Fogs shifted, coiling like clouds, hiding and revealing.

  Thread of scarlet.

  Moth went back down to Swift. A house, of sorts, to build. And a forge. Of sorts.

  Much to do.

  Dreaming, beneath the pines of Swajui. Lying by the cold springs, a pair of coats over them for covering against the cool air, Ahjvar in his arms. They lay down here this summer night; it is not dream but real, and yet he dreams it, too, and in his dream still holds Ahjvar, who is lying in the true night curved against his back and a heavy arm over him, slow breath in his hair. In the dream Ahjvar is awake; he dreams, too.

  “Souls go to the road,” Ghu says. “To the Old Great Gods. We say, it is their proper place.”

  “No,” Ahjvar says, and almost the dream shatters, he tenses, his sleeping hand grips hard, digging into flesh as if someone seeks to drag him away.

  “Hush, no,” Ghu says, and frees himself from that hand in the night, turns over and pulls Ahjvar to him, head on his chest, arms around him, a hand soothing his hair, so that dream and night are doubled, fading one into another. “I don’t mean that. But why, do you think?”