by K. Johansen
He could not fold the land around him, step here and there in a passing dream, and by times he enjoyed the travelling for its own sake, alone or wandering together, as they often went. Important, for him, for the both of them, to hear and see and smell and feel the land, to know the roads as well as the rivers, the folk tied together by them, the life of the villages and the city streets as well as the shrines and the palace. Sometimes. He had made a long journey of it, heading down the river valley last autumn and winter, a slow progress. Now…it was enough. Time to go home.
He might not wear the land like a coat. He did not need to, to find his way. Needed only to be found.
He passed a last straggling party of ditch-diggers, young men and women dallying on the road, talking, teasing. Faded out of their awareness, no more than shadow and river-fog. Laughter loud as he rode by, a bit of elbowing. Two holding hands, which was the source of the others’ amusement. Lives decided. One boy turned to look after him, frowning, uncertain what and if he had seen, and a dog growled at nothing.
Ahjvar turned the dusky bay aside from the paved imperial highway, down a track between fields. The river sang in his blood. The sun was setting, turning the grey clouds a curdled rose in the west, when he came to a shrine, one of the old holy places where local folk might come to make personal prayers, seek advice, or give a gift of food to the priest. It was a grove of willows on a slight rising of the land that had probably been a sandbar or island before some shifting of the river’s course. The holy ground was fenced with living willow woven together; the gate stood open. There was a bell to alert the priest to the coming of a visitor to the god’s enclosure, but Ahjvar did not ring it. The ducks foraging on the green between the trees, all moss and mint, turned bright eyes to him and went back to their feeding. The priest’s cabin was built of grey planks, wooden-shingled, and stood on stilts against the floods still to come. A thread of smoke rose, the smell of frying vegetables drifting from above. He headed away from the cabin, down towards the water.
Shadowy, half-seen, and then there, solid and real…Swan-white, black-legged Snow watched, as the ducks had, gave him a nod that was more human than horselike. He leapt down from the saddle, looped up the reins and left Gorthuernial to follow at his heels. Out in the river something stirred beneath the surface, two shapes, chasing, long and lean, one pearly pale, the other pewter streaked on gold, one rising like a whale—glittering scales, twisting, and they both swarmed ashore, changing as they came, shaking water from shaggy coats, barking and leaping.
“Sh!” He didn’t want the priest down here. “Jui, shut up!” But Jui leapt and swiped a tongue at his face, and even Jiot, more reserved, flung himself up, so he got down on a knee to take two armfuls of soggy, wriggling dog. Told them they were good, told them they were wicked, and wet, and ill-mannered, and smelt like fish, which made them grin, and they went back into the river as dragons again, lengthening and changing and disappeared upstream.
Laughter, in the shadows under a big willow where the river overflowed its bank. Ghu, waiting. Ahjvar went to him.
He looked what he was, and was not: a young man. Not tall, lightly built but with an athlete’s strength and assurance, grace even in the turning of his head, the lifting of his chin. Flash of a smile. Barefoot, ankle-deep in cold water, dressed in blue cotton trousers and loose white shirt, no gown over it. He could have been a labourer come to bring the priest some little gift, eggs or a handful of cresses. Black hair unruly as a Malagru hill-pony’s mane, a fine-boned face of strong angles, the warm golden brown of the south provinces, eyes black as the sky between the stars, and as deep. They leaned together, and Ahjvar buried his face in Ghu’s hair, in the reassuring, familiar scent of him, moss and stone, pines and horse. Held to him—Ghu thought it was good for him to go out into the world alone, to separate himself a little, but damned Great Gods, he had needed to be home—till Ghu pushed him back against the willow bole and pulled his head down to take his face in his hands, kissing him as careful as if he might dissolve to smoke and drift away at any rougher touch, which quickly turned to something more urgent. But—
“What?” he asked, because there was something of concern in that, and not merely desire.
Tongue tracing his ear, playing with the gold ring there. And words, whispered, tickling. “You were a long time away.”
He slid hands beneath the shirt. Warm skin, solid muscles, heart that beat with his own. “Whose fault is that? You could have come to join me any time you chose.”
“It’s good to be missed, sometimes. And I was watching.”
“Watching what?” Not him. No need. Ghu held his soul in his hands; what he had found was known, did not need to be said. They would only choose to haul it out to argue over conclusions. Inevitabilities.
That might come. Not tonight. Time enough.
“Everything. Dreaming, mostly.”
“You’ll get lost, someday. Who’ll come to find you?”
“You, I expect. I was trying to see into the west.”
“Was that wise?” Ahjvar asked. Old Great Gods, no, it was not. The devils might act even in dreams. Fingers busy with the fastenings of his jacket, the ties of his shirt…
Was this wise? He did not trust the priest to stay quiet in his house, and a priest, if anyone, would know the presence of his god. Besides, who would eat within-doors on a fine spring evening? He captured the exploring hands and held them against his chest. “Ghu—”
“I don’t know. When do I ever? Necessary. I wanted to find Dotemon.”
“Did you?”
“No.” And that troubled Ghu; Ahjvar heard it, and it certainly troubled him. They had exiled the devil Yeh-Lin Dotemon many years back. Not for anything she had done, exactly. She had settled into the imperial family over several generations: tutor, eternal auntie, counsellor…even Ahjvar admitted it was not her fault young Hezing had grown so infatuated; she really had done nothing to encourage him. His ambition and disloyalty to his brother had been born of his own dreaming, not hers, and that he had made her a focus for it…well, she had gone, and left the House of Suliasra to sort itself out, which it had, eventually, with the god’s wisdom, and without fratricide or any lethal act of Ahjvar’s, though it had been a near thing, in his view. Prince Hezing had ended his days a relatively honourable mercenary captain somewhere in Pirakul, a better end than Ahjvar had ever expected for the boy.
“Dead?”
It was possible. The devil whom Ghu persisted in calling “the storyteller” was an assassin of her fellows. She may have found Yeh-Lin, though she had claimed not to be seeking her.
“I don’t think so. Hiding, maybe.”
“From you?”
“Would she?”
“Depends on what she’s up to.”
“Yes. Hiding maybe from the storyteller. But Yeh-Lin had gone into the west, the last I dreamed of her. Beyond Marakand. Beyond the western deserts.”
“What’s beyond? Grass, the north…”
“Tiypur. Ahjvar…”
“Not now.”
“No. Alright.” Ghu escaped his hold, hands sliding down his ribs, over old scars. Breath caught at nipping teeth, teasing…Ghu laughed at him, stepped away then, but kept him by the hand. “You’re right. Not now. Come home, Ahj, before we scandalize the priest’s fowl.”
“More concerned with scandalizing the priest,” he muttered, and let himself be drawn a step, another. Willows and the river, pines and its headwaters, the springs of Swajui where those scarred and battered in mind and soul came to find some peace and healing—all ghostly, light and shadows of mist. Then stone and storm-sculpted snow and the wind harsh, the hanging valley under the peak of the holy mountain, the tall standing stones along the track, the creeping pines and red-barked willows, low bushes here, where no true trees could grow. The shallow stream loud, ice-edged over rocks, pouring away towards the cliff and the waterfall. They were so high that spring only waited on the threshold, not yet come. The horses were there befor
e them, heading into the open shed that some long-ago friends had built, to do them for a stable.
And Ghu, being Ghu, abandoned him to turn groom and tend to Gorthuernial, who was saddled and muddy and hungry for more than the dry winter grass beneath the snow.
The most holy sanctuary of the god, this, a high cold valley on Nabban’s northern border, above the trees, below the unmelting snow, where even priests and emperors did not come unsummoned.
Their house here was only a cave, partway up the steep and stony eastern slope. It expanded beyond the narrow crack of its mouth and ran far back into the mountain’s dark. The fire on the hearthstone near the mouth might be the same Ahjvar had laid at the first frost of the autumn before he left for the south, because wood had to be packed up from lower down and Ghu did not always remember that the fire should be fed—or perhaps merely did not see the need any longer and so neither did the fire. And time was anyway a strange and dreaming thing here, for all that the seasons and the stars kept their ordered turning. Sometimes it seemed to Ahjvar that he could take a breath and a year was gone. But it was home, and better than the last, the half-ruined broch they had so inexpertly repaired with a sod roof that was more often on the hearth than over their heads. The wind never found its way back so far as the alcove where they made a deep nest—juniper, hay, bracken, and camel-wool stuffed quilts—on the clean-swept floor.
He had brought coffee from Kozing Port, and a new map of the lands west of Marakand made by the empress’s wizard-cartographers. Maybe would hope Ghu forgot that, for the time being. He had only put the scroll away with the other few books he kept in a chest well out of reach of any blizzard wind when Ghu came back, shaking snowflakes from his hair and laughing. Ahjvar met him at the fire, wordless. Ghu had the coat off him, and his shirt, and the sword, before ever they reached the bed.
But the shadow of the west was on him, and would not lift.
On both of them.
“I won’t let go of you,” Ghu whispered over him. “No matter where, how far your journey. You know I won’t.”
“No. Don’t.” It wasn’t the being let go of. It was fear of being taken from that woke him in the night in sweating terror. But not this night, not when he was held hard and close, timeless in the dark.
Dawn just greying the world outside. Ghu sat shirtless by the fire at the cave’s mouth for all the winter-cold wind, humming. An old lullaby, something from his childhood, maybe. Maybe they had sung it over him in the stables where he was first sheltered. Maybe his mother had, before she drowned the both of them. Certain it was that he had sung it over Ahjvar some bad nights when the hag stalked beneath the surface of his mind, not waking into the world, but not lying quiet, either, and the fear of her hunting and the guilt and the loathing of what he had become, ridden by her, racked him in nightmares and he feared to sleep lest it was she who woke.
Humming became words, nonsense rhyme. The moon rides in a sea-shell, Ghu sang, and the sun is carried by a golden fish.
Maybe Ahjvar woke. Maybe this was a dream. Often hard to tell. He rolled from the bed and went to Ghu anyway, wrapping a blanket over naked shoulders.
The fire blazed high. The kettle sat steaming on a stone for tea. The snow still fell, driven by the wind. Spring was not going to release their high valley yet; nor would the pass to Denenanbak and the road across the deserts and Praitan to Marakand be open soon. He was glad of it.
Ghu looked up and smiled. Turned his gaze again to what his hands did, as Ahjvar settled down by him. The dogs were curled into a single mound of fur. Jiot opened an eye to check on him, catching a gleam of firelight, a spark of jewel-tone, dragon eye. Lifted his head to yawn, curled it down again. Jui thumped his tail.
“Duck,” Ghu said, setting aside what he held. There was a knife in his hand.
Ahjvar ducked, obedient. Fingers wove through his hair, found the longest lock of it, and the knife sliced, a little sawing needed. He should take that off Ghu and sharpen it, after.
“What do you want with my hair?” he asked, rubbing a stubbled patch the size of a thumbprint.
Ghu turned Ahjvar’s head to face him. He did not explain the sudden need to sheer a hank of his hair. Only held him, hand cupping his jaw, fingers combed into his beard. Leaned in and kissed him.
Let him go and took up his work again. A braid, an elongated knotted web that had echoes of a Grasslander cat’s-cradle spell in it. Ghu was no wizard. The framework of the thing was white and dull black horsehair, long and strong, but braided into it was glossier black—shorter, finer. Much of that. Ghu separated the strands he cut from Ahjvar’s head into several, gold and coiling loosely through his fingers, and began to braid and weave and knot. Shells were strung on the horsehair, and three acorns, pierced through, cap and nut.
Ahjvar recognized them. A boy’s treasures. A place.
“Give me your thumb,” Ghu ordered.
“Why my thumb?” But he offered it. The knife jabbed lightly, just enough to draw a swelling bead of blood. “What in the cold hells are you making?”
“A…thing.” Ghu considered, still holding Ahjvar’s thumb. “I don’t think it has a name.”
He set the knife aside and smeared the blood on his own thumb, went back to what he was doing. Now there was blood smudging the shells, the braids, hardly to be seen. “For you. For memory.”
Ahjvar sucked the wounded thumb. “I remember too much.”
“Not always the right things. It’s also for…I’m not sure. Ivah would see it, I think. More akin to her wizardry than yours. Or maybe not.” Ghu paused, considered again. His eyes were deep, dark as night, unseeing, at least of what lay before them. “Not a binding. A dance of edges and knots. Something we make between us, you and I.”
“Also Snow.” Deflecting, that. Was his god trying wizardry? Rarely a good idea, to mix human wizardry with what was power of the earth, the force and will in gods and demons, grown out of the land.
A frown. A shrug. Ghu shook his head. “No. Doesn’t count.” Like a child in a game, declaring rules as he thought of them. “The horse isn’t part of it. I needed something strong to hold it together, is all. I could have used flax, but I thought you wouldn’t want me pulling your shirts to bits for the thread.”
“You can have such things for the asking down in Dernang, you know. Thread, cord, string. Or beg at the castle. They’d give you what you needed.”
“True. But Snow’s tail was closer. And he is mine.”
Strands of gold against black. Fingers danced. Through, around. They knotted shells and acorns and bound them, black and gold, and wove a pattern. Ahjvar smelt, for a moment, the sea and the shore, the thyme-grown downs above the cliff. Memories he didn’t hold close, for all Ghu did. Ghu walked the downs and the cliff and the shores of Sand Cove in his dreams, longing for that place again, as Ahjvar did not. A bad time. They were all bad times, for Ahjvar, till they came here…except for the sun on the stones of the wall, and the sound of the surf, and the young man sleeping on the other side of the fire, who did not have the sense to be afraid.
That was good. That was there at Sand Cove, and not to be forgotten, held in scent of sea and weed and thyme.
In the dreams, when Ghu’s dreaming drew Ahjvar there, the place held no nightmares. In the dreams, when they walked in that place, there was peace, and the scent of thyme, of lavender and the sea.
“Duck again.”
“What do you want this time, my ear?”
“Maybe.” Ghu caught and bit him like a puppy, but was solemn the next instant. Kissed him like a blessing. The web made a crescent, a young moon, the shells caught in it, the acorns. He knotted the cords of its two tails behind Ahjvar’s neck, under his hair.
It was warm against Ahjvar’s skin. Scratchy, a little. He expected he would grow used to it.
The tying of it brought them to where they would not be.
“The horses can’t go far over the border, can they?” he asked. Ghu sighed. “They’re not exactly…rea
l and living beasts. Not entirely. Not any more. Too much drawn into what I am.”
“As I am not?”
“It would seem so.”
He had been east to Pirakul in the service of his god and emperor, and south over the sea to Barrahe for the god. That had not been—as Empress Iri had irreverently suggested when she was only a girl being fostered for a time by the god and his consort, as all the imperial children had been—an expedition in search of the secrets of growing coffee beans. Many times in Denanbak and Darru and Lathi, where Ghu could not go and yet had reason to send more than an imperial envoy.
“This is going to involve camels again.”
Sober, then. “Ahjvar…I am sorry.”
“Camels. You should be.” A deep breath. “There’s a devil behind this Westron cult of the red priests, Ghu. You know, I know—it’s Sien-Shava Jochiz. He’s what the Lady feared.” And he said it unflinching, who could not speak of her, would not. “An empire in the west, Tiypur rising again. That’s what the empress and the council of the provinces thinks, and the Pine Lady of wizards and the captain of the Wind in the Reeds. I think there’s more. It…is it you who feels there’s more? I don’t know what I know. What’s you knowing, what’s me fearing. You were trying to find Yeh-Lin. What did you see that I can’t remember the shape of?”
“I don’t know. Something. I can’t see. Shadows.” A hesitation. “Death. For us all.”
“He builds an army. He already has his own folk well under his heel, and he builds an army out of them. It sounds mad to say it. We’re the other side of the world from him. But we hurt him and he hates us. Nabban, which defeated him, drove him out. The land he would have made a puppet-empire in the east. Hates us, you and me. We hurt him.”
“Yes.”
“Cold hells, Ghu, I don’t know how we kill a devil.”
Because it was hard for him not to see the world so and in this he did not understand how else to see it. When an enemy came hate-filled to kill, not in some confusion, some pain that could be eased, some wrong to be amended and the cause of hate made less—he did not see that there was any other way. But he had barely survived, and Jochiz had not even been in Nabban, not truly, only casting a part of himself into the land through a puppet, a vessel of his will.
