The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  The lancer company was over to the east, and she found Holla there. No fires, not once night fell. Reyka’s rule. Folk lay close, shared blankets, not necessarily with any thought of more than warmth and fellowship. They would be breaking camp in the first grey light of the new day, moving slowly northward, a shield to the families and herds in flight ahead, making for the Bakanav, the river that joined the Kinsai’av above the caravan town of At-Landi. The Northron ships, which came down by forest rivers and a portage between the Varr’aa and the Bakanav, gave up their cargoes there to the camel-caravans and took the goods of east and south back north. A barrier to the Westron advance, maybe. Or at least a means of getting out of his path.

  Most were already sleeping and she stood staring in the dark, not able to make out hummock of body from roughness of the ground or stacked gear. She’d thought to find some cluster still gossiping with the newcomer. Many of the lancers were caravaneers, who’d come with horses and camels and years on the road behind them; they’d be wanting news of friends and gangs and even family left behind. But the days were heavy.

  Hopelessness. On them all. A weight like grey cloud, unending, pressing low. This was a retreat, a withdrawal from their own land, and they left their gods and their goddesses dead behind them.

  “Caro’s gone out on watch.” Soft voice at her shoulder. She wasn’t even surprised. Turned to face him.

  “I was looking for you.” Jolanan shrugged, which was pointless; he wouldn’t see. “I don’t know—making sure you’d settled in.” That was pointless, too. She wasn’t responsible for the man and that wasn’t why she’d come anyway. Just…

  “Can’t sleep?” Was that a question, or did Holla say it of himself? She wasn’t certain. “Here, I saved the last of the tea.”

  Dim movement. Cup in his hand. Jolanan found it as much by the fading heat of it on the back of her hand as by sight. Took it and followed him when he walked away, off into the night, waiting for her to catch up, a hand under her elbow when she stumbled on a tussock. Found a place to sit together, bruised grass sweet about them and a nightjar calling, as if all the humans and horses and camels were nothing to worry it.

  “You alone?” Holla asked her.

  “Tibor’s my cousin,” she said. “He’d gone to the road. I found him, when—I came east. Found the warband. Everyone else is dead. You too?”

  “Long dead,” he said.

  She drank the tea, bitter, sweet. Caravan tea, smoky as hard Northron fish.

  “You should be with Caro’s riders,” Holla said abruptly. “I like how you handle that cranky brute of yours in a fight.”

  “I’m a cow-herd, not a caravan mercenary.” Had he been lying up in the grass watching? Jolanan supposed he might have been; unhorsed and lacking a bow he couldn’t very well have joined in when she and Tibor were fighting for their lives. Had he seen that wolf-thing?

  Distracted from asking the question. He’d touched a knuckle to the back of her hand, still wrapped around his cup. Not accidental, though they both could let it seem so, if she only moved her hand away. She didn’t.

  “I’ll teach you,” he said. “They’re going to have to scare up a spear or two for me somewhere, anyway, they can equip you too. You ride with us tomorrow.” She didn’t question how he was going to bring that about. He seemed to take it for granted Caro, Lazlan, they’d all do what he asked. Her too?

  Holla wasn’t asking anything. He was just…sitting there. Tired. Disheartened. Alone. She leaned a little. Not much. Didn’t need much, to bring her shoulder to his arm. After a moment it went around her. Tucked her closer.

  Heart might be beating a little too fast. Reckless and not worth worrying about, that she didn’t have what the caravaneers called a maiden’s friend from the glovers of Marakand or Serakallash, or the amulets a wizard more skilled in spell-crafting than Arpath might sell. Not worth worrying, because she didn’t think they were any of them going to survive long enough for next year to matter. She didn’t want the mere warmth of some half-known fellow archer who might be dead tomorrow snoring and sighing and breaking wind beside her, she didn’t want to lie trying not to think, to remember, waiting for exhaustion to drag her down so she could sleep and forget till in the morning it all began again or the horns woke them into blind flight in the dark. She didn’t want to care, about anything, and Holla had smiled, younger than his eyes, and even his eyes had something in them that wasn’t there in Tibor, who worried over her for kinship’s sake, in Arpath, in Nessa who so quickly become a friend like a sister and then was dead anyway, last week which seemed months ago now—

  “You tired?” she asked, and when he looked down to answer her she could feel his breath, clean, inviting, on her face.

  “Very,” he said, but when she set the empty cup down and put her fingers to his cheek, thumb under his jaw, she could feel that his pulse ran hard like her own.

  Jolanan found his mouth in the dark on her second try, and what was sweet, careful invitation—he could still say, no, we need to be sensible, a Westron patrol might find us, the alarm might sound, there’s someone back in my caravan-gang, I’m too old, you’re too young, or just I’m really too tired and we should sleep—all of that, any of that—became hungry, urgent fire burning away all the sensible arguments neither of them was making. Fingers finding buckles, ties—not quite so insensible of caution as to strip themselves utterly naked, no, but his hands were warm on her skin, fingers spreading over a breast, fingers spread on her belly, sliding down and she lay back, hooking a leg over him, tugging him down over her, her own hand going down between them where she’d never let a hand go with a man before, cuddling with Dharand who had ridden herd for some remoter cousins of the next valley, the two of them so careful, so sensible of what was right between young people who had not yet pledged their betrothal before the goddess—Dharand, like all the other people of her first life, dead or lost and only might have been, nothing to do with Jolanan who could kill a man and not even remember his face, only that his horse had a white blaze. Holla was hot down there, hard and silk-soft, and she was afraid she might hurt him, her fingers so bark-rough, ragged-nailed. He made a sound that was nothing but pleasure, though, and let her carry on with what she had begun, his mouth on her breast, till it was his own hand exploring, fingers…a tongue deep in her mouth and she was losing herself, somewhere, losing the world, which was all she asked of the night.

  Something—on the edge of his awareness. A shadow. Something…slinking past, in the darkness. Like the swift-slow shadow under the canoe, half lost in wave and shimmer. Shark. Corner of the eye and gone.

  “Wake up,” his sister said. “He’s coming to kill you.” And she laughed.

  Something out there. Dangerous. Ancient. Hidden.

  A shape he almost knew.

  Jochiz sat up, opening his eyes, flinging the blanket back. The woman Clio woke as well. A primate of the seventh circle, diviner and warrior and devoted lieutenant…he pushed her aside, when she would have reached for him, her words meaningless, questioning, concerned at his alarm.

  It wasn’t alarm. He had not cried out.

  It was only dream.

  Warning.

  Jochiz lay down again. Let the woman reach for him, hold him, stroke the scars of his forearms, which fascinated her. Her mouth on them, soft, as if she would suckle there, feed on what he had already given her, given again and again, for all his folk in their generations. He could ignore that. Ignore her even as her mouthing grew more insistent, teeth nipping. He put her aside, but did not order her from the bed. He might want her later. The body, Sien-Shava, had his needs, and her nibbling teeth…not now. Later. He let himself lie, still, rocking in the waves, in the darkness, letting the water flow through him, carrying the shape of the shadow, the scent…memory.

  Elusive as water, unknowable as the depths of a lake.

  CHAPTER XIX

  From the Chronicle of Nikeh Gen’Emras

  Most of the Nearer Grass had fallen before
that bloody summer’s end, though a band of warriors drawn from the folk of many gods and goddesses of that land had harried the army, a small dog nipping at their heels, until the fall of the Sayanbarkash, whereupon they retreated after the folk of that land, who had fled, many of them, north over the river Bakan into lands of folk who were kin both to them and to the Northrons, and had their own customs and ways. They were not entirely unwelcoming, but neither was there any easy way for the folk and beasts to fit themselves into a land already peopled. Some found place there, others went up the Kinsai to At-Landi, the town where the caravans of the road gave up their trade to the ships of the Northrons.

  The All-Holy’s advance stopped at the Kinsai’s western shore. His knight, Prince Dimas of Emrastepse, elevated to the seventh circle of his favour, a lord of the faith and in command of the Army of the South, on his orders established a winter camp opposite the Lower Castle, a hundred miles down river, below the Fifth Cataract. The All-Holy himself, commanding the Army of the North, did the same above the First. All across the Nearer Grass, in lands where the gods and goddesses had been destroyed, those folk who had not been able to flee and who had saved themselves from the slaughter by surrendering to the priests, swearing oaths of submission to the All-Holy, learning to recite their catechism, offering their wrists to the tattooers’ needles and undergoing initiation to the first circle of the faith, laboured to bring in the sparse harvest and to supply the armies. All across the Nearer Grass, mission-houses were established that were more like the princes’ towers of Tiypur, ditched and walled and garrisoned with not only teachers of the third circle, who had charge of educating the folk in their wide-scattered family holdings as well as the children brought in to be students—truer to say hostages— in each tower’s school, but a garrison of fifth-circle knights and ordinary soldiers.

  There were rumours among the folk of the Nearer Grass and even among the Westrons. They called it a lie of the heathens, the raiders, that somehow spread, though whispering it might have the one who did so hanged. The All-Holy was not any messenger of the Old Great Gods. The All-Holy was no oracle. There was no nameless god and never had been.

  The All-Holy was a devil, one of the seven, and his name, when he was a man, had been Sien-Shava. He was the devil Jochiz.

  The red priests killed for the hint of it. Blasphemy. But like fire in a coal-seam, it never quite would die.

  Too many afoot, exhausted, hungry. They couldn’t simply keep running and leave pursuit behind. Caro’s signaller bleated the order they all anticipated. Not too much confusion when the ram’s horn blared. Holla knew something of such manoeuvres and there were Grasslanders among them, and one caravaneer, Hani Kahren, who said he had been Nabbani cavalry far in the east of the world. They managed it, turning back through themselves, first time that wasn’t a drill. Jolanan kneed Lark about, holding her place in the line. Caro came through them, moving to the fore again, with the signaller and the man carrying the pennant ahead. A gap formed to Jolanan’s left in which they would find place. Holla was riding up there with them, as if by right—which he had, now, since after three days of him at her shoulder Caro had gone to Reyka and told her to give him the damned lancers, since he had so many opinions. No, he’d said, and ended up her second anyhow. One of the few, along with the Nabbani man, who understood not only that they should hold to greater order than some kind of raiding party, but how to achieve it, beyond what Reyka and Lazlan had managed.

  Jolanan wondered if Holla himself had served in the guard of Marakand or some company farther afield. Didn’t ask. He didn’t talk much of where he had been, before he loomed up out of the grass on a fresh-stolen horse. No tales of life on the road, of other lands. Didn’t talk much at all, except of each day just past. She didn’t want to look back either. Or ahead. Grass and stars and a shared blanket. That was all they had.

  Trotting, a threat. Fear before them. Already the Westron soldiers began to bunch together as though they would be safer so, crowding one another. If they had the sense to ground their spears, those that had them, to make a bristling wall—but they were far from their most feared captains—conscripts, probably, with little training and no armour but leather. Scouts riding far out to the east had reported the band, a hundred or so, tracking Westgrassland refugees afoot, a mass escape from one of the enslaved settlements. The fugitives seemed to be heading for the Kinsai’av.

  Arguments. They were too few to split, almost to the Bakanav, which like the Kinsai at least felt as if it should be a border, a barrier. Most of the folk who had fled had gone that way, into the hills north of At-Landi at the rivers’ meeting. In the end, they had divided, some to go with Reyka north, hoping to gather more folk over the river, form some plan of defence to hold that as a line if the Westrons turned that way, but a company of mixed lancers and skirmishers under Lazlan and Caro to overtake and protect the folk fleeing east. So few, they were, once they split. Nothing but raiders, brigands, the delusion that they were a warband, an army, revealed as nothing but a bard’s dream, ten riders for every one when the ride came to be song. But who would sing it, when all who survived were slaves and their children raised to worship a devil?

  Didn’t matter. Now. Here.

  The Westrons nerved themselves, a jogging charge, shouting the praise of their false god. The lancers surged into a canter, and the troop of archers flashed past, shooting, whooping, wheeling away. Noticeable gaps in the Westron formation, if you could call it a formation when it was breaking apart, each man abruptly a rabbit running in terror of his own life. Hunting exhausted folk armed with a few scrounged tools—that was one thing. Facing a cavalry charge, apparently, another, and Jolanan found she was laughing. Lance lowered on the captain’s sign, the bright pennon ahead dipping, and they were up and around Caro, making her one of the line. They struck the Westrons with a roar. The shock was still strange, for all her weary evening drilling; this was only her second fight as a lancer, if you could call the patrol they ran down two days ago even a fight. Her force and Lark’s made one, and the dead man dragged her lance down; couldn’t free it so she let it go, drew her sabre as their own line spread, and the butchery began.

  Behind them, men and women, some few mounted, others afoot, were running, running now for their lives, a company of Lazlan’s skirmishers making a shield of bows and steel about them. Half a mile more, that was all—they were nearly to the Kinsai’av, the farthest east Jolanan had ever been. Nearly the whole of the camp. No children. The adults had given their promises to the red priests and were marked for the false god—because, the woman who spoke as their chief had said, it was better to live and find their children again and keep memory of the true gods in their hearts. They served by tending the ill-managed fields, vast ploughings of virgin grassland on hills that had been grazing since first ever this land was settled, stony and dry. Their children were gone. To other settlements, it was alleged, where they might attend school under the red priests and learn to be good and true servants of the All-Holy.

  The Westrons weren’t people, behind the faces. Jolanan didn’t let them be. Just eyes and mouths, just intent and movement. Slashed and shoved and Lark struck, hoof and tooth, savage. For every lost father, lost mother, stolen child. Every man and woman and child torn from home, from god or goddess, or dead in their purging fires. A man kneeling, no weapon but a long knife which he dropped before him, hands over his head, defensive, and she leaned and slashed at his throat as Lark plunged on by. No mercy, no quarter. If the Westgrasslanders escaped from the camp were retaken, they would be killed as apostates, and not swiftly. Back when she first joined, when she was riding a patrol with Lazlan himself, so young, in the spring, they had found the aftermath of one such execution. No wood for burning, the usual punishment, so the prisoners had been pegged to the earth through their wrists and ankles and gutted alive, left to die.

  They had buried them in the clean earth, and then she had been sick.

  In the back of the mind, always, in those
first days—would they find her father, Tibor’s mother and elder sister, the folk of that farmstead, among the prisoners, among the dead…

  Never did. Never any word. She and Tibor and every other West-grasslander among them, every time, searching, afterwards—asking among the survivors, hoping, fearing…most of them didn’t even look any more. Didn’t let hope take root.

  Their own line had lost its shape, broken into solitary fury or smaller bands, scattering. Holla was standing in his stirrups at Caro’s side, roaring at them to close up. The signaller’s horn echoed him and Caro’s pennon whirled.

  “They’ll try to make you scatter,” he had said. “They’ll want to break your line. You’re a wall. Remember that. Each rider, each horse, a stone in that wall, interlinked. Weakened, the whole line of you, if there are gaps. You’re not children. You’re not puppies, to go chasing what catches your eye. If they run, let them run. Wait your signal, watch your five-leader, watch your captain. Don’t lose yourself in the fury. Don’t lose yourself in the fear. Strength in the line, remember that.”

  Man on her right, woman on her left. This was no longer any charge, no pushing front. They were circling, turning, closing around their enemies.

  Fewer and fewer. One of their own unhorsed and down before her, his eye-framing tattoos of coots saying he was of the Darya-Kinsai. Occupied by the Westron Army of the South now, she had heard. The man was wounded past saving or already dead, his lower jaw slashed away. She tightened her legs, jumped Lark over him. The last Westrons were on their knees, not even begging, just crying out for death, crying the name of their lying god, arms reaching out, as if to embrace him and the miraculous translation they expected in their dying.

  “Devil-worshippers!” she shouted at one as she struck him down. “Die damned and godless—your road will be lifetimes long!” They didn’t understand her. Didn’t matter. She smashed a man’s face with her shield when he tried to scramble up Lark as if she and the horse were some tree to be scaled, hand groping to seize and pull her down. Someone who still had their lance speared him as he struck the ground.