The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  Tonight the mountains loomed close, jagged teeth against the stars. A faint smudging of the sky to the north, some rising smoke or fume. The Malagru, marching down to meet the Pillars of the Sky, grew restless. He had led them off the road, but in the morning they would return to it, to climb the stone-paved highway up the pass. Be in the city by nightfall, probably.

  There was a chill in him. A reluctance.

  He had drowned in Marakand.

  The Lady of Marakand, everything of her, was gone. Felt nonetheless as if he braced to plunge his hand into fire. War and earthquake, since he had last ridden this way. His doing. Well, his had been the pebble that started that avalanche.

  And this time?

  The fire he had made burned bright. In Marakand, he would go to the ambassador’s house. Not expected, but welcomed, as he must be, the god’s own consort. A place where he might command, if he wished to. He did not.

  Yeh-Lin was there, in the city. He could feel her, now. So close, there was no hiding any longer. They had lived too near, too long, and she had sworn herself to him.

  No. To Ghu.

  Sometimes he was not altogether certain whose thoughts he was thinking. It should bother him, and it did not. He was the god’s champion, his sword…his eyes and ears and voice, to go for Nabban where Nabban could not.

  Twelve years ago, he had made a voyage.

  The diviners begin to dream dark dreams, and the shamans of Denanbak, and the Tigress of the Little Sister. His god, in his fey and dreaming moods, when he sits watching unblinking through the night, sees a fire rising in the west and spreading over the world, sees shrines godless and souls lost, torn away from their road, devoured.

  Sees the tides of the world shifting. Rivers wander. Forests walk. That is as it has always been. They remember that the Badlands of the desert road to northern Denanbak were once a lake, an inland sea. But the spring comes later and later to the northern provinces; the snows are deep, starving the herds in allied Denenbak, in Choa Province and Alwu and the hills of Shihpan. The rains in the south fail; the little rivers dry, and die, and the rice new-planted in the paddies grows yellow, parched. The imperial granaries that stockpile reserves against bad years are depleted and the folk of the villages flock to the cities, seeking work that is not there, and beg on the roads, and murder their neighbours to steal their little all. Storms come out of season, and a city in Pirakul is washed away by typhoon, its temple fallen, its goddess…silenced in the sea, her holy well drowned.

  Is this what was, or what might be? Now, here, Ahjvar does not remember.

  This is as it was when the great lake died, a woman says, a goddess, standing stretched, her arms reaching to embrace the sky, broad toes digging into the earth. Brother turns on brother, sister on sister, the white bones of the beasts bleach on the cracked earth. She is a tree, not a woman, holding up the sky. A piece of the land dies, and its death births new winds. Currents change, and the sea bleeds fire. My folk are dead, all dead, and the generations lost to the gods of other folk, and the gods themselves, have forgotten my name. But in the coming time the desert will flow to the sea.

  This is a tale told by the devil Yeh-Lin: a goddess who is a lost river, a lost river who is a tree.

  A thing does not have to cross the borders to bring death and destruction upon them. Better it is prevented before it ever does. And a god of the earth has responsibility to the whole of the earth, not merely his own folk. Ghu says that. It is not a thought shared by any other god or goddess Ahjvar has ever met.

  What disrupted, what would disrupt, the balance of the world, neither they nor the diviners and seers of the Imperial Corps can determine, but—it seems ominous, and not merely a few bad seasons, when ships and caravans begin to bring stories of lands troubled by unseasonable cold, or drought, or sandstorms, rivers dried or lowlands flooded. True tales, not foreseeings. The caravaneers tell that the sleeping volcanoes of the Malagru grumble and leak smoke once more.

  Then there comes a great wave, striking the coast east of the marshes where once the Golden City of the emperors had floated in its lagoon. Ghu has dreamed, or felt its rise; the few seers dwelling among folk of the stilt-villages, the fishers and fowlers and salt-harvesters there, see his vision, cry his warnings, and many are able to flee inland in time.

  Not all.

  They hear, after, that an island in the southern archipelago, where the pearl-chieftains rule, has been torn apart in eruptions of a green and sleeping mountain over the course of a week, and nearly all its folk, save some fishers out in the great canoes, have died in smoke and burning stone and poisoned air.

  It is as if the world shivers in fever-dreams.

  It does not seem to be any devil’s working. And yet…

  The Rihswera is the god’s sword, held not over the land but against the things that might come to threaten the land. And to that end, the protection of the land, perhaps the world itself…there are other weapons they might also wield. Perhaps.

  The young too-soon-empress is only a princess in these days, and Yuan, too-reckless hunter of wild buffalo in the marshlands of the south coast, is emperor still, when Ahjvar finds himself on a pilgrimage through the lands of the Nalzawan Commonwealth, which occupies the east of the southern continent beyond the sea.

  “Try not to annoy any gods,” Ghu says, before he boards the ship at Kozing Port. “Or princes. Or Yuan will come to me to say that if I must meddle beyond the borders, could I perhaps not send an armed thunderstorm to do it?”

  Not Emperor Suliasra Yuan’s term, but his mother Ruyi’s—Can you not keep your armed thunderstorm at home, Holy One?—when the irate ex-ruler of a small hill-kingdom of Pirakul had begun to send increasingly undiplomatic letters to the empress and high priestess of Nabban demanding compensation for the slaying of that king’s god and his subsequent conquest and exile by a neighbouring queen.

  “Have the emperor lend you an ambassador, then, if you want,” Ahjvar says. “I won’t complain.” He has no especial desire to travel to the lands south overseas, particularly as it means a sea-voyage of well over a month even with fair winds, and whatever he tries, he still suffers seasickness as badly as he ever did. If godhead has to spread tendrils through him, so that he dreams dreams not his own—not that he minds, Ghu’s dreams being far the more restful—

  Am I dreaming now?

  What do you think?

  I think I should be keeping watch.

  I think you do watch.

  —he might wish his good head for the sea were catching as well.

  “I don’t want an ambassador. This isn’t a matter for courts and emperors. Try not to make it one, won’t you?” A grin warm as a touch. “And Ahj, this time, whatever you do, don’t start any wars.”

  He hadn’t that other time. Nor killed a god. Not really. Only a halfling god, anyway, born into too much of his father’s power, which most deities who took it into their heads to consort with human mates had better sense than to let happen. Not his fault that while he was in Pirakul the darkest rumours of the tiger-cult and its sacrifices turned out to be true, there in the far reaches of the hills, or that the deluded godling had chosen to set his devotees hunting the man who had been, in another life, the Leopard of Gold Harbour. That the king who had profited from fear of the cult so long suffered at last the wrath of his neighbours, his protector gone, was no responsibility of Ahjvar’s.

  That isn’t what he dreams tonight. If he dreams. He can see Ailan, sleeping, a hummock of blankets. Hear the old, familiar song, the night-lark. A night-hawk, too, squawking, less melodious. See the stars, the streaks of high cloud trailing over them, like the smoke of distant fires.

  But he is carried there, then, twelve years past, and it feels like dreaming, not memory.

  The Nalzawan Commonwealth is governed by a council of elected tribal elders and the hereditary kings and queens of those tribes. The folk of its various lands, the lush coastal forests and the green hills that make the north to south spine of
the country, the grassy plains and the desert edge beyond, regard both their monarchs and their gods as a shared heritage, unusually. Priests and priestesses of all their many gods and goddesses might travel to study and serve at the Temple of All Gods in the capital Barrahe at the mouth of the goddess Sato’s river. Some never leave. It is a centre of learning and scholarship, like a library of the north. Ahjvar gets out of teeming Barrahe as swiftly and quietly as he can.

  I would have liked to have seen more of it,Ghu says. A beautiful city. Iri should send architects to study its domes. So light, compared to Marakand’s.

  I don’t like domes. However light.

  You’re not an architect.

  A pilgrimage is a thing most Nalzawans try to make at least once in their lives, travelling one of the holy trails that begin and end at the Temple of All Gods in Barrahe. It is a worship of the young, almost a duty, a widening of the world, a way of keeping coast and lush hills and dry, desert-edged plains all united and in understanding—a chance to flirt and court, make friendships and partnerships of lives and trade both, and return home travelled and allegedly wiser.

  A scholar from the north might do so, come to learn about the Nalzawan lands and gods.

  To travel with the pilgrims seems a way to pass through the land quietly, not wandering unwitting into the forbidden, or disturbing presences who might see a straying power, however minor, as a menace and a threat, as had happened in Pirakul and not only in the affair of the tiger-cult. Go humbly with the shield and cloud of a company of souls about him, walk the sacred lines that have been walked for generations, and he will be part of an acceptable pattern, whatever his folk and his land.

  The difference between a spy and a diplomat is more in how you approach a foreign court than in what you do when you get there,Ghu says.

  “That sounds like Rat, not you.”

  Wisdom of the Tigress, says Ghu. Yes, her words, not mine. He laughs. The goddess of the Little Sister has her own way of looking at the world. As goddesses go, Ahjvar rather likes her.

  From Barrahe he travels up the valley of the Sato by boat on the broad, slow river, where in the wild places hippopotamuses are as great a danger as the crocodiles, the latter giants compared to the small beasts of Nabban’s southern rivers. Sato never appears to bless them, though several pilgrims who belong to the folk of the valley speak with her in dreams. All up the valley Ahjvar feels watched.

  She feared us. Ghu regrets this.

  Feared him. This is dream, memory flowing in waking dream, and Ghu is with him, which he was not.

  Ghu has all this in his own memory. He must. He holds all that Ahjvar is. This memory, the dream that colours it. But they share it now. They walk this road of pilgrimage together.

  It is a path. A pattern. A dance.

  A summoning, cast to the wind.

  The wind blows out of the east, west to Marakand.

  He is glad when the company leaves the boat and its crew below a waterfall higher than any he has ever seen, a thunderous pillar of furious white.

  Ghu stands, humanly entranced, the boy again. For a moment Ahjvar even sees him, solid as the stone beneath their feet, hair damply greyed with spray.

  A broad road of steeps and stairs angles up the side of the gorge through dense forest, mist-cool, which clings with roots and tendrils into every crack in the stone. Locals who make their living off the pilgrim-companies have come to carry baggage for them, and to marvel at the foreigner who has travelled so far inland from the busy port to visit the holy places of their gods.

  As they climb away from the water they move into heat and out of the trees. They follow the river past the falls to where the hills open out and the high plains stretch before them. Another shrine, another halt. Forzra, the god of the last of the hills, does not bring himself fully into the world to bless the pilgrims, but later that night, the god wanders down to the yard of the pilgrims’ guest-hall in the town. No one else feels the god’s presence out in the high-fenced yard, not even the chief of their guides, who is a holy sister of the Temple of All Gods in Barrahe. Ahjvar leaves the habitual evening drinking of an oily-tasting tea, said to encourage dreams of the gods, to go out to him.

  “What are you?” Forzra asks. Gods do not always take human form, though it is most common. He looks a man, young, strong, black-skinned, his eyes long-lashed, hair in many short ringlets. The god dresses as the folk of the plains do, only a striped cloth twisted about his hips like a kilt, chest bare. Ahjvar has been getting used to that in both men and women, though it is not a fashion he has adopted, feeling naked enough when the heat drives him to strip to the short gown and sandals of Nabban’s south provinces, with all the ancient scars even that exposes, to pilgrim’s eye or god’s.

  An attractive young man Ahjvar would rather not have staring at him with quite such cool assessment.

  Certainly not now, when he can even smell Ghu beside him, the lingering faint scent of horses that is never out of his clothes, the indefinable mingling of man and pines.

  “A servant of Nabban, travelling to visit some of the shrines of your land,” he says.

  “The Nabbani have become like the Marakanders, thinking nothing real till they have seen it with their own eyes and set it down in their words.” Forzra leans on a staff patterned in fine scales, its head carved like that of snake. He speaks as if he addresses it, not Ahjvar, then turns it so the eyes, chips of glittering stone, seem fixed on him.

  Or on what stands beside him, shadow not quite seen. If he reaches— he won’t, because to touch and find nothing would be worse.

  “Yes. I serve my god in this.”

  “And how do you do so?”

  “Here, in your lands? I’ve said. I travel to visit your shrines and hear the tales of the land, and to carry greetings to any gods I might meet.”

  “And what else?”

  Ahjvar shrugs. “Nothing that is any harm to this land.”

  Forzra frowns. “There is something in you like a sudden wind from the north. The breath of the storm that brings the first rains.”

  Armed thunderstorm.

  I’m glad you’re finding this entertaining, Ghu. Why? Because there are other dreams he would rather dream, and other memories to live in.

  Such as? Breath on his ear. Faint and distant laughter. Walk this path again. It brings us—

  Forzra addresses the staff again, thoughtfully. “I am not sure that I like this storm-front that you bring.”

  Ahjvar bows, though it isn’t Nalzawan fashion to do so. “I serve my god,” he says. “Nabban has nothing but goodwill towards your land and its gods and its folk. All your lands and gods and folks, here beyond the seas.”

  The god says nothing to that, only continues to study him, which he endures in silence, until Forzra gives a nod, turns on his heel, and strides off. Corporeal enough to leave footprints in the dust. But his staff leaves no mark, and then he carries none, something thick as Ahjvar’s upper arm slung over his shoulder…swarming over his shoulder, riding there, tail twining his thigh. Snake embracing the god’s throat, rising over his head like an elephant’s trunk to look back.

  The snake, mottled black and yellow and gleaming as if oiled, is in the guest-hall yard in the morning, when they gather for breakfast while their hired pack-oxen and their handlers assemble. A sacred animal of the god Forzra, their guide Sister Enyal says, and offers it an egg, which it ignores. “A blessing on our journey. Don’t disturb it.”

  I prefer dragons,Ghu says.

  Dogs.

  The dragons don’t track mud into the cave.

  The dragons don’t fit into the cave.

  The dragons turn into dogs, and the dogs roll in the mud and track mud into the cave. They miss having you to tease. I miss having you to cook for.

  He wants to reach, to hold. To be held. But he is by a fire, under a bank of hollies a day’s ride from Marakand. He is no devil, to ride the winds home.

  The snake is at their hostel the first night out from t
he hills, too, or its sibling is, and Ahjvar does not sleep, but sits with his back against the wall and a knife in his hand. After that, Forzra’s lands are left behind. What watches him then, if anything does, he is never certain.

  They have left Sato’s river at Forzra’s town; its course comes down from the south through the fading edge of the hills and will no longer serve them as they set off towards the northwest. Few shrines this way; nearly as few good wells, and not the most popular of the pilgrim circuits. There are only hill-gods of small semi-nomadic herding folk, their shrines often no more than a tree or an engraved stone, with a priest or priestess living nearby in some small thorn-walled compound to tell the stories of the god and accept alms for the blessing, or goddesses of the dry riverbeds that he calls coulees, their shrines rare rocky outcroppings that will be islands when the rains come.

  A few gods and goddesses do appear to bless them, some as man or woman, one as an elephant—

  No, he says to Ghu’s presence. Not even a little one?

  No.

  —two no more than a stirring of the air, yet a presence even those without a priest’s insight or a wizard’s senses could feel. They are wary of Ahjvar but do not approach him, wanting him gone. He makes them uncomfortable. Small gods, wishing to be left in peace and not to draw the attention of powers they do not understand. Much his own attitude to them.

  Though the holiday pace frets him, Ahjvar finds the open land, the long views, ease his soul, at least in the mornings, before the chatter begins to grate. The grasslands are, in their own way, as strange to him as the hills, coulees marked by stands of tall, bare-trunked trees that lift their heads like clouds, unexpectedly graceful giraffes, which he knows only from scrolls in the imperial library, reaching to browse them, and wild elephants far larger than those that work in Pirakul. They see antelope of several kinds, some wild oxen that look to be all head and shoulders, wary wild dogs, red jackals with a different song from those of the deserts he knows. Lions, which take his breath away. And leopards. He watches it all and wishes he had an artist’s skill to paint it, especially the trees like solitary clouds and the elephants and the striped wild horses that they say cannot be tamed.