by K. Johansen
He knows a man would bring them gentle and willing to his hand. But it is only his own eyes can look on them, beyond Nabban’s boundaries. And at that time, he regrets the wonder lost that Ghu would find, more than he could ever see. The words he sets down for the imperial library are blunt and plain things. He lacks the gift of his long-gone granddaughter for poetry.
But I did see. You made me a winter’s worth of tales when you came home. And I see, now, with your eyes, your living it again.
The pilgrim-party spends its nights either in guest-houses maintained in the thorn-fenced dry-season villages, or in compounds that to himself Ahjvar calls caravanserais, hostels maintained for these pilgrimages and spaced for their slow and easy footpace.
So many voices, so much noise. Unending, entirely inoffensive, laughter and jokes and tales traded in several related languages; even the inevitable grumbles and complaints and frictions between people should be no cause for real anger. So many small fretting days, dragged down to the trudging of the white oxen. A lean and leggy breed, but still—he could easily outpace them, and not regret doing without the burdens they carry, the water-gourds no more than the twice-baked cakes. He stops sleeping, which is never a good sign, and is not so gracious as he could be in refusing the suggestion by one of his fellow travellers that they might quite pleasurably share their blankets for a night or two.
She seemed very nice, I thought.
Ghu… And reckless, because why should Ghu be the only one to tease, or for that matter, the only one to— Would you have minded?
Ghu seems to consider this carefully. Perhaps.
Good.
But if you did want—only tell me, is all.
No. No.
The daytime heat is oppressive. No worse than that of the southern provinces, but here there is no shelter other than the shadows of scattered stands of thorny acacia and baobab, the latter of which makes him think somehow of elephants, the same ponderous curves massive against the sky. He wraps a caravaneer’s scarf over head and face. Day by day the grass grows shorter, more sere and sparse, and the temperature climbs. The wind blows unceasingly, gritty with dust. They are drawing near the desert, Sister Enyal promises, and the turning point of their pilgrimage, after which they will make a shorter journey back to the hills and follow the highway of the legendary wizard Nalzawa, founder of the commonwealth, through the hills to Barrahe. The end of the world, this land, for them. If there are folk in the desert, no land claims them. Beyond, somewhere, one comes again to mountains, and the city-states of the north and west, the land called Rostenga. Few pilgrimages come this far, to the holy place of the goddess of the first and last tree, nameless and folkless.
A goddess of seers and diviners. A goddess of silences.
Last tree before the desert, first tree of the desert’s edge. Oldest tree, in the tales told in the north of the world, but first, oldest, that might be a translator’s error. Goddess of the underground river, a devil once told him. There are still occasional trees, mostly thorn, but there is no sign there was ever a river. Not even the least of coulees.
Ahjvar has always assumed an underground river must flow into or out of the earth—he expects hills, a gorge, a cavern, not just the pale grass and yellow dust reaching, it seems, to the world’s end in all directions, the sky burning above.
“By noon, we’ll come to her,” Enyal had said as they settled into the hostel the previous evening. “She’s not a goddess who takes form in the world, but she has been known to speak in the dreams of those who most have need of her. Perhaps tonight. She may watch us even now, as we approach her holy place.”
Nothing watches in the night, except what feels like the night itself, the natural world of these plains: insect, bird, rodent, hunter, all disturbed and wary, a single human straying. The hostel left sleeping behind him, Ahjvar stops and unslings the bundle he carries, the one bag he does not let them put on their oxen, though they laugh at him, insisting on carrying himself his sheaf of paper, his inks and reed-pens for his daily account of their travels. What else he carries, rolled in an old plaid blanket, he has never shown them. A thing of his god, he says when someone notices and asks what he has hidden there.
Ahjvar shakes out the plaid blanket, snatches the scabbarded blade as it flies free. Belts on his sword and two of his knives, digs in the bottom of the bag for his bracelets, which are nothing of Nabban but a king’s gold from another life, heavy, with terminals shaped as snarling leopards’ heads. They cover one set of scars, but that isn’t the reason to wear them. Declaration, of what and who he is, for himself as much as the goddess. Declaration and courtesy, offering respect. Ambassador, god to god.
Feeling even more unburdened than when he left the crowded hall of sleepers and all their pressing, dreaming souls, though a sword at his hip should be no lesser weight than in a bag on his back, he covers the last miles, as certain of his way as the arrow once it leaves the bow.
Only with the help of the Old Great Gods were the seven defeated, say the songs of the north. But the devils were devils, even in human bodies, and were not so easily slain, despite the aid of the Old Great Gods and only by the Old Great Gods were they bound, one by one, and imprisoned: Ogada in stone, Jasberek in water, Vartu in earth, Tu’usha in the heart of a flame, Ghatai in a burning mountain, Jochiz in the youngest of rivers…and Dotemon, who had been the Nabbani wizard and empress and tyrant Yeh-Lin, in the oldest of trees.
The girth of the ancient baobab is vast, a blackness against the stars. Ahjvar can believe it the oldest of trees after all. He has slept in houses smaller. Roots deep, deep, seeking hidden waters, and thick branches reaching like a child’s stubby fingers for the stars. The naked twigs sway, and the grass about him whispers suddenly like the wings of disturbed bats. Nothing else.
He bows to the starless darkness that is the tree, there being no other obvious focus for courtesy. “Lady of the tree, my name is Ahjvar, rihswera of the holy one of Nabban, and Nabban sends me to you to speak of the devil Dotemon.”
He waits for some thickening of attention, some change in the uneasy wind, but the answer when it came startles him.
“Priest of Nabban, they call you, do they not?” Human voice, a woman’s, not young, not old, and the feeling of a body near him, that impression of warmth, scent, breath. And she speaks Nabbani, with Yeh-Lin’s archaic accent. “But what is rihswera?”
“A Praitannec title. The rihswera is the champion of a king or a queen. What the folk of the north would call the king’s sword. Lady of waters, you’ve seen Dotemon? She came back here?”
“She did, yes. Forty-four rains past. She stayed with me through a year.”
Two rainy seasons, greater and lesser, in each year. Not so long ago, then.
“Why?” he asks, because it might have a bearing on what he has come to ask. He hopes not.
“She wanted quiet, she said. Peace in which to think, and to empty herself of thought. She had been many years travelling in Pirakul. She said—” the voice chuckles, deep and rich, and says something in a southern tongue he doesn’t know, and then in the speech of the coast that is the second language for everyone of the commonwealth, “she said she must sit and let the winds off the desert blow the cobwebs and the clutter from her mind, because they weighed her down and made her coward when she faced thought of—she did not say what.”
“Do you know where she has gone?”
“No. Is she an enemy of your god, Rihswera of Nabban?”
“No.” He hopes not.
“She spoke of you. She spoke of your god. Her god, she says. She spoke of him often, when we spoke at all. Generally she only…was. Beneath the sun, and the rain. She is able to sit. The devils were restless, and the wizards they seduced to them were restless souls. Yeh-Lin Dotemon has found stillness. I value that in her.”
“You believe her true, lady?”
“Do you not?”
“By her deeds…I think so. Nabban does. He trusts in hope.”
Yes,Ghu whispers.
“And yet he keeps a killer to run his errands? Do not deny that you are that.”
“I am not—” He doesn’t bother. “No.” Denial and agreement. “We’ll find her when it is time, regardless. Lady of the oldest of trees, I’m sent to ask you to free her.”
“I have freed her, in defiance of all that the Old Great Gods asked of me when they laid her like the dead above my river, within my trunk, with a stone arrow in her heart. I freed her, though I had wound roots all through her within my own Gods-wounded heart, to hold her deep in her dreaming death. I freed her and I let her go into the world to see it with newborn eyes. Why ask?”
“Because either she lies, or she is still constrained by you. Leashed and limited. You hold a part of her still.”
“I do. Rihswera of Nabban, why would you have her otherwise? The devils were not meant for this world. They do not move through it lightly.”
“Yet we would ask you to free her, lady. A time is coming when we may need her strength unleashed. My god sees it.”
“Nabban goes to war? Is it Pirakul you would have her invade again, or the jungles and the highlands south of you? I know your land from her tales of her own old sins. It was great and it was feared, in the days of her rule. Would your god make it so again?”
“No. Not war. We hope, not war again. Lady, we know the devils are free, and some have died, and some are hunted by one of their own. There will be war, maybe, between them again, war to tear and scar the world as they tore and scarred it long ago. We don’t know. We hope to avert it. We hope Dotemon will be our ally. We know—my god has seen—that there is a darkness growing in the west, a storm brewing— beyond our horizon still, but coming. He wants Dotemon freed to stand with us against it.” Though if it reached so far as Nabban again, it would be too late.
Ghu shapes him, he knows it. He shapes his god. He is a corruption, he sometimes thinks, as much as consort—
No,Ghu protests, urgent. No.
—and he knows that other gods, and the philosophers and priests of other lands, might say it. A god should not look beyond his bounds, should not reach, and act. They do, he and Ghu—
We do now. Ghu, how?
We dream in one another.
Typical cryptic Ghu, going poetic and elusive.
Idiot boy.
Oh, always.
—They will use what they have, to prevent that storm ever rolling over Nabban. He knows it, there before the goddess of the baobab. He knows it now.
Come with me, not to be my assassin, the man had said, long ago, and, You don’t kill for me, not like that. But that was a different time, and in defence of the souls of his folk, Ghu, who is Nabban, will use whatever weapons he has. And if Ahjvar his rihswera be one, Dotemon is surely another.
Ghu says nothing. Ghu knows this, knows he has always known it.
“He used the devil in his wars before,” the goddess says. “He allowed his first empress, the Grasslander Suliasra Ivah, to use her.”
“No. The devil served as general and wizard. Of her own will, and as a duty to the land. She was not used. She served, as lords of the land do. She kept her oaths, and she kept faith.”
“You believe—your god believes she will still do so? In her full strength, which he cannot match? He would trust in a devil to choose to stand with the folk of the earth and their gods against her own kind?”
“Yes.”
“Certainty, or hope?”
“Lady, we ask. We trust her. She has been tried and proven.” To a point. So far.
“Fighting fire with fire? A tactic, but what if the wind changes? Should I tempt her, or let you push her, to be what she once was? Think— she was the tyrant of Nabban. Perhaps she still covets it. It is your land and its folk will suffer if your trust is misplaced.”
“You think Nabban, he and I, would not suffer, if she turned against us, first and before ever his folk and his land? She knows us, and what we could and would do against her, however doomed that might be in the end. She would not leave us free to act against her. We don’t offer our folk as sacrifice to our trust being misplaced, without offering ourselves first.”
“I do notice you say ‘we,’ now, and not ‘my god.’”
He keeps his silence.
“Do you speak for him, or he through you?”
He shrugs. No answer to give. To him, it makes no difference.
“Priest and champion. That is not what you are but what you do. What you are, your nature…There is the hand of a god on you and the breath of a god in you, and his roots run through you, blood and marrow, river and stone. You unsettle the winds of this land and the currents of its water. You are—a wrongness.”
He is not going to apologize.
“You should take yourself out of this place, Rihswera of Nabban. Go back to your own land and stay there in peace with your god.”
No arguing with that. He craves the solitude of two, not loneliness.
Ghu says, I’m sorry. I miss you, every breath.
The wind off the desert is hot. It gusts about them suddenly, and dry twigs rattle together. Some fall.
“Dotemon,” he says. “We ask that you release her.”
“Are you come to threaten me, if I do not accede to Nabban’s wish in this?”
“No. But we need…he says, he sees her free. He will…I don’t know. I don’t know what we might do, or what you might do to prevent us. Or might try, to do so. Do you think you would succeed? Better we neither of us have to find out, don’t you think? Gods and demons have died trying to hold the devils bound. None succeeded in the end. We need Dotemon, unleashed to do what she may.”
“And when all the north is laid waste in another devils’ war, will you come with the survivors of your folk to beg refuge?”
“I would be dead with my god. It’s another devils’ war we fear and try to find some way to prevent.”
“So you say. Sit, priest of Nabban. And find silence. Wait with me for the dawn.”
He settles with his back against the smooth bark, sword across his lap, and watches the rising stars until they begin to fade in the swift lightening of the southern dawn.
The goddess stands only a few paces distant, watching for the sun. The ground about them is a litter of broken twigs, dead leaves.
The tree is not dry-season bare. The tree is dying, or dead.
The goddess turns to look down on him, a face grave and beautiful, with broad cheekbones and a small chin. Shorter and stockier than most of the plains-folk, with full breasts, broad-hipped. She is quite naked, her cloud of iron-grey hair neither dressed nor trimmed. Her only ornament is a braided bracelet, cold black against warm near-black skin. She is quite humanly handsome, but she forms and wears the body as a shell, a dress to show respect and honour a guest, as he has armed himself and worn the gold. This is not she, not as the appearance of the god Forzra living among his folk had been the true expression of himself. This appearance of a woman was not something that the goddess of the tree has ever been or needed to be.
An underground river, Yeh-Lin had said. Did the devil think it so? They have met before, she and he—Ghu, not he, but now he remembers that vision as if it were his own. This is the goddess of the dreaming. This warned of—what would be, or had been?
The weight of a great and ancient lake, an inland sea, lost and remembered, and all the land tilts inwards to wrap around her, dizzying, folding up about him so that he feels he is falling towards her, to drown.
No. She does not intend that. She only is, existing, a weight in the world. As is his own god, but Ahjvar does not feel it so alien, being within it in himself.
A weight, still, even dying. Fading, as her waters, into the earth.
He bows low where he sits and straightens, waiting for the world to steady, as she seats herself across from him, legs folded under her, hands on her knees.
In silence, he can find the deep waters of his god, that stillness of stone, the light sparking out of darkness
into bird-bright flight, all flowing wind and water. But the goddess does not keep her own meditation. He feels her brushing along the edges, listening, tasting, testing, and cannot help the jolt of anger, of outright fear, that gives him. He does not rise and pace, does not trace the lines in the air with the sword’s edge, weave the dance, but he walks it within, sets rowan for protection, almond to forbid, prickly ash to counter what she works: her quiet insistent pressing to see beyond the surface of him. Too late, maybe, to keep her from seeing more than he would have her know, but she…backs off, or at least fades, no longer touching. The god’s stillness is lost to him, though. It becomes only the waiting, the timeless watch, which might be for a death or a dawn or a changing of the guard, the stillness only of the drawn bow, of the breath yet to be taken.
He is not hunting. Remember that. It is the goddess who first breaks the stillness.
“I have seen what you are,” she says. “I understand what it is I feel in you. Priest of Nabban, what has been done to you is against the proper nature of things. It is wrong. Would you be free of your god and the bonds that hold you?”
“No. No.” A deep breath, to stop himself bolting to his feet, reaching for some defence. He spreads his hands, lightly resting on the scabbard, not to clench them. “And do not you think to tear me from him. You will fail. Others have.”
“I do not see how I might free you, yet, though if I sat long enough in silence I might come to see. I shall do so, if you would have that gift. This is an ugly thing.”
“Yes, but it is not his doing. He only took what he found. I am his now, as I am—and of my own will. Leave us be.”
“Is it you yourself who say so, or he?”
“I.”
“Do you know so? What is your own will, and what his? How do you know?”
