Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  Smell of burnt flesh.

  He should have ridden by. But they were here now. Ghu ducked into the low doorway of the domed drystone hut, pushing the sheepskin curtain aside.

  “Ghu?” Ahjvar muttered something about fools and half-wits, which sounded more like Ahj and reassured him, before crawling after.

  The hut held nothing but a pile of dingy sheepskins for bedding, a few baskets and leather sacks hung from pegs driven between the stones, and some hand-shaped pots and bowls.

  “Don’t take the food,” Ahjvar said. “We’re not so far gone this time that we need to steal a dead man’s stores, are we? Leave it for the truly desperate.”

  Ghu was not so sure of that. They lost time by hunting everything from antelope to speckled sandgrouse, so as to leave more of the dried peas purchased in Porthduryan for the camels, and he was not certain how far yet they had to go and whether they truly gained anything by such diversions. He had asked about the road, but estimates of the stages of the journey varied wildly. There was still a dividing of ways before them, a choice between longer and easier, or shorter and more dangerous. Winter deepened over them. The real killing cold was yet to come, but even now, though the sun stood at noon, the shallow scrape of the well outside the thorn fence here had been iced too thickly for the camels to break. They would water after and then be on their way, though the recently broken ice was going to be another sign to the unseen caravan that followed them that there were travellers ahead. He knew it was behind by the dust when the sun slanted down into the west, and every time they turned aside to hunt, it gained on them.

  “Maybe,” he said, about the food. There wasn’t much. A small sack of peas, another of millet, a brick of tea, partially carved away, shrivelled garlic. A very meagre existence the hermit had lived. Various dark and dusty herbs, carefully sorted into bowls and little bags, did not smell like anything for cooking. “Ahjvar?”

  Ahj came crouching over; he couldn’t stand upright. Even Ghu had to duck. Ahj rubbed leathery, dry black things that might have been some sort of mushroom, sniffed his fingers and shrugged, but held up a fistful of wizened, once-fleshy roots, scraping a little of the scabby dark skin away with a thumbnail to show fibrous yellow flesh. “This one I know. We call it tranceroot. Poison yourself with that, all too easily.”

  “Wizards use it?” Maybe that was what had killed the man. Fallen dead and into his own fire.

  “I don’t,” Ahjvar said pointedly, and returned it to its place. “It comes from the desert, though. One of the shaman’s nine holy herbs, I think. The apothecaries call it dreamer’s yellowroot in Nabbani.”

  He hadn’t heard of it by either name. It probably meant, though, that this was a holy man of the tribes whose territories lay hereabouts. But not a priest with frequent visitors.

  “We should go.” Ahjvar had a tight, weary look about the eyes again. It wasn’t the death; it was the burning. Ghu led the way back outside, leaving even the brick of tea. They had plenty of that, at least. Now, if there had been coffee . . . hah, the Leopard of Gold Harbour wouldn’t be above looting coffee, no.

  “Yes,” he said, but when Ahjvar headed for the gap in the thorns he turned aside to crouch by the corpse, taking up a handful of ashy dust.

  “A wandering god?” The ghost’s voice—thought, perhaps, more than voice—was soft, bemused. “So far from your land. A river. Are you? A man and a river? Are you come here seeking answers?”

  “No.”

  “They do come.”

  “Who?”

  “The folk.”

  Ahjvar stopped and turned back to him, knelt down, a careful hand on his shoulder. “Ghu . . .”

  “Do you see him?” he asked.

  “The ghost? Old man. Yes. A little. Thin old man.”

  “Wandering god. And a web of bone and fire. Why do you hold this man here, when he should be gone to his road?” Not accusing, just mildly curious.

  “Don’t.” Ahjvar backed away. “Ghu, let him go. Come away.”

  “A wandering god. You should hurry home. They’ll take your land from you.”

  “Who will?”

  “A fallen star.” The thought drifted, attention sharpened. “A lie. A hungry fire. The road . . . it calls, and I cannot answer. Let me go?”

  “Would you have us bury you? Do you have kin near, someone we should take word of your death?”

  “Oh, let the birds feed. They are the desert. I am the desert. Let me go back to the desert, bone to dust. It was always kinder than kin. They would have taken me back to snuffle and dribble in their tents, scolded and babied in the smoke and the squabbling. Better it came this way, quiet and quick and kind. I only fell, a little pain in the heart and I fell, and . . . and then I was free. Why do they make death so difficult? They will find the bones, when they come again, and bones are all we are, bones and dust and the fire of the stars . . . You ride to war, young wandering god. Is it worth it? Why do the gods demand the blood of their folk to feed their land?”

  “Why say so? It’s the folk who make war, not the gods.”

  “Not you. Not your land. Not the one who hunts you.”

  “Who?”

  “A lie. False god, false truth, false hope for a dying land. A waking devil. Is she? Not she, hunting, but you are the quarry none the less. A false true god, yes, hunting. Take care, young river, take care lest you fall and fail and fade and leave an emptiness and an empty folk that will welcome what crouches quiet, waiting, in the west and reaching fingers even into . . .”

  “Ghu!” Sharp fear in Ahjvar’s voice.

  The presence of the ghost drew in on itself, shivered small and weak and afraid. “You should not linger on the way, child of river, child of mountain.”

  Ghu held up a hand to Ahjvar, who stooped to take up a handful of sand and would have cast the ghost away with it.

  “Do you say I do?” he asked. Ahjvar swore and turned his back.

  “I say nothing. I only dream. I would drink the tea and dream true visions for you, wandering child, but . . . I am gone. Am I gone?”

  “You’re dreaming still.”

  “I do dream. I always did. They are heavy, dreams. Too great a weight to bear, sometimes. They said I should not have killed him, because he was my brother, but what choice did he give me? But the dreams are heavy. Must I bear them to the road?”

  “The road takes all.”

  “So the gods say.”

  “So the gods know. Go, find your way.”

  Ghu scattered the ash and sand, sat back on his heels, dusting his hands and watching Ahjvar, standing now in the gap in the thorn fence, looking away. Something had frightened him, and nothing waking ever did. Some echo of nightmare.

  Old man. Seer. Hermit. Murderer?

  Gone to his road now, anyhow. And wanted his body left to feed the birds. Well, it was a rite among some folk, or so he had heard, and why not? Ghu straightened the disordered limbs at least, scrubbed his hands in the sand, though dead flesh was a scent hard to lose.

  “He wished his body left for the birds to clean,” he told Ahjvar, who only gave a jerky nod. “He died of his age, is all, his heart failed and he fell over where he sat. Nobody meant to burn him. It’s all right. Go break the ice so we can water?”

  Another nod. The camels were nosing at the ice, the dogs waiting patiently by. Ahjvar used the axe to cut a hole, filled their depleted waterskins before the animals drank. Ghu cast a look around the horizon of this long hollow in the grey-gravelled waves. Nothing to show that anyone had been or gone in the past days, but the wind might erase all tracks. It felt like the whole of the world for a moment, empty, desolate, lifeless.

  “Wait,” he said, and went back for the peas and millet. Ahjvar leaned on his camel’s shoulder and shook his head at the sky.

  “I have no idea,” Ghu said, “how far we have yet to go.” He made the sacks fast to the baggage frame behind the saddle, about his camel’s second hump.

  By noon, when they would usually hal
t to rest the camels for an hour or two, they had come to a fork in the road; the dividing of the ways of which he had been warned, so many weeks ago. North or south? He knew which pulled him.

  “Which?” Ahjvar asked.

  Ghu considered the horizon and their choices, trying to discount the pull in his blood, trying to think of Ahjvar, and the camels, and the husbanding of their strength. Both roads led, in the end, to the border town of Dernang. South, they had told him in Porthduryan, had better wells, a safer road, but was a longer way by several stages, maybe a week, maybe more. They had also told him he was a fool to think of setting out on the desert road without the protection of a caravan. One lamed camel, one mistaken path, and they would die, especially at this time of year. Only a few caravan-masters would have risked the journey even then, and in a few weeks more, they said, it would be too late altogether to set out. But what choice had he had? The caravan-masters of Porthduryan had eyed Ahj askance, a tall Praitannecman with a mane of yellow hair and an untidy beard, blue eyes fever-bright in a face gaunt and grey-tinged, shadowed like old bruising. He startled at sudden movements and flinched from anyone who passed close enough to touch, hand on his sword. They said they were not hiring guards, nor grooms, no, nor cooks. Not, at least, if they had to take on Ahjvar as well as Ghu. He had not told Ahj of that part of it. Nor of the caravan-mistress, a fox-tattooed woman of the eastern deserts, who had made him another offer. He might have taken her up on it; she had been good-humoured and not overly pressing, handsome, too, dark and lean and clean. Not an unappealing offer, by any means. He’d done worse, endured worse, willing and otherwise, but she hadn’t wanted Ahjvar along either.

  “That one’s mad,” she had said, with a jerk of her head back towards the tea-house doorway. Her braids, all wound with silver rings, had danced and tinkled. “Watched you prowling about town with him trailing like your shadow. Wondered about you, but him, I’ve seen those eyes before. Boy I used to know went off as a mercenary to fight in Nabban’s wars in the south. Came home, married the girl who’d been waiting for him, cousin of mine. Don’t know what had happened to him in the wars, but he was broken like that. Smothered her, one night, and cut his wrists. That friend of yours is the same. Dangerous mad, the sort that’s quiet till someday he kills for no reason and maybe takes someone else with him. You don’t want to be the one standing next to him when that time comes.”

  “He’s not mad,” Ghu had said. “He’s getting better.” Which was perhaps not quite the contradiction he had meant it to be. And he had collected Ahjvar, waiting propped against the wall outside because he would not go into a crowded room, and they had gone back to the hill of the god and the shepherd-priest who let them shelter in his shed in return for Ghu’s help doctoring the lame asses and coughing sheep of the hillfolk. Neither god nor priest spoke ill of Ahjvar; they had left him space and quietude. It was Porthduryan had set Ahjvar sidling and tense as a misused yearling, but he hadn’t trusted Ghu to be safe there without him. He would do better by the time they came to Nabban. Ahjvar healed. He must.

  Ghu rather thought it might be the silver-ringed eastern desert caravan-mistress whose caravan trod so close on their heels. She had been preparing to leave about the time he decided Ahj would be better off if they went on their own, and that he himself could not wait in Porthduryan all winter. Travelling as they did, they should have pulled well ahead of any caravan that followed, but with so much wandering aside, they lost what they gained in travelling light and at a faster pace than the heavily laden baggage train could maintain.

  Time. He should not feel time gathered and began to outrace him, flowing like the tide. But it did. Ghu knew it. Powers moved of which he understood nothing, except that Nabban lay beneath their uncaring feet.

  They left the camels, already fed from their nosebags, browsing some twiggy brush that Ghu trusted wasn’t poisonous, to climb the nearest height. The northerly branch of the trail continued more easterly, heading down into a sinking, stony land, ridged and tightly folded. To the southeast there were higher hills, yellow-dun with old grasses between the drifts of sand, and the right-hand road angled into these, rising, falling, curving. It was clearer, the same well-trodden, well-dunged track that they had followed all this way. The northerly route was more difficult for the eye to follow. Southerly, too, lay the lands of the eastern desert tribes, pastoral, nomadic folk from whom so many of the eastern road caravaneers came. Their gods were many and small; they drifted between them on their yearly cycle of grazing, so that the folk of one tribe, one family even, might be born to different gods, depending on the seasons of their births.

  “South?” Ahjvar suggested.

  Common sense said it was safer to stick to the better-travelled road. The caravan-masters knew what they were about. Yet, there was that caravan behind. It would likely swing south of the badlands. Most did. The flowing tide tugged at him . . . You should not linger on the way.

  “The northerly road is straighter,” Ghu said.

  “And worse terrain,” Ahjvar countered. “Stone.”

  It was lying up a day with a lame camel, a blister turned to a deep sore in the sandy one’s pad, that had first let the never-seen caravan creep up on them. He had remembered caravaneers’ talk in the market of Dernang, of patching a camel’s pad. Eventually, they had improvised a boot for her instead. It seemed simpler than trying to truss her, just the two of them, and stitch a patch to the pad itself, and the boot had lasted long enough for the foot to heal, though he’d done something to speed it and to keep any other sores from going so bad or deep.

  “I know,” Ghu said. “But I think nonetheless . . . the left-hand way. We’ll try the badlands.”

  Ahjvar didn’t debate the point further, only nodded. They headed back down to the camels, mounted, and set out again. Yes. The northerly road pulled at him, drawing him.

  “Maybe we’ll be able to buy grain from the tribes in Denanbak, if we go among them,” he said, mostly to drive that fish-on-a-line feeling from his mind. “We’ll come to settled lands sooner this way. We’d run short of feed for the camels and food for ourselves both before we came to Dernang or even to the winter camps of lower Denanbak, if we took the southern route here.”

  “Does that matter? We have no money left. Do we?”

  “A few coins,” Ghu said guardedly. He had no idea if any trader of Denanbak would even take the three diviner’s coins he carried, they were so old. Maybe they’d have some value for the weight of the blackened bronze. There were Ahjvar’s bracelets, though. A lord of the west, decently outfitted as such, could sell his barbarian gold if he chose, though they would melt down the lovely work, no doubt, and never see the beauty in it. Truth was, he would like to see Ahjvar wear them again, well and whole and bright in the sun on a good horse. . . . “The gold—it’s the same problem, bring trouble after us, I think, selling or trading it in that land. Better to wait for Nabban and the cities. But I have a book I can sell. A thing like that won’t draw half a chieftain’s hall out after us the next night in hope of more as the bracelets would, but they would take it, thinking to sell it on to some caravan wizard.”

  “You have a book? Ghu, you can’t read.”

  “It’s not my book.”

  “You can always be counted on to have something that doesn’t belong to you. Purses. Horses. Camels. Now books. I thought gods were more upright and moral. Let me see.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Ahj. It was a friend’s, but she’s dead in Marakand, I think.”

  “Let me see. You’ll have no idea what it should be worth, will you?”

  Ghu, with reluctance, twisted around to root through the bag closest behind his saddle. What he passed to Ahjvar was a fat leather scroll-case, worn, but well cared for. Ahjvar slid the scroll out and unrolled the first pasted paper page of it, to study close, fine Nabbani writing. Ghu craned to see. There was also an illustration of a lord and lady, sun and crescent moon raying their respective heads, and an ornate seal stamped in red, a
flower surrounded by characters, which overlaid the elegant calligraphy of the title. Another few turns and Ghu could see bold black lines making little blocks of tracks down each page, surrounded by much dense writing.

  “The hexagrams for coin-throwing,” Ahjvar said. “The book’s called The Balance of the Sun and the Moon. Nabbani divination.”

  Yes, Ahjvar could probably read it. He said he had learnt to read the court characters long ago, when to pass the years he had studied for a lawyer in Star River Crossing. Why, he didn’t seem too clear on himself. Maybe because the Leopard, or whatever he had called himself in those days, had needed some cloak of respectability.

  He also said, small wonder they had turned to a syllabic script in Yeh-Lin’s day, and generally from there he moved on to the subject of Ghu learning to read. Not this time, no. Ahjvar said only, “Your friend was a wizard.”

  “Yes.”

  “The Red Masks.”

  “She was taken by Red Masks, she and another man I met, another wizard. If they were made Red Mask by the time I freed you, then they were already dead, Ahj. You didn’t kill them.” He added, because Ahjvar kept looking at him, “I couldn’t go after them. I had to follow you.”

  In silence, Ahjvar rolled the book up and returned it to its case, handed it back.

  “It’s old,” he said. “It’s valuable, yes, but not uncommon. Something every Nabbani wizard would have a copy of, but this is a fine one, beautiful calligraphy, worth a decent price for that alone. And it’s stolen. It has the seal of the imperial palace library stamped on its first sheet.”

  Ghu shrugged. “Better to sell it before we come to the Golden City, then.”

  If they did. He had not thought about where they would go in Nabban, but . . . there must be destination. A time and an ending. A place. A chill touch on his spine. He had kept Dernang and the castle of the lord of Choa ever in his mind, never looking beyond. But that was the half-wit boy again. He could not wander blind and trust to the winds of chance. Not now.