Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  They had fought a skirmish, with what Kharduin dismissed as a rabble of outcasts adrift, and driven them off with no injury or loss, only a few days into the desert crossing. It seemed almost a season ago now. More recently, they had found a dead hermit at his shrine, a regular stopping-place before the badlands, and had buried him with a prayer to the god of his distant folk. She divined for the safest road to take, the southern or the northern, at the forks where a caravan had to choose whether to venture the stone valleys of the badlands; her divination warned of a blizzard striking there, meaning they took the southern route, which would bring them into Denanbak at its westernmost edge. It was nothing Nour could not have done, and hardly a challenge. More truth to be faced: the reason she had not completed her star map was not the difficulty of working with ink and tanned hide in the cold; it was a creeping mental laziness, the body worked to exhaustion in the cold days but the mind growing soft with lack of exercise.

  There was nothing for a scholar-wizard in Nabban, though, but to be taken into the imperial corps of wizards in the emperor’s service.

  Her father’s daughter, her mother’s daughter, would be no servant of any lord. That was not the arrogance of high birth, but simply that she had claimed her own soul from her father’s overmastery; she had sworn she would make her own choices, think her own thoughts, find her own beliefs. She would not surrender that.

  That need only mean Nabban was not her destination, as she had once thought it might be. She could stay with the gang, return westwards in the summer. Maybe go back to become a scholar of the library in Marakand after all. Maybe to the Five Cities, where there were also houses of scholarship, and patrons for wizards.

  She could tell herself that, but Nabban had the weight in her thoughts of a mountain on her horizon from which she could not look away.

  The dream had had much the same feeling.

  Ivah checked the hobbled camels, studied the haze against the stars of the horizons to north and south, noting how they differed, the long fingers of cloud in the north, the subtlety of the blurring of the southern edge of the sky, which she might not have noticed at all had Wolan not made it something she should look for. She circled the camp, the several tents. What she wanted was to talk to Nour, but she was hardly going to go crawling in to drag him from Kharduin’s side to babble of dreams. But if ever she had truly loved another person, and sometimes she wondered, it was he—though not in any way that wanted to take anything from Kharduin—and she wanted, achingly, to try to put this dream to words, to have someone hear her, before it all faded with the morning’s light and the routine bustle of the day and left her lost, wondering if she even remembered truly what she had felt.

  Friendship had its roots in their imprisonment beneath the temple of the Lady; there was a debt on either side for survival and a bond born of horrors no one else could understand. It need not have become anything more, but over the months in Marakand and on the road, it had. Her brother of the soul. She was not a child, though, to go clamouring for a comforting word because of a dream. If daylight burned it away, perhaps that was for the best. Ivah turned her back on the clustered tents and studied the rising constellation. It was named for the shaman Urumchiat, who had danced the winter down in the years of ice. Tomorrow she would work on her sky chart.

  Footsteps crunching, sliding gravel and frosted grass. She turned. Not Wolan, too tall. Nour, climbing to the ridge with a quilt wrapped over his shoulders.

  “You don’t have a watch tonight,” she pointed out.

  He shrugged. “Woke up thinking I heard you call me.”

  “Oh.”

  They both considered the horizon.

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  He yawned. “Too early to get up. Must have dreamed it. I’m going back, then, before Khar rolls himself and all the quilts into a cocoon?” He made it a question. Ivah had come to think Nour had a stronger natural talent than he knew, stunted by long suppression in Marakand in the years when to be known a wizard meant worse than death in the Lady’s well, and by lack of proper teaching.

  “Nour, I did—I was wishing you’d wake up.”

  “What, you some sort of wizard or something?”

  “Sorry.” Her father had walked unseen in her dreams when he sent her out to hunt the goddess Attalissa on the road. She did not want to think she could do such a thing and not even be aware of it.

  “No, you’re not.” He leaned to bump her with his shoulder, not sparing a hand outside the blanket. “You need me? I’m here. Twins. Blood-bound.”

  She snorted. “Of course. My mother forgot to mention it.”

  He yawned again. “Funny. So did mine. Why did you want me?”

  “I was just thinking—I had a strange dream. I wanted to tell someone.” She shrugged. “I wanted to fix it in my own mind, I suppose. I don’t know.”

  “How strange?”

  “Shaman-strange.” But that might not mean much to a city-bred Marakander. “It doesn’t sound like much. I dreamed . . . in the dream I wasn’t really there, you understand. I was just seeing. There was a man, very far away. A rider on a white horse. Desert-bred, I think.”

  “Tell me about the man, not the horse, Grasslander.”

  “You say that like it’s an insult, shopkeeper.”

  “Man or woman, are you certain? You said far away. Anyone you knew?”

  “No. A man, though. I couldn’t see . . . I knew. I just know. A man.” She shut her eyes, trying to see again. “Dark haired,” she decided. “I’d have noticed if he wasn’t, probably. Black hair.” Not wearing a caravaneer’s many long braids, either, or she might have thought it was Nour or the Blackdog; at distance either’s hair was dark enough to be taken for black, and she hadn’t seen the face, to see tattoos or the shape of his cheeks, the shade of his skin. Black-haired man on a white horse, and dressed—“He was all in black. Not a caravaneer’s coat. I don’t know, just, black. He was that far away. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking away.” And was that the abandonment, rejection, of the coins? It hadn’t felt so, though she had wanted him to look around. “I couldn’t see where he was. It was just . . . there was nothing but the man, and the horse. When I try to see it, that’s all there is, no grass, no road, no sand, no snow. As if everything is dark and the only sunlight is there, on him. And the sky. The sky over him was bright as noon, as blue, and it turned all to banners, blue banners, blowing from the sky like great sheets of silk around him, and that was all. I woke up. The thing was—”

  Nour didn’t laugh, though in the light of the setting moon and the grey edge of the coming dawn she thought he was smiling, a little.

  “—the thing was, I knew it was a true dream. I knew it dreaming, and I knew it when I woke. A shaman’s dream, we’d say.”

  He shook his head. “Remember I’m a half-trained wizard at best and not in a tradition of shamans, either. Does that mean he was a real person, somewhere, sometime, or is it only the meaning of it, whatever that is, that’s true?”

  “Oh. It could be either, in a true dream. He might be only a symbol of something, a man out of a story of the stars or the past, or someone in the world now. It felt—it was both. He is real. I’d know him, I think, even though I never saw his face. I’d recognize the weight of him in the world. But what I felt, that’s what was—” She shook her head.

  “Frightening?”

  “Yes. I—I belong to him. Old Great Gods, Nasutani would never let me hear the end of it if I said that. I don’t mean it the way she’d take it. I don’t mean like, like falling in love.” Not that she had any experience in that, really. She had never fallen love with Shaiveh; her noekar bodyguard had simply taken her over when she was a very young woman. Ivah could think now, with guilt for Shai’s death faced and accepted, that Shaiveh had been attracted not so much by her person as by power at second-hand, attracted by the knowledge that she possessed something of her lord’s daughter. “It felt like what it must be, to come to a place an
d realize it’s your home, even if you’ve never seen it before. Knowing it.”

  “Or if you’ve lost it, and come back to it after years away,” said Nour.

  “Yes. I need to—to find him. I—” She remembered something Nour had said about his brother-in-law Hadidu, the last priest of a murdered goddess. “Nour, you know what you said about Hadidu when the god Gurhan called him, when he was so devastated and lost, and he just got up and—went? That. If the man had turned his head to see me, if he had called my name, I’d have gone and knelt and said, what do you need of me? I’d have gone right into the dream, if he had called me then.”

  “Good thing you didn’t. You’d be an awful burden to lug around if your soul went wandering.”

  “I would not. I’m the smallest one of you. You could roll me in a quilt behind the back hump and your camel would never notice the extra weight.”

  “You think you dreamed a god?”

  “I didn’t,” she said slowly, considering. “But now you say it . . . yes. Yes. I saw a god. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, now, before the day, before I forgot how it felt and it turned into just a dream of a man on a horse. A god. I’ve met gods—” Attalissa, in whom she had never seen any holiness and who no doubt hated Ivah, with good cause. The gang knew she had been in Tamghat’s service, if not exactly all that she had done, but it didn’t matter anymore, and Nour, at least, knew all of it, even the truth of her father, confessed walking on Gurhan’s wooded hill in the night. “I spent a lot of time with your god Gurhan, last summer. He felt like that, but he didn’t make me feel like that, if you know what I mean. I’ve sat and talked with him, long hours . . .” Drunk tea with him, told him her crimes, given into his trust to keep for their rightful owners strange things that had come into her possession: a Northron axe and a carpenter’s chisels and an ancient horse’s skull, smears of runes painted in old blood between its eye-sockets. “I could understand and feel Gurhan’s godhead. I felt—as though all my burdens were eased, when I was with him. But I didn’t want to give myself away to Gurhan. He wasn’t—my soul’s home.”

  “Some people—most people, maybe, never feel that for their god at all,” Nour said gently.

  “Oh.”

  “The ones who do, we generally call priests.”

  “Nour!”

  But he was serious, and he put an arm and the quilt with it around her, pulled her against his side. She leaned there, head against his shoulder.

  “I was born godless,” Ivah said. “My parents were travelling in some territory between folks, between tribes and gods on the Great Grass. Not even a little wild god without a folk.”

  “You have a god, and he’s calling you home.”

  “Not to the Grass.”

  “Do you know that?”

  “Nabban,” she said. A mountain on her horizon.

  “There are only two gods in Nabban, the Mother and the Father. The priesthood of the Mother are born to their service, the way the servants of Gurhan and Ilbialla used to be in Marakand. The priests and priestesses of the Father are those who feel themselves called. They’re mostly scholars, I think, what little scholarship isn’t the preserve of the imperial wizards. But neither order is held in very great esteem by the court or the rulers of the land, and their shrines are very poor and unregarded, for the most part.”

  There had been nothing fatherly, nothing of the quiet scholar, about that man on the horse.

  “A warrior,” she said. “Sky-blue banners. I don’t think he was Father Nabban.”

  More footsteps, heavy. She shrugged free of the arm and turned, as Nour was saying, suddenly unhappy, “Something that wants you to think it a god and isn’t, Ivah . . .”

  Kharduin. He didn’t say anything, just tramped up to stand beside them, a burly shadow.

  “Storm coming?” he asked after a while.

  “Ivah is . . .” Nour shrugged, not going to betray her confidences. “Needed to talk, is all.”

  “Dreaming strange dreams,” Ivah said. “I wanted a wizard’s thoughts. Nothing to do with the gang at all, though, no danger. Just, dreams of things that might be, far from here. But Wolan says there’s a sandstorm coming in the south, and snow north.”

  “Should die down before we meet it,” Kharduin said, after a glance to the southern horizon. “Nearly dawn. No point trying to go back to sleep in a cold bed. Someone walked off with the quilts.”

  “One quilt.”

  “Tea.” Kharduin growled that like a bear.

  “Yeah. Good idea. You go do that, Khar. Ivah—”

  “I heard. But I don’t think—I don’t think what you’re thinking could feel like that, Nour. I—” My father was a devil and I never knew. “I just don’t think so.”

  But she was chilled, and her dream-certainty that she must find this man, this mountain that drew her, that claimed her, was shaken.

  Dawn was just pushing at the east, a grey twilight, a yellow edge. Tea and porridge, to warm the belly and the heart. Ivah followed Nour and Kharduin back to the fire.

  A woman burns, fierce and bright and how has he not seen her before, Min-Jan’s blood, Yeh-Lin’s—obnoxious, mocking old woman, but Dotemon was always so and found her true mate in the aging empress. The bright, fierce woman dreams . . . dreams and her dreams touch the edges of the prophet’s dreams and he finds her there, dreaming of her god.

  “He is a lie, and weak, and will perish,” he warns. “You are stronger than he will ever be. Daughter of emperors, daughter of . . .” He sees it in her mind, her shame, her love, her regret for lost love, her anger for betrayal. Evil, she thinks her father, the warlord, the conqueror, the tyrant of the lake. She regrets her child’s proper love and yet loves him still. “Daughter of devils. Will you be empress? They have grown weak here, and they look only inward, all this empire festers and seethes in its own poisons. A wind from the north, the west . . . a daughter of the Grass, to make all new again under a new god.”

  In her dreaming mind she weaves fences of cord against him, cord rolled of grass of the steppes. She says, “I know you.” She turns her back on him, and fixes her mind on the white horse that rides in her dreams, and the blue banners flying.

  She thinks she has driven him out. She thinks the barriers she raises against him, grass and sky, are enough. She thinks she has learnt not to listen to the doubt and the fear, having grown up within them, the voices that are never silenced, that say she is never enough, never good enough, can never be right, no matter what act, what choice, what deed she offers. She thinks that angry stone core that has always stood within her, mute and stubborn and raw as the ice-dropped boulders they take for altars in this land, will resist him.

  Women, in his experience, always do mistake obstinacy for strength.

  They do learn differently in the end. His sister did, long and long ago.

  This one will be an empress to fear, when she is his. But Buri-Nai will suffice to hold a place for her for now. When he has what he has come here to have, when what he has foreseen he may have, the foundation, the keystone, the great soul wound into the soul of this living world, then he will snare and take his new empress, his worthy queen, to serve him in the east.

  He hesitates. Now the grass surrounds him, green and trackless, shifting, moving like water. She is gone, she and the black horse of childhood she rides in her dreams, but he holds still the threads he has wound into her, the roots. He has not lost his way. There. But she is a sly one. He did not expect that she could have done that, slipped from sight, not while he yet wanted her to remain.

  He withdraws and leaves her to her dreams. She will not remember. Her god will not see.

  She will be there, when he wants her. She is the daughter of Tamghiz, the daughter in many generations of Yeh-Lin. Ambition, power . . . he knows the shape of such desires.

  CHAPTER X

  By evening, the sky was streaked with grey cloud in long ridges, and the wind was bitter, tearing the white smoke of their breath away. The camels’ muz
zles were bearded with frost.

  They had no proper tent, but a cobbled-together shelter of poles and felted blankets, the edges of which they weighted down with rocks. Here, though, there were caves, like wormholes in the cliff sides. It seemed more practical to make a heap of every blanket they owned at the back of one such cave, out of the cutting wind. The one Ahjvar chose was about twenty feet above the valley floor, up a slope rounded like edges of the channels through the mudflats along the lagoon of the Golden City. The camels they left in the lee of a turn of the rock, unhobbled. They would not stray far. Camels wanted the safety of their herd, which included Ghu and Ahjvar, now, and they had had their ration of peas and browsed on what few wiry plants grew about the base of the rocks. Ghu checked their feet and legs and the points their harness might gall, scratched their cheeks and ears, praised them for their day’s work, and lingered to warm cold hands in their fleeces, grown winter-long. A moment of peace for all of them. Good beasts, quiet and patient. Sand and Rust, he called them, for their colours, which Ahjvar, who never named his horses, said was unimaginative, but then said, so were the camels, though maybe that was a virtue. Ghu left them chewing their cuds in drowsy contentment and climbed higher up the cliff to cut a few armfuls of the sparse weeds that grew in the cracks of this place for extra bedding in the cave. The camels could breakfast on it.

  Ahjvar had a fire just inside the cave mouth when he came down. There wasn’t much fuel; dung gathered from the passing of earlier caravans, a few sticks gleaned along the way. Enough to boil up some tea and take the edge off the chill wind. Fuel would be a problem soon, since the shifting sand in these ravines had buried most traces of the caravans. He shaved tea into the smaller kettle, scraped lumps of the morning’s cold pease porridge out of the larger of their two bronze pots onto a wooden platter, rationed out water into that kettle to start more dried peas and some strips of smoke-dried mutton simmering for the morrow’s meals. He let the dogs drink, too. No watering-place till the third day into the badlands, at least in summer, by what he had heard. They didn’t want to delay here, but if he went out at first light with his sling, he might bring down a sandgrouse or two. The dogs watched the platter of cold porridge hungrily, though they had dug out a nest of desert rats nearly rabbit-sized and dispatched the lot of them that morning. He should have called them off long enough to add one to their own pot.