Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  A second man came to the doorway, wearing feathers in his braid and a many-stranded necklace of pierced coins over his chest. He didn’t embrace the shaman before strangers, but his look of relief was telling, and as she spoke, giving their names and possibly much more, his eyes measured them. He inclined his head to Ahjvar, but his attention was mostly for Yeh-Lin as Ketkuiz spoke on.

  “Ganzu my brother offers his thanks for the deaths of the poisoners, Ahjvar,” Ketkuiz said. “He says, if you are enemies of this ruler who sends assassins to poison children, then you are welcome as our guests, though there will be no fire in the hall until the seven days of the funeral prayers are over—no, she is not dead, but it must be soon.” Her voice cracked. “My lord Ghu—”

  “No lord,” Ghu said quietly. “No physician, no healer. This isn’t my land. It’s Lin you must let see her.”

  More urgent Denanbaki, to which Ghu added a few careful words. Neither Ketkuiz or Ganzu the chieftain seemed surprised by that. Nor had Ketkuiz questioned Yeh-Lin’s appearance, though by her own witness she knew only two had made camp in Letin and that Ghu had left to go hunting alone.

  Dreamshaper.

  “Come,” the chieftain said, in rough caravan-Nabbani. “See. You cannot help. No help her. But you see. You carry my vengeance to Nabban.”

  “I want to know more about what exactly you plan to do in Nabban,” said Yeh-Lin, as they all ducked in the low doorway. “Two of you, both half dead on your feet, and an empire that is already trying to kill you?”

  Small though it was, woven rugs hanging from the beams partitioned the house. These were mostly tied back, bedding rolled up for the day, leaving two bed-platforms covered in cushions for seats, with a loom against the wall between them, but a third corner was screened from view. The small clay stove was roaring, the room stiflingly hot.

  Ahjvar could hear the laboured breathing from the doorway and the sudden muffled drumming, like distant hooves, of a body jerking in convulsions.

  “I can’t,” he said, not knowing he had spoken, till Ghu said, “Stay,” and left him, pushing back the hangings of the secluded corner and going down to his knees at the bedside.

  “Ah, damn,” he heard Yeh-Lin say, following Ghu, and for all she spoke Praitannec, her tone could be no comfort to the family. “This is ugly.” The room smelt of urine and bile and sweat, stronger than the smoke, and he had to look. Several women knelt by the bed, two elderly, one younger. Ketkuiz knelt too, arms around the largely-pregnant younger, and they clung together before the shaman sat back and, voice unsteady, began to sing. A prayer, no magic in it. A raw plea, but he thought the goddess of the spring had already done all she could to delay the inevitable a little longer for a hope they all knew was futile, that the assassins had not lied and carried some cure. The girl was tiny, four maybe, or five, and she briefly made a shrill whining as her body arched and began to jerk again. Then the chieftain, who had stood for a moment holding the hangings, crouched down by the pregnant woman’s side, pulling her head to his chest, and the striped rugs fell back to hide the spasming heap again.

  Ahjvar set his shoulders to the doorpost and found Ganzu’s guardsman his reflection. The man gave him a nod. Waited, which was all such hands as his could do, in such a time. There was nothing wizardry or gods could do but still her and, in mercy, send her on her way.

  He heard a murmur from Ghu. “Hush. Sleep.” A slowing of the gasping breath, maybe. At least a stillness.

  “Give me your hand,” Yeh-Lin ordered, still speaking Praitannec.

  “I’m no god,” Ghu said. “Only, Nabban that might be, and this is not Nabban.”

  “Nevertheless you are shelter and shade like a rock-rooted pine, a weight even in this place. Don’t you know? The shaman saw, for all she does not know what she sees. Give me your hand. I want some anchor of this earth.”

  Ahjvar closed his eyes, but he could not help seeing another room, another deathbed, where he had waited because he was being paid to wait, in the days when he was still new to trading in death. The senior-most clan-father of the Sea Town Daisua, who had sent assassins to kill all the family of his own ambitious nephew, even the young children. The man had tried to hire Ahjvar for that and been turned down; he had been on retainer to the Sea Town Aka Clan then, and the nephew had, in defiance of his uncle, taken a high-ranking Aka wife. They had been warned, the nephew and his family. They had been guarded, not well enough. Ahjvar had refused the bodyguarding. As well put a mad dog to keep your sheep safe, though he’d given some other excuse to the Aka clan-mother who thought she had him on a leash in those days. But he had done what the Aka lady asked of him, after the family’s death. The wife had been her daughter, stepdaughter, he didn’t remember now. Remembered he had bought the poison himself; she wanted rumour, she wanted it known the Leopard would come for the clan-father of the Daisua and what it was he should be fearing. That fat little apothecary in the crooked street just up from the harbour. He couldn’t remember the name. It ran uphill with a dog-leg turn and the shop had had yellow shutters. The mind held on to such odd and trivial things. That was eighty years ago. Before he had gone to Star River Crossing for the first time. The reason he had gone to Star River Crossing . . . he had met Miara, in the years he lived wild in the hills upriver and worked in that city . . . don’t think about the Star River Crossing years. He’d gone all the way down to Noble Cedar Harbour after, under yet another name, though he always came back to the Leopard, whatever else he called himself. That fat little apothecary, what had she said . . .?

  “Ye—” He caught himself and turned it to a cough. “Lin!” He crossed the room in a few strides and pushed through the hangings, his fellow guard warily at his heels. “There’s said to be an urchin in the deep waters off Tiypur, the colour of garnets, with venom in its spines. It causes deadly seizures if handled, if one gets caught up in a fisherman’s nets. If that’s true, that venom may be a component of this poison. At least, someone told me so, once.”

  “Yes?” She sat kneeling with her right hand spread on the child’s bare chest, her other hand holding Ghu. The child Shui was still now, corpse-still. Her face was skull-like, skin sunken, all a child’s proper fleshiness gone. Face and chest smeared with a thousand pinpricks of weeping red. Did she even breathe? Yes. Yeh-Lin looked up at him, and there was something cold, an emptiness, to her eyes, and an ember of light that should not have reflected there. “An urchin. So. A thing of water, not earth, or so your wizardry would say. One could try to work against that, to find a balance, but that is not the true pattern of things and I think you would fail. Besides, there is so much damage, nerves, muscle . . . the heart is a muscle, dead king, did you know? And the mind lives in the brain, which is the greatest web of the nerves of man. It is only the beginning, to call back her soul when she stands with her face to the road and her feet on its threshold, and that we have done, her goddess aiding.”

  “You,” said Ghu.

  “We. But she will nevertheless die. I must restore what has been burnt and scarred and utterly destroyed and that is no work of this earth. There was more than this poison of the sea in what she was given.”

  “I said so.”

  “You did, Ahjvar, yes. I’m talking to myself. The bleeding looks like arjibe-seed oil, which is not necessarily fatal, wouldn’t you say? Not in small doses, at least. Whatever caused the purging is long gone out of her. So. But this is beyond human skill, even for the greatest of the wizard-surgeons and healers, and they are all long dead.”

  The devil began to murmur to herself in something other than Praitannec. It might have been a prayer, but he didn’t believe so. The air grew cold, Ahjvar thought, and Ghu suddenly hissed, as if in pain.

  “Felt that, did you?” Yeh-Lin asked, as if from very far away. “I don’t know that you can really call yourself human any longer, heir of Nabban. Think on that, and speak for me to the goddess of this folk if need be. She watches us in the shadows. She may have seen. Or maybe not. She is a smal
l thing, and we are such a confusion of powers, we three, all hidden and tangled in your holiness.”

  “Not,” said Ghu through gritted teeth, “yet—a god.” Ahjvar put a hand on his shoulder. He was shivering.

  “We three,” said Yeh-Lin, in clear Nabbani, “are servants of the gods of Nabban. Small lady of the spring of Galicha, what was done was done by no will of the true gods of Nabban, but by their enemies, and in the name of the gods, we will do what we can to make amends to this child of your land.”

  He could not see what the devil did. No wizardry, for all her talk of elements, but he thought for a moment that there were threads of light woven through her flesh, and they extended and sank into the girl, growing like root tendrils, and it was Ghu who caught at him, then, before he could make any move towards her, and said, “Leave her, Ahj. It’s all right.”

  Nothing changed, but a heaviness in the room seemed to lighten. The presence of the goddess of the spring, carried in the shaman’s prayers? Yeh-Lin finally released her hold on Ghu, who sighed and brought Ahjvar’s hand to his face. The man was cold, chilled as if he had been standing out in the bitter wind, and he shivered, leaning on Ahjvar’s leg. Lin folded the child’s hands over her chest and drew the blankets up to her chin, brushed the sweat-soaked hair back from the little girl’s forehead, and bent to kiss her cheek.

  She had been a mother and grandmother, Yeh-Lin, before she gave herself to the devil.

  Ketkuiz ended her chant and regarded them anxiously.

  “Let her sleep,” Yeh-Lin said. “When she wakes, give her broth. No milk, no bread, no meat, only broth, and in a day or two, when she can swallow it, a little gruel, very, very thin, thin enough to drink. Think that her throat, her stomach, all her inward parts are burned as if a fire has been in her, and judge her care by that.”

  “She will live?”

  “She has a good chance of living. Tell her parents that. A good chance, if she takes no other illness in her weakness. There is no certainty. I—we, with the gods of Nabban, who are kind and merciful, have done what can be done. We were given a great blessing, to be able to do so much. But it may not be enough. They must have hope and take great care of her, and seek the blessing of your goddess Galicha, whose hand must ever be on the child.”

  Ketkuiz spoke to the anxious parents. The chieftain wept, and went to his knees to pat Ghu’s feet, and Ahjvar’s, and last of all Yeh-Lin’s, bowing to touch his forehead to them. His wife simply embraced her, mother to mother, maybe, and Yeh-Lin, an odd look on her face, awkwardly, and then firmly, put her arms about the woman and let her cry on her breast.

  “She will always be frail, if she lives,” Yeh-Lin said, over the mother’s head. “Ketkuiz, make sure they understand this, please. Shui will be frail. Her heart will be weak. It took a great injury. The fever and seizures have done her mind no damage, though—if I could not have saved her there, I would not have damned her to the life of an idiot,” she added in Praitannec, and then in Nabbani again, “She will not be a warrior. She must not do any great and heavy labour. She must not—when she is older, you must make her understand, she must not bear children. She will not have the strength.”

  “She my heir,” Ganzu said, following more Imperial Nabbani than he spoke. “She to take my sword.”

  “If she is still to be your heir, then her brother or sister must fight for her,” Yeh-Lin said. “Better, maybe, to name another heir, and let your daughter be trained to some quiet craft.”

  The mother put a hand to her belly, then went to the bed and lay down by her daughter, curled around her, protective, stroking her hair.

  Probably that was not the way of this folk, to have a chieftain who could not fight. Petty wars among the tribes, raids into or defence against the desert, every few generations some unifying warlord arising and an attack on northern Nabban, that would be the pattern of their life. Well, they would find their way.

  More Denanbaki talk, and then Ganzu said, “Sohi my wife watches with the child. The aunts with her. We eat with our guests. We praise the gods, ours and yours. We drink!”

  Word had spread through all the settlement. Folk were crowding to the hall, waiting for news. Ganzu cried out to them, arms spread, and some scattered away, voices loud. Dogs barked. They brought burning brands into the hall and lit the stone lamps, which burnt mutton-fat and gave as much smoke as light, and a fire was made in the stove, bronze braziers brought too, to add their share of light and smoke and warmth. The travellers were swept in a crowd to cushions on the dais with Ganzu and the chief folk of his household, the place of honour, displacing the hounds. Food began to appear almost at once, first cold flatbread, leftovers of the day, and bowls of new milk, and soft cheese. A feast was not made in a moment. Bread, cheese, and milk made good enough a feast for Ahjvar. Bone flutes and Nabbani fiddles swirled into music, and Ganzu the chieftain stood to speak, gestured the three of them up in order to embrace them before the hall, kissing both cheeks. Ahjvar saw it coming and succeeded in not flinching at strange arms seizing him, but his heart ran too fast and his mouth went dry. Ketkuiz joined in the embracing and kissing, but added, with a glint of mischief, a kiss on the lips for both Ghu and Ahjvar. He swallowed and rubbed sweating palms on his cushions, sitting again, and saw that his hands were shaking; he wrapped both around the bowl of sweet milk to hold them still. It wasn’t even he who held her eye; that was Ghu, not hiding now in wordlessness, not in Ahjvar’s shadow, but the centre of them, talking Denanbaki in which Ahjvar caught Nabbani names, Choa, the province of the northwest, kho’anzi—the title for a lord of a border province, Dernang, the town of the northwest pass. Emperor. No, empress. Yeh-Lin listened, nodding sometimes, frowning, as if she too began to absorb the tribal language. It was oddly isolating, as if amid the noise he alone sat in deafness. Distancing. Safe? No. But he had Ghu on one side and Yeh-Lin on the other and up here on the chieftain’s dais no one crowded close against him, except Yeh-Lin, leaning across to speak to Ghu and Ketkuiz on his other side. The shaman’s eyes, intent on Ghu, were bright within her tattooed mask.

  He shifted back, a little behind them, where Yeh-Lin did not have to touch him when she leaned to catch a word.

  Game stews began to appear, Ghu’s pheasants and the hare some contribution there, maybe, and collops of mutton hastily seared on skewers. Jugs of buttermilk that fizzed but seemed no stronger than weak beer were passed around, and then more bread, hot, with rice and both sour pickled fruits and others in syrup, some that he knew from the markets of the Five Cities, some he did not. Finally the serving-folk of the hall came with jugs of something that even in the dim lamplight showed a clear yellow-green as it was poured into the drinking-bowls. The taste was strange, not the golden barley-spirit of the lands Over-Malagru. A complexity of herbs. Sweetness. An underlying bitter edge. But definitely the oily, burning kick of distilled spirits unwatered.

  “Oh, very nice, very fine,” Yeh-Lin murmured over it. “But not, I’m afraid, meant to be served in bowls that thirsty hunters might take their kefir from.”

  Some, most notably the spear-carriers of the chieftain, did not drink, or took only a token mouthful, even in this night of celebration, so Ahjvar trusted he could safely do likewise without giving offence, standing in the same relationship to Ghu. Yeh-Lin did not seem object to having her bowl filled, overgenerous serving or not.

  People wandered in, stayed a little, wandered out, the faces changing. All the settlement passed through, he thought, even children darting in for sweets, being chased off back to their beds by their parents. A slim girl in a grass-green coat drifted in like mist, her face marked like that of the shaman, but the pattern was waving grass. Galicha, the goddess of this region. Few saw, and sometimes she was no more than smoke and shadow and streaks of light. She paused a moment, inscrutable, to look down on them. Blue eyes, in this brown-eyed land, deep and dark as the twilit sky, and she looked at Ahjvar as if it gave her some pain to do so, as if he were the false and ugly note in the song.
Fine with him. He wanted no truck with gods. But when she turned her gaze to Yeh-Lin the goddess wavered and was for a moment a reflection in water, cloud-shadow on the grass, no more. Yeh-Lin bowed where she sat and Ghu, saying nothing, reached over to put a hand on her. Claiming her. The goddess, a slight human woman again, backed a step away. Now she carried a bronze spear. She had not, before.

  Letin is not forgotten, Galicha said. Ahjvar understood her, though the words were not Nabbani, nor even spoken aloud.

  “We’ll be gone in the morning,” said Ghu. “All three of us. We mean no harm to your folk or your land. Dotemon is . . . other than she was, she claims. She has so far proven herself so. And she did save the little daughter of your folk. Grant her willing passage through your land, for that.”

  And what could a small goddess of the earth do against a devil, but hide and hope for it soon to leave? Galicha of the spring inclined her head and turned to Ketkuiz, who bowed deeply. The goddess rested a hand on her head in blessing. She was gone altogether the next moment, smoke and shadow taking her place.

  “Well,” said Ghu, on a long sigh, and since Ahjvar had no more than touched his green whatever it was, drained it for him. “One of us,” he said, “needs to be not falling over, when we leave this place.”

  Fair enough. Ahjvar found the words he ought to say, the light jesting of such an evening, but that finding took thought and effort. “Me, is it?”

  “You’re too heavy for me to carry.” But Ghu’s gaze was sober. “Ahjvar . . .”

  “I’m all right,” he said. It was a lie, but he would make it truth, or he would sit up and not sleep. The Great Gods knew, if anyone deserved a night when he did not have to put someone else before himself, it was surely Ghu.

  Ketkuiz leaned in and asked a question, waved a hand, circling and inviting, taking in the hall. Ghu answered; she asked something further. Ghu was doing most of the talking now, Ketkuiz and Ganzu and the whole of the hall fallen largely silent to listen. Strangers in the hall. Of course they must offer a story. Marakand, he heard. Praitan. Deyandara. There would have been caravans pass through in the autumn with pieces, at least, of that tale, and more would come in the summer. Marnoch, Ketsim the Grasslander. Ghu gestured, sweeping armies here and there, a glint of enjoyment in his eyes. Not the full true tale, but a bard’s telling, Ahjvar could trust that. He still did not want to hear, even without understanding.