Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  There was no justice in the world. Ghu ought to have had a foul hangover, but it was his cheerful whistling as the kettle came to a boil and he made the tea that woke Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin.

  It was not advisable to enter Nabban by the road. The pass was fortified and guarded, and they had no idea who might be watching for them. There had been a camp, also, a market, almost a town, along the road not too far from the border. Caravans fugitive from the fighting, and the remnant of some broken rebel force had been there, but more soldiers—the Denanbaki didn’t know whose—had come through the pass and Nabbani had fought Nabbani there not so many days before. Some had fled east with the caravaneers, out of Ganzu’s lands; many Nabbani captives had been taken back into Nabban. Others might still roam; his patrols watched for such outlaws, though if they left his people alone, he let them be, Ketkuiz had told Ghu. Better they were free to creep south and make trouble for Nabban or harass the imperial soldiers guarding the road down from the Denanbaki pass. Just who those imperial soldiers served, or even who held Choa now, Ganzu did not know.

  “Isn’t the whole of the frontier watched?” Ahjvar wanted to know, blowing on his tea.

  “Yes,” said Ghu, “but usually for raiding parties and caravans trying to avoid paying taxes, not a few folk on foot. Now, who can say? But with only three of us, we may be able to cross.”

  “Afoot?”

  “I think, yes. Ketkuiz has said Ganzu will lend us horses and a guide to the border.”

  “Good.”

  Ghu shrugged. “They’re grateful, but they want us gone. ‘Before the eye of your enemy falls on us again,’ she said. The goddess spoke in her dreams.”

  “Ah. Useful if Galicha thought to mention who this enemy is. I suppose she doesn’t see.”

  “What we need to ask,” said Yeh-Lin, “is, why fear the heir of the gods? And, since little love though I have for the Old Great Gods, I do not believe they have taken a sudden passionate interest in the rule of Nabban, what power other than a servant of the gods would know of him?”

  Neither Ahjvar nor Ghu offered an answer.

  Their leave-taking was long with Denanbaki courtesies in the hall, another incomprehensible speech that no one translated for Ahjvar, more embracing and kissing—all very proper and formal, this time. They drank the green liquor again, in one silver cup shared by all. Ghu gave the camels Sand and Rust to be Shui’s, the foundation of a herd of her own, he said, because she had lost her birthright by the act of his enemies, and added that both were in calf, which Ahjvar had not known. Ghu and Ketkuiz must have planned it in the night, because there seemed some ritual involved for which Ghu had come prepared, a handing over of a lock of long wool cut from each beast, which Ketkuiz accepted on her niece’s behalf.

  The shaman followed them back to watch their packing, afterwards. There was little to leave behind except the camels’ gear; they had carried so little anyway. Food and skins of kefir were given them, and she came with them so far as the gate, where their two guides waited with the horses.

  A less formal leave-taking, then, and Ahjvar did get kissed on the mouth, which this time he was expecting and braced for. She and Ghu took their time, twined in one another. Ahjvar looked away.

  Horses, at last, and a clear sky, snow sparking bright beneath the sun. They would not pass by Letin again, angling west away from the road instead and rising into the low green and grey mountains of the border there. Two days, their escort said, then they could go on alone afoot and had only to climb the knees of the westerly mountains, keeping out of sight of the watchtowers, find a path up the cold north-facing cliff of some particular hanging valley or scale the turf and stone wall that barred slightly more passable sections of the wilderness border to horses, cross the spine of the range, and they could come down into the deep and forested Nabbani valleys west of the town of Dernang.

  “And then?” Ahjvar asked.

  “We’ll see,” said Ghu. “I suppose, I go to the mountain.”

  CHAPTER XV

  The Golden City could stand a siege forever, if the fleet stayed true. The empress had said something about the fleet sailing from Kozing, but there were few ships of war in the lagoon that Kaeo could see. Merchant ships carrying supplies for city and palace, yes; merchant ships carrying folk away. He had a good view of the distant city from the narrow window in this room up under the eaves of the main palace. Cowards, the empress named those who were inclined to desert the city, and ships were searched, and any residents trying to flee were stripped of rank and sent as labourers for the army of the Imperial Demesne, which was meant to hold the border with Taiji Province but had been falling back towards the city these several days, by all reports. The tribal armies of the Wild Girls were coming. Soldiers and slaves of the imperial estates were erecting fortifications along the line of bare hills on the western horizon, the Beacon Hills, they were called. He knew this, though he had not seen it, not even in a vision. She had given Captain Oryo that order when Kaeo had spoken of the palace burning.

  “The palace will burn,” he had said. “A beacon brighter than the hills. It will drown, it will be forgotten, a pasture for wild cattle, a story for peasant firesides. Once there was a castle on the island, and a wicked empress who thought herself a goddess—” And he had laughed, unable to stop. He was not sure which half-healed scar he had to remember that by. There were so many. He could not remember, now, if what he spoke had been the delirium of prophecy or drug-addled defiance. He rarely heard the dreams of the gods any longer. They had faded and failed, were gone from him, but still she pressed.

  Death in the dead city, he had said once. Months ago, he thought, but time dragged and rushed and confused him and sometimes the visions of prophecy came back as dreams in the night. He knew it was the end of winter, with spring warm in the air, nothing more. You send your spies to their deaths, he had said. That had been even earlier, hadn’t it? Captain Diman no longer followed at her back. Diman was sent to her death. He laughed when he told her that Diman would die; the empress had been fond of Diman, as close to a friend as an imperial princess could ever have, maybe, and he liked to see her hurt. But he was sorry, because Diman was a slave made to be what she was, and all through the winter, till she was ordered north herself, she had never beaten him or hit him for doing as the empress asked and speaking the truth the gods gave him. He had thought sometimes Diman looked as though she might, if only he knew how to ask, to persuade her, let him have a knife.

  To use on himself or on the empress? He had thought the empress would kill him, the time he had screamed and screamed, the Peony Throne is broken, the devils are loosed in our land and the Peony Throne is broken.

  It was not, of course. But it would be. He had seen it struck and split by lightning. He spoke of a sign, Buri-Nai said, of her new dynasty. That was what it was. Not the wrath of the gods.

  But he knew the city. The whispers of the canals would know the wrath of the gods when they heard of it, when it came.

  A knife. He still did not know how to get one from the slave-woman who had charge of his care and who was no true servant but a spy and assassin of the Wind in the Reeds. He played at being even weaker and frailer than he was when she came to his room. There was always a guard outside to be called for—probably the guard did not rank highly enough to know her for more than what she seemed, a girl even younger than himself, thin and quick in her movements, but he had felt her muscles firm as wood as he sagged to his knees in her grip, she trying to wrestle the soiled silks from him. Any hero of a play would by now have seduced her, taken the best of her weapons, and with her at his side—either to be wedded or to die tragically in the final scene, slain the guard at the door and fought his way out to some waiting ship of his allies.

  Kaeo’s face had been a pleasing one, once. People had always professed themselves delighted to discover that there was beauty behind the masks of the stage, beauty to match the voice and the grace in movement. He did not think he had much beauty any longer. H
e limped; he moved stiff as an old man, for all he tried every day they left him alone to work through all the seventy-two forms that were the syllabary, as it were, of dance. His face pulled and bled; there were always new cuts from the fan as the old scabs healed. His nose had been broken at some point; he did not remember how that had come to happen. Some of his seizures he had in truth; not all were lies to cover the blows of the empress’s temper.

  Perhaps pity could seduce the girl. Her name was Lau. He had no pride left.

  She was Wind in the Reeds. Pity would get nowhere.

  He leaned on the window frame and watched the sky, the sea, the city veiled in fog as the tide rolled in, cold water over the sun-warmed mudflats. The setting sun threw shadows out over the lagoon. The first geese came on their way to seek the north, and the empress’s fowlers went out into the marshes and onto the creeks with nets.

  There was rebellion in Choa and Alwu and Shihpan, led by Prince Dan, or in his name. The wind from the north. The empress said her enemy came from the caravan road. She had ordered an army into Choa, to take the province and hold the town, to split Dan’s alliance of rebel lords and slaves turned wild brigands. Rebellion in Vanai and Taihu and Upper Lat as well, and in Argya in the far northeast, but not in any unity with Dan or his god. Too many high lords were taking advantage of the imperial disarray to seize their own territory, making princedoms in all but name—though Lai Bolan of Argya did style himself prince, and the empress had prayed to the Old Great Gods who protected her to make his Denanbaki wife barren. There was no philosophy, no dream behind it when such lords claimed autonomy. Mostly, they put down revolts of the folk and the slaves as brutally as ever imperial troops could. Kaeo heard these things. The chamber-slave Lau chattered, as if the empress’s prophet might be hungry for the gossip and news in his holy isolation.

  There was some excitement in the palace. He could hear nothing in this high room, but earlier there had been parties of labourers clad only in loincloth and smock swarming like ants about the paths between the artfully-sited buildings and disappearing down towards the eastern water-gate and the wharves that faced the city. Troops of soldiers followed the same route, and once a party of wizards in their blue robes, surrounding a handcart.

  Muffled thunder. Water burst upward like a fountain, visible above the height of the curtain wall. Again, and this time the fountain was red mud. Shouting carried on the wind, excited. There were other thumps, low, shaking the air, the floor he stood on.

  He wondered if the warriors of Dar-Lathi would kill him when the palace finally fell. It would fall. He had seen it burning.

  Kaeo stood rigid at the click of the lock on the door, heart speeding up, mouth going dry. His hands shook. His eagerness disgusted him. Excitement. Fear. He made himself turn slowly.

  It was Lau; it always was. The empress did not want very many to know the secrets of her prophet.

  No covered cup in Lau’s hands, though. He had already had his evening meal, plain rice and a little fish with greens, which he had not finished. No appetite. He thought again about the heroes of tales. He was not so very tall; she a little shorter, and slender. Even thin and poisoned-sick as he was, he might outweigh her. Maybe not. Wind in the Reeds, remember that. And there was the guard outside the door. A precaution against assassins who might be sent by Prince Dan or the Wild Girls to slay the empress’s prophet, of course.

  “Get dressed,” Lau ordered. “Quick.”

  Kaeo who had been the darling of the Flowering Orange might have smiled and pointed out that he was already dressed and that maybe he was in fact wearing a little too much, at least if it was seduction and getting his hands on her knives he had in mind. Kaeo who was the broken prophet of the empress only stared at her blankly. He wore cotton trousers and smock and there was a heavy quilted gown on the bed, cover for the night, which remembered they still stood in the shadow of winter’s rains, but the order usually accompanied the white silk that made him respectable for his passage through the palace. “Dressed,” she repeated and pointed at the gown, which was plain brown wool and cotton and patched, a cast-off from some lesser servant or guardsman. He pulled it on. No sash. Too obvious an invitation to strangling himself, perhaps. Another reason there was always a guardsman on the door.

  “No sandals,” she said, frowning.

  “No.” He was barefoot. He had been since they took him to the prison. No one had minded before. Holy hermits often were.

  “You’ll have to do. Come. Stay close to me.”

  “Why?”

  “The Wild Girls have taken the Beacon Hills. The empress is breaking the dykes to flood the marshes. The imperial companies are fighting Dar-Lathans at the western gate and the boatmen’s village is burning.”

  “The palace will burn,” he said. “It will drown.”

  “I hope not. You should see the library. You read, don’t you? A sin to burn it. They ought to evacuate it, but the empress is sending only folk she finds useless mouths off to the city. No wizards, but lots of courtiers and officials. Even so, I noticed a bit of furtive scurrying down there. I think some are taking the chance to make themselves scarce, and taking their pet books with them. I’d have a go at pinching a few myself if—” She shrugged, gave him a strange smile. “I hope you appreciate the sacrifice, Dwei Kaeo. There are some histories I’d really like to get my hands on.”

  He frowned. He did not remember that his clan-name had ever escaped him in her hearing. She winked, opened the door, and stepped out. There was a broad-bladed dagger in her hand and she punched it deep into the guard, right through his leather, between the bronze plates of his coat. His mouth opened and closed like that of a feeding fish, and the blood was nearly black in the lantern-light as she stepped away from the falling man. He was still trying to breathe, but he made no cry and the gasping stopped as she wrestled him over face-up to unfasten the buckle of his belt and take his short sword. She hauled Kaeo’s gown off one shoulder, slung the refastened belt over him as a baldric, the sword under his arm.

  “You know how to use it?”

  “Yes. No. Not a real one!”

  “Pretend it’s wood. Just thrust harder. You want to do more than tickle their ribs.” She snickered. “You could make a dirty joke if you like.”

  He didn’t like. He was watching a man die and wondering what he felt and if he felt anything. She cleaned her knife carefully on the man’s trousers and stowed it away inside her own quilted gown.

  “I’m sorry, not that you’d be in my place,” she said, and squatted down to push something into the dead man’s mouth. “Salt,” she said. “Better to send him to his road than leave him for a wizard to question, eh? Come on.”

  “Wind in the Reeds. I knew you were Wind in the Reeds, but—you’re Prince Dan’s,” he gasped, wits returning. He had to run to catch up, trying to get his left arm back into the wide sleeve, the sword swinging wildly.

  “Old Great Gods, no!” A strange gesture sent light flaring wildly down a dark stairwell. “It’s clear, come on.”

  “But—”

  She grinned back over her shoulder. She had a sharp, pointed little face and her short hair, free of the jewelled combs she wore when attending the empress, stood up every which way.

  “You’re a wizard? One of the ones who fled to Dan in the north?”

  She yelped with laughter, as if she were drunk.

  “Try again. Third time lucky, boy.” She waited at the bottom of the stairs, caught his hand, tugged him around into a dark corner. Kissed him, to his astonishment.

  “For luck,” she said, and stooped to drag out a big basketry chest. “And because it’s been a long time since anyone laid a friendly touch on you, hasn’t it? Here, you take the back end and try to keep up close to it, keep your gown from falling open. Don’t want anyone seeing that sword. Keep your head down, too.”

  Play a slave and hide his face, she meant. He could do that. She took the front handle and they set off. The chest was not light, not to his weak
ened arms, anyway. But she must have put it there herself. He was feeble as an invalid, that was his problem. Head down, fall into step with her so that it did not sway wildly. More stairs, corridors where herds of people ran back and forth shouting. Two of the giants passed, running, shouting over heads something about the empress’s boat being taken down the river to safety. Stairs, passageways, lamplit receiving halls where crowds gathered making a noise like geese. The basket grew heavier and heavier and Lau had to brace herself against it going down the stairs, to stop him losing his grip on it altogether.

  Outdoors. He didn’t know where they were, which direction they faced, but there was fire on a nearby mound, within the curtain wall. Some villa or tower burning. Away to his left, shouting, screaming, a hideous din, metallic thunder. The gate that faced the inlet of the boatmen’s village. Fire lit the sky there, too.

  Lau dropped her end of the chest, and it twisted before he could let go, spilling out silks. That was all that weight, a few gowns. He was ashamed. Also terrified. She dragged him sideways into a bush sweet with leathery, evergreen leaves. A party of men rushed by towards the burning tower. The sounds of fighting faded and the night was filled with more men, tight-packed herds of them, with officers shouting. The remnant of the forces that had held the Beacon Hills? Pursued to the very gates of the palace. At least these had made it inside. It sounded as though the Dar-Lathan pursuit had been driven off, or maybe only given up, retreating. Carrying with them the heads of officers to strip clean for trophies. Bodies for their victory-feast. But perhaps that came later, when they took the empress. There was nothing in the old plays about the Dar-Lathans eating their enemies; he remembered Shouja Wey adding lines about it. Kaeo had wished Master Wey had not done that; it took out a beautiful, hard-edged line about the hero’s brother’s death.