Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  They paddled along the lines of drowned drainage ditches, where bordering bushes and wind-slanted trees would hide them. The moon was treacherously bright. It must be past midnight. Every other Dar-Lathan seemed to be an archer, and they knelt each with an arrow in hand, ready for the string, but no alarm was cried from the palace walls and nothing else stirred on the marshland. A frantic rabbit thrashed past. Three foxes sat together on a piece of flotsam, a heavy plank that had once bridged some ditch. Kaeo watched them watching the canoes, imagined them thinking, if only we had a paddle. He was delirious. Perhaps they smelt the rabbit. But the water was lower than it had been. The tide was ebbing. The shallow lagoon created by the dykes might not drain completely, but creatures would pick a way through puddles and pools and muck to move inland out of the softening ground.

  Why worry about the foxes and rabbits? There were men and women dead in the boatmen’s burning village and at the gates, and there would be more, hundreds more. But he hoped the foxes would come safely ashore. And the rabbit.

  They took the canoes up a brook that had become a creek of the sea. It was guarded by a Dar-Lathan outpost that he never saw; there was only a brief exchange of low-voiced words, and they passed on by, though the party with the outrigger put into the bank and did not follow on up the narrowing water. When it became a ditch, they abandoned the canoes—or maybe left them guarded. At any rate, their numbers kept falling away, until in the end there were only five, including he and Rat, who came to where sentries guarded the crossing of a new-dug defensive trench on the rising ground. Kaeo was staggering with weariness by then; he sank down on his haunches the moment they stopped moving, but it was only a moment’s rest. Rat hauled him up. Winding their way into a camp. Huts of brush, tents. The fires were mostly banked with sods, but a whiff of cooking smells started him retching. A dog barked and was hushed. There were few people to be seen. Asleep. Just guards here and there. From the height of the hill, the sullen dying fire of the burning moon-tower still made its signal in the gardens, and there was torchlight about the palace walls. Windows showed lamplit yellow where palace folk still planned, or panicked, or where wizards worked, preparing who-knew-what defences or attacks. He had never walked on grass, he realized, in all his time in the Golden City. He had not felt simple earth under his feet until Rat dragged him out into the gardens.

  Priestess of a goddess centuries gone. What authority did she carry here? He wasn’t any use to the Dar-Lathans; she said so herself. A whim. They didn’t take slaves. Or prisoners, from what he had heard. Maybe someone would want a singer.

  They paused outside an enclosure that was a not a hut but a circle, a brush wall enclosing firelight. Echo of one of the storied roundhouses, he realized, and there were, there really were, skulls, ivory-white, jawless, hung like fruit in bunches from two tall posts that marked an entryway. The high lord of Taiji? Commanders of the army of Dar-Lathi, lords of the city of Ogu? Surely they would not want his; he was only an actor.

  Here, at last, came a challenge, and they had lost all their escort but the one man with the lantern. A man and a woman armed with spears barred a gap in the thorny fence. The wizard brought up his light to a golden brightness with a pass of his hand, swinging it to shine on Kaeo’s face. Rat spoke, quick and urgent words. He heard his own name, the full Dwei Kaeo, and Buri-Nai’s. The spearman made a gesture at Kaeo. His gown was flapping like a bat’s wings, exposing his sword. Kaeo meekly began to drag the belt off over his head, but Rat’s hand seized his arm.

  “No you don’t, my boy. You’ve earned it.”

  Argument, brief. The man shrugged, stepped back. The woman likewise gave way, looking amused. Rat gave both of them a cheerful wave as she towed Kaeo through.

  A woman in armour paced back and forth before a fire. Other people sat about under a thatched roof on posts, or stretched out sleeping, but most of them were already stirring, disturbed by the argument at the gate. The pacing woman paused long enough to prod another with her toe, and that one leapt up as if kicked, then launched herself at them, shouting something. Kaeo had an impulse to leap in front of Rat and an even stronger one to hide behind her, and ended up only twitching, as the older woman grabbed Rat and shook her, laughing. The other strolled up in time to fling her arms about both as they embraced, all talking at once.

  “All right, all right.” Rat disentangled herself. “Here. This is Dwei Kaeo. He’s a singer and actor and was a spy for Prince Dan until one of his fellows betrayed him under torture. He’s also a prophet of the heir of the gods of the land, or was taken by the gods to be so, when the magistrates tortured him to the very threshold of the road, and the empress has been drugging him back there at regular intervals ever since with dreamer’s yellowroot, though he’s no wizard. He may be useful, if we want to talk to either Dan or whatever or whoever it is who’s coming into the land to take the place of the gods. Kaeo—”

  He was already bowing to the armoured women. They looked very close in age, their mid-twenties, maybe, older than Rat, but they shared her pointed face and keen eyes. Their armour was lacquered jade-green, mottled like the stone, and both wore jade pendants in their ears, jade rings braided into their hair. The elder was plucking at Rat’s cropped head, scowling.

  “It’ll grow,” she said, distracted. “It’s only hair. Kaeo, these are my sisters, Nawa and Jian.”

  Father Nabban, she meant real sisters, not fellow priests or fellow commanders. Raised in the furthest wilderness of the highlands and the coastal swamps, hunted by the corps of wizards, hidden by the gods and goddesses of their many tribes. The Wild Girls. Daughters of the grim god Tai’aurenlo of the burning hills and a human mother. The queens. He hadn’t heard that there were three of them.

  A queen of the south thought him worth kissing? A halfling god did?

  “Give him to the priests, then,” Nawa? Jian? said, dismissing him, and followed that with more in whatever the language of Dar-Lathi was called. People were gathering at the fire—some council meeting. The wizard took Kaeo’s arm.

  “Dwei Kaeo, come.” So he spoke Nabbani after all. Rat must have seen his frantic look around for her.

  “Go on with Toba. He’s more a shaman than a wizard, to put it in your terms. It’s possible you are too. Anyhow, he probably knows what to do with someone half dead of overdosing on yellowroot. We’re talking boring sisterly things—”

  One of the queens laughed, not pleasantly, in his opinion. Said something about Buri-Nai.

  “Well, if you wanted her head, Nawa, you should have told me sooner. Though odds are she’d have sent mine back to you. Nicely charred. So.” Rat left her sisters to run after him, take him by the shoulders. “You’ll be fine. I told you, nobody wants your skull. You’re safe. We’re friends.” She wiped at something on his face. Mud, he hoped, and nothing worse. “Get some sleep.”

  Kaeo found a smile from somewhere, though in truth he was so tired he had no energy left for worry over what they meant to do with him in the morning, if only they would let him sleep now. “You think your sisters would have let you keep the empress’s dog?”

  “Only if it could sing.”

  No whimsical kissing here, just a brief tightening of her grip on him before she turned away, back to her sisters and their council and the fire.

  Water, plain rice, a quiet corner. Toba seemed a civilized man of quiet good sense, not a headhunting cannibal shaman. The last thing Kaeo saw as sleep pulled him under its darkness was the wizard sitting nearby, his lantern-pole stabbed into the earth, its light glowing dimly over a pattern of small white bones that he gathered up, breathed on, and threw again. Maybe not civilized. They were human finger-bones, he was certain.

  Toba looked over at Kaeo. Nodded. Gathered, breathed, threw again.

  CHAPTER XVI

  The fleet begins to arrive with the dusk, ships dark on the lagoon. A strong wind has blown from the east all day, as they came along the southern coast of Nan-Ya. He promised the empress it would be so, once she su
mmoned the admiral. She is the Daughter of the Old Great Gods and the empress of all Nabban. The Gods bless her and by their grace the winds will serve. But now they grow wilder, swinging, shifting. They swing to a southerly, bringing cloud and rain, and the summer warmth of the ocean, unseasonably early. Not the following wind she will no doubt wish for, but it will serve.

  I am weak in your world, he reminds her. The heavens are very far from me.

  “The palace will burn,” her prophet told her, and she believes his words, all his words, even the ones that were spite.

  The fleet could have carried soldiers from Kozing, could have landed them, driven the Wild Girls back, but—why bother? The south does not interest him. Why should she struggle to hold it? It is in the north that the heir of the gods is moving, shifting the currents of the land.

  The palace will burn. She does not intend to be there.

  All the first half of the night, there has been much stir. Torchlight and lanterns moving, and noise, too, human voices like the distant babble of waves, rising and falling and never ceasing.

  Wait, he says, when Buri-Nai would go, the last of all with her company about her. Look back, he tells her.

  Buri-Nai obeys, impatiently.

  What? she asks, shaping the word with lips and tongue, no breath. The Daughter of the Gods must not mutter and whisper to herself, but sometimes she treats him as a tutor, a counsellor—an irritant who forgets she is empress and divine, by his own testimony. He intends to teach her otherwise, eventually. Not yet. The messenger of the Old Great Gods must be patient, kindly even when stern.

  Her urgency to be gone is not fear, which rather surprises him, but Buri-Nai has a serene and utter confidence in her sanctity and her invulnerability. Merely, she is finished with this place. Through. The Wild Girls can sack it, for all she cares.

  That suits him.

  He asks, Should the throne of your ancestors be left to those who will pick through the wreckage here?

  He feels her pleasure as she considers that wreckage, the ruin to come of the palace so long her cage.

  “The years of the Peony Throne are ended,” she says aloud, quoting her prophet, who vanished in the first abortive attack on the palace walls. Stolen, he presumes, by Dar-Lathan assassins who thought him of some value. Their mistake. They seem recently to have killed him, perhaps in some jungle rite of their wizardry. A soul stolen from the braid he weaves, the foundation he lays. Aside from that, the man is no loss, though she was angry. He did not bother to search when the man was first taken, though she turned humble, asking him to. Obstinate, clinging to the idea that secrets of the gods might be revealed, if only she pressed him hard enough. Or an ageing woman besotted with a once-attractive face. He was annoyed, though, to lose that soul as he had, opened as it was to vision and dream, stronger than the man who had borne it.

  Yes, he says patiently. The Peony Throne will be cast down. They say so, in the markets throughout the provinces.

  “A prophecy for me or against me?” She laughs, her hand on her amulet. “Or does the Daughter of the Old Great Gods cast down the Min-Jan throne along with the laws of Min-Jan? I shall.”

  The air grows tense with the breath of storm. He takes her, courses through her. She draws a breath that is almost a gasp; there is pain in the white light that burns an instant through her veins. Lightning tears the air.

  The throne is split from carved canopy to seat, fallen into two halves, and the edges, and the delicate patterning of the floor, inlaid in many woods, smoulder.

  “No cannibal tribeswoman is going to defile the throne of my father,” she says. “And what need have I of it? The years of the Min-Jan are ended. These are the years of the Daughter of the Gods.”

  She turns on her heel and strides from the long throne-room, walking like a warrior, not with the soft steps of a courtier. He has taught her that. Carry yourself as what you mean to be.

  The dark of the moon. Beacon Hill is spattered red with the fires of the tribal horde. By the time the dawn comes, Buri-Nai and all the folk of the palace, those she has not sent to the city to have them out of her court, are aboard and the ships are nosing out the gap in the breakwater, seeking the open sea.

  By the time the dawn comes, the palace is a beacon, burning, to be seen far offshore.

  Let the Wild Girls have the ruin and gloat in their triumph, for the short time they can. The heir of the gods is in the north, and he must come into the empress’s reach.

  Far out to sea, the winds shift. The waters stir uncertainly.

  The heir of the gods is coming home . . . Kaeo thrashed himself out of smothering blankets, awake, heart thudding. Echo of a dream.

  Toba woke. The old wizard had been physicking him with assorted unpleasant brews to stop the headaches, the vomiting and the shaking, that had kept hitting in waves over the first days of his freedom. He was better, now, but one of the less-foul teas, which Toba still insisted he drink, still gave him dreams. Vague and troublesome ones, mostly, elusive on waking. This . . .

  “The queens,” he said. “The empress is gone. The god . . .”

  He was hardly coherent.

  Come dawn, they stood on the crest of the highest of the Beacon Hills, looking down. The queens in armour, jade in their hair, their ears, about their throats, heavy collars of it. Faces painted for battle that, apparently, would not come. Rat looked older, a stranger, almost, masked in green and brown swirls like light through leaves and birds in flight, till she winked at him.

  They had been already awake. Only he, drugged on his pallet in Toba’s little hut, had slept through the uproar of the sentries, the messengers going to and from the Council House of the queens, the preparation for the attack that had not come, as the palace went up in flames.

  The ambassador of the Kho’anzi of Lower Lat was with them, speaking of his lord’s most certain trust in their promises . . . He thought it some great wizardry of their own.

  “You dreamed,” Nawa, the eldest of the sisters, said.

  “The heir of the gods. The one the prophets speak of. The empress has gone—some threat against him, I don’t know. Some—” Sometimes he dreamed her outlined in fire, sometimes the last emperor, falling, the lightning drawing him against the sky. “Some thing is with the empress, and it means death to the god, it does. We need to go to him.”

  “We have the Golden City,” Nawa countered, and he should feel afraid, that he argued with a queen. He did not. “The empress has realized she can’t retake Taiji, now that Lower Lat has turned against her. She couldn’t even take the Imperial Demesne back.”

  “We don’t have the city,” Jian said. “We have no ships. Unless you want to paddle over in stolen canoes to burn it, and what would be the point of that? Send to their lords or their rich grandmothers or whoever will surface to rule now that the court is gone, and talk them over to us.”

  “The god,” Kaeo said. “We—you should send someone to speak for you to him. When he comes. If he does. If we can find him.”

  “Listen to him,” said Rat. And her sisters had a brief conversation in Lathan.

  “No,” said Nawa. “The empress has gone to make war on him. You would only be putting yourself in her way, and she knows you now.”

  “Who looks at a slave?”

  “A slave who stole her prophet. And it might not be the empress who recognizes you. You said yourself, some other power was there in the palace.”

  “But we need the god,” Rat said simply. “What do we have? Provinces we can’t hold, once Nabban settles its quarrels within itself. A border hard to defend, because we can keep no standing army. We need—to talk.”

  “So wait, to see what happens in the north.”

  “Yes,” Jian agreed.

  Rat shook her head, but she made no further argument. The queens ruled so. Argued themselves into some consensus—not always a majority. But Rat was letting this go, for now.

  At least until her sisters left them.

  “We will go, Kaeo,�
� she said. “I—am sure of it. A few days, a week or two . . . we need to go. We will.” Smiled at him. “Sorry. Prophecy’s your game. Ignore me. Sometimes I get feelings, that’s all. I’m sure I’ll grow out of it.”

  “We’ll go,” he said, more certain than she. “But just the two of us?”

  “We’ll be enough. Faster that way. Less arguing. Best leave Jian and Nawa here, and Toba’s too old. He’ll throw the bones of his grandmother for us before we go.”

  His grandmother. Left to him on her death, as the wizard said he had left his own bones to his newest grandson, who already showed signs of the wizard-gift.

  A strange people. Kaeo did not like to think of someone handling his fleshless bones after he was dead. But it was the way of the mountain folk south of the Little Sister.

  Bones clean and wrapped in a straw-woven rug, a cave high on a mountain, the place of a god. It is very peaceful there, and the sky is very blue, like banners. The forests below are green and dark and hide secrets of the highland folk and the jungle folk, and the river guards their border, and the folk go freely over and back.

  “We remember his name,” a white-haired old woman says. “He was mine.”

  As fragments of dreams went, there were worse.

  “We don’t need the bones,” Kaeo said. “We go north. I’m not his—the new god’s. I never asked to be made a prophet. I never prayed, or thought that much on the gods at all. I honoured the Father and Mother, but . . . it was Prince Dan and what he promised that I served. The gods weren’t my concern, ever. They still aren’t. I only want—a life of my own. But I can find him.”

  As surely as knowing he faced the sun, Kaeo thought. He did not entirely like that feeling. As if a part of him had been taken, enslaved, however accidentally, by the dying gods, as he was dying on the Isle of Crows.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER XVII

  “Papers,” the young soldier said, and Ivah, bowing, dug in the pocket of her caravaneer’s coat for the short section of bamboo that held the rolled paper. One only needed a pass if one was travelling between towns, but here in Dernang imperial officials had gone house to house making a census of inhabitants, each vouched for by the others, and any deemed suspicious investigated further. Suspected runaway slaves had been stripped to check for brands.