Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  A tigress, then. That rather pleased him, despite not feeling it was quite a part of him. But neither had the empress’s mark been.

  Maybe when it healed. His chest was scabbed and itching. He knew how to shut mere physical discomfort from his mind, at least. This was only another mask, another part to perform.

  Jian herself dragged him up every morning to practise with the sword. The part was fast becoming his reality.

  The Wild Sisters—specifically Nawa—argued now that there must be a council of the city representing all its districts and guilds and classes of folk, to speak for it to the queens, since it had no sensible division into families and roundhouses. The self-appointed lords of the city said that a freeport acknowledged no lords and that they made a treaty, not an offer of submission.

  Jian said, the queens intended to offer the city to Prince Dan in return for acknowledgement of their borders and they could damn well do as they liked till he sorted them out, but she said it in smiling Lathan and it was only Rat whispering translation in Kaeo’s ear that told him what was said.

  “The slaves will be free,” she said, breath tickling. “Whatever’s decided today, in the end, your prince and your god will have the city.” But then she frowned, and looked at him, sitting back.

  “No,” she said aloud. “Kaeo—I don’t see it, I don’t see the city free—come outside.”

  Sharp speech from Nawa. Jian set her hand to her sword.

  “What does the elder queen say?” asked a stout, white-haired woman, an importer of Gold Harbour wines. They had no translator but Rat. They had brought one, but he had been left outside, and the ambassador of the new prince of Lower Lat was not admitting his fluency to the folk of the city, though he had not looked best pleased at Jian’s asides.

  Kaeo rose obediently. He bowed politely to the other two queens, the ambassador, the representatives of the city, and walked around the outside of the circle. Rat caught his arm at the door, dragged him into a jogging trot. Toba came long-legged after them, demanding to know what was happening.

  He was beginning to catch the Lathan words, to hear the echoes in them of their kinship with Nabbani.

  “Storm,” said Rat.

  “We’re well above even the spring tide line,” Kaeo said. “It’s too early in the season for a typhoon.”

  “Is it? But the Daughter of the Old Great Gods has left the city to us, for all she burned her palace. Do you think she’s the sort to let others hold her cast-offs? I said it was a trap.”

  A trap, the abandoned and burning palace. They had looted what was left from the free-standing towers and villas, after the ruins of the main building began to cool. Much left. Much taken. If it was a gesture of defiance, it had only served to hearten them. Jian had been all for shifting their camp to the palace island. Symbolic.

  Trap, Rat had said, though Toba and the other wizards of their following found no evidence of any spells set against them. When Rat spoke so, the other two ceased whatever protest they were making. Priestess, of a sort.

  Outside the camp and along the crest of the Beacon Hills, to where view of the lagoon and the sea beyond was unobscured by the palace island. Voices behind. Kaeo glanced back. The whole of the gathering in the Council House was following, led by Nawa and Jian, the city merchants looking more apprehensive than ever. High view of the lagoon, here, the city beyond, and the breakwater. Waves smashed against it, black and white and high. Waves dashed themselves against the city, too, over breakwaters there. He could see some boats leaving the mouths of the canals, heading over the lagoon towards the barren shore or the second lagoon created by the dykes of the marsh, or for the Gentle Sister’s mouth.

  “That,” said the wine-merchant, her not-quite-court-accent dropping from her, “has come up a lot since the morning.” She sounded now what she probably was, a ship-captain climbed to higher rank through marriage.

  Nearly noon, but the day was dark, the sky to the southeast almost black. A greyness on the water, out to sea.

  “Rat . . .” Kaeo said.

  Sweating. He wasn’t used to wearing armour made of anything but paper. The air was hot and heavy as late summer. He glanced at the city folk, but it didn’t matter what they thought now, or who they thought him. There was at least one woman there he did know . . . rather better than he would want Rat to know about. A dealer in exotic weaves and spices from Pirakul, mostly, and a connoisseur of poetry of the unfashionable heroic mode, which he rather liked himself. She was carefully not catching his eye.

  Listeners far too close. He whispered. “The palace will burn, I said, and it did. The palace will drown. I said that, too. Didn’t I say it?” He could not remember.

  “You said a lot when they drugged you,” she said, head close to his.

  “Yes.” And some of it had been his own anger finding a way out to spite the empress, if he could not hurt her. But it was loud in his ears. “The palace will drown.”

  “Trap,” Nawa said. “My sister Anlau saw it and said so, when Buri-Nai fled. It was a trap. Dwei Kaeo, blessed by your gods, has said it. The palace will drown, and your Daughter of the Old Great Gods intended that we drown with it, lured to shift our camp to the palace hill, as if we needed to demonstrate our hold of the coast by squatting on her leavings.”

  “We need to evacuate the city,” the wine-merchant said. “And the harbour—my ships—three in port and it’s already too late to get them out to sea and run out of its path.”

  “Can the city stand such a storm?” Jian asked. She was looking at Kaeo, as if his opinion mattered more than what the great folk might say.

  “It did last time,” Kaeo said. “That was when the typhoon came on the day of the Harvest Festival, the year they celebrated Yao’s fortieth year of rule. It stood, but—the canals were choked with bodies, after, like—like weed washed in.” An image that he thought he had put from his mind.

  More boats on the water. Some in the city were deciding to risk cannibal tribesmen rather than face the certainty of the storm.

  “The Golden City has faced storms every year since its founding,” another merchant-lord said. “There’s no reason to panic like children who’ve never heard—”

  Lighting flared along the horizon, a fire high in the clouds. No sound of the thunder reached them. The sky was black and purple-grey as bruising, and down among the bushes on the lower hillside the birds were singing songs of dusk.

  “I,” said the wine-merchant, “am bringing my people to the mainland. Honoured queens, I beg we adjourn this council until another time.”

  Rat had been standing with her eyes shut, face tilted to the sky. Now she looked around at them all.

  “Go,” she said. “Don’t bring only your own people. Tell them on the canals and in the markets, in every quarter and on every island, this will be no storm like any that has struck the city before. This is the work of the one you’ve called the Daughter of the Old Great Gods. This is a weapon, aimed at us by the evil of your empress, without regard for what other lives it destroys. She’s safe away. Did she give you any warning to follow? She did not. We do, Dwei Kaeo the prophet of your true god does. Bring the folk to the hills inland, so swiftly as you can. All your folk,” she added, with a glance at Kaeo. “The canal-side traders, the shopkeepers, the boatmen, the slaves, the beggars. All folk of all rank, if ever you hope to face your god or your road to the Gods with a clean heart. So many of the folk as you can. You have ships. Fill them, run them ashore on the mudflats if you must. The prophet of the god of Nabban, your god, the heir of the Mother and Father, has warned of it, and we did not understand. The palace will drown. The city will drown. There is nothing we can do now but save what we can and spite our enemy so. Go!”

  “Yes,” Nawa said, and began issuing orders to her own people.

  Kaeo stayed where he was, as Rat did, when even Toba went back to the camp. They were tearing down the shelters, when he looked. Better to endure the rain and the wind than to lose tents and the reed-bundle
huts and have no roof to put up again when all was over.

  “What are you watching for?” he asked, after a while. The boats of the merchants had fought their way across the lagoon to the city, and it was truly a fight, the oarsmen straining against the wind and waves. Boats were leaving the city. One canoe went down into the trough of a wave and never came up. They had left it too late, and so many vessels were meant only for the canals.

  “She’s going to kill her own folk to strike at us,” Rat said.

  “She’s mad. She thinks she’s become a goddess.”

  “But she isn’t mad. She truly believes it, because she’s been told it, and had it proven to her, the way all her path is cleared by miracle—the powers she commands, or thinks she commands.”

  “Who’s told her?” Kaeo asked.

  “Something next to her heart.” Rat looked at him, her smile a little crooked. “She rather liked you, I think. You should have tried compliments instead of cursing her. You might have got to find out what she wears there. I never did, for all I was slave of her chamber.”

  He rubbed at the tattoo. Rat squatted down on her heels. “Stay with me here? I don’t know what I can do. I’m only the priestess of the memory of a goddess, and a faint hope of . . . growing into something more. But what I can do, I need to.”

  He nodded. Stood like a guard over her, because he did not know what else to do. Toba came back to them, to wordlessly offer the little bag of his grandmother’s finger-bones. Rat nodded and laid them out in a semicircle before them, as if she set a wall. Toba clapped a hand to Kaeo’s shoulder that seemed to be some approval and went back to the other queens.

  Ships, flying wild before the wind, only the least of sails set. They really did careen themselves in the mudflats beyond the dykes, and there were people struggling to drag canoes and small boats to take the folk over the marshes. Dar-Lathans were down there with the outriggers they had taken from conquered villages, and riverboats. Smaller boats still came from the city, too. He watched another swamped, the folk disappearing, the waves too great to be conquered by even the strongest swimmer. Another. Rat stood. There was a grey wall over the ocean now. A dark and straggling line of folk winding up the lower hills northward of their camp. So many carried bundles, dragged possessions—what space in those ships was given up to hasty grasping after things that the gods would not judge in the balance against even a slave’s life as having the weight of a feather?

  Up the rising hump of the hill, the banners of the camp were snapping and streaming inland. Thatch was tearing off the Council House.

  “I was going to say, we should leave in a day or so,” Rat said, conversational. “We can’t delay any longer, or we’ll never come to your god before the empress does. She can move swiftly by water, at least, and we’ll be walking. Horses would draw too much attention, more than I could shift away.”

  “I can’t ride, anyhow.”

  “You’d learn. You wouldn’t enjoy it.”

  They were shouting into the wind. Leaning into it. The first drops of rain struck, hot and fat and hard as hail, and in the space of a few breaths they were drenched, blinded. Thunder rolled above them, and the sky over the lagoon was lit a strange pinkish white, like lightning high in the clouds at night. The city vanished in the rain as if eaten by mist, and then even the palace hill, so heavy the storm. They crouched together, holding to each other as if the wind might blow either away, alone. Impossible to see much farther than the reach of his hand. The water drowned his eyes, stinging, poured down his neck, down his spine, into his boots. Rat groped for the bones, sitting up on her knees. Touched each in turn, singing something. A prayer, he thought. He heard a few words he almost understood. Sister and tiger and safe.

  The wind knocked her backwards.

  He caught her arm and pulled her down beside him, both of them lying on their bellies, the rain pounding them into the earth.

  “Pray,” she said, or he thought she did. There was a light on the bones before her, as if moonlight lay in them, escaping slowly. She drew breath and sang again.

  He did pray, uncertainly. Wondering, did he betray his gods, if with Rat he prayed to some memory of the Little Sister’s tiger-goddess. It was a tiger that filled his mind, a tigress, red-gold and fierce, and the itching of his chest was soothed by the soaking he was getting. Warm, though, the tattoo. As if he took a fever in it, but it was not a bad feeling. He put a fingertip, hesitantly, on one of the bones. Rat had taken one up in her hand, sang whatever her words were, a pattern of twenty lines or so, he thought, with it cradled almost to her mouth.

  “We ask the memory of our foremothers and forefathers to strength us,” she broke off to shout at him. “They’re gone to the Old Great Gods but there’s memory of them in their bones, memory going back to the days of the goddess, and memory of all our own living gods and goddesses.”

  The finger-bone was smooth and warm and the light felt almost like a human touch. He matched his voice to Rat’s and sang, not a prayer, but a deeper undercurrent to hers, making a wordless music. An offering. To what god, he could not have said. Mostly it was the warmth of the tigress tattoo and of Rat lying against his side, warm even with their armoured coats between them, that shaped his music, not the thought of the dying Father or Mother, or their promised heir. He could hardly hear Rat, to follow and wrap around her voice. The wind screamed, roared. Thunder crashed, and waves, and things snapped and cracked and boomed. Trees, buildings, the end of what was left of the palace and of the palace gardens. The end of the ships run onto the mud. How many had come ashore, of all those in the city? Best not to think of it. Shut it from his mind, let the music carry him in Rat’s footsteps, whatever it was she did.

  She fell silent, eventually, and he did, throat raw, rain in the mouth a blessing to be swallowed. Their hands were clasped together over the bone and the rain drummed hard. The wind would seem briefly to weaken, and then roar again with renewed strength. Dark shapes moved, new leaves, birds, who knew what hurled inland. When finally it did begin to die, Kaeo could not trust he did not imagine it. The darkness did not lift. The air was colder, though. He dared to lift his head. Softer rain, and icy. He could see—not much. Night had come on them. Rat whispered something, and spread light above an opened hand, but when she unclasped the other from his, the bone they had held together was only a little white dust. She touched it to her lips, then to his, then wiped it away. Tried to take up the rest of the bones and found them gone, a little white graininess in the mud.

  She shivered. “Toba’s grandmother,” she said. “Did you feel her memory with us?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand these things.” The warmth of the tigress tattoo was gone, though. So was the lingering soreness, and the itch of it. “Why say you’re not a wizard?”

  “Powers lent me,” she said wearily. Her teeth chattered. The pale light smearing her other hand faded and died. “That’s all. I don’t think it was enough. This is Nabban, not the shores of the Little Sister, and your god is not even—a god, yet.”

  She picked herself up. The wind was blowing from the north, where a few stars showed.

  They went to find what was left of the camp.

  The palisade still stood, and the Council House, mostly roofless, but filled with elderly Nabbani, small children, babies. Little else. Fires were already being built—a good thought, whoever had ensured some fuel was kept dry. People everywhere, and all down the sheltered side of the Beacon Hills, where the wind had been a little less.

  No food, no tea. Fire was enough. Someone made a place for them closest to the warmth and they sat shoulder to shoulder. Rat fell asleep against him, which was—awkward, when Jian came searching for the youngest queen, to find him with his arm about her. She said nothing, though, except, “Nawa says, come and see.”

  Dawn. He shook Rat awake and they went out into the open again.

  The marshes were flooded deep, and the waves still rolled high, spitting over the dykes. The palace hill
looked as though it had been struck by a thousand hammers, trees splintered, smashed, buildings that been spared the fire gone as if they had never been, or lying in shattered heaps.

  “Plenty to burn,” Jian said. “Plenty to build with, too.”

  “Look further,” Nawa told them.

  He did. Found he was holding Rat’s hand.

  “Yes,” said Jian, to something in his face.

  The Golden City was—gone.

  Waves churned rough and white. Sandbars, ancient pilings of massive logs, stone-paved plazas, and canal-side streets, there. Buildings—a few. Broken things, sagging, leaning. A scum of flotsam heaved with the waves, made rafts that drifted on the surface of the lagoon. Mia. Shouja Wey. The Flowering Orange, the masks, the scrolls of the plays.

  Yeh-Lin’s ghost-haunted and long-deserted palace loomed over all, roofless now, but still standing.

  He had not thought wind and wave could do so much.

  “We were spared,” Nawa said. “The full force of the wind was weakened as it came over the hill, a little. Our walls and fences still stand, and they were better shelter than none. The Little Sister is with us.”

  A wall of finger-bones, a memory holding out its hands, to guard them. A tiger, crouched defiant, snarling into the wind.

  He looked at Rat.

  “No,” she said. “It was only the last memory of Toba’s grandmother. The last strength in her bones. We have nothing to set against the power the empress holds, whatever it is and however she came by it. We need alliance with the god of Nabban. We’ll go to him, Kaeo and I. Kaeo is his prophet. I—go only as the youngest of the queens, I think. Find us food, if there is any. We’ll leave today.”

  Neither Nawa nor Jian made any protest this time.

  CHAPTER XX

  The Daro castle, called the White River Dragon for an old, old tale of its founding, sat to the northeast of the town, separated from it by a broad moat. The spring flooding often reached so far, lapping at the town’s eastern flank, mingling with the waters of the moat, but Dernang was on a low mound and the castle itself on a higher, safely above the waters in most years. The castle’s main gate faced the town, with a bridge between, but its second gate looked east and flung out a raised roadway towards the river. Ghu did not want to keep too close under the city walls, so he led them out into the fields, heading cross-country to circle to the river road, across wet fields that sank into ankle-deep water. The ditches became drowningly treacherous, marked only by lines of cattail and reed. Ghu and Ahjvar went barefoot; there was water even over the road, and boots meant for the winter desert were no use for wading. The cold numbed Ghu’s feet. These were the waters of the Wild Sister, Mother Nabban’s own river, whose three main sources converged two and three hundred miles south of here, carrying the waters of the mountains that bordered Choa and Alwu over shallow, stony beds. Spring melt, always, and sometimes the autumn rains in the mountains, swelled her waters to push over the land, a shallow lake drowning thin clay and the beds of ancient stone beneath. He felt her in the water, felt him in the stone, the Mother, the Father, like a slow, slow breathing, a tide in his blood, rising. The river’s tree-lined banks were only a weight in his mind, lost now in the night. The bridges over the small streams that fed her rose humped and forlorn, like the hulls of overturned boats, from the lake she was becoming, and then even they faded, as the fog thickened and they moved blind in darkness that felt muffling, no reflection of moonlight on water to guide them. The drowned lanes he followed through the fields were only memory to his feet. In the fog, he could fade to nothing himself, to memory, instinct, with only the shuffling splash of Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin, the more rapid spatter of the dogs, to anchor him.