Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  Lord Gahur was not yet dead, but his sword had fallen from his grip and he swayed, kneeling, sunken back on his heels. Yeh-Lin slashed and cut the strings of his helmet and knocked it off with the dagger again, before she dropped the shorter blade and took a two-handed grip on her sword to sweep, in a single stroke, his head away.

  The body tipped and spurted and flooded and folded to the ground. The head fell with a horrible soft thud. It stared, mouth open, and eyes. Ivah shut her own eyes, swallowed hard. Her mother’s head flying, taken in one clean blow, and her long hair trailing out, a beautiful banner as it flew . . .

  The devil caught up her dagger and shoved it filthy through her belt. She spun in the centre of the circle to catch them all with her eye, a whirl of black and scarlet and blue, and she cried out, “Witness! It is done! By the will of the Old Great Gods! I claim command of Dernang and Choa and the imperial army in Choa for the heir of the gods of Nabban.”

  Now there was a thought. Challenge the empress to name a champion—Old Great Gods, she did not want the empire. It was her god she sought.

  There were cries from the crowd. The heir of the gods! The holy one of the gods is coming! The holy one of the gods! And, Find the priest-killers! Death to the usurper! Death to the sons of Min-Jan! The fall of the Peony Throne!

  The market square was crowded, and it was soldiers packed the space behind the unwary townsfolk, trapped now where they had thought to learn the news and skulk away, and the soldiers were crying out too, The true gods and their holy one! Death to the empress! The heir of the gods!

  Bodies began to push and surge; Ivah could not see beyond the shove and shift of them, but there was shouting, words becoming lost, and a man roaring and then screaming. She thought the soldiers were killing an officer, there away beyond the shoving shrieking townsfolk, and suddenly some group broke through, running, and others surged into the circle. Yeh-Lin shouted, “Daro and the true gods! To horse!” and leapt to the magpie-brilliant piebald she had ridden into the square.

  But Ivah had distinctly heard her say, in the bastard Nabbani of the road, “Ah, damn! A bloody riot. He’s going to kill me!” as she passed. Ivah almost burst out laughing. That, that was not a weaver of dreams and schemes and a master of puppets. That was some warlord’s noekar who had overstepped her authority and had her lord to face.

  Her god came to Dernang. Not here now, but he came. And she would know him when he came.

  The devil on her circling piebald caught her eye. Ivah didn’t care. She grinned, bowed, hands together, and slipped away through the crowd that ran and milled like confused cattle.

  She found a safe sanctuary on the roof of a porch, hid herself. Judge gods by their deeds. And their servants as well.

  The scaffolding of the temple of the Daughter of the Gods was burning, and so was something beyond the half-built wall. In the market, by the town keep, she could see soldiers on their knees, officers too. There were other soldiers standing over them, gesturing, shouting, but not nearly the blood and mess and horror she had expected must follow, though it was bad enough. Bodies lay about the square, soldiers and bright-armoured lords and townsfolk. Trampled or slaughtered in the first fury. Now came a hurrying back and forth towards the north gate, and to the silk-merchants’ street where lay the grand houses expropriated for officers’ lodgings before the castle fell. But the fire of the scaffolding had spread to the next courtyard house, and there was smoke from other streets, too, and shouts and cries. She did not suppose all the soldiers rushing off were doing so to put out fires.

  Orders shouted. Parties of other soldiers went after them, more orderly. Officers grim. These ones wore blue ribbons on their helmets or scraps of blue cloth about their arms.

  “Go home!” the townsfolk were being ordered. “Go to your houses, clear the streets, the god has gone to the mountain, he comes but not today, go home, keep the peace; the Kho’anzi Daro Korat of Choa will send criers to tell you what follows. For now, go home.”

  Good advice. Ivah dropped down and made her stealthy way back to her new base, an inn where, for Kharduin’s name, she had been given a corner and one meagre meal a day in return for scouring pots and sweeping the yard. Better than her den in the ruined stable, though she had never before in her entire life wielded a broom.

  Kaeo and Rat marched swifter than any army ever could, begged passage on the riverboats in trade for a song, and went cross-country by winding paths only the peasants knew, but which Rat could always find. There were whispers, as if the thought rose from the grass, the wind. The empress lied. She was denied by the Mother and the Father. The heir of the gods would come to the north. One morning in a small town whose name he never knew, somewhere in Choian Province, the imperial banner that hung faded and tatty at the magistrate’s gate burst suddenly into flame and was burnt to ash. Folk went to see it, Rat and Kaeo among them. That story followed them, met them everywhere. Banners had burned throughout the land. A sign.

  It was forbidden to speak of it. The magistrates flogged those who repeated it. The folk gathered in the half-built temples dedicated to the empress as the Daughter of the Gods to pray for her protection against their enemies in north and south, and yet still that whisper followed and met them. The heir of the gods comes to the north and the weeping land will be set free. Word born from the wind, from the rustling leaves of the willows . . . from the dreams of the fled and hidden priests, more likely, yet Kaeo did not hear it in his own.

  Everywhere, they found shrines deserted, priestless, burnt. They sheltered in such ruins, and Rat shed her levity to pray, briefly, in the shadow of a great grey boulder that was the only altar such shrines ever had, while whatever millet or lentils and rice they had bought with Rat’s coins simmered on a small and careful fire with fish she had caught and the wild greens he foraged for. Kaeo would make his own prayers, such as they were, to add to hers. He offered a waiting silence, at any rate, kneeling, holding to stillness. But waking, he could not touch the gods.

  They were dying. Dead? Why should he feel that they should be there as more than a thought in his mind, a hope, a wish? They never had been, in all his life. It was they who had reached blind and desperate out of the deep darkness and found him. But when Rat prayed, he tried to make his own stillness an echo to hers, a shared reverence, at least, for the place where the gods should be.

  One such night-in-day, while he knelt with closed eyes, waiting in a silence that had no answer, her hand touched the back of his neck. Rested there. He looked up, expecting a grin, a joke, a poke in the ribs and a comment on men who fell asleep at their prayers. Her lips smiled, ever so slightly, but her eyes were—her eyes were wide and solemn.

  “Kaeo,” she said. Only that, and he reached for her where she knelt beside him, as her arms came around him, and her mouth all uncertain, most un-Rat-like uncertain, found his.

  No uncertainty on his part, only a startled wonder. She was all sharp bones and hard muscles until Kaeo found the curve of hips that clothing hid and the small breasts, soft and warm, to fill a hand. Clothes shed all anyhow, laughing, and under her shawl and shirt, along with a simple amulet of a flat and naturally-holed river-stone, she wore a heavy collar, many strands of variegated jade, that would betray them entirely if they were ever searched. It was the green of forests, a dream, he thought, of hidden pools, of a goddess’s eyes, and the colours shifted and moved like leaf-shadow against her brown skin. She was gentle when her hands travelled his autumn’s scars, fiery fierce when she pulled him over atop her, wrapped him in arms and legs. At some point they remembered to move their supper off the fire. It would keep.

  They were late rising that evening. The sun was set and the young moon following it, before hand in hand they took to the road again.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  For Ahjvar, the journey to the god’s mountain passed like a dream, like memory of fever. Night. Fog. Cold water. The road rising from the flooded lands, angling to the northeast. Not the highway to the pass to Denanbak. La
nes and trackways Ghu seemed to know blind. Crouched silent, waiting, as some patrol rode by, betrayed by their hooves and desultory voices, by their torches sullen red in the fog. Meat-filled dumplings and cold tea from a flask in the lee of an empty herder’s hut. They were among hills, climbing out of the fog and into a slow dawn, a sunken track through a grove of drily-whispering bamboo, then trees about them, a rocky, boulder-strewn ground. Lee of a boulder, warm in the sun. Dragged by Ghu out of dreams so foul he could only crouch, gasping and retching, for what seemed an age but probably was not. Arms hard around him, breath against his hair. His name, over and over, until he turned his face against Ghu’s shoulder and sobbed like a child, while the dogs nosed at him in concern.

  Ahjvar didn’t speak, even once he could. The only words he could find in that place would ask for his death.

  They climbed another mile in silence. Maybe it was two. Hay meadows, and thorn-hedged pastures, winter-brown and with snow still drifted in the northern shadows. Ghu led; Ahjvar followed. Ghu looked back often, waited when he lagged, feet heavy. More grey pastures, horses tiny and distant in a steep valley, a stream tumbling down shelving stone ledges between slender smooth-barked trees, some white flower like a carpet of snow between their interlaced roots.

  “I’m going for horses,” Ghu said. Watched his face. They had drunk. The water was cold, with the taste of stone in it. They sat on a stony step, spray misting over them. “All right here for a little?”

  Ghu looked drawn and grey, older than his years now. No god but a man pushed to the fraying edge.

  Ahjvar went to kneel by the water again, drank again, bathed his face. The little brook had risen up over the flat stones of the ledges. In the deeper channel, small fish hung, wriggling to hold position, gathering strength to leap, to climb to the next stair.

  “Go,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll wait.”

  Ghu still hesitated.

  “Go on.”

  Ghu nodded, touched his shoulder as he sat down, back against the stone, sword across his lap, and left him, keeping under the shadow of the trees. Both dogs stayed, this time.

  Ahjvar found the acorns shoved into his purse, sat hunched forward, worrying one through his fingers. He drifted, fighting sleep. No thoughts. Only the shape of the nut, the sound of the water, birds. Jui scratched and shook himself and curled on the stone to sleep. Jiot came to lie with his muzzle on Ahjvar’s boot. Small white clouds, scudding like a flock of sheep before the wind. Change in the weather. Rain on its way. Maybe not this night. He must have touched the edge of sleep again, or dreams came into his waking. Wizardry seeking to fix a hold on him, to catch at his sleeve. . . . He walked about and broke the stalks of last year’s dead weeds, stripped a few twigs. Some kind of beech, but he had given up keeping to the strict patterns of the spellcasting of Praitan. Let the weeds and twigs be what he told them they were. Laid out three patterns, one within the other, of three points each, the innermost three paces a side. Heather for dreams, hazel to purify, cypress for sleep and healing. Then mountain ash at all three points, for protection. Outermost three all prickly ash, to break and scatter and turn the illusion of wizardry that he dreamed against itself. To keep it from him, in his waking. He didn’t sit down again but shed Yeh-Lin’s blanket and began to work through the old exercises, making something new of them. Weaving a pattern through the wizardry. To keep his mind from wandering into dreams, to feel sun and sweat and blood coursing in his veins, to know he lived, he alone, the hag gone from him and the deeds of his hands his own.

  The sun was dropping into the west when the dogs stirred and the wind brought the scent of horses and oiled leather.

  Horses at an easy canter. Ghu. A great black-legged white Denanbaki stallion, moving like flowing water, bright as the moon, and following it, no leading rein, a dusky bay. They jumped the stream lower down, came up through the trees at a long-swinging walk.

  Ghu on a swift horse was an eagle on the wind. He should always be so, not worn and bruised and shadowed.

  Ghu looked down on him, faintly smiling. “My white colt. Isn’t he grown fine?”

  A king of horses, this was. Ahjvar remembered some night—Sand Cove, it was, and a storm, and the waves lashing and raging at the cliff, and the wind howling like the ghosts of wolves. The two of them sitting against the wall, out of the downpour, warming themselves with spiced wine—their roof repairs of the ruined broch never did last well and sodden turf followed by the weather had come down on the hearth, for neither the first nor the last time. Ghu had spoken of a wind that shrieked with the voices of dragons, and snow driving hard as whips on the mountain of the god, a difficult foaling, a mare strayed high above the trees and the snow burying them, boy and mare and foal together. But it was the god’s mountain, he had said, as if that mattered. And he had brought them down, sometimes carrying the foal, who must have weighed as much as he did then, after the blizzard, and . . . that was all the story. It had been maybe the most words Ahjvar had ever heard from him, at that point. He had been shivering in that autumn storm with cold or remembered cold. Ahjvar hadn’t supposed the value of the slave nearly lost to death on the mountain’s forbidden height had been counted anything to compare to that of the mare he had been sent to find, and he had not gotten up and moved away when Ghu huddled over to press against his side.

  That foal, here and real, tying time together.

  Standing still, his shirt soaked through with sweat—the light wind cut with an edge of snow. Ahjvar shivered. “Yes.” Beautiful, yes, hard and sudden as an arrow to the chest. Horse and rider. He turned away. “For a race on the flat. For hill-work—”

  “They were born to hills, Ahj. You’re thinking of western desert-breds. But if we do go cattle-raiding, I’ll let you choose.”

  He snorted, heading to the stream, to drink and wash at least his face once more. Water like ice. He felt chilled to the bone. “They let you take them, or are your Castellan Yuro’s men coming after us to get them back?”

  “I knocked Chago down,” Ghu said seriously, as Ahjvar returned, swinging the blanket over a shoulder, pinning it with the devil’s gold. “Nothing to do with the horses. Old. Settled. Chago says, the bay they bought from Denanbak two years ago and his name is Evening Cloud, a stablemate to the white and trained to battle. Oh, and he—Chago, I mean—gave me food and a gourd of millet beer. I expect it’s very bad. What they make up here at the high pastures always is. Eat, sleep, or ride through the twilight?”

  “Ride. What’s the white named?” Ahjvar asked. He didn’t really care, but Ghu did.

  “Sia gave him another name. I’ve always called him Snow.”

  A name a child might give a puppy. Ghu had given all their horses such simple and obvious names, the ones Ahjvar owned, the ones they had stolen, once, twice, when he had gone to Two Hills on business of the Tenju clan-father. Born in a blizzard. Snow. What else? Ahjvar startled himself, laughing.

  They rode past the twilight, eating soggy buns and passing the sour beer back and forth between them. The dogs went crashing off in pursuit of some small beast, came back bloody-muzzled and pleased with themselves. When they lost the last light and stopped in the shelter of a fern-hung outcropping of rock, making no fire, Ahjvar found he could not bring himself to lie down. Dreams prowled the edges of his mind. He felt them there, gnawing, waiting.

  “You sleep,” he said. “I’ll watch.”

  Measure of Ghu’s exhaustion that he didn’t debate it, just lay down rolled in his filthy sheepskin coat, the dogs curled nearby. Ahjvar paced a little, checked the horses, turned loose without hobble or picket. The stallions were quiet, not disturbed by the oddity of their night. Ahjvar set his back against the rock, tilted his head to watch the stars turning slowly through the leafless branches overhead. Frogs sang in a loud chorus, echoing and answering, all around. Up in the trees, maybe. Distant water rang over stone. Always water, it seemed, in these mountain foothills. The birth of the Mother of Nabban. Eyes closed. No good. He paced a
circuit of their camp again, ended up squatting on his heels by Ghu. Touched the back of his hand. He didn’t stir. Ahjvar spread Yeh-Lin’s blanket over him. Cold to keep himself wakeful. Maybe. He drew his sword, drove it into the earth a pace from Ghu’s head, and walked off, climbing several low shelves of stone, choosing a way that seemed thick with the boles of trees, and—he found by blundering into it—a thicket of that bush with the hanging, leathery leaves. Good to have all that between them. He found a way around and still wouldn’t lie down, but sat leaning on a tree, watching the sky again. If he slept, he would probably fall over. If he didn’t wake himself tipping, and if he dreamed, he would probably make enough noise to wake Ghu, either shouting or—Old Great Gods prevent that he walked in his sleep, don’t even think it, don’t let thought of the hag rise—if he did walk he would be sleepwalking, only sleepwalking, as men did, not hunting open-eyed and ghost-ridden, and walking blind in his sleep he would crash and trip and fall or tangle himself in the brush, and Ghu would wake. . . .

  Best he could do. But he would fight to stay awake, waiting for moonrise, and then for the following dawn. Name the constellations as they cleared that gap between the branches, count the hours thus. Tally them in the leaf-mould, each he could name, to have that focus to his watching. Thin ribbons of cloud trailed over the stars. Eddying like smoke. Drifting.

  Fingers still clenched on her throat, though she had stopped fighting, stopped moving long before. Words, broken, the mind could not hold even the echo of them, the woven patterns of the twigs on the beaten earth floor where they had knelt broken and torn by her thrashing, the three beeswax candles set likewise on the floor knocked over. One had set a pattern of thorn to smouldering. Stench of burning hair, strong, and roasting flesh, but Miara was not burning, that was another time, another woman. Miara was dead, Miara dying, gasping and choking beneath him, the spell they had designed and she had worked, his wizardry having been sealed beyond his reach or the hag’s, broken as its patterns, as the cords of her throat, and he was on his knees, gasping to breathe, torn fingers splayed where they had clawed against the stony ground.