Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  He gives himself to you. The Father’s thought, deep, resonating, stone and marrow. How do we deny that?

  They had sent him to follow the sun, to find what he needed to become in a world they could not know, and Ahjvar had been what he had needed to find, the sun he had found to follow. Or the rock he had needed in that time, to brace his back against, to be able to find his stillness, to see. A man, who made the silences in which he found how to speak.

  He gives himself to you, and not from fear of death. He gives himself to you—to you, through you to us, to the mountain and the river, in service of our children. How should we deny that?

  He accepted that. It was forgiveness. It was his, the deed and what must follow. Father Nabban did not take Ahjvar from him.

  He would let him go. That awaited, at Swajui. But there would be time for leave-taking, and so Ahjvar could go free and clean and at peace, without pain, between breath and breath, and lie among the roots of the pines with the wind and the sky over him.

  You have come back, the Father said, with a devil at your side. You have brought Yeh-Lin Dotemon back to this land.

  To say she would have come anyhow was a child’s argument.

  “Yes,” he said aloud. “I don’t know; I’m afraid of what I’ve done, allowing her. I don’t know I’ve done right. But I see her, I . . . need her. Will need her. There is something among us that should not be. It was in the Golden City. It . . .” Eyes shut. Darkness to hold him. He shook his head. “It’s a fish, too swift for snatching.”

  You would set fire against fire? All may burn.

  “Maybe. But maybe not. I would trust her, a little. We are Nabban. All Nabban. For a little—” And was it he or he and he-the-Mother who had been the Wild Sister, and a dragon in the dawn of the world, who spoke those words, held that thought? “—while we are that, while the gods and goddess are growing within us unborn, we may match her. She is not what she was.”

  We made you. You are what we are.

  You are what we are not.

  Angry.

  Alive.

  Newborn in the world. Do what lies before you.

  Find your own road. Ours has failed us.

  Find your own road.

  Or make it.

  They reached to enfold him. Father, Mother, Sisters, Brothers, dragons, tigers, peaks unknown and waters unnamed, forgotten, rebirths awaiting. Snow, stone, deep brown water.

  My mother, my father, he told them, voiceless, and let himself fall.

  CHAPTER XXV

  The track plunged down a long hillside, then followed a valley upwards again, crossing and recrossing a brook. It ran swift and noisy in its rocky channel, bright with green mosses on its banks, new ferns uncoiling. One of the many sources of the Wild Sister. The path left it, though, where it poured in a plume like a white horse’s tail down a sudden broken cliffside rising to the north. Now there was smoke on the wind, not fresh but damp old burning. Ahjvar rolled an acorn through his fingers and told the horse, “The soldiers will have fired the buildings.” Give the words voice. Maybe he would hear them himself. He rode alert for any movement in the barred light and shadow of the trees, largely maples of some sort, by the cushioning leaf-litter that muffled the slow beat of Niaul’s hooves. Pale early flowers spread in carpets beneath. All very peaceful. If he had seen his shrine burnt and his family hauled captive off to their deaths, he would be greeting the next intruders with an arrow on the string from ambush, though he thought the priests of Mother and Father Nabban took vows not to kill and even ate no meat.

  Under the circumstances, he thought they might be tempted to forswear such vows. At least he could not be mistaken for an imperial soldier.

  But Ghu had said there would be no one here. No survivors.

  A raven flapped heavily overhead, followed by a second. A third. Heading away to roost.

  Late-slanting sun breaking through the clouds at last to shine in his eyes, and a gateway, of sorts, marking where the path entered the precinct of the bamboo-fenced shrine. Two trunks, pines, scaly and grey, rose like pillars to either side of a narrow gap in a high palisade. There had been a simple gate hung between the trees, but it had been torn down—gate and destruction alike symbolic, because it was little more than a screen of split and woven bamboo and its latch a loop of cord, no defensible barrier, nothing that would keep even a determined sheep in or out. The track passed between boles of the trees, over a web of roots like the bone and tendon of two elderly hands interlaced, and descended by three stone steps. The way was just broad enough to admit a rider. The steps were shallow, leading down to the lowest level of an enclosure of three terraces, much larger than he had expected, five acres, maybe, with stone paved yards and paths and the roofless, blackened ruins of a dozen sizeable wooden buildings. A broader road climbed up from the south; its wide-spaced gate-pillars had likewise been great pines, but they were scorched and scarred by fire. There were pools between the buildings, some with wooden pillars extending out into them as though they had been half roofed over. The water steamed in the cooling evening air. Charred wood and rubbish floated in the pools now. And rags. The horse blew and snorted and shifted his weight. Ahjvar wrapped his scarf over his face again, for what good that would do. Layering camel over corpse. The overflow of the pools ran in stone-lined drains to gather to a single channel, dropping over ledges, passing under flat bridges formed each of a single slab of stone. Iris blades and some yellow mounding flower and mats of sky blue forget-me-not thrust up from gravelled beds to border the flowing water. Greenery grew back over trampled patches, nearly hiding them. The stream ran out at what must be the main gate to the south; he heard it chiming down another fall, natural, that one, or so he expected. Not the waters he and horse had played leapfrog with.

  A single bare tree, not an evergreen, reared up and spread broad branches over the central—bathhouse? Shrine? Priests’ house? The holy shrine itself, he guessed, too small to be more than a henhouse, really. A black stone boulder sat squat amidst the wreckage there. He would have called it an altar, but that it was unworked.

  More ravens sat in the branches, watching him.

  He could picture the place crowded with folk come to ease rheumatic joints and wheezing lungs. Not his idea of holiness, something that had more in common with a city bathhouse.

  No pilgrims seeking ease and healing now. The great central tree had been girdled, its bark stripped with axes in a broad band all the way around. In that, he saw General Zhung Musan’s hand. And the will of what power, that hid behind Zhung Musan and the empress he served?

  Something that harvested the souls of its servants. Or devoured them.

  He was nearly sick, and not from knowing what he was going to find in this place.

  He had given up looking ahead . . . long since. Left Ghu to carry that, too.

  Go up the pines, go to the sanctuary, Ghu had said. Had not wanted Ahjvar here, where there was burning and death and horror.

  Ghosts, still tied to unburied bodies. Those who had sunk beneath the Mother’s waters were gone—water of the earth was one of the blessings to free a soul—but there were others here, still bound to the world. Ahjvar rode slowly out into the open, not reaching for a weapon. The horse moved alert and tense, his weariness fallen from him, but he did not fight or refuse Ahjvar, though nostrils flared and ears were back. The smell of death. Old death. The massacre was not recent. The priests hanged at the keep had been prisoner some time. The ravens launched themselves away with a susurration of feathers as he rode up to the middle terrace and around behind the ruin. Niaul’s ears went back.

  Young woman, Ahjvar thought. Long hair, brown robe half torn off, the pale shift beneath shredded, ribs opened out, spread to the sky. A disjointed foot lay some distance away. Nose, cheeks, eyes gone, body long past bloating, turned soft and greasy, falling in on itself. But she made the effort to stand visible before him, hair braided with rings of white shell, memory of those crushed about her body, hands tucked into her
sleeves—ghost holding to the dignity her unswift death had ripped away. It was not the foxes and ravens, nor even the flies and crawling maggots, had defiled her body.

  “Please . . .”

  She was faint and uncertain, and afraid, even dead and beyond further harm. Ahjvar dismounted, though that put him closer to the stink and he had to fight the gagging urge of his throat. It seemed discourteous to loom from the stallion’s height.

  Others were aware, but were only light, warmth in the corner of the eye, not to be seen by staring. One drifted nearer, a growing presence. Old woman.

  “He comes from the gods. From the god who will be. The child dead and born of the river, born of the snow.”

  They considered him, two women of light and shadow and smoke, like enough to be one alone viewed in youth and age. Grandmother, granddaughter?

  “Is he coming?” the elder asked. “In the Mother’s dreams, I saw him. But she left us.”

  “Yes,” Ahjvar said.

  Both ghosts regarded him, quiet, calm now, the fear he had seen in the younger gone. “She is born into him?” the younger asked. “And he has sent you?”

  “Yes.” Agreeing with the last, at least.

  Some spark of the young woman she had been before horrors took her still endured. Her eyebrows went up, and the corners of her mouth. “You are the priest of the god who will be? My grandmother’s mother—” And she bowed to the older ghost—who showed herself now a woman little older than the other, in the way of ghosts, since few were elderly in their own hearts. “—foresaw that one would come, but I would not have taken you for a priest.”

  Well, Ghu had not mentioned that one, that night after they left the gathering of the kings at the Orsamoss. Ahjvar didn’t debate the term, but grinned suddenly beneath his scarf. “Neither did Zhung Musan.”

  This time teeth flashed fierce in her smile.

  “But what are you?” the grandmother asked. “A living man?” She sounded doubtful. “You—look very strange, although to see beyond the flesh of the living at all is . . . very strange. I wonder if the gods see us so? Light and fire and shadow. But you are—”

  “Does it matter what I am, grandmother?”

  “No. You are the god’s. That’s enough. You’ll do what must be done here.”

  “Did any survive?” That seemed to him the most urgent question. The dead were going nowhere.

  “My son—”

  “My sister and her husband. Our little cousin.”

  “They escaped to the forest. I don’t think they escaped for long.”

  “No,” he said. That was the tally of the hanged priests of the keep. “No. They were taken. I think they were prisoners some time, but they were killed a few days ago. We came too late.” There was no apology he could make for that. “They’re blessed and gone to the road.”

  “The Mother in the god-who-will-be came to them. I know. I dreamed. I did not think that dead, I could dream. Young man—” The old one looked younger than he did, now. “—you will want a spade. But—” And an old woman’s weariness slowed her voice. “—I don’t know what has been left. It burned. All burning, all the night . . .”

  He stooped to gather earth, but the young priestess put a hand over his. Her touch was like warm water, barely felt. “No. Give us to our graves. You can’t dig them in a night. We’ll wait with you, priest of the god.”

  “If you will.”

  The younger lost form, became nothing but an impression of misty light in the corner of the eye. The elder trailed him as he led Niaul across the terrace. He breathed through his teeth, through his scarf, and the horse pulled ahead. He headed for the western side of the enclosure, where there was another narrow, pine-sentried gate; the evening wind came from the west and he wanted to get upwind before he was sick. The burnt buildings here seemed to have been smaller, less formally placed. Scattered, blackened timbers gone to charcoal ridged like scab. A few oddments of metal. Sickle, there at his feet. Tools.

  No spades, as she had said; they’d have been wooden, with a metal cutting edge. Maybe some of these rusted strips among the ashes.

  “You’ll want water. The springs within the shrine are better for bathing than drinking, and . . . and they cut the throat of my other son over the well, and threw him in after he bled dry. He is gone to the Old Great Gods in the blessing of water, but the . . . the well will not be fit for use. There is another spring dug to a well by the gardens. Come. Let’s see if it is unpolluted.”

  A ghost could not travel far from its anchoring body, but the old priestess walked ahead of him, a shadowy woman’s figure, long hair loose down her back, and then fading to a streak of silvery mist, but still very much there. A handful of hens scattered from her as if she walked in the flesh.

  “Hah,” she said. “They missed a few. I suppose the foxes are taking them.”

  Ahjvar said nothing, concentrating on breathing clean air, still swallowing the body’s urge to retch itself clean of the corruption it only inhaled. The western path led to a steep hillside cut and walled into terraces facing the southwest, muddy, puddled with water, trampled with boots. Ranks of grey cabbage-stalks not yet cleared, tangled dead vines of pea or bean. The spring there came out among rocks, its natural well expanded to a broad, deep pool, with stone steps descending and a stone-lined channel carrying it to many branches, some blocked with wooden boards, to water the gardens at need. Nothing in the water that he could see. The soldiers would have wanted fresh water themselves. Would they have poisoned the well as they left? There had been hate here, not just enmity. The general had been one of those sick souls who took pleasure in power over others, and in death, besides.

  The horse pulled again, wanting water.

  “Wait.”

  There were tracks in the earth by the stones. Fox. Prints almost like small hands. Pheasant. All made since the night’s rain. No small beast-corpses in the bursting ferns. Besides, though Zhung Musan had not destroyed the shrine immediately on taking Dernang, this massacre was still a week or two old. Poison ought to have been flushed away.

  He thought only after Niaul had plunged his muzzle in, that to clear the water of potential poison was a spell simple enough. Slow and stupid.

  “The water is clean and blessed,” the ghost said. She had been drifting like mist along the channel, down to the terraces, but now returned. “I think you’ll have the easiest time of it if you make our grave here. It’s a stony land, and this is the best you’ll find. The cairns of my parents and my other sons are high on the opposite side of this valley. You would find it too far to carry all of us. I don’t suppose there is any dishonour in laying our bones in clean earth, even if it is last year’s onion bed.”

  “I suppose not,” he agreed, bemused. He had never met a ghost so—so solidly of earth and self. Usually they yearned to be gone, pulled to the Old Great Gods.

  “And the sun is setting. Another night makes little difference. What the ravens and foxes and rats will do, they do. You should make a camp. Perhaps here? I don’t think the wind will change.”

  “No.” He tried to sound less brusque. “No, grandmother.”

  The corner-of-the-eye presence was close, at his shoulder. “I don’t think I’m old enough to be your grandmother. And I would have lived a hundred years, if I had lived until midsummer, though I’m no wizard. My name is Swajui Kiaswa, elder brother.”

  “Ahjvar,” he said. “I—” He did not want to discuss why he would not camp near death and old burning, nor where there were any strangers to witness the night, dead souls or living. “I’m going up to the sanctuary of the Mother. I’ll return in the morning.”

  “Is the air bad even here? I can’t smell. Isn’t that strange? I can only imagine. I’m sorry.” The light began to drift back towards the fenced compound of the shrine. “Come with the dawn, then, Ahjvar.”

  Nothing to be seen, but he felt the gathered force of them still, a gentle pressure of—not life. Souls in pain, trapped. Even she. Yet Kiaswa dress
ed herself in the cares of the family matriarch she had been in life, and thus staved off her pain and fear and the forlorn anguish of a soul held back from the road. They chose to, both of the priestesses, all of these holy folk, no ghost asking to be set to the road this night. Why? To defy their enemy his triumph. They were murdered and deliberately left as ghosts, for the torment of their souls, but they would take their leave of their gods and go to the Old Great Gods of the far heavens with due care at the hands of one they chose to believe a priest, a successor to themselves.

  He was no priest but a murderer many times over. Ghu should have come himself, but his god had pulled him as fiercely as the road called these, Ahjvar suspected.

  At least he could dig graves. The ghosts could make their own prayers.

  An owl dropped from a tree, soaring over the nearer terrace. The last of the sun cut redly through the broken clouds and the lacing branches. Dusk was thickening as he found, easily enough, a path climbing up behind the shrine, wandering aimless between the trees but always upward. Narrow, but not overgrown, at least for one afoot. He walked, leading the horse, and always found the way under his feet, even once the light faded to blackness. It would be dawn before the last of the waning moon rose. At some point water began to sing alongside, maybe even the same stream he had crossed and recrossed riding from the east, and then the feel of the ground underfoot changed from leaf-mould and occasional beds of stone to springy layers of fallen needles. The air was bright and clean and living with the scent of pines.

  Cold mountain air, though. He should not be a fool and sit up chilled through the night, but he was exhausted, and if he lay close enough to a fire for its heat to be any comfort, he risked throwing himself into it.

  The thick trees opened out into spaciousness. It was more the sound of the air about him than any certainty of shadowy trunks. The feel of a compressed path beneath his feet faded away, as though it had come where it meant to be. The singing note of the water grew louder, then quieted. Whispering of pines more lofty. Water and wind in the needles, branches moving. A bird singing like liquid silver, strange and beautiful and nothing he had heard in the Nabbani forest below the mountains. In the far distance another echoed it, or challenged, or merely sang an answer.