Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  Ahjvar was abruptly so weary he could not bear the thought of standing any longer, but he unsaddled the horse by touch, found a sack that felt like feed and shook out a small measure of grain of some sort for him, made sure the soft, questing muzzle found it, and left Niaul to it. He still had the stench of rot in his throat, in his hair, his clothes, or maybe it was only in his mind.

  Water called him. The ground was all fallen needles ribbed with roots. Softer ground under foot, and stones too. Scent of bruised green. He knelt down to feel for the water. Cold as winter’s breath, running fast and shallow. Cupped his hands and drank, and drank, and then bathed his face. Got out of the way as he heard the horse walk up by him, splash and begin to suck. He found a tree, a vast trunk, and lay down between the spreading roots, wrapped in his plaid blanket. Cold. No idea where he had left the saddle and gear. There was one of their old blankets rolled and tied behind the saddle and he couldn’t be bothered to seek it. Hollow belly and no stomach for food. Just . . . sleep. Stars like chips of ice between the clearing clouds. He missed the warmth of a body beside him. Admit that. Hoped the horse wouldn’t stray too far or fall over any cliffs in the night. Should have tied him, not trusted to Ghu’s horse-magic, god-magic, sweet fool’s innocence. . . .

  Slept. And drowned in nightmares, was drowned, choking beneath the waters of the well, hit his head on the root he lay by, skinned the back of his hand on the rough bark of the trunk, slept and woke with a cry lying alongside a corpse and woke choking on smoke, white bones, woke . . . Did not set the knife’s blade to his skin, though he had it in his hand. Rocked and told himself he was awake, he only imagined the smoke and it was old smoke, old horrors, not his horrors but the poor blessed ghosts he was called to serve here and the morning was coming, the morning would come. . . . Counted out acorns, three, turned them through his hand and tried to count the trees of the cork grove, so carefully peeled and tended by the villagers of Sand Cove. Say he stood at the turn of the road, or sat on the stone wall there, and looked from the south, how many? First the old great grandfather tree, lightning scarred, the outrider. Then . . . He drew it in his mind as an artist might, this tree, the next, an intrusive dark holly there. The next . . . did he remember? That one had a crooked branch . . .

  When he realized the first grey was upon him he staggered stiffly up, whistled for the horse, which came as obediently as a beast would for Ghu, and found a little more barley. Discovered pick and comb and brush, so cleaned Niaul’s feet, worked till the gleaming dark hide was free from mud and sweat and dried blood. A long time since he’d had to tend his own horse. There was cracked barley, too, meant for men to boil to a porridge rather than for horses to eat, and he seemed to have both the larger and the smaller kettle among his gear, bad luck for Ghu, but he thought he would rather face the dead, or their remains, with his stomach empty.

  Brick of caravan-tea.

  Not even tea.

  But he did not feel so—empty—of the soul, as such a night should have left him. There was a quiet here, a deep, calm quiet, even knowing the goddess of the place dead. Dawn spilled golden through the pines, and birds all around sang, though not the silver outpouring of the early night. The axe taken from the Northron brigand so long ago and the roll of the old blanket over his shoulder, the horse following, he headed down to the ghosts.

  Ahjvar half expected some hovering overseer, Kiaswa herself, to be vocal at his ear with instruction; the ghosts were only a presence like the birdsong, though—there, but belonging to the background. He stirred through the debris of the outbuilding until he found what he thought he had noticed without giving it much heed the evening before, the head of an iron mattock, undamaged, rust-flaking but sound, though its shaft was burnt away. He took it and his axe and went in search of a good strong sapling, the ghost of Kiaswa with him as faint presence, while Niaul grazed along the ditches and greening banks of the terraces. There were buds showing swollen on the trees, and a mist of pale green over the lower forest, viewed from the terrace heights. How long till the waters receded and armies could move again?

  It was rough work—Ahjvar was no carpenter—but the mattock’s head showed no inclination to fly off its new haft when he swung. Good. He left the horse still grazing and, after consideration, left shirt and plaid as well, wrapping the old headscarf over his face again as he climbed to the western gateway. The wind was out of the southeast, today, and smelt again of rain. And the damp air held more scent.

  Smoke might be preferable.

  The waiting dead. He had walked a battlefield once, long ago. Cattle-raiding, Yeh-Lin might jeer, but it had been claim to rights over a section of the caravan road they contested, that war between his father’s folk and the Duina Broasora. He was just eighteen and newly named his father’s champion, the woman who had held that place before him having stood aside, saying she had yet a few years for childbearing and meant to make the most of them with a bard of the Duina Lellandi she had met. Sword-mistress . . . he had not forgotten her name . . . Ailsa. Not the master who had trained him, that was her father. His mind wandering, not to think of what he breathed. Battlefield. And a princess of the Duina Broasora dead, a young woman he knew well. They had been friends in another summer. Maybe might have been something more, especially after such a season of blood, and peace sought with autumn, before the harvest, but she was dead. If that prince had married that princess . . . who could say. But as there, so here: on that field the dead had waited, to be known and named and claimed.

  Only he, here, to walk among them, though their names were Kiaswa’s and her granddaughter’s to speak. He took the old man from the well first of all, with a sapling cut and trimmed, a low pair of angled branches left a foot long or so, to make a grappling hook. His body was gone soft and strange, but the cold water had kept it from decaying so badly as some of the others. He was still . . . in one piece. Ahjvar laid him by the gate, limbs straight, white hair parted from his face.

  One.

  He hauled them from the pools, next. Those were . . . bad. Dis­jointed. Sunken beneath the surface again, torn clothing swaying like weeds. Bones, flesh slowly poached off of them. The water steamed not from cold air alone, but because it flowed bath-warm from its springs. Clothing held them together. Some had been put in naked. He had to cut another sapling, leave more branches, not exactly a rake but . . . fit for raking. He gathered them onto the blanket, not his plaid but the old one, camel-rancid and desert-gritted, and dragged them to lie by the old man.

  The old woman and the young were a pressure against his back, a presence. Naming names. Kin born to the service of the Wild Sister, the Mother of all Nabban. Marriage kin from hills to the east who had chosen the service of the goddess, the tending of the pilgrims. Children.

  Twelve. At least the souls of those who had been given to the water had taken the road, their feet safe on their way, blessed and set free.

  He considered the defiled well. The springs that made the bathing-pools would flush them clean and purify them, in time, but the well that had been given the old priest’s lifeblood. . . .

  “What will you?” the younger priestess asked, as he walked a circuit of it, laying gathered twigs from the dykes of the terraces, carefully patterned. “You’re wizard as well as priest?”

  “I can’t leave this here and open. If someone comes—if anyone came, and drew water—”

  “No,” she sombrely, and “No,” Kiaswa said, drawing slowly to her body’s form. “But it could wait.”

  “No.” It gave him the horrors, that dark water, reflecting the bright sky and concealing a man’s worth of blood. How long till that was clean again? Never, sunk deep in the goddess’s earth or not.

  He walked his pattern, sword in hand, cutting lines through the symbols he had set. The square wooden coping of the well, which had survived all the burning, crumbled inwards, and the earth beneath it, stones sliding. Then there was only a sunken hollow and the earth all disturbed.

  “So.”

&
nbsp; Back to gathering bodies. Those who waited. The granddaughter, whom he had rolled in the blanket and carried, trying to wrap her opened ribs back together, not forgetting the foot. Some lying where they had fallen at the public southern gate.

  Seventeen.

  Two boys close under the wall, dragged up from the terraces, where they had been turning the ground for peas, the granddaughter said. Brutally used, ribs cracked open, like herself under the tree. Brothers. Silent ghosts, but even they . . . “No,” Kiaswa said, when he asked. “They wish to wait with us. We will wait to take the road till we are in our grave, all of us left here. We will not leave you to this alone.” And the boys pressed close to her, to Ahjvar, and still did not speak, but he felt their fierce will, their agreement.

  Nineteen.

  Kiaswa herself. She lay at the north, hidden away under a bush sticky with pregnant buds, and a baby lying where they had dropped it, torn from her arms. Frail, shrunken little woman, white hair gone thin and fine as silk floss, limbs all sprawled and her skull beaten in.

  “Don’t see me so,” she said. Illogically. “Don’t look.”

  “My baby,” the young priestess said, and light gathered in light, but the ghost could not hold the ghost, not here, and the infant was a little thing without words, wanting its mother, unable to join with her. On the road—a baby was drawn pure and direct to the Gods, it was said. A baby had no sins to face and know. A baby . . . should have had a life with its mother, Gods or no Gods to hold it now. He wrapped it into her robe when he took it to the gate with its great-great-grandmother, and nearly fell, so dizzy, when he stood again from setting them down. Ears buzzing like wasps, light and high with fasting.

  Twenty-one.

  Late afternoon already. How had the day passed and so little done? Not hot, though sweat ran in runnels down his chest and back. He was cold.

  “You should rest. You should eat,” Kiaswa said.

  “Could you, grandmother?”

  “Go away. We shouldn’t have asked this. It’s enough. I was wrong. Bless us and go, give us the quick blessing of earth and leave us under the sky, let the crows and ravens do their work.”

  “No.”

  He trudged away to the gardens with the mattock. No ghost followed, then. Kiaswa drifted near, later, as sunset stretched the shadows into twilight.

  “Ahjvar.”

  He looked up. Nearly, he thought, deep enough, broad enough. One bed to hold them all. Stones, grubbed up from below the level of their tillage, ringed the pit.

  “Go. Come in the morning, but go, now. It’s dark. You’ll take your own toe off,” she added tartly.

  He leaned on the mattock, hardly understanding her.

  “Elder brother, promise me something.”

  He nodded, vaguely.

  “Cook something. Eat. Drink tea.”

  He considered her, sorting words.

  “You promised.” She flicked a finger at him. “Say yes.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Ahjvar!”

  “Yes. Grandmother.”

  She made a sound halfway between laughter and a sigh, and faded away towards the shrine. He left the mattock where it was, climbed out of the pit, and wandered in search of his way again. He remembered to take his shirt and the plaid blanket only because they hung on a bushy willow where had cut his first sapling.

  Niaul saw he was going and followed after him.

  Not so dark, this evening, the last light still lingering. He could see what he had not noticed even in the morning, that there were three springs in that wide sloping open space beneath the ancient pines, one high, two lower, all twining together to one as they plunged down a set of shallow rapids. Was there any sanctity to that little brook from which the Wild Sister arose—would there be any taboos as to its use? He stripped regardless and slid into the largest pool below those rapids, stayed till the cold cut to his bones and teeth chattered, washed his linens and dried himself on the same blanket he meant to sleep in.

  But he made no fire, and brewed no tea.

  Know in your dreams you are dreaming.

  New moon: blackest of nights, but cloudless. Starlight was cold. Frost in the air. He drowned in exhaustion, lay deep in graves, in a grave, with Miara. Groped after others the hag had destroyed, bodies buried, the ones in the quiet hills, if he found them again, or abandoned in the nighttime streets. That old couple, the man who had tried to be kind . . . graves he had dug with his bare hands. It was Miara he fished rotten and disintegrating from the Lady’s well in the cavern beneath Marakand, and Miara who kissed him, mouth hot with his blood, and pulled him in to drown, devoured, smothered, chained.

  Something he needed to find. Lost somewhere. Memory. Shape. Warm body next to him. Burning beneath him, grappling him close and his burning hands clutched her, his thumbs pressed—no. Feel of an acorn clenched against his palm. Real. Acorns were real. He was awake, and choking on smoke. He still held the acorn. He had gone to sleep holding it.

  No smoke, of course not. Dawn lightening the east.

  He drank and washed and fed Niaul the last of the coarse grain, saddled the horse with no intention to ride, but lacking any other better harness, the ornate breast-strap would do to pull against. Odds were the stallion had never been set to such work in his life. He thought it about two winding miles from the shrine up to the cold springs, but it seemed to take more than an hour to walk down, this time, and twice he found himself standing, holding himself up with a hand against some tree trunk, without knowing he had paused. Dreams pressed at him, ate time. He heard Miara screaming his name, which shocked him awake, still walking. A lie. He had not used this name in that time. A little, dog-sized brown creature—deer? goat? overgrown cloven-hoofed rabbit?—stood staring in the path. Fanged. Niaul stretched out his neck, snuffing, and it bounded into the air and vanished.

  He had not dreamed that. A tiny fanged deer. Maybe. He could ask Kiaswa if there were such things. He had forgotten it, though, by the time he rounded the next sharp bend in the descending track. Stared stupidly at stepping stones where the path crossed the brook—he did not remember crossing the brook this way. Did not remember that the path had crossed any brook at all, before. Suddenly could not work out the pattern of the stones, how he should step from one to the next. As though he had never seen such a thing, could not think how to get his foot to a stone, or what followed. As though he must think of each muscle, to move it, to set a foot in place without thought was—he did not understand how to walk.

  Niaul paced impatiently forward, and Ahjvar, who had been leaning against him with a hand hooked through the breast-strap, having forgotten to bridle the beast, stumbled alongside him. There, he had not forgotten how to walk after all and the stones did not matter. Boots were wet. No matter.

  The path forked. It had not forked before. Had it? Small sweet yellow flowers on a leafless bush. Niaul stood to tear several mouthfuls, looked round at him, still chewing, led off again, right-hand fork. Steep plunge down, up again. Ferns. Moss. Weeds with rosettes of leaf just greening beneath last year’s rattling seed-stalks. Open ground. The terraced garden plots. Not lost after all. He let the horse go and sank down to his heels, eyes shut. The paths through this forest shifted and changed. He would believe that, not that he hallucinated the ordinary.

  Twenty-one. It was not broad enough yet, nor deep enough to hold them safe. There would be bear in such a forest, larger scavengers. He stripped off his shirt and sword and went down into the grave to widen and deepen it. The sun grew hot. He cut new ferns and the yellow flowers that Niaul wanted to eat, laid them over mud that was winter-sodden and puddling, and when that was not enough, gathered old leaves too, the earthy scent of autumn. He was coated dark with clay, a thick second skin, boots heavy. The ghost followed him, seeming worried, but if she spoke he could not hear. He cut poles for the frame of a travois, made a sling of the old blanket across it, and whistled dry-mouthed for the horse. No good. He stumbled to the pool to drink and tried again
, and when Niaul came, led him up to the narrow western gateway of the shrine, frightening off three ravens and a handful of squabbling crows. The smell was something he could shut out, now. It belonged to some place other than this staggering dream. Foxes or something had been among them, scattering . . . parts, in the night. He gathered them again. Niaul was unhappy with being harnessed to the travois, tied with torn strips of the brown scarf, but he stood even to have rotten flesh loaded behind him, and was praised in mumbled Praitannec whispers. Ahjvar took them two at a time, first the bodies of those whose souls were gone, carried each down into the grave, no rough tumbling. It mattered. He forgot why it mattered but this he must do, with care and reverence. This service, to these innocents he had not killed.

  Niaul proved patient and biddable, obeying spoken commands like a good herd-dog. Ghu’s lingering horse-magic, surely. They tramped a mucky trail, many trips, and when they were done Ahjvar brought a load of ferns, which were unrolling with the growing warmth of the day, to cover them, and more twigs of yellow flowers, before he cut the horse free of his knots and the travois.

  “Pray,” he told the old priestess, who had taken form again. “I can’t.”

  “But you do, elder brother. With your every breath.”

  The younger touched his hand again. Warm now, almost as the living. Shy. Smiled. The small bright soul of her child was twined with her own. They all came in forms of life, those that remained, old, young, the two boys, and touched him, which he should not have felt, hands brushing his, clasping fingers. Solemn eyes. Then they were gone to light again. Kiaswa lingered last of all, reaching her hands to his shoulders. “Duck.”

  He bowed his head obediently and she stretched up to kiss his brow. Her lips were dry and warm and he was surely dreaming wakeful, to think he felt them. “Find healing. Be free. Be blessed. You have surely blessed us.”