Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  Here, there were no fires, no sleepers, no smell of timber and tar and smithying and muck. Here, the dreams of the sleeping and the wakeful were so distant as to be less than the sound of the wind in the riverside weed. Only stone and water and the frogs singing, the water a music, coiling over and under itself, changing its note with the seasons, but unceasing.

  He could lie in that current, on the stones, let it flow over him, through him, lose himself, find himself in it. Ahjvar’s tolerance for nighttime wanderings would probably be pushed too far if he began sleeping in the river. He would take Ahj into the river one day. Not yet. For now he simply sat listening, learning, taking into himself the currents of his land. All too soon there would be no quiet nights, no escape to solitude. Not till all was won or lost. Ahjvar lay stretched out behind him, not quite sleeping and close enough to touch if he reached back, sword held with arm against his chest, like a child clutching some necessary toy.

  Not quite sleeping, but near enough, and Ahjvar muttered suddenly, nails of his outflung left hand scraping the stone. Falling into the claws of nightmare, catching himself before it seized him. For a moment Ghu was fully there again, stone, night air, a few gasping breaths behind him, a sigh as Ahj forced himself into slow-breathing stillness again, resumed his watch of the circling stars. Ghu shut his eyes again, let the river reclaim him, let himself go, now, till awareness of stone and frogs and stirring leaves, even Ahjvar’s careful soft breathing, was left behind and there was only the water. If he breathed himself, he did not know it.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER XXXI

  Damn Dotemon. What game does she play? She stalks him, stalks the empress. If she understands what he wants, she may yet deny it to him, destroy her own tools to keep them from his hand.

  Empress of Nabban with a god leashed to her hand? An empire in the east? Would Vartu ever ally with Dotemon again? Would Nabban follow Yeh-Lin the Beautiful, twice rid of her before?

  She is nothing to fear. She never has been.

  He does not want her loose to interfere regardless. Difficult to destroy her.

  Drown her, break her, leave her trapped in long years to pull herself back together. The best course. And it will shake their confidence in their slave-born god.

  Over five thousand men, nearer six, marching, but not on the highway, which swung away from the river to hug the shadow of the escarpment. The river road was shorter, though in this season it was also muddy, puddled, and outright gone half to swamp. They had no wagons and wrapped in the river’s breath, they were harder to see. So said the heir of the gods.

  The important thing had been to get them out of Dernang, which could not feed them. They were joined by straying bands of rebels and fugitives, drawn to the banners of the god and Prince Dan, who would be making his base at the fort of the Dragon’s Gorge. One could not have two cooks in one kitchen, in Yeh-Lin’s opinion, and two lords in one castle, even serving the same master, would be ill-advised as well. Leave Dernang and the rule of Choa to the Kho’anzi, leave his lieutenant Daro Raku to command the sizeable garrison left behind to guard it against brigands and banditry, or against some counter-rebellion of hidden imperial support. Zhung Huong remained as governor of the town under the two Daros to deal with the day–to-day practicalities. Dwei Ontari was sent into Alwu with Dan’s orders, which he would follow where he would not have followed the god’s. Couriers were sent to Shihpan, announcing their prince’s restoration, commanding the borders be held against any imperial incursion, summoning certain lords to their prince at the Gorge. Couriers were sent, less openly, out south and east, carrying messages to the shrines, or to hunt those priests and families of the shrines who had fled into hiding. The dreamer Nang Kangju had been left with Lord Daro Korat. The young wizard Gar Sisu, who had given her oaths to the heir of the gods, travelled with that part of the army sent down the river and was to remain with Prince Dan.

  And all in less time, Yeh-Lin thought, than any army had ever been stirred to move in all Nabban’s history. A few thousand men and, as the strays joined them, women as well, still winter-weary, many still barefoot, for all the soldiers might be somewhat better fed than they had been under Zhung Musan. As they wound their way down through Choa they could see the village fields being planted and tended again, and they did not raid them, nor trample them. But the river could not feed them all with its fish. If Dwei Ontari proved false . . . but she thought him true to his lord, willing to set aside his own doubt for Dan’s faith in the heir of the gods, so long as the god’s aims seemed to follow the same path Dan had committed to when he raised his banners the previous year. So long as the heir of the gods did not drag Dan to death in his confrontation with the empress. Nothing to lose. They were condemned traitors, both Dan and Ontari; if the god proved true, then well and good; if a deluded madman who journeyed to his death, at least he left the north in better order than he had found it, and under Dan’s hand. And the restoration of his prince to himself would count for much with Ontari, she judged. So he would come with the cavalry of Alwu. The eastern ferry landing, where the river made a border between Alwu and Choa, was very close to the border with Numiya. It would be held for them.

  Her mirror showed her nothing of the empress, though Yeh-Lin sought her almost nightly. Nothing. Divination—hers, Ivah’s, Gar Sisu’s—found nothing. Even the dead king was persuaded to make a drawing of the wands in the Praitannec way, but no revelation came to him. It was as if Buri-Nai, and whatever force she travelled with, had vanished from the world. Enclosed in a devil’s fist.

  A worry. But it was a long way from the Golden City to Choa, even if the empress went first by sea to Kozing Port or the fishing towns of the lower mouths of the Wild Sister, and the imperial armies of recent history moved broken, crawling, driven by fear at an oxcart’s pace.

  Yeh-Lin was impressed with what young Nabban had, by contrast, inspired—persuaded, driven—his folk to achieve. Speed, most of all. They marched light, and in hope and trust of their god. They were organized in half-companies, bands small enough to start to feel kinship, to know and maybe to trust. In the five weeks they had been encamped at Dernang after she took the town, she had seen that their officers drilled them with spear and what swords they had, and new crossbow companies had been formed.

  It was her rafts freed them to move. No clumsy platform of logs but a shaped thing given form by their layers and lengths, higher in the water—a vessel, not a desperation. They rode the water as if it carried them willingly, and maybe it did. Even the one that had run aground the day before was floated clear undamaged, losing none of its load. The god blessed his own. The riverers, proud of what they had achieved and in so short a time, held themselves to have become the personal followers of Nang Lin, the god’s captain-general. That she had named herself after a devil in her challenge to Hani Gahur was her biting humour, and they loved her for that, as well. It was that brought her out onto the rafts. She would rather have ridden ahead with the advance guard, who were also hers and who would have the camping ground chosen, hearths and latrines and laneways marked out with flags before even the rafts, always the last to leave and the first to arrive at any camp, ever arrived, but it mattered to the raft-captains and the folk who crewed them that she be among them sometimes, that they not lose her entirely to Prince Dan’s army before they came to their end and their craft were broken up for their timbers. While they had the river and their unity as a company, they wanted to have her.

  Nabban was somewhere out here on the water today, too. He, too, had come to understand the need to give himself to his folk, to share himself.

  The chill of fog stroked over her skin, but there was no fog. The raft, heavy thing that it was, nevertheless danced with the water, no contrary wind catching their load like a sail and sending butting waves to make them labour at poles or oars to force their way downriver. The two sisters at the great steering oar at the stern sang with it, a song of menfolk left behind and the river’s freedom. Ti sat out of t
he way, as enrapt as if he listened to one of the great poets. Folk had sung that same song on the river in Solan when she was a girl. Jang and Kufu were up in the bows sitting with the grizzled raft-captain, who was teaching them, so far as Yeh-Lin could overhear, the river, talking of currents and winds, floods and storms she had known, the lore of the sky as it related to winds and water. The rafts did not keep the strict order of the marching companies and half-companies. Sometimes, where it was broad enough, two might even race, raise a bit of sail on stubby double masts, if the wind was right. One swung close now. Half a company of the archers on that one, rather than tents and provisions, a great offering of souls to the river if they tore one another apart. Though every raft-captain seemed to fear the shame of carelessness, with the river’s very eye upon them.

  Green fields to either side. The river was safe and quiet, the god’s own place.

  But the fog Yeh-Lin could not see felt greasy on her skin.

  She stood up, swaying atop the net-bound stack of their cargo, turned through a full circuit of the horizon. For what good that would do. The scouts were out of sight ahead, the main force behind, hidden by the river’s twisting course. Nothing moved on the eastern shore. Alwu, like Choa, was a sparsely populated province, though between the rocky, forested hills its soil was deeper and its grazing fatter. Once into Numiya, the pastures and meadows that made a web around the crumpled hills would fade away into cropland and villages and manors each nearly within sight of the next. She was still not certain how best they might travel, Nabban and what she could not help thinking of as his hearthsworn, old phrase of the north. Disguise meant giving up their far-too-excellent horses for commonplace nags, and what to do about the dead king’s hair and height . . .

  They should have been secret on the river. She had the chill conviction they were not.

  Yeh-Lin descended to the deck in a few hops.

  “My lady?” The captain broke off her talk.

  “Children, go to the stern with Ti. Get your backs to the cargo and stay away from the water.”

  “Why?” Jang asked.

  “Now!”

  Too indulged. She was not their grandmother. But they ran without further word. The captain had bounded to her feet at Yeh-Lin’s tone, taken up the long-hafted boathook of her authority. Blunt, maybe, but the bronze head was no weapon to be discounted.

  “Danger, my lady?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The gentle sway of the raft was changing. The river was narrow here, swifter, deeper than it had been. Dark. Tangled stands of willows lined the shore. Ambush? No, nothing living there but what one expected: birds, snakes, frogs, voles.

  Silence. No song. The water was loud, slapping against them, under them. The captain breathed too loudly and Yeh-Lin almost snapped at her to hold her breath, as if that would help.

  Small clouds above made patches of shadow.

  Cold, cold, cold. Claws of ice, not fog, striking, freezing, ice in her veins, ice to hold her, stilling thought, paralysing—

  Waves gathered. The motion of the raft changed, diving and bucking, a gathering of current like a bunching muscle, a snake coiling to strike. The captain shouted, turning, so slowly, too slowly, to stare at the darkening water, shadow coalescing into . . . life.

  The shadow gathered itself, creature of old bone and mud and water, reared up high as a tree, struck. Fangs long as a hand splintered logs; the prow ducked low, flinging a wave over them all, but it surged up again as the fangs tore free. A child screamed and a woman cursed. The captain had fallen to her knees, but struggled up again, water sheeting from her hair, her boat-hook gripped like a spear.

  “Dragon!” the woman shouted—warning, terror, disbelief in equal measure.

  The great head, the size of a man’s torso, had disappeared beneath the water again. River water, cold river water, soaked her.

  Move! Dotemon raged, burning in her veins. Move! But ice held her.

  At the steering oar they were shrieking of dragons, repeating their captain’s cry though they hadn’t seen what hit them. Trying to summon the crossbows of the following raft. No good. The river carried them all.

  Stench of old rot long buried, ancient death, forgotten, gone to slime and stone. The water heaved and churned, brown and frothing. Something dark beneath the surface, arrowing towards them. No. No, no, and no.

  For a moment Yeh-Lin felt herself what she was not—was not, bone, gaunt skin, old wounds, and the fire beneath, the fire within her marrow, cold and hungry, the stuff of stars, of ice—

  The raft-captain glanced her way, stared, mouth opening on some cry of horror.

  Unravelling—

  No. We are not.

  Yeh-Lin tore herself away, pulled herself together.

  “Behind!”

  And as the captain spun back to the river it thrust from the water again and Yeh-Lin leapt to meet it, snarling, her sword a song in the air. Skylark, she had named it long before, that voice that only she-Dotemon heard clear as water, edged as glass, keen and piercing as the sun in the sky. But the ice still clutched at her to slow her, ice or memory of ice, and the creature struck the captain, seized and shook and tore shoulder and arm away, flung back its head to gulp and swallow even as what was left of the women fell away and the Skylark sang, carving the snake-neck to the spine. They were screaming at the stern, the raft tossed and flung, new shadows coiling under the water, darkness in the air. This head was the length of a tall man, maw snarling wide enough to engulf and bite a woman in two. It snatched and tossed the bulky green-brown body of the first aside, lashed away as Yeh-Lin swung for it, whipped around and struck. She stepped aside and brought her blade sweeping up, but the thing was fast as a striking snake, fast as her own thought. So was she, rolling away. Wood splintered from its missed strike.

  Yelling. Another raft angling close, the crossbows shooting at the shadows, the dark thickening of air that was striving to become—something. Fools would hit the children. She screamed at them to hold, hold as another massive head reared itself over her, Skylark’s edge opening a gouge in one great throat and at the same time she reached into the water, the air, reached for what shaped this forgotten monstrous life . . .

  Something went into the waves from the other raft, smooth and silent as a diving bird. She knew him before her eyes had understood, felt him, the river suddenly a live thing, and it sucked down the smoke-shadows and the cold fire burned free through her veins, waking from its ice. Her second kill slid away, dissolving into river-muck and weed. The last head lashed back the neck’s own length and plunged down after Nabban. The raft rolled over god and monster both, carried by the current, as Yeh-Lin leapt the mangled body of the raft-captain and raced to the stern and her children.

  The water roiled. The creature thrashed half out of the water alongside them, a thing that should not have been, streaked now red and white, rolling, its belly opened like a gutted fish.

  They had pushed little Ti up tight against the net-bound storage jars, Kufu and Jang shielding him, all clinging together. The steerswomen knelt, one with a knife, one with another boathook. The head began to rise again, wounded as the creature was, snaking across the surface of the water for them. Yeh-Lin stood with a foot braced on the frame of the steering oar, waiting, but steel flashed up its neck and ripped a gash a yard long before it reached her. It sank. Red curling and coiling in the water, darkening, water foaming pink along their sides, fading, shadow, dissolved into nothing, the river quiet, gone bright and dark and sparking in the sunlight. The god hooked his knife into a crack between logs and heaved himself onto the deck, black coat and trousers clinging, hair slicked flat. No expression, none, as he came to his feet. Cold eyes, black and deep as night’s own ocean. But it had not been she who summoned the creatures from bone long gone and the memories of the ancient seas held in the stone, and his anger faded as the shadows had. He went around her with merely a nod of acknowledgement—going to the dead captain. She turned and the pages were staring
, but Ti broke from the other two and rushed to her. She dropped her sword in time to catch him, hold him against her, and Jang and Kufu followed. Ti was sobbing. He was so very young. She tried to remember being so young, and went down to her knees to hold them all, three shaking young bodies pressing close.

  “Captain Lin?” She looked up into the face of one of the women, grey, sweating, river-soaked. “That—was that a dragon?”

  She had no name for it. “I don’t know. But it was sent by the enemy of the heir of the gods. Look to your steering!” They were drifting out of the current, twisting sideways, and other crews were recovering from alarm to hail them, crying out for news.

  Ghu came walking back down the deck, sombre, as if shadows still clung to him.

  “Your sister died fighting the monster,” he told the two leaning on the steering oar again. “I gave her to the river.”

  A fit funeral for a riverer, and better that they did not see her dismembered body, Yeh-Lin thought. Better that the children did not see.

  Did she mean to take them beyond the fort of the Dragon’s Gorge? Had she given it any thought at all? Better they stayed with Prince Dan, who had left his little Jula in the care of Lady Willow’s governess at the White River Dragon. Better she had left them behind to attend on Lady Willow and chase after Jula.

  The sisters of the raft wept, but they did not leave their steering.

  “Take us in to shore,” Yeh-Lin said. “The danger is past . . .” Switched to Praitannec. “Is it, Nabban?”

  He considered her. “I wasn’t their quarry.”

  She had not given that thought. “Ah. Take us to shore, if you would, sisters. The danger on the river is past and Prince Dan and the lords must be shown the heir of the gods is safe.”