Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  “My river,” Ghu said quietly. “Don’t tell me its strength. Ivah will look to the ropes.”

  Ivah’s eyebrows went up, but she only nodded.

  “Tomorrow,” Ghu said. “Eat, rest. Tell the people. Tomorrow’s will be a long march, and then we’ll begin.”

  The stone steps are high, and she climbs them alone to the summit. Red pillars support a soaring roof high above, and the eaves are gilded, bright in the sun. She turns, slow in her heavy robes, brocade of crimson and gold over layers of silk that trail a train. Her golden headdress is rayed like the moon, like the crown of Mother Nabban, and set with pearls rose and white and gold. She rests her hands on the hilt of the sabre in her sash and watches them all so far below, the lords and the ladies, the nobles of the land assembled in the great plaza. The priests, too, in their robes white and brown, the priests of the empress, the warlord and wizard who has brought peace to the wounded land.

  They go to their knees, the folk, and bow their faces to the stone.

  A cold wind stings tears from her eyes. She shuts them. Cold wind, chill heart.

  Don’t leave yourself hollow, a devil says in memory.

  Wind rises. She opens her eyes, raises her chin, grips the sabre’s hilt. The wind strengthens, blowing like a storm off the mountains. Robes become banners, rags, streams of snow snaking over the paving stones below, around, over the hunched bodies, which are no more than the undulations of the land, and the waves of the grass, lying near-flat in the wind, and she stands on a hill, one of the old mounds, grave of a forgotten hero. The roof is gone to churning grey cloud, the pillars are leaning stone, minimally shaped; faint lines still trace broad-antlered deer, aurochsen, bear. She staggers against the wind, bare-headed, flings her arms wide, flourishing her sabre, her sheepskin coat flaring like wings, as if she would turn to a hawk and fly.

  No! she shouts, and she stumbles to the grey rock, the low one, not old hero-stone but a heart and warm and she crouches, sets her back to it, watching, seeking her enemy.

  Show yourself! she calls. Let me see you, and I’ll deny you to your face. Stay out of my dreams.

  Empress, he says. Your own dreams, not mine. You know what you are. Daughter. Chosen. Worthy to be mine.

  Ivah muttered in her sleep, in the tent she shared with the banner-lady Ti-So’aro and four warriors of her retinue, and rolled over, half-waking. It was the uncertainty of what might come disturbed her unremembered dreams. She did not sleep well, these nights on the river road. Who could?

  Ahjvar had grown used to sleeping while Ghu sat wakeful by the water, used to hard ground under him, dew and the river’s fogs dampening his clothes and curling his hair, a chill that once would have set old broken bones to aching but never seemed to bother him anymore. He wished Ghu wouldn’t sit up, because it left him vague and distant, less human, for too long the next day, but maybe it was something he needed, as a snake needed to bask in the sun. He never seemed tired as a man should be after such a vigil. He sat, and Ahjvar slept, and he might wake with Ghu lying open-eyed alongside him, or sitting where he had been like some outcropping of the stone, misted pale like a spider’s web. It wasn’t yet dawn when a touch on his face woke him that night. The moon was past its height, hazed with fog that rose and wavered, filling all the broad valley like a tide.

  “We need a boat,” Ghu said, crouching over him.

  Ahjvar groaned, tried to bury his head in his arm. He hadn’t been dreaming. Sweet dark depths of dreamless sleep, and he wanted to crawl back there.

  “Hey.”

  He lipped the hand that burrowed in between face and elbow, then bit it, not terribly hard.

  “Idiot.” Ghu rolled him over. “Boat?”

  “Don’t have one. Go steal a raft. A change from horses.”

  “Wake up, you.”

  He considered trying to pull Ghu down on top of him, decided against it and pulled himself up instead, hands on his shoulders. Sat wrapped around him. That proved distracting to Ghu, at least for a few moments. Mouth on his neck, his ear, mouth lingering on mouth. But this was hardly any private place.

  “Why a boat?” he asked, and disentangled himself to walk the two steps to the shore, wake himself properly with cold water.

  “I want to look at the river.”

  He didn’t have to speak his sarcasm, crouched and splashing river water on his face.

  “The other shore. Have you ever handled a skin boat?”

  “No.”

  “Like a canoe, but crankier.”

  “Nor a canoe. I can row, you know.”

  “Not a boat for rowing. Probably you should just sit still.”

  “That, I can do. But are we leaving the dogs behind?” The dogs were there, ears alert, the roots of their curled tails wagging in that gentle, questioning way that meant, us too?

  “The dogs will wait over here.” Ghu rubbed both wolfish heads, light and dark. “I don’t quite trust you two not to go off looking for excitement.”

  Two tails slowly uncoiled to the straight and then drooped.

  “Go find Ivah,” he said, which seemed to cheer them. “I’ll want her, and the horses.” Tails rose and they trotted off. Ivah, wherever she slept, was about to get a cold nose in the ear. Or two.

  Ahjvar swept up sword and crossbow, trailed after Ghu upriver, to where the fogs smelt of smoke and horse and humanity and the rafts were grounded in the shallows or moored to those that were. A few of them carried lighter vessels, property of the rafters, double-ended bark-skinned things that rode the water like gulls, but it was the boat the scout had brought over that Ghu sought, and found as if he had, like the dogs, nosed it out, hauled up on one of the rafts. A watchman came walking down across the decks, swaying gently with the river’s motion.

  “Holy one.” He acknowledged them without question and gave Ghu a hand unlashing the boat and sliding it into the water, but seemed to consider Ahjvar doubtfully, as an awkward piece of baggage better left ashore.

  Not so doubtfully as Ahjvar studied the boat, though. It sat far too lightly on the water for his liking, a framework of woven bamboo covered in hide, wider than the bark canoes, but not so long.

  “Up towards the bow,” Ghu said helpfully. “Stay low.”

  No thwarts, only a couple of bracing crosspieces, and short paddles shoved in beneath those. He didn’t plummet through the bottom, which he half expected. It was lined with split bamboo and doubtless tanned bullhide fit to cover a shield in. The boat shifted and bobbled as Ghu stepped in behind him, kneeling up on one knee, not sitting to row like the coastal boats of Gold Harbour. The thing spun and shot away, caught in the current in a few quick strokes. Ghu chuckled with what sounded like delight. Ahjvar just kept still. Balance, no different from a horse. Very different from a horse, and like no boat he’d ever used before. Not that he did so except in desperation.

  “Want me to take a hand?”

  “Just keep an eye out ahead.”

  There was a greyness to the east, and the half-moon towards the west making the fog pearly. On the water, they moved in a muffling cloud of night. By the time he saw anything, they’d be on top of it. They seemed to scud like bubbles kicked along by the wind. As if the river breathed and they rode the flutter of its pulse.

  Ghu was taking them downriver, not across, and keeping in the strongest flow of the current, too, he judged. They passed the village on the east; smell of pigs and cattle and lingering smokiness. Ahjvar settled back, warily, and the boat did not tip or dive. Relaxed, a little. Oddly, he wasn’t feeling the motion as much as he did on the rafts. The night faded and the fog turned to white banners around them, glowing with captive dawn.

  Daylight. He found it hard to judge their speed, but they passed a point where Ghu said, “That’s where we would have camped, but they’ll have to march on.” Their marches so far had been short, though. No great hardship.

  He began to wonder if Ghu planned to take them all the way to the ferry. If they got into the current sweeping to
the gorge, there would be no turning back. And it was broad daylight; eluding the sight of a distant and possibly dreaming devil would not be to elude keen-eyed watchers on the shore, or their arrows.

  An island divided the river ahead, low and marshy, overgrown with tall willow, thick beneath with tangled scrub and some pink-flowering weed clambering through everything. The scent carried on the wind, sweet and harsh in one. The broad, twiggy nests of herons filled some half-dead trees at the gravelly point that faced them like the prow of a ship.

  The skin boat swirled sideways and held place, suddenly out of the current. Turned to face the western shore. Tangled, marshy woodland there, too. Ghu turned the boat again. The east, though, was flat water-meadow and more of the steep, forested little hills beyond. No herds grazed, no village smoke rose, but still, at some point in the year it must see use, or it would be gone to scrub as well. Perhaps the interval-land was pasture of the ferry village.

  “Here,” he said.

  “The swamp will be a problem.”

  “Might not be so wet as it looks.”

  “Is that the river knowing, or just hope?”

  “Where are we without hope?”

  “In a swamp with our feet wet.”

  “Yeh-Lin is right about the strength of the river. The island will help.”

  “Did you know it was here?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Ghu . . .”

  “Well, I’m not. Sometimes I know, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes . . . I don’t know if I know, Ahj. I see things . . . Let’s look.”

  The woodland continued the length of the island, and half a mile back upriver. Impossible to see from the surface of the water how far inland it ran. Ahjvar caught an overhanging bough as Ghu brought the boat nosing in under the trees. No stony ledges here, but mud and roots and winter-broken boles of some tall bush rising from the water like spears, but they managed not to hole the boat as they snugged it in deep under the branches, probably impossible to see even from the island, and tied it there. Getting out involved crawling like a squirrel through a random jumble of branches and boles and discovering the ground to be fern-hummocks with water between. Ahjvar hoisted himself up onto a branch of the big willow that brooded over all the snarl like a hen on her chickens. Ghu came up after him, more gracefully, less encumbered with weapons. Also shorter and thinner, which made a difference when it came to weaving oneself through branches.

  “We can’t march them through this, unless you want to take the time to lay a log-road.”

  “Wouldn’t take long if this wetland’s narrow.”

  Whatever kind of willow this was, it flung up multiple leaning trunks, reached out branches near-horizontally, seeking light. They made it across two trees before they had to take to the ground again and there it was drier, less tangled. Ghu took the lead, keeping his back to the river. Ahjvar followed, watching the wider field of view while Ghu dealt with finding the immediate path, slipping around bushes, under the snagging pink-flowered whatever-it-was. When Ahjvar seized his shoulder, he froze. Ahjvar moved in close, pointed, but Ghu was already looking where he wanted him to, sliding aside, reaching behind for the hilt of his forage-knife.

  Ahjvar kept his hands free. Certainly no place for a sword or the crossbow. For all their care, they were leaving a clear trail behind them, and something else had as well, angling up their way from further downstream, heading, like them, for the higher ground, but with less certainty. Too broad a path for any smaller woodland animals and this was no country for bear or boar. Not broken enough for cattle or buffalo, no sharp-pointed hoofprints in the mud, either. Not the old track of some hunter; the crushed plants were still green. Someone else had come from the river and was trying to strike through. Come up the river? Nobody had passed them in the night, that was certain. If whoever it was had gone down the western channel, odds were they’d have found a canoe or some such vessel hidden like their own.

  Ghu gave way to him and they made a slow and near-soundless progress. A muddy puddle in the deep shade of a tree gave them the footprints of two people wearing soft shoes, not horseman’s boots, but they’d come by water, of course.

  He doubted any fisher or hunter of the village would wear anything better than sandals, if that, for this season.

  The light brightened, trees thinning; the ground, though not rising enough to be noticeable to the foot, was drier. The undergrowth thickened with the strengthening of the light. Coming to the edge of the woods. Narrow enough that they could slash a way through and lay the trunks and brush to make a roadbed in hardly the time it would take to bring up a company or two. Better if the empress’s forces weren’t warned they were coming, of course.

  Knife in his hand now, moving very slowly, watching all ways. And up. Up was where a man lay along the broad, sloping branch of one of those willows. Watching up the river road with the patience of the hunter. No weapon ready, though, no bow or crossbow. The other, another man . . . sitting at ease beneath the tree, leaning on it. Ahjvar couldn’t see his face, only one shoulder, the outstretched legs, crossed at the ankle. Rough sandals. The shoes . . . had been replaced. The feet were clean, too clean for anyone who had walked that path in sandals. Their clothes were hempen trousers and smocks, shabby. They could have been any of Prince Dan’s rebels.

  Waiting for the army. They might have been scouts sent to count Ghu’s army, judge its pace, if the Lai commander had some warning of their coming, which he might very well have. Gar Oro might not be the only one of Ontari’s scouts to have had too close an encounter with the enemy, and another might not have been lucky enough to escape them. But scouts would not come prepared to join the march and pass as followers of the holy one, and how the Wind in the Reeds knew where to lie in wait . . . with all their careful shielding of their march and the river from wizardrous watching. But perhaps what Ghu could summon, the shadowing essence of the river, was not enough against the empress’s devil. Or perhaps it was simpler than that, rumour travelling down the eastern shore.

  He wanted one alive. Not even a whisper, though. Slid his knife away again, touched Ghu’s hand, pointed to the man on the ground. Ghu nodded. Deep breath, running the tree in his mind, branch, handholds, feet, knees. Surged up it, a foot against the angled trunk, sideways to a branch, another, seizing the man’s far arm, flipping him, flinging him—the man twisted, falling, so that he landed crouched on his feet, but Ahjvar kicked him as he rose, knocked his head back, not hard enough to kill—he hoped—followed in as he fell. The man rolled and staggered up, unsteady as a drunk, fumbled a knife. It slipped from his fingers and Ahjvar kicked him down again. He struggled weakly, tangled in the whippy branches of a bush. Ahjvar dragged him out, dropped him facedown in the trampled mud and green, cut his rope belt and used it to lash his arms behind his back. Took the time to tie his ankles, too, since all was quiet beyond the tree. He rolled the man to his back. The eyes wandered a bit and he panted, but he didn’t seem likely to die in the next little while. Went around the tree to find Ghu crouched by a body. Bloody mess, literally. The forage-knife was not a weapon for neatness and Ghu must have been face-to-face with the man when he slashed his neck half through. Ahjvar prodded the narrow-bladed knife dropped in the old leaf-mould. That, and a short sword. Neither showing any staining or oiliness to the blade. Well, you wouldn’t poison a weapon you might have to carry around with you a day or more yet. The sword’s point was bloody, and not with spatters.

  “All right?”

  Ghu shrugged. “He came up at me like a shark. So fast. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  Ahjvar hooked a finger through a tear in the breast of Ghu’s coat, four fingers broad, and hot and wet beneath. He didn’t think that was the assassin’s blood, though Ghu wore a mask of it. The man must have heard something, probably Ahjvar’s rush up the tree, and been rising into his own attacker. Hadn’t meant to kill him but hadn’t had time to think through any other choice, Ahjvar judged. His fingers were busy with the knotwork button
s of the coat, ears strained for any sound, but there were only the birds of the morning singing, now that the scuffle was over. What had he taught the boy? To defend himself without hesitation for thought. Ghu batted him away.

  “He didn’t touch me.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  The proof was in his slashed shirt beneath the coat, but yes, the main force of the blow had been struck aside. There was a cut running along the ribs, ugly and bleeding more than he wanted to see, welling up and streaming down, but not the deep thrust that would have, and Great Gods Ahjvar felt sick, likely killed him.

  They should have backed off. He could have shot the one in the tree and gone after the other himself.

  “Doesn’t hurt.”

  “It will. Now who needs sewing up?”

  But a pad of torn shirt and the rest of the shirt as bandage around the chest to hold it was going to have to do.

  “Tattoo,” Ghu said. He hooked his left hand through the sash of the coat to keep his arm steady, with his right, cleaned his knife methodically. “And his soul—I lost it. He was terrified. I don’t know what he saw, but as he died he was suddenly terrified. Of me, of dying, of something else, I don’t know, but I tried to hold him, Ahj; I’d killed him and for a moment he clung on to me, to the road through me, but he was torn away. I—didn’t dare follow. There was—light. White, but murky. Darkness. Like water. A weight. I don’t know.”

  Ahjvar would take Ghu’s word for the tattoo. Wind in the Reeds, though. Ghu’s knife had snagged and ripped the fine chain of the man’s badge.

  “Sit,” he ordered, but Ghu was already sitting. The blood on his face was drying and cracking. Never an obedient servant, he grabbed Ahjvar’s arm and pulled himself up, stood, head low, finding his balance. He was too pale around the eyes, but he let Ahjvar move his supporting hand to the tree instead, turned loose from that after a few breaths to follow to their prisoner, who had gathered his wits enough to be trying to scrape the ropes loose. Ahjvar put a foot on his chest.

  “Wind in the Reeds,” he said. “Any more of you?”