Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  “There’s a spring,” he said, when he came down again. “A spring, and the altar-stone, and a pine-sapling growing by it, and they will build me a cabin once they’ve cleared the yard within the old stone fencing. I think I’ll keep a cat for company.”

  They buried Kaeo in the Nabbani fashion, in the earth, and set a stone over him. Rat had tied her river-stone amulet about his neck. A promise, as it had been to her, when she took the smooth, holed pebble from the Little Sister’s bed, that dreaming night when she was fourteen. She would come back someday, Rat thought, while she was still Anlau, before she went to the river. She would gather his bones and take them to her father on the mountain. Dwei Kaeo had died for Nabban, but it was the Little Sister who would remember his name.

  Something remembered. Ahjvar found Ivah, claimed that splinter of the devil’s amulet from her. She had cocooned it in thread and hair, a binding he did not trust to last, but did not want either to disturb. He took it to Ghu.

  “Empty of souls, I think,” Ghu said. “I think . . . seal it, as your goddess sealed your wizardry, till we know better what to do with it. I don’t suppose an ordinary fire would do much to it at all.”

  And he did not want to burn again, no. Ahjvar cased it in river clay and wrote his own bindings on it: elm, rowan, hazel. Ghu set his thumb-print in it, like a seal, before they fired it.

  “Bury it at Swajui, under the roots of the oaks,” he said. “They’ll hold it till we need it.”

  “What are we likely to need it for?”

  “I don’t know. We may, though. Someday.”

  “I am not your emperor,” Prince Dan said. Lords, officers, rebels and imperial conscripts, village folk—and priests, because there were priests coming into them from hiding in the hills, day and night—they were gathered to witness. Folk in their thousands. Most could neither see—except that there were small figures stood on the bed of a wagon beneath the blue banners—nor hear. “It is not my place. It never was. I am a servant of the god of Nabban, a servant of Nabban—as the emperor must be, first and foremost of all his servants—but that is not the service I am best able to give. I will retire to the mountains of Choa and keep a shrine to Nabban there, and watch a child I have adopted as my daughter grow. You have heard the prophecies that were spoken. The Peony Throne is cast down. The rule of the sons of Min-Jan is ended.”

  “The holy one will be emperor!” some soldier called, and Nabban, Nabban, they echoed it.

  Ivah saw Ghu, all in black and half lost in shadows behind Dan, shake his head in denial. They saw that refusal, the front ranks, at least.

  “Nabban says, the Princess Ivah will serve him in this. A daughter of Nabban, a daughter of the Great Grass, his wizard and his captain of archers. If she is Min-Jan, the daughter of my lost sister An-Chaq, she is also Tamghati, come out of the west, and her house is the house of the Grass. It is a new era. We start again.”

  They cheered, whether they had heard or understood or not. They would have cheered anything.

  No gold, no jewels. Archer’s leather and her hair in a warrior’s knot, not a caravaneer’s braids. She wore sky-blue and black for the god, a robe sent from Dernang by Lady Willow, something that had been the girl’s mother’s, the colours a fortunate chance. She left it sashless, open, showing her leather and sabre beneath.

  Empress might mean something more like a high priestess. She would make it so, and make certain her heirs, however she came by them, remembered it.

  She might wish for Nour’s good sense here, but Kharduin was not a man to bring harmony and reconciliation to a land, unless it could be brought by knocking heads together. It was her father’s example she needed, strange thought. His leadership, but not his ambition and his evil. No mound of heads. His warband had followed him with loyalty and affection and respect, and not for fear. Her father’s example, in some things. And she had known good men and good women, and had seen how they lived, and how they dealt. She might try to be so. She must.

  A morning of clear skies and warm winds, and the birds singing up the steep sides of the gorge. Yeh-Lin came to them there, where they were clambering among the lilacs that covered the slope, with the river growling white below. Not there for any great and divine purpose, only that it was a quiet place, open and wild, and there were no people there.

  “Nabban. You wanted me?”

  “Yes. Something for you to do. Go south.” Ghu nodded to Ti, who followed in Yeh-Lin’s path. “Take your pages, since they’ll only follow you anyway—”

  Ti nodded, edging up beside her. “Even Kufu,” he said. “You scared him, my lady, but not anymore.”

  She took the boy’s hand.

  “Your pages, and good horses, and a few of Yuro’s folk to look after them. Yuro, if he’s fit to ride and wishes to go with you. Go as my ambassadors, and as Ivah’s, you and Lord Daro Yuro. Go with the priestess of the Little Sister and speak with the queens.”

  “Me? Are you out of your mind, Nabban?”

  “You began this. You end it.”

  “All the lands drained by the Little Sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they were Lathan long ago, and no one asked my mother’s name.”

  “Jochiz tried to take you, you know. You understand that. You could have turned on him. Fought him for his soul. Taken him into yourself, as he meant to take you. Did you not even think it, you and the dead king between you?”

  “No,” Ahjvar said.

  “What would we have become, if we had?” Ghu asked.

  “Something—the world has not seen. God and Great God.”

  “Devil,” Ahjvar said.

  “Yes, that.”

  “Something,” said Ghu, “to break and burn the land, to let all anger loose and leave Nabban barren and lifeless as they say the deadlands are along the Kinsai’av?”

  “Yes,” she said steadily.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would be too easy to become so. Go to the Wild Girls for me, Yeh-Lin.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “And come back.”

  “For a while?”

  “Ivah might need your advice. For a while.”

  “We will,” said Ahjvar, “be watching.”

  “Dead king, I do expect so.”

  Couriers riding, it seemed day and night. Shihpan embattled along its border with Vanai, a lord declaring himself a free king. Daro Korat and Zhung Huong the governor of Dernang sending accounts of village councils established and lands given to the shrines to keep for the god, and serfs of the manors to hold each their own, under, ultimately, the god. The governor of the Old Capital sent his submission. The widow of the admiral of the fleet, who had killed himself at news of the empress’s death, sent hers, with thanks and her oath as her husband’s successor, which might or might not be let stand. High lords were raising their banners or sending their submission, but the folk were rising, too, for their god, and it was not good to be a lord who denied the god of Nabban, and the empress, and the changes they would make in the land.

  A great senate. A council, and not only of the lords or the merchants or the heads of the clans. Voices which might speak for all the folk. Let them throw the stones to be chosen, and come to the capital, the Old Capital, which was new again, for a term of three years. Fools and the wise, appointed by chance. The voices of the land. The empress would hear them, and would remember that the god most certainly did.

  Always.

  EPILOGUE

  They have been coming for six months, the lords of the land, and the common folk too. Pilgrims. Priests and priestesses of the shrines. The tomb had been intended to stand alone, visited perhaps on certain anniversaries, formally, but that is not what the folk want of it, and she belongs to the folk.

  The tomb is built into a green hillside in Solan, south of the Wild Sister, looking north over the river. It is stone quarried of the hills in Numiya, where the empress won her first
battle, its pillars and the swooping eaves of its porch reflecting the entrance of a keep. The path down the hill descends in shallow steps, the way marked by stones carved with verses by the poet Yeon Silla, who was the empress’s lover for half her life. The poet herself is buried nearby; it was seeking a place for her that led the empress to choose this hill for her own tomb.

  There are horses and hawks in flight carved on the sealed doors, and the sun ascendant over them. Groves of flowering trees are planted, making the hill a garden. She began this with her own hands, setting lilacs about Yeon Silla’s simple tomb.

  She would have had her own the same, and set by Silla’s, but the senate of the land and the Emperor Sanguhar, her son, wanted to do her greater honour. It was grand, but not overdone. They did not aspire to the opulence of the Min-Jan. She had sent the emperor and his younger sister, as he had later sent his three daughters, to be fostered for two years each in turn in Choa, on the mountain, and they learnt simplicity there. Humility. Service. Among other things.

  “The emperors must learn the ways of the god,” the empress had said. “We will not become the Min-Jan again. We will remember that we serve the land, and why.”

  That they came back horsemasters to satisfy even a Grasslander, and rather better with knife and sword and the arts of unarmed fighting than had been the Nabbani custom of imperial youths previously, was not considered, by the House of the Grass, any ill reflection on their god or his man.

  For six months, the folk have come to the tomb. It had not been considered how the folk of the land have taken the empress to be their own. She fought for them, they say. She is theirs, and a saint of the holy one, of Nabban. They come, and they leave scraps of prayer, gifts of verse. Through her, they address their god.

  The tomb must be meant to be a shrine, the emperor says. There will have to be a priest to tend it. Not a large establishment, not a temple, as some shrines near the towns have become. A shrine like a shrine of the wilderness, with its sacred tree and boulder and spring or well. A hermit, perhaps, or a couple. Someone will come. It is the way of things.

  But meanwhile the pilgrims come, and leave their prayers.

  It is evening, and the sun is setting, dusk spreading through the young trees. The pilgrims are gone. The wind stirs the prayers and the poems, which the folk leave pinned to the bark of one of the few older trees, a camphor that stood before the hill became a grave.

  A hawk circles in the fading light. A white owl. It lands, wings spread, ruffles its feathers and is a woman, tall, lean, harsh-boned. Not Nabbani. Skin very pale, hair the colour of old flax-stalks in a long braid. Northron, and her eyes are grey. She wears a cloak of silk sewn with feathers and a mail hauberk, a long sword at her hip, its hilt gold and garnet, and another, the grip wrapped in leather, at her shoulder. She reads Yeon Silla’s verse on the nearest stone, and does not hesitate over the Nabbani characters. Walks to the door of the tomb.

  “She is gone, you know.” A soft voice. “I’m sorry. You’ve come late.” She turns.

  A man, and another at his shoulder. Horses, maybe, wait, dim and ghostly. The light is fading. Dogs watch her. One marks the tree of the prayers. The men themselves are dim, there and not there.

  “Seeing,” she says. “It’s not knowing. I thought I might have time.” Her Nabbani is accented, harsh, overtones of both the caravan road and archaicisms long forgotten. She sets a hand to the sealed door. The empress’s daughter the Princess An-Chaq, whose wizardry takes its form in carving, has made the roundel of running horses interlaced.

  The men are more present in the darkness. Sound of footsteps, brushing cloth. Scent, too. Man, horse, pine trees, snow, wood smoke.

  The tall man is not the sort she likes moving to stand behind her, and he knows it. He has a Northron sword, older maybe than he knows. One of the demon-forged from the isles, though a lesser and later smith claimed the work than the Wolf who made hers. Its name is lost. He keeps his hands from it, at least, but he does not like his lord standing so close to her. She keeps her hands from her sword. From either sword. Sets her back against the door instead, to watch them both.

  “This is the storyteller, Ahj,” the god says. “I don’t think she means any threat, here.”

  “No,” she says.

  “Ulfhild Vartu.”

  “Moth,” she says.

  “Yeh-Lin said you might come, someday.”

  “Where is she?”

  The god smiles. She does remember him, that odd, half-understood creature in Marakand, human and not, god half-formed, watching her, listening to the tale she performed in the market square.

  “I sent her away.”

  “Where?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “No,” she says, low, intense.

  “Ivah,” he says, “said you were set to destroy the devils. All of them. She says you killed her father.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Lady of Marakand.”

  “Ya.”

  “And have you come for Yeh-Lin Dotemon?”

  “Should I tell you? What does it matter, if she’s not here?”

  “It matters.”

  “No. I came for Ivah. To—say farewell. Only that. I should have come sooner.”

  “She wasn’t your daughter.”

  “No.”

  “She remembered you with—” The god shrugs. “Respect, honour, affection.”

  “Ah.”

  “She left a message for you,” the tall man says. He is a strange thing, not exactly a bone-horse like Storm, whom she has lost somewhere in Marakand, and his skull has probably been ground up to fertilize the fields long since, poor faithful, cranky ghost of a horse that he was. This man is a thing that is a part of his god, as a demon is a thing of the world, and yet like a demon is his own self, whole and certain. A beautiful thing. This world is always a miracle, in what it finds it can be.

  She envies the pair of them.

  She misses the bear with a pain that she cannot let out, even so much as the glimmer of a candle in the night, or she will not endure it.

  The god’s man is waiting.

  “A message?” she asks, as he wants her to ask.

  “Ivah said, ‘Ulfhild will come. She must. If she comes too late, tell her. I left the skull and Mikki’s axe and chisels with the god Gurhan, when I set out from Marakand. Tell her, she has to go find Mikki. She can’t do this to him. Tell her, the Old Great Gods do wrong. Tell her, for Yeh-Lin, for the Blackdog, for herself, she must find a way to refuse the Gods. Tell her, she can’t do this to Mikki. She must find him. He needs her, as she needs him.’ She never did say who Mikki was.”

  “Who’s Mikki?” the god asks, with childlike curiosity.

  “A bear. Sometimes. A man. A half-demon. I . . . left him. He was safer so.”

  “Ah,” the god says, and the word is heavy.

  “He was.”

  A gesture, an open hand.

  “I need him,” she says. “I forget who I am, without him.”

  “Yes,” the god says. “Why chisels?”

  “He’s a carpenter.”

  “Ah. A maker of things. Not a breaker.”

  “Mikki? Yes. He is that.”

  “Good.”

  “Something for you,” the man says. He holds out an open hand. In it is a small thing, a lump of fired clay that looks as though it was formed to a rough disc by pressing between two hands. Symbols inscribed on both sides, which she can’t read, and a thumb-print. The characters are Praitannec, she guesses. She’s seen such writing before, on stones in the Malagru mountains. That fits with his looks, not Nabbani, not Northron for all his pale hair, and the plaid cloth around his shoulders.

  She takes the clay disc. It is . . . cold.

  “What is it?”

  “A sliver,” the god says, “of the soul of a devil. We think.” He shrugs. “I don’t understand such wizardry. Ahjvar doesn’t.”

  “Jochiz,” the blond man says.

  Her
turn to say only, “Ah,” closing her hand over the disc.

  “Take it out of Nabban.”

  She nods. They all stand in silence, as the full moon rises.

  “She is gone,” the god says again. “I’m sorry. But she thought well of you, always.”

  She nods.

  “Go find the one who helps you remember who you are,” he says. “That matters.”

  “Does it?”

  “Always. Ahj?”

  “Yes.”

  They leave her, quiet on the hillside. Some few words together, not meant for her, in a language which she does not know, but who does speak Praitannec anyway? They mount the horses and move off into the mist seeping up from the summer grass. They are gone before they should be, dissolved into the night.

  Someone whistles, and the dogs abandon their sniffing to follow.

  Moth stands for a time at the door of the tomb.

  Better not to have seen her become an old woman anyway?

  No.

  “You did well,” she says, her hand on the carved horses. “You did better than I ever did. Safe journey on your road, Ivah.”

  She draws the Northron sword. Kepra, it is named, Keeper of the hall. The Wolf made me for Ravnsfjell, the blade says, and, Strength, courage, wisdom.

  Until the last road and the last dawn, is the inscription on the guard.

  It is not a blade for carving, but it cuts the wood of the door like an engraving chisel, fine lines, deep, above the horses. Old runes of the north. A blessing.

  Journey. Joy. The harvest. Which is completion, and success, and a victory.