by K V Johansen
It was this chest she opened. Ivah’s hand hesitated over the embroidered silk purse that held her mother’s oracle coins. Probably not a good idea. She reached under them for her own, a mismatched assortment in an older purse, its red silk long since faded to a dull mud colour.
“No, not the coins. Read a bone for me.”
“Of course.” Ivah found instead the leather case that held the tools she needed, a sharp bronze stylus, a slender iron rod like a small poker, also sharpened and dark with repeated heatings, a knife with a thick, short blade, very sharp. She set the poker in the brazier to heat.
“I’ll need a blade-bone, Father. Do you mind waiting? I’ll send Shaiveh to search the midden.”
Her father shook his head, flourished an ivory bone he had carried tucked into the back of his sash. She ought to have noticed.
Ivah took the bone and almost dropped it. It was not flat, but slightly cupped, and looked almost like some broad-finned, swimming thing.
“This isn’t—”
Tamghat leaned down to pat her arm reassuringly. “It isn’t fresh, daughter. I took it from the tomb of one of Attalissa’s earlier incarnations. They have a room full of stone coffins, all lined up in a row. I wonder if they ever let the living goddess go in there? They’d give the poor child nightmares.”
The thought of seeing a row of one’s own tombs was enough to give anyone nightmares, child or not. An-Chaq had no tomb. Ivah set that thought aside, her face carefully intent, thoughtful.
“What do you want me to ask, Father?”
An-Chaq had taught her Nabbani magic, consulting the oracle coins and the blade-bones, the casting of spells by the sixty-four patterns and harmonies of sun and moon. Her father taught her the string-weaving spell-casting of the Great Grass, and the divination worked with sky-charts and nine river-pebbles, which depended on knowing all the stories of all the constellations, and how to interpret their interactions, their roles in past, present, and future. It was not a horoscope such as they cast in the kingdoms of Pirakul, but a dance of constellations, of stories each with message and moral, and the wandering stars to give choice and warning, as they rode among the constellations through the fixed gates and altered the tale.
Ivah felt no sympathy with the sky-chart; in all their lessons, Tamghat generally dismissed her readings, and told her she had missed layers of meaning in the stories that utterly undermined what she had said. He corrected her even when she read the fall of the coins for him, a Nabbani soothsaying he often mocked as something little subtler than thrown dice. He had never asked her to read the bones at all.
That had been An-Chaq’s privilege.
“Shaiveh tells me you’re still a virgin, daughter. Is this so?”
Ivah flushed, and dared a brief resentful thought. Why could he never use her name? Always “daughter,” like a thing. That saddle, that bow, that daughter.
“Yes,” she murmured, looking down at the bone.
Ova’s exploring hands surely did not count. She had grown too nervous, and he had been, too, the shadow of Tamghat hanging over them both. So they had gone back to the fires, that night six months ago, and the gold-haired Northron had not met her eyes straight-on ever since. Probably he had been relieved. She was no great beauty; she had nothing of Tamghat’s handsome, sharp features to show she was his. Though her eyes were the light golden brown of the grass, her face was round, too heavy, she thought, in the cheeks and jaw, and her features shallow, even flat. Her only likely beauty in the eyes of any of the men she knew was the long curtain of her hair, black and straight and glossy as that of any Nabbani princess. But maybe Ova praised it only because it was all he could find in her worth desiring, except her nerve-wracking nearness to his lord, which was no doubt the source of both desire and fear. An-Chaq had always warned her that men would see her only as the hem of her father’s coat.
Tamghat snorted. “What’s Ova’s problem?”
Ivah felt her cheeks grow darker yet.
“Never mind. You’ll have a greater affinity with the maiden goddess for this oracle-taking.”
“Oh. Yes, Father.”
“I’ll give young Ova a boot on the backside for you later.”
“Father, please! Please don’t. It isn’t…it wasn’t anything. Really.”
“No? Why’s he been sulking so much, then, if it was nothing? I thought he was just having sudden qualms of rank. You lead him on and drop him? Don’t play your mother’s games with my noekar, girl.” His voice was suddenly sour. “I’ll have no more Nabbani whores in my following. You deal honestly with my noekar-men. I won’t have you using them, or them thinking they can use you.”
“No, Father.” Ivah took up the stylus, looked up at him again from her seat on the floor at his feet. “I’m your daughter, Father. I didn’t mean to…it was…I was wrong, I misunderstood my own feelings. I’ll apologize to him, I didn’t realize he still hoped…” Glad she had closed the brown-lacquered chest, with its hoard of fans and hair jewels.
Tamghat smiled again. Ivah relaxed, smiling back. That had been the right answer. Confusion, bashfulness. Childish immaturity. She repeated her earlier question. “What shall I ask, Father?”
“Ask the manner of Attalissa’s returning, and the year.”
It was not a simple question, a yes or no. Ivah tapped her teeth with the stylus, considering, but then sat still at her father’s quick frown. Instead she closed her eyes and adopted the posture of meditation he had taught her, legs crossed, hands loose in lap. Opening herself to the guidance of the stars by which he set such great store. Allowing herself time to think: the correct phrasing, the interpretations that such a question would require for the two palaces and the four elements.
Strange, that Tamghat was so cheerful and patient. A small ritual or divination gone awry could drive him to cursing the Great Gods and striking his servants, or even the noekar. His horses fled him when he lost his temper, as they would flee fire or thunder. And this failure to capture the goddess, coming so soon on An-Chaq’s great betrayal—Ivah would have expected fury. The execution of even those priestesses who had submitted. The razing of the temple, to relieve his feelings.
He was wiser than she. He already saw future patterns forming, and he moved on to shaping the advantageous and harmonious result. Besides, he had been like that all her life, a thunderstorm, loud and sudden, black fury and bright sun sparkling on rain-jewelled grass, and often little enough cause for either. Perhaps this setback was no greater, for him, than some small divination gone amiss. She had never been able to gauge the true depth of his powers. Or his ultimate intent, in anything.
Ivah opened her eyes again. “You’ve seen something great and good to come out of this delay, haven’t you, Father?” she dared to ask, keeping her voice playful.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps.” He fingered the bear’s teeth in his braids, looking…thoughtful.
“Tell me?”
“No. I want your thoughts on what the bone reveals to be unshaped by what I’ve seen.”
“You’re right,” she said contritely. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Ivah sat back again, eyes closed. Something momentous, but not certainly to his benefit. Yet something that he thought he could turn to his use, or he would not have given up pursuit of the goddess so easily or be so good-humoured about her loss. Something very great, to balance the very great disaster this expedition had already been.
Tamghat had been a month preparing the great spell that would carry his noekar-men and noekar-women, the sworn warriors who had left other warlords to take oath to him, and the mercenary rabble that made up the largest part of his army, to the distant mountains of the Pillars of the Sky. The patterns had been cut in the earth, the sacrifices made, the omens read. Tamghat trusted An-Chaq, with Ivah helping, to prepare the lesser, the outermost, of the three rings of power-laden words that surrounded the encamped army. They wrote phrases of power in ground charcoal and red and yellow ochre, black and red a
nd yellow, the three sacred colours of the wizardry of the Great Grass, at the twelve points of the circle.
The warriors and mercenaries knew they went to conquer and plunder a wealthy mountain town by wizard’s magic. The noekar knew their warlord meant to hold and rule it. The only wizards in his service, An-Chaq and Ivah, knew he worked this great and unbelievable spell to move his army a thousand miles or more, in order to bind himself in marriage to a goddess and claim for himself the power of a god.
That had turned An-Chaq’s mind. It must have. No sane woman would have done what she did, not to Tamghat. Jealousy sent An-Chaq mad, and mad, she wrote into the inscription a curse against her lover.
Ivah had not known what her mother did. Her father believed that.
The curse was meant to kill Tamghat. It did not, though a dozen of the noekar standing closest to him died, when he summoned his great powers and sent them into the spell.
Ivah would remember that in waking nightmares. She had been standing close as well, holding her horse’s bridle, soothing it, soothing herself, braced to be flung bodily, or shot like lightning, or whatever the effect would be, into the mountains. And then men and women around her were screaming, writhing on the ground, clutching their bellies. And they died.
Tamghat had let out a great roar, so that Ivah thought whatever enemy’s attack had done this tormented her father too. She wove hasty symbols of protection with the long loop of yarn she carried, the circle of swords and the river-island, and set the spell on her father, with the simple figure that was the father. And her well-wishing spell of protection went unnoticed, as he drew his sabre and swept off An-Chaq’s head.
Ivah saw, when she lay trying to sleep, her mother’s allegedly royal hair, which she would never cut or even braid, sweeping like a comet’s tail after her head as it fell, and her mother’s eyes looking up at her, wide and surprised and angry.
They had needed to move the camp and begin cutting the circles all over again. The curse-murdered noekar were buried near where they had fallen, with all due ceremony, but An-Chaq was left for the carrion-eating ravens. Ivah knew better than to weep for her, beyond the one startled scream.
When they were finally ready to carry the army to the mountains, it was nearly too late. Tamghat consulted almanacs and had Ivah do the same, in the self-deceiving hope their previous work had been in error. And he cursed An-Chaq for a Nabbani whore. The afternoon when they were finally prepared again was the afternoon before the night of the second new moon of spring. Two of the wandering stars, which were called on the Great Grass the Maiden-Warrior and the Bear, or in Nabban the Princess and the Exile, or in Pirakul the Cow-Herd and the Armed Sage, became one in the house of the Seven Daughters, which governed marriage and beginnings. The coming dawn was the time when Tamghat said he must work his great ritual, even more difficult and taxing than the transport of the army, to bind himself to the mortal woman who was the goddess Attalissa.
One night to take Lissavakail and the temple, and prepare himself, exhausted, to take the goddess.
They had done it. And the mortal goddess was a little girl, and the little girl was missing. She, or her demon-possessed guardian, had killed over a dozen of the noekar sent to watch for them at the exit from the underwater tunnel they no doubt had thought secret. The noekar were eager for a chance to avenge themselves on the shape-changing black hound that Siglinda said she had seen for a moment, after Tamghat broke down the gates. But it was all for nothing.
So perhaps An-Chaq had won. There was no divine rival to replace her, yet.
Thinking such things did not tell Ivah how to approach the oracle-bone and what it might reveal.
“What will be the manner of Attalissa’s returning, and the year,” Ivah repeated, opening her eyes and changing her posture, kneeling, the shoulder blade braced on the floor before her. She took up the stylus again and began to incise the question on the lower part of the bone, using the Nabbani ideographs. With any luck Tamghat would not notice how gingerly she handled the bone. She was not even certain the divination could work, with a human bone so differently shaped from what was customary.
Sun and Moon she cut into the upper portion, dividing the bone into the two palaces that governed all Nabbani magic. Under Sun, in a descending line, she scratched Air and Fire, and under Moon, Earth, and Water, working more hastily, seeing Tamghat start to tap his foot. Then, right to left, above her question, she began cutting numbers. How far to go, that was the problem. She ran out of space at twenty-four, which might be a sign. The Northrons thought in twelves rather than tens, and her father was oddly Northron in some aspects of his wizardry.
“Done?” Tamghat asked, as Ivah sat back on her heels again. “Good. Colour it, now, with your blood.”
“That isn’t—” Ivah bit her tongue on the protest. That was not right, not how it was done in Nabban, not how her mother had taught her to read an oracle. It was a Northron thing, a barbarian superstition, An-Chaq said, to think writing coloured with the wizard’s own blood held more power. “It isn’t customary,” she said, a milder protest.
“It will give force to the link between your invocation and her fate, give you more certainty of truth. Don’t be such a coward. Weren’t you just calling yourself an eaglet?”
“A very small eaglet,” she said, making it a joke, and took up the stylus again, hoping her hand was steady. She drove the point into the soft ball of her left thumb, before she had time to think of flinching, and watched the blood well up without any need to squeeze it. Red and glistening on her skin, like the droplets on her face, the smear across her hand when she wiped away what she thought were tears, after An-Chaq dropped in front of her. Ivah swallowed hard and ducked her head almost to her knees, letting the ringing in her ears fade as she smeared her thumb over the characters of her question, trembling hands hidden in the curtain of her hair. She hoped. Hoped her father would not see her pallor as she sat up again, wiping at the trace of blood with her sleeve, so that all that remained was the red in the incised lines.
Tamghat leaned forward, but he was studying what she had written, not herself. His command of written Nabbani was next to nonexistent, though he avoided admitting it. Ivah used the knife to carve a small pit in the bone, took the hot poker and held it there, waiting for the heat to do its work and the fine, branched crack to form.
The human blade-bone was all wrong. She had known it. She had to reheat the poker twice more, before there was anything to see. A long, straight line, like a single hair draped over the bone, ran up through the Palace of the Moon without intersecting either Earth or Water, and the second crossed the number fifteen, fractured there in a snarled knot of finer lines, and ran to its end in Fire.
“So?” her father asked.
“Fifteen,” Ivah said. That was the easy and obvious thing. “Fifteen years.”
Tamghat frowned. “That doesn’t…I’ll have to do more calculations. That doesn’t harmonize with the stars, I don’t think. Perhaps not fifteen years from now, but when she is fifteen? Though would that be by Grass reckoning or Nabbani, here? I’ll need to learn the time of her birth.”
“Perhaps.” Ivah knew better than to contradict him, even if it was she who was reading the oracle. “The longer line shows that the Palace of the Moon will dominate her return. Thus the manner of her return will be secret. In secrecy?”
Or to her father’s disadvantage: the Palace of the Sun was advantage and success; that of the Moon adversity, disadvantage to the questioner.
“But then there is Fire, which belongs to the Palace of the Sun. Renewal. Destruction. It can be either. Heat and life or a funeral pyre. Given the dominance of the Palace of the Moon, destruction and death are more likely.”
“The Moon for maidens,” Tamghat said. “And renewal in the Palace of the Sun, for new life and the male principle.” He smirked. “A wedding.”
Ivah frowned doubtfully. “I’m not sure, Father. It should be Water, for joining, if there’s to be a wedding.”
“Don’t pout, Eaglet, you’ll give yourself wrinkles.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Well, it adds a little to confirm what I’ve seen.”
And it still pleased him, for all it screamed danger and failure to her. Ivah smiled, relief and pleasure at having pleased him a warm glow in her chest. Probably she read it wrongly, took falsely grim views because of her own bleak mood. It was he who had the real power and wisdom.
“Now will you tell me what your forecasting showed?” she asked. “Please, Father?”
Tamghat laughed and ruffled her hair. “A greedy eaglet. I cast the pebbles. Black for the past, for roots and beginnings, and they showed me…old friends, and old betrayals. Ar-Lin, who poisoned her husband. Tor and Otha, who vowed brotherhood till death and sailed into the west, searching for Ecgtheow’s grave and the sword she had carried. Red for the present, for the beating heart, and those told of patience, not action. Ar-Lin, waiting thirty years for her lover’s return. The leopard, who stalks the mocking monkey. Yellow for the future, for immortal gold and the undying sun and the rising soul, and there, yes, in time to come Attalissa will return, and draw with her another. The Princess facing the sun’s door, combing her hair, drawing in her lover with the magic of her hair, and Ar-Lin who went seeking her lost lover, an old woman, alone, and sang him back from death, never looking behind her.
“And lost him again, because he was young and beautiful, and she had grown old, waiting. She changed, and he didn’t.”
Ivah had always hated that story. Besides, Tamghat jumbled together constellation-stories from different lands. An-Chaq had told her, when Tamghat was not there to hear, that such combination of stories should never be done if a Grasslands divination by pebbles and sky-chart was to have truth in it. It probably shouldn’t have been Ar-Lin at all, but some other tale from some other land, if Tamghat was going to connect her with the leopard or the Princess, or with Tor and Otha. But Ivah suspected her father was not telling her half of the connections he made between the constellations the pebbles chose and the patterns they made between them. He had not mentioned the wandering stars or the fixed gates, which could utterly change the tale.
