Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  Sometimes, it was said, Sera herself would rise from the spring and speak to them. Gaguush swore she had seen her once, a woman shadowy and insubstantial as a ghost, mother-naked. Her hair swept into the water and became the deep pool’s shadows, and the tattooed horses of Serakallash had galloped on her mist-dim skin. Bikkim said she rose to talk with native Serakallashi more often than not, if they came alone, with earnest intent and need of counsel in their hearts. Holla-Sayan had never seen her and had no desire to now.

  “Water for water,” Pakdhala said, and tipped out the gourd she had brought. It stained the rock dark, gathering dust as it flowed, and disappeared into the spring-green grasses that crowded the bank.

  Sera my sister of Serakallash, I am Attalissa of the Lissavakail in the mountains. I have been driven from my lake by a great evil, and I come to your place with peace in my heart. I want to warn you of this wizard, who calls himself Tamghat, and ask your leave to pass through your land.

  That was not the fearful girl but the goddess entire, as she had not been since she told him, Prayer is for them, dog, not us. Confident, regal.

  Told Otokas.

  Arrogant, Holla-Sayan thought. There was no asking in her tone, merely assumption of right and Sera’s acquiescence.

  The grasses hissed like arrows in flight, beaten flat in a swirling wind, and the water rose in waves, splashing them.

  “Go away, and take your murdering dog with you!” Sera did not bother with silence, or dignity. If she had been a woman, she would have spit at them; her voice was shrill with anger. “Are you thinking you can ask me for help? Abandoning your people, running down here to be pursued by that…thing? I can see the fear of it, taste the shape of it, in your dog’s mind, and I tell you, I won’t have you leading it to my folk, whatever it is, wizard or mad demon like your dog. Go back to your lake where you belong!”

  The goddess whirled into a pillar of water, dark and glittering in the early morning light. Sand drove against them, sharp and stinging. Pakdhala cried out and covered her face, and Holla shouted, felt the blaze of anger turning liquid, dissolving through him.

  “Leave him alone!” Pakdhala shouted, like a little child defending her elder from bullying, all bristling impotent outrage.

  Sera laughed, the column of moving water chiming, but Holla thought the laughter forced. He had known too many brawls to mistake the nervous assumption of carelessness for firm-footed confidence, even in a god. Sera was afraid.

  But he could not see that she had cause for fear. Otokas’s memories knew the Blackdog could not overcome a goddess in her own ground.

  “Is that all you are, great sister of the Lissavakail? A little girl, who stamps her foot and threatens and hides behind her slave? But you’ve always been good at doing that. Leave him alone, or what? You’ll kill my folk, bring your priestesses down here, make me one of your protectorates? I think not. You attracted this mighty wizard, you left your folk to him and fled yourself—you fight him.”

  I can’t yet. I’m weak.

  Wilfully weak, avatar of Attalissa. Don’t cry to me about it.

  I have to hide.

  Not here you don’t.

  Fear was stronger yet in the taste of Sera’s words. She should be afraid of Tamghat, not of them. Attalissa was weak and the Blackdog only a mortal body men could kill, while she was a goddess in the heart of her land. But the Blackdog reacted to her uncertain fears and aggressive bluster as any dog would to another that snapped and snarled and cowered at once; it pushed at Holla, wanting to prove its own dominance and assure Attalissa’s safety by cowing Sera.

  Pakdhala, childlike, was growing angry in her fear and confusion. Holla tried to take her hand, to lead her away, get them both out of this place where they did not belong and were not wanted.

  The Blackdog fought him. It thrust bone through his bone, nerves through screaming nerves, wrestled to push him from the world. It felt as though it and he were one…thing…and that thing stood with its right and its left on either side of some barrier. Night and day, water and air. Life and death. And it dragged him, turned, and the dog was in the world. He was blinded by the pain of it for a moment, felt his heart had faltered and started again, felt a sheet of fire had washed through him. It was the dog’s heart he felt, anger like a fortress wall raised around the goddess against the world, and she was the hard core of the world all the wild stars circled. But his own thoughts, his own mind, were wound over and through the dog’s wash of emotion. He flailed away from it in terror, felt as though he might pull free…remembered, knew the danger in that, the dog free without the man’s will and understanding to leash it.

  There was pattern within memory, within the memories that were not his, patterns of control. Experience asserted itself. He snarled at Sera, that much escaped him, but he stayed where he was, crouched between the goddesses, and Pakdhala gripped the long fur of his ruff, anchoring him. Pakdhala. Not any damned foreign goddess but a girl whose hand shook, holding him back, because she almost knew Sera might shatter him from the dog and leave him dead and the dog seeking a new host, lost and panicked and preying on whatever man chanced by. Only almost knew. In her conscious mind she was afraid only because she was a child, and an adult shouted with anger she only half-understood, and the world threatened once more to fly apart in violence.

  No, he told the dog, and memory knew, if he did not, the way back, and the man was in the world again.

  He knelt, his face dripping with sweat, breathing as though he had in truth been wrestling.

  “Sera,” he said. “Lady of Serakallash, I’m sorry. We never meant to offend you. I don’t understand how we have. She’s a child. She means no harm. And you know me. I’ve been here so many times. She thought it was courtesy to come to you. We’ve no strength to be a threat, you have to know that. If we did, we’d be back in Lissavakail dealing with Tamghat.”

  The column of twisting water subsided, but the pool still churned storm-like, cloudy with sand. “I knew you, caravaneer, Westgrasslander of Sayan. You belong to Attalissa now. I pity you.”

  “Pity her, Sera. She’s a little girl, and she’s afraid.”

  “Attalissa knows nothing of pity and will have none from me. You know this and you know why, Blackdog. Take her and go.”

  “I’m with a caravan-gang. We’re leaving this morning, but I can’t avoid Serakallash. I’ll have to come back.”

  You’ll stay away from my spring, you and she both. I deny you the blessing of my water so long as the Blackdog is in you. But because you were a good man of the road once, Holla-Sayan, my town and its wells will still be open to you. But I will not have you here at my spring.

  “Tell your folk about the wizard, Sera. Warn them. Serakallash is a short march down from Lissavakail.”

  Go away! Sera screamed, and the wind lashed around the spring, raising a red cloud of sand, every grain a needle on the skin.

  Pakdhala cried out. Holla grabbed her hand, an arm across his eyes as he lurched up, blinded, eyes stinging, and dragged her away.

  The wind calmed as his feet found the well-worn path between the rocks, and he stumbled to a stop where it ran straight between the walls of two caravanserais, blinking till his watering, grit-scratched eyes cleared. Fell to his knees, hands in the mud left by the last rain, swallowing hard against rising bile. He shook like a man in a fever. Pakdhala sniffed, tears running down her cheeks, and flung her arms suddenly around his neck. He shoved her away, finally sat back on his heels, looking at her. She pressed herself against the wall, hands twisting together, lost in the rolled-up sleeves of Thekla the cook’s old striped coat.

  Pakdhala sniffled again and wiped her face on her unrolling sleeve, but said nothing.

  Why? Holla-Sayan asked flatly. What did you do to her?

  You remember, dog.

  No. “I don’t want to,” he muttered. “They’re not my memories.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  He didn’t want to remember, but the Blackdog�
��s memory leaked in, like sound from another room which he would rather not overhear. Dog’s memory, host’s memory, it seemed all one. Demands for tribute, demands for acknowledgement of Lissavakail’s overlordship, acknowledgement that the wealth and prestige of Serakallash was due not so much to the caravan-road but the road into the jewel-rich mountains. Sisters of Attalissa’s temple, striding down out of those mountains, and mercenaries hired from the desert tribes. The famous horse-herds of Serakallash driven off, the longhouses of the foothills razed, the market square where the chiefs of the great families held their council burned on a market day. It was not the sept-chiefs and the warriors but the folk who came to buy and sell who were trapped, boxed in by the surrounding buildings, trampled in the struggle to escape, suffocated, burned, as the stalls and the awnings burned.

  Our Spear Lady was in error. She believed the council was meeting that day.

  “And that made it right?”

  The girl looked up at him, looked down at her bare feet in the dust.

  “It was a long time ago. Father.”

  “Don’t call me—” He rubbed his face, slickly cold with sweat, with hands that still shook, and forced himself up, leaning back against the wall. “You lied to her. The Blackdog lied to her. You…we told her the sept-council was meeting there, with all their warriors, assembling to march out. You tricked her into attacking unarmed folk. Children. Children younger than you died there.” That long-forgotten Spear Lady drowned herself a few years later.

  He had heard no songs of any war between Serakallash and Lissavakail, that was how long-forgotten it all was. The burning market…he had heard that in Serakallashi songs, but the villains were desert raiders.

  It wasn’t me.

  Pakdhala shook her head, scuffed a foot in the dust.

  Terror. It had seemed to him—to that man—an effective way to break the Serakallashi will to resist.

  Tamghat had plainly thought the same, and indiscriminate slaughter of the townsfolk had worked to break the Lissavakaili. The Serakallashi were a harder folk, as Attalissa’s warriors had learned.

  Justice, maybe, on some vast, cruel scale.

  “It wasn’t me,” he repeated aloud.

  “No,” Pakdhala said, just that.

  Sera’s awareness watched them as they went on in silence, not touching, up to the dusty street.

  Pakdhala kept her silence as they rejoined the chaos of departure at Mooshka’s caravanserai. She kept it as they set out, the strings of soft-padding camels falling into one line, the harsh tin bells clanking as the day’s outriders, the Great Grass woman Tusa and her husband Asmin-Luya, who had been a bondman to her father till he ran away with her, loped up the line.

  He couldn’t put a child who’d never even ridden a horse till a few days ago up on one of the pack-camels alone, so Pakdhala rode with him, steadied in the crook of his arm. He pulled her hood low, wound a scarf over her face against the dust, all without a word. Holla shut his mind against any sympathy.

  It seeped into him anyway. Otokas’s memories. A lonely, caged child. The girl had had no toys in the temple. No occupations but ritual and calligraphy, copying scrolls in her own praise. No games with the youngest novices, no lessons with them, no drilling as they learned the martial arts. No friends. She learned needlework, embroidering hangings for the temple, ceremonial gowns. Otokas had opened what windows he could for her in the high walls of ceremony and precedent that had built up like a shell, layer upon layer, life upon life. She swam. Otokas took her out boating and fishing, though Old Lady said it was highly improper and took from the goddess’s dignity.

  Holla-Sayan pushed those memories away. He touched her as little as he could, as though contact, body against body, would bind them closer.

  That Blackdog’s name was Laykas, the goddess said suddenly, as russet Sihdy swayed and lurched, descending the steep road to the desert. Do you remember him, dog?

  Holla in turn kept his silence. A hard man, Laykas. A cruel man, contemptuous of weakness. He did remember. Like Otokas, Laykas had raised Attalissa from an infant. Unlike Oto, he never called her anything but “Goddess.” No calligraphy in those days. Blades and bows and study of Nabbani scrolls on the arts of war and rule. He had not failed to beat her, when she failed to learn swiftly enough, and she had believed her punishments earned. What had Oto said? You can trust him, the Blackdog always knows…Surely not.

  The man shapes the Blackdog, Holla-Sayan. You are not Laykas.

  Parents do as much as blood to shape the child. He remembered his mother declaring that, her voice shaking with suppressed anger when some kinswoman called him worthless, doomed to trouble and a lodestone for ill-luck.

  Who had shaped the goddess? Attalissa was Attalissa unending, but she experienced life like any child, grew and learned, was shaped and shaped herself, died and began again. The Blackdogs and the women of the temple shaped her, over and over, and if so, they made some part of her and carried that responsibility.

  The Blackdog was an animal, and perhaps carried no more guilt than the blameless beast of a bad master—he could try to believe that, that it was the man to whom guilt belonged, Laykas and not the Blackdog—but the goddess was not pardoned for Serakallash’s market by blaming her teachers. No matter what they had done to her in that life. She was immortal, a reasoning mind as the dog was not, and she had seen more of life than those who reared her, whatever her age. She was old, old, old, and could make her own choices, or should.

  “Where are we going?” Pakdhala asked faintly, and her voice trembled. Otokas, at least, had never been angry with her, and this child’s life knew nothing worse than Old Lady’s tight-lipped disapproval.

  Holla sighed and made himself speak. “The caravan’s going all the way up to At-Landi on the Kinsai-av, the great river where the Northrons come in their ships down the Bakanav from Varrgash and the forests. We’re going to cross the Kinsai-av below the Five Cataracts and go to my family.”

  “We’re going to live there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She twisted around to stare up at him. Dog…

  “We’ll see when we get there,” he said, more gently. “I haven’t decided.”

  He had, but the dog disagreed.

  After a moment she nodded and turned to stare ahead over the stretching reaches of desert, into the unending sky. When she leaned back against him he tightened his arm around her.

  Holla-Sayan could not keep the anger alive, could not keep Pakdhala, in his mind, the same being as Attalissa, who had made war on Serakallash. Shyly, the child made friends with the gang, beginning with young Bikkim, who treated her like his own younger sister, a mixture of teasing and affection, and Westron Thekla, who was the most foreign of them all. Small, tough, and wiry as grass-roots, she could barely communicate in any intelligible language, but Pakdhala seemed to grasp her meaning, even when she strung together the desert trade tongue and the Stone Desert speech she picked up from her lover Kapuzeh. But they all tolerated the child, the hot-tempered Stone Desert brothers Kapuzeh and Django, bronze-haired Northron Varro, the Marakander twins Immerose and Tihmrose, Judeh the camel-leech, the Great Grasslanders Tusa and Asmin-Luya, who did not complain overmuch that Holla-Sayan was allowed to bring his child along and they were not. Doha accepted her as family. Even Gaguush, in her way, took an interest, teaching her all the camels’ names. The Marakander merchant they escorted called her a pretty little thing and gave her sweetmeats.

  She was a girl, nothing more, seeing for the first time the great open spaces of the world. Pakdhala watched the soaring buzzards, eyes wide with wonder. She cried out in delight at spotting a herd of elegant kulan, wild asses, their long-legged foals galloping at their sides. Pakdhala learned to play Grasslander cat’s-cradle games with Tusa and forced dreadful squealing noises from Tihmrose’s flute, danced to Doha’s fiddle and teased Bikkim into letting her throw his spear at foxtail lilies and clumps of grass. She turned over rocks to watch lizards and scorpions scu
ttle away, learned to dress herself and not wait to be waited on at mealtimes. She proudly showed Holla-Sayan how Tihmrose had taught her to braid her hair, though it was too short, yet. The scraggle-ended braids stuck out stiffly around her head. No one laughed.

  The girl needed his mother. But the dog did not care if she lived a childhood or not. The dog wanted her safe at any cost, and did not understand what it was to watch her coming alive.

  It did not take many days of travel for that unfolding of life in Pakdhala to falter. She slept more and more, until she was passing most of the day as well as the night in a restless doze. She ate, with what seemed grim determination, but her round face grew thinner every morning, eyes hollow, lips pale.

  Limp against Holla on Sihdy’s back, she clutched the amulet-pouch. She no longer ran chasing bird-shadows on the sand. No longer helped to groom the camels, now shedding their thick winter coats, the wool of which was carefully bagged up for sale in At-Landi. No longer watched Thekla at her pots, frowning with concentration when the Westron woman allowed her to knead the evening’s bread. If she was not sleeping as they rode, she leaned back against Holla, watching the foothills and the distant mountains away to the south with an old woman’s eyes.

  The Blackdog could not endure her decline. It clawed at Holla-Sayan, fought him, so he rode with clenched teeth and hardly dared to sleep because of the dreams it brought him, images of its own fears, the girl wasting away, a baby born in Lissavakail with Tamghat to midwife her birth, Tamghat a monstrous thing of teeth and eyes, a gaping maw tearing at the girl’s dead flesh.

  Waking, he could imagine the dog within him, like a dog of his youngest brother’s, one of those surly, devoted, one-man dogs. They shut it into a summer-empty cowshed while a bard did Fanag’s final tattooing, before he went off to keep the vigil of his coming of age on the god’s hill. The dog had seemed to know something terrible was underway; terrible as it saw it, at least: its master’s pain. It paced and paced, and howled, and dug in frenzy at the door until its front claws were bleeding, torn away to the quick, and the pads of its feet full of jagged splinters. When Fanag did ride off to Sayan’s barkash, numbed and bleeding and proud, Holla and his mother had gone to let the dog out. It could not walk, then, and he had almost wept to see it. His mother was more practical. She went for rags and tweezers and a jug of his grandmother’s fennel-flavoured grain-spirit. They used some to clean the paws and some, in a dish of milk, to calm the dog into a snoring sleep until Fanag’s return.