Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  The Blackdog was doing the same thing. Tearing and tearing at the walls of his soul, to attack with mindless fury anything that came near its suffering mistress. As Fanag’s dog would have gone for the bard, with his needles and dyes, the Blackdog would turn on anyone it saw as causing Attalissa’s pain. And the gang were the only targets near.

  He made a wall around himself, because he flinched whenever any of the others moved too suddenly, had to check a reach for his sabre’s hilt or a tightening of his grip on his spear when some outrider swerved in close to Sihdy. It was better they kept away, out of reach, and left him to whatever they named it, exhausted worry for the girl’s evident decline in health or sulking over the desertion of his mountain woman. He avoided, most of all, Gaguush’s eye. He did not think he could bear to have her touch him with this thing in him, and he ached for her.

  Not that there was any chance they could sleep together, as matters stood. Pakdhala, who had since she was a child of three always slept alone in her vast bed in the goddess’s great lofty apartment in the temple, would not lie down at night except curled tight against him; she whimpered and reached out for him if he so much as rolled an arm’s length away.

  He tried to summon his mother’s patience. Pakdhala was young, and afraid, and had lived through terrible things. She knew every woman in the temple by name, had felt their deaths, each and every one that fell before he—Otokas—took her away across the lake. No child could witness that many deaths sanely, goddess or not. She needed to know she was safe, that someone was there to protect her, of course she did. And she was too clearly ill, on top of it. But she was past the age when she should be sleeping with her father. It was as though she began to retreat to some younger child, to become a toddler cuddled with a nurse again. She looked panicked and on the edge of tears when he suggested she could more properly sleep with the Marakander twins. He was too worn from fighting to keep the dog down to argue.

  Afortnight out of Serakallash, and between the girl and the dog, he felt like some trout beset with leeches, or a victim of the vampire devils of the old tales, which latched on to a man and drained his soul away.

  In a convulsion of pain, Holla-Sayan woke out of a nightmare that muddled together two or three of Doha’s favourite vampire stories, stood staring, seeing all too clearly the moonlit camp, every shadow-relief sharp, every crunch of sand under Bikkim’s feet a thunderclap as the boy paced along the rows of hobbled camels. Pakdhala stirred uneasily, didn’t wake, but reached a hand and clutched at his foreleg. He snarled, deep in his chest, as on the other side of the smouldering fire Immerose rolled to her back, then sat half-up on an elbow, eyes gleaming, blinking at him. Her hand, half-waking, wandered towards the spear lying near.

  Holla wrenched the dog away, lay down, shaking, watching Immerose, clenching his fingers in the rough woollen cloth of his bedroll as though that could root him. Immerose flopped down and, after a moment, started snoring again. Her sister flung an arm out to hit her without ever waking, long practice, and Immerose turned on her side, falling into silence. Holla sat up, head on his knees, feeling sick.

  Danger. Enemies, weapons all around. They are not, he told the dog. They’re my folk. My gang. They’ll fight to protect her, because she’s mine.

  Bikkim came around the corner of the merchant’s tent, the only one pitched. They put up their own only when the wind threatened sandstorm, or in rain along the upper Kinsai-av, and in the biting cold of winter, when thin snow lay over the deserts.

  “You all right?” the Serakallashi asked Holla softly, dropping down on one knee by him. “I was just coming to wake you. It’s about your watch.”

  Holla nodded, grunted when he realized Bikkim might not have seen the gesture. He cast a glance at the horizon, to measure the stars. Four hours to dawn, his watch and then Northron Varro’s. Pakdhala still had hold of his wrist. For the length of his watch she would wake frequently, checking on him, calling him silently back to be sure he was still there. The last few nights he had almost reached the point of snapping at her, but never did. She rarely even seemed fully awake, her frantic reach for him a reflex.

  “Can’t have been easy on her, being torn away from everything she knew.” Bikkim tucked the blankets Pakdhala was wrapped in more securely about her. “You think it’s the lowland air? People get sick going into the mountains, sometimes. Might happen the other way as well.”

  “Probably.”

  Bikkim gave him a look, as though he was going to say more and thought better of it, gripped Holla’s shoulder a moment instead. “Go to Gaguush, why don’t you, when your watch is over. I’ll stay with your brat the rest of the night. She’ll never notice the difference, as long as she can feel someone’s by her.”

  Pakdhala was already stirring.

  “Can try,” Holla-Sayan said, and heard himself surly, snarling with temper. He sighed, “Thanks,” and crawled out of the tangle the dog had made of his bedding, pulled his boots on and then squatted down by the girl, smoothing the hair back from her face.

  Go back to sleep, Pakdhala. It’s my turn at watch, that’s all. My duty to the gang. You understand about that. I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to die. You know I can’t run away. Just go to sleep. Bikkim’s going to stay right here with you to keep you safe.

  Don’t leave me alone, dog. Even her thought was blurred with exhaustion, barely formed.

  You’re not alone. Bikkim’s with you and you know I’m right here. He hated to hear himself sounding like Old Lady, tying the child down in a net of shame for failing to be all that was desired, but the words shaped themselves anyway. You don’t want Bikkim thinking you’re a baby.

  I’m not. She pushed herself further into wakefulness, eyes fluttering open.

  Show me, then, he said, feeling heartless, but he was going to suffocate if he could not have a few hours alone. Maybe all new parents felt that way; it was not so different from a baby’s incessant crying for the breast, or just the comfort of being held. But that passed, and that went with babies. Attalissa was no infant. Don’t keep distracting me when I’m supposed to be keeping watch.

  Black eyes shone in the starlight, looking, he felt, right through him.

  I won’t call you, she said, and finally let go of his arm. So. Go then. She dragged the blankets up over her head.

  He felt more like some servant, disdainfully dismissed, than a parent who had asserted any authority.

  “Sound asleep again,” Bikkim whispered. “She’ll be fine.” He kicked off his boots, tucked his sabre down by the side of the bedroll, and crawled into Holla’s bed, putting an arm gently over the blanket-cocoon that hid Pakdhala. “There. She’ll never know you’ve gone.”

  Holla-Sayan belted on his own sabre, picked up his spear, and strode off hastily. The dog was bristling and snarling at Bikkim’s possessive arm. He sweated in the cold night air with the effort of ignoring that, and a sudden cough from within the merchant’s tent made him draw and whirl to meet the sound, his heart not leaping in alarm but gone slow and cold and calm and…angry, that there was nothing to fight.

  Where I come from, we don’t keep the vicious ones like you around, he told it. They’re no good for herding or hunting, or even as watchdogs, a danger to everyone. You damn well wait till I say someone’s a threat.

  It turned on him. Mad, he had time to think, mad as Fanag’s dog had made itself, but whatever the Blackdog’s sudden rage was for, there was no reason to it, and no master to calm it.

  He hit the gritty soil hard as if he’d been thrown, rolled to his knees, dropping the spear.

  Couldn’t get rid of it. It was his. Or he was its. And which, he had to settle, now, before it did drive him mad and some friend died.

  Take me, then, he told it. Just try. And you can both die in the desert, then.

  The Blackdog flung itself into the world and for a moment Holla-Sayan saw it, blackness, a shape of inky tendrils and smoke, a beast with a heart of smouldering fire, a shadow over him, in h
im, and the dog shook itself, himself, flesh and blood in the world again, the dust of his fall rising from his pelt.

  No, he told it, as it, he, they, turned towards the square felt tent, where the merchant’s maidservant was coughing again. Gaguush had tried to leave her in Marakand, but the merchant insisted it was only the camels made her cough, not any catching illness. You want to fight something, you fight me.

  The dog ran.

  He grappled with it, not to pull himself into the world again, but to be the dog. He plunged through memory, men’s lives lived in confidence and certainty, almost all of them. The assurance of power held in check. Love. Devotion, an amber sea enclosing him. That was not love, he thought, what there was of him that could still think. Love could stand back and see the person loved, and the dog never saw Attalissa, only the unchanging fire it circled, blind to all else. Love belonged to the hosts, not the dog, and not all of them had loved her. Admiration and fear and tolerant amusement, paternal love and son’s love and never-spoken passion, man to woman. Hatred, somewhere in the depths. The goddess young and old, solemn and kind and brazen in conquest, arrogant, fearful, the drunken excitement of battle, of conquest and strength proven. Men and women might face themselves so, when they kept their vigil of adulthood on Sayan’s hill, in the delirium of their second and final tattooing, in the haze of pain and poppies and the scent of their own blood. Some never would see into their own souls, but the strong and centred might. Sayan might lead them down. One never spoke of it but with the bards.

  So this was no new journey, strange land though it was, and they kept no such ritual in the mountains. The hosts before had never seen, never known the dog.

  He had run deep in the desert, the camp and the dark rut of the caravan road miles behind, and Holla flung his heart into the power of the body, his body, the untiring strength. Run then. You won’t outrun me. This he knew just as well. He’d had a half-broken horse bolt under him before. Let it run, out where it could do no harm, and stay on. It would tire, and know itself mastered.

  Make the dog his. There were echoes of those who had not done so within it still, trapped and blind, dying alone and mad, dying berserk, unable to tell friend from foe. He was not about to join them. Otokas had never looked so deeply as what he saw. They were bodiless spirits, he and the dog, smoke or fire or thought twined together. The dog had smelt weakness in his reluctance and tried for the upper hand. It had enjoyed the men it destroyed, the ones taken at need and broken in madness, though it had each time taken a host only to serve the goddess, meaning no harm, had turned on the man only when he failed to bond with it, when he offered that…crack of opportunity.

  For what?

  …Something it had lost? Holla saw with the dog’s eyes: desert, night, hills, the poppies bending in a wind that might promise sand if it rose higher, and the watch should warn Gaguush of it. He could run, and slow on the crest of a hill possessed of a god, one the Red Desert tribes might name, but the pillar of light the dog’s eyes saw gave him no name and wished him strongly to go away, so he did, though the dog snarled at it.

  His will now. He loped along a streambed already dried, awaiting next spring’s melt. I’ll look after your damned goddess, not because she’s a goddess but because she’s a human girl with no one else to love her. And you’ll trust me to know my land, my folk, my place in this world. As you trusted Otokas. But he’d spend a year on his knees to the Old Great Gods, if he thought that could free him. The dog knew that, too, and was…amused? He had not thought it could be, and that, of a sudden, frightened him, that it could stand back and watch. That was not animal’s intelligence. It had not seemed to possess such a mind. But it lay under him, his fangs on its throat—the image that came to him. It allowed mastery. It drew him into the core of its soul, where he might see its secrets, since he knew how to see…

  A sullen ember, dull red like old blood, that flared into brighter life as though it saw him in turn, but there was a cold wavering wall between them, a dark mirror to save him from the devouring flame.

  Eyes on him. The dog, watching, within itself. No one had been here, of all the hosts who had carried the spirit. None had fallen this deep, even the mad. Holla-Sayan reached out. Touched the mirror, or wall, whatever it might be. Cold and as forcefully in motion as a curtain of water, a river sheeting over a ledge. Colder, cruel as steel in the heart of winter on the Western Grass. He jerked away, but felt something stab, like a needle under the skin, a thread of silver, running up his arm, anchoring itself…

  Holla-Sayan pushed away, surfacing into desert night, scent of sand and poppies and the crushed plants beneath his paws. A fox yapped. The dog might have trapped him there, killed him then. It was stronger than he was, there in the old, sunken flame. If it had drawn him through that dark wall…But it had not tried. His hand, paw, burned a little, as though he had gripped frozen steel. It warned him away, perhaps that was all. There had been no hostility in it then, not as there had been when it attacked him in the camp. Well enough; he would not want it fossicking about in the most profound depths of his soul, either, what little was left it had not already lodged in.

  He shouldered through a thicket of tall fennel, limping a little, shook himself, and ran again, an easy trot, back to the camp.

  Movement on the skyline sent him slinking, flat to the earth, but almost the same instant he knew her, and ran faster than he had known he could.

  Pakdhala waited atop a low ridge. She had not put on her over-large felt and leather boots, and he would scold her for that later, given all the creatures that lurked in the deserts to bite and sting. She swayed a little, and smelt of cold sweat, and she had the fixed stare of a sleepwalker.

  I wasn’t running away, Holla said, angry, as though she were not so much a child who wanted him as a grown woman who would not trust him out of her sight. And on some level she had to be that, as well. Just running. You said you’d sleep.

  She put a hand on his head. I woke up and I was afraid.

  You know Bikkim wouldn’t let anything hurt you.

  Afraid for you, Holla-Sayan. Come back now. Not a child’s mind, behind those black eyes.

  That’s what I was doing. He couldn’t stay angry, nuzzled at her hand in apology, and she leaned on him. He could feel her trembling, at the limits of her strength.

  You can’t walk back. I’ll carry you. We need to go quickly; someone will wake and Gaguush wouldn’t call this keeping watch. Besides, it’s past time I woke Kapuzeh. Holla eyed the stars. Hells, everyone will be up soon. He pushed at the dog, felt his way into its greater, fighting size, though it was reluctant, more a token resistance than anything, proving it was not cowed. Can you climb on?

  Pakdhala stared at him. “I can’t ride on you.”

  Why not?

  Some focus came into her eyes, and the corners of her mouth tipped up. “Can I, dog? Really?”

  I can carry you back to the camp a lot faster, this way. And don’t call me dog, I told you.

  “Father. Old Lady would say it wasn’t proper.” There was a certain degree of satisfaction in Pakdhala’s voice.

  Old Lady can go dance in the cold hells, for all I care. And what did Gaguush tell you about not running around barefoot?

  “Snakes and scorpions and spiders,” she half-sang. But they won’t bite me, Father. You know that.

  It was good to hear her sound like a child again.

  Any daughter of mine would be smart enough to be afraid of walking on snakes and scorpions and spiders. Now get on.

  He crouched, and she clambered onto his back, awkwardly, gripping his ruff. The child needed to learn to ride if he was going to make a Westgrasslander of her. They’d see she learned, at home…The Blackdog stirred at that, mistrust rising, and he snapped at it, I didn’t say I was leaving her. Let it be.

  It settled, warily.

  Holla-Sayan didn’t run, not with Pakdhala so nervous of falling, ill-balanced, but he trotted, faster than he could have walked in a man’s body
carrying her. She lay forward, which spread her weight better, and sighed.

  I was afraid the Blackdog would hurt you, Holla-Sayan. But it knows you’re just as strong as it, now. It will listen to you.

  Holla gave a grunt of assent. And he thought, she’s lying. Somewhere in that, she’s lying. It was the Blackdog’s belief that shaped the thought. What she had feared when she felt that he and the Blackdog struggled was something entirely other.

  They were nearly back to the camp when he felt the girl go limp and start to slither down his side. Faster than thought, dog and man in accord, he slid from dog to man and rolled to catch her before she hit the ground. She struggled weakly to wake, to get her feet on the ground, and then turned her face against him.

  Dog, she said, so faintly he barely felt the thought. I’m sorry, dog. I’m so tired.

  He held her tight against him and her eyes fluttered open once more.

  “Past your bedtime,” he said hoarsely. The collapse was no attempt on her part to distract his roaming thoughts; the dog was on the edge of panic again, believing utterly her weakness. He did, too. She was shivering, and felt feverish to the touch.

  I’m draining away, dog, like water into the sand. I was never meant to leave my place.

  Fight harder. Hold on to life. You must want to live.