by K V Johansen
The ferrymen were a folk apart. Tall as Northrons, they ran to desert-brown skins and Northron-pale hair. They used no particular pattern of tattooing to declare their folk and land the way their neighbours of the Four Deserts and the Western Grass did, but decorated themselves as they pleased, if at all. It was their eyes that truly set them apart, though. You’d hardly find one in four of them with matched eyes.
Holla sheathed his sabre before the ferryman could take offence, clenching his empty hand till his nails cut the palm. No threat, no threat, he assured the dog, but perhaps the only hope the goddess had, if she were to live this life. His only hope, if the dog were not to drag him back to Lissavakail, to guard an unborn avatar and die at Tamghat’s hand.
“You startled me.” Holla offered the apology with a hint of a bow, as due a priest. Or a wizard. The Blackdog’s knowledge said this ferryman was that: the smell of magic in the blood, rain on dry earth. It grew angry, more focused in its anger. Wizards, old treachery. “I’m Holla-Sayan of the Sayanbarkash, of Gaguush’s gang, up there, that’s heading for At-Landi. My daughter’s ill. I’m hoping there’s a physician among you.”
“Several. But I don’t think it’s a physician you need.”
The ferryman reined in beside Holla-Sayan, studied him, head a little to one side like a bird. A heron. He had a long, thin body, a long, thin face, sharp-nosed, and carried a three-pronged fishing-spear. Panniers behind the mare’s saddle held a dozen fish, each as long as an arm. He was an older man, his light-brown hair streaked with grey, braided up with ribbon and knotted at the nape of his neck with a fan-like arrangement of feathers. One eye matched his hair; the other was a pale, mist-sky blue. The outline of a single feather was stitched along the side of his face, curling around his eye, in black. What it meant Holla had no idea. The man wore a ragged cameleer’s coat, patched trousers, and was barefoot, but he had pearl pendants swinging from each earlobe and what Holla was fairly sure was an emerald in the side of his nose. In addition to the trident, he wore a plain Northron sword at his belt.
The man smiled, following his glance to the sword.
“Blackdog,” he said, and gave Holla a little bow in turn. “Rumour recalls you distrust wizards. A precaution they thought I might need, since I’m chiefly a soothsayer—” he used the Northron word for one who was half-diviner and interpreter of dreams, half-dispenser of advice, sought or unsought “—rather than a caster of spells. But I remember you, I carried you over the river once, years ago, and I think you’re strong enough to keep the dog on a leash. I’m Kien, son of Kinsai.” Which might be a title, or might be literal, one never knew with the ferrymen. “We’ve been expecting you.”
Holla hesitated, until the moment felt too long. “Have you? And you went fishing while you waited?”
The man’s narrow face creased into a thousand lines with his grin. Older than he looked. “Why not? Kinsai was in a bountiful mood, and there’s always too many mouths to feed.” He tapped Holla-Sayan’s booted leg with his trident. “You’re a long way from home, Blackdog. Why have you come here?”
“Pakdhala’s dying. She needs help.”
Kien shook his head. “None we can give her. Attalissa’s gone beyond mortal aid. She chose mortality. She must live in the body, or not, as she can. Why have you come here? Think. Tell me truly.”
Holla frowned. “I don’t know, anymore. I wanted to cross the river, to take her home to the Sayanbarkash. To hide from Tamghat.”
“Tamghat? The warlord they say has sacked the Lissavakail? No good. He’s a wizard, a wizard to be feared by wizards. He’d find you.”
“Maybe to pray.” Sayan help him. No one else could, or would. And how had news of the fall of Lissavakail run ahead of them?
Kien nodded. “That’s better. Give me the goddess.”
“She’s—”
“Dying. Yes. You said. I can see that. Give her to me, and do try to resist the urge to tear out my throat.”
Holla frowned down at Kien, who rapped his leg sharply with the trident again, the piebald mare pressed in close to an unusually tolerant Sihdy’s flank.
“Kinsai’s no enemy of yours or Attalissa’s. Don’t make her one. She doesn’t tolerate fools. Give me the girl.”
It took all his strength of will to keep the Blackdog down, but then as if in a dream where nothing could matter anymore, he handed Pakdhala over to Kien, who sat her on his saddlebow, cradled against him. She murmured indistinctly and fumbled an arm around his neck. “Good. Leave the camel.”
“Leave…?”
“You said you came to pray. The camel doesn’t need to pray. She needs to rest and chew her cud, and she can do that more happily in the stable-yard. Go and pray. I suggest Bitter Hill.” Kien pointed to the east, beyond the road, where the hills were dusty pale stone. “Up there, the central peak. It’s a good place for praying. No one will bother you. There’s a demon at the moment, but she has a good sense of self-preservation—I’m sure she’ll leave you alone.”
Kien clicked his tongue to his horse and it strode off. The Blackdog nearly flung Holla after it, to seize Pakdhala from the ferryman’s arms.
No, he snapped. Lie down. Like it was some badly behaved hound.
“Let the camel loose,” Kien called back. “She’ll follow. Go on. It’ll take you till dark to climb it as it is.”
Holla slid down Sihdy’s side, rather than asking her to kneel, and tied the reins, the nose-line and the reins from the halter both, loosely to the harness. The red camel, with only a single backward glance at her master, did follow the ferryman. There was no frantic cry from the goddess. Nothing but his own heart, racing, panicked.
She’s as safe with him as with me. You. Us.
Perhaps she was already dead, her spirit fluttering back to the Lissavakail, where some unfortunate young woman was lying in the embrace of some…If she were dead he would know. Holla-Sayan rubbed his face and headed across the road. After picking his way over the rough land for a mile or more, he began to regret his so-sudden giving in to the ferryman’s suggestion. Order? His water was on Sihdy, his throat rasping with dust.
He found water, a seepage, reed-grown puddles in the mud, some crooked miles later, after too much clambering over cracked and tumbled yellow rock. His hands were torn, nails broken and bleeding, trousers torn as well from a fall down an unstable escarpment. And he was only at the foot of Bitter Hill. But the water, though muddy, was sweet. Holla drank deeply and began to climb.
Darkness overtook him before he reached the summit, and the moon was only a low sickle in the west, chasing the sun, but the Blackdog’s vision let him pick his way as easily as by daylight. There were no trees on Bitter Hill, even in the cracks where thin soil accumulated and where thorns and wire-grass would be found on most of the rest of this range of hills. Not even the noxious fleshy-leafed weeds that clung to the ground around the bitter springs of the Salt Desert grew here, and the broken landscape looked shattered rather than merely crumbled by wind and sun. This was the highest of the sandstone hills. To the north, the black stone stretched away, like an island between the Kinsai-av and the Great Grass that ran for unknowable distances east and north. The sandstone felt good, old and at peace, whatever powers had left it a wasteland long leached away by sun and wind. A good place to pray, as the ferryman said.
From a cleft in the yellowish stone, pale blue eyes watched him.
He had never seen a demon this close, not so clearly. Flitting shadows at night, sometimes, drawn near the fire by music, that was all. This demon was very like a striped hyena, but a pale ash-grey with darker markings the blue-grey colour of Westgrassland oxen. Its—her—large, delicate ears swivelled, following his slight movement aside.
“Sorry,” Holla said, feeling as awkward and out of place as if he had wandered into a strange woman’s private room. There was something naked and panicked in her wide, staring eyes, blue as Varro’s. Something almost horrified.
She could see the Blackdog. Ah.
The demon flicked an ear. They could speak, or so all the tales said. She obviously felt no need to do so.
“I’ll just go, um, over there?”
The demon blinked.
“Thank you.”
She simply disappeared from the corner of his eye as he picked a way along the crest of the hill. A flicker, and she was gone. Holla shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, like a dog shuddering off snow. Something cold had run over his mind, then, with the demon’s vanishing. The demon’s awareness, darting in for a closer look? He kept the Blackdog from stretching out to pursue her in turn. She was no threat.
Holla settled cross-legged atop bare stone, facing northwest. Home. The Sayanbarkash was across the river there somewhere, west and north, almost due west from the First, the uppermost, of the Five Cataracts. He had no koumiss, no bread, no jug of wine, none of the gifts one took when one went seeking Sayan. They had no priests in the Western Grass. When you needed your god, you went to him or her and spoke. And he, or she, might come to you, and share a drink and a meal, and offer the advice you sought. Or not. No koumiss, no yoghurt. Not even a broken piece of journey-bread or a gourd of water. His throat was parched again, and his stomach grumbled.
Holla shut his eyes on the last dull red glow of the horizon, shut his mind to thirst and hunger and the prickling between his shoulders that was more than a mere demon’s attention on him. The dog slipped almost to the surface, a shadow on him, and he knew his eyes would be glowing yellow-green, if he opened them and there were any to see. He could hear. An owl called, and away to the east a pair of hyenas yipped to one another. Much closer, stone slipped and rattled, some small thing rootling for prey. A hedgehog. He could smell it. A snake’s belly-scales rasped over rock. Dogs barked, down at the ferrymen’s castle, howled not for any unhappiness but because it was night and they enjoyed the noise of their own singing, their unity. A woman shouted with no real anger in her tone, and they were silent except for a pup’s brash yip, claiming the last word. Under all, over all, the cataracts roared, throbbed, like the current of Kinsai’s blood.
He had never gone to pray to Sayan needing aid. He had gone once, when he was a boy, after one of the wandering bards had done the first of the agonizing tattoos that marked him as of the Sayanbarkashi. Once when he was a man, and the full drawing of face and arms had been completed, the snakes that meant one had reached adulthood coiling on cheeks and upper arms, twining into the eye-flanking owls and the knotted, spiralling cheetahs of the forearms. Once before he left home, he went with a skin of koumiss just to sit a night with his god and to take away a stone from Sayan’s hill.
Once when he was an infant, he supposed, but he did not remember that.
What did you say to a god, when you truly had need of one? And this was Kinsai’s land. There were no gods in the broken hills of the eastern bank, only Kinsai in her river, and Sayan was a couple of hundred miles away as the raven would fly. Gods did not reach beyond their own land. That was why he was here. Begging for help.
“Sayan? I need you to hear me, please.”
Truly talking to himself. Holla opened his eyes, pressed a hand, palm down, to the stone, and looked to the west. Stone, the bones of the world. Stone was the favoured talisman to carry of a wanderer’s own land. Stone bound you to home. Stone ran forever, under desert and forest and river and the fabled ocean, salt and unending, on whose shores Varro swore he had been born. Holla-Sayan pulled out the white pebble from the pouch about his neck and took the knife from his belt.
In the songs, the wizards of the kingdoms of the north sealed their spells with their own blood. Stone, bone, water, blood. Earth and life. If stone and blood of the Sayanbarkash could not reach by stone and water to the Sayanbarkash, prayer here would be empty as Thekla’s prayers, a Westron who knew her gods were long dead, who prayed only because men and women should pray, to remember them.
He cut the palm of his hand, not deeply, but enough for the blood to well up quickly, clenched that hand around his talisman-stone and held it out to watch the gleaming drops spatter onto the dusty hilltop. It did not bleed for long, the cut knitting almost as quickly as the blood began to clot.
“I am Holla-Sayan of the Sayanbarkash,” he began again. “Please, carry my words through the stone, through the water, through the earth, to Sayan where he walks on the hills of the Sayanbarkash. Please. Let him speak to me. I am of the Sayanbarkash, and I need his aid.” Sayan, please hear me. I don’t know what to do. Pakdhala’s going to die.
He felt the attention on him, that watching awareness, grow stronger, until it was almost a touch, a hand running up his spine, stirring his hair, a breath on his ear.
And then words, in his ears, in his mind, in his blood. Well then. Clever, but the Blackdog should be clever. Though wizards know better than to bind gods with their blood, or do anything so suggestive of that, as you have done. But earnest and innocent one, you are certainly no wizard. I will let your words be carried by the bond of your blood and soul and the bones beneath the earth to brother Sayan. Perhaps he will come to you. Perhaps I will allow it. For a fee.
The voice, if it was a voice, was almost affectionate but at the same time mocking. There was breath on his ear, on the nape of his neck, someone there, a cool hand cupping the side of his face. And nothing. Perhaps he was asleep, and it was only the wind. Grass whispered, spring-soft and sweet in the air, and the air was wine-rich with the scent of damp soil and growing things, the spring grasslands. The sun was rising over the Sayanbarkash, pale yellow light casting long shadows ahead of him, clear sky, the last bright star fading. Black larks climbed singing into the air over him. It would be like this on the heights of the Sayanbarkash in a spring dawn, but it was summer now, and night. This was memory, the time he went and took a stone away with him. It was too much what he remembered to be otherwise. Dream, yes. He was dreaming, Holla did not doubt that, and did not doubt the reality of it, either.
He sat, cross-legged on the earth, and rolled the bloodstained pebble between his palms, wondering if he would find the same stone still in the gravelly soil if he parted the grass. When he looked up, the god sat by him, intent on a knife and a knot of wood in his hands.
Sayan looked a great deal like Holla’s father, stocky, weathered-brown, his black braids tied with careless knots of multicoloured thread, his eyes, when he looked up, narrowed against the sun, nested in fine lines. But they were like pools of dark water, bottomless, and his skin was without tattoos.
“Holla-Sayan.” The god gave him a nod, dropped his gaze back to the work in his hands. He carved something, with careful, tiny flicks and curls of the knife. And he did not call Holla “Blackdog.”
“What desperate need demanded that?” Sayan cocked an eyebrow at the pebble, now cupped in Holla’s hand. “Did you stop to think what Kinsai might ask of you in return?”
The god sounded like his father, as well. Holla sighed, and felt a weight rising from him. Even in dream it eased his soul to be back in his own place, his own land, the custom of his own folk, where the gods were of the folk, simple and sane to be with.
“Of course not,” Holla said, but his voice betrayed him, not half so careless as the words. “If I stopped to think before getting tangled in gods, I wouldn’t need your aid now.”
Sayan snorted. “No, of course not. And what, exactly, did you think I could do for you? Blackdog.” He frowned, paring away the merest shaving of wood, and held what he carved close to his nose, turning it to catch the light.
Holla-Sayan took a deep breath. This was what he had sidled around in his thoughts, all the way from Serakallash, keeping the hope in shadow, in the corner of his eye where the dog might not notice. Say it quickly, before the Blackdog could panic.
“Drive this thing out of me. If you can, drive the goddess out of the girl, let he
r be a human child and live. A human shouldn’t die because she leaves her home. Attalissa can go back to her lake and fight the damned wizard herself.”
The Blackdog stirred, disturbed at anger fixing on thoughts of the goddess, but not at all alarmed. Amused, even. So Holla knew, before the god spoke, that the cautious hope he had kept hidden all this way was no good. And that amusement again made him believe that the Blackdog had a mind, somewhere, that could see itself beyond the goddess.
Sayan sighed. “Separate Attalissa and the girl? I can’t do that, Holla-Sayan. The child is not a creature with two souls, as you have become. She is the goddess incarnate. There is nothing else. She’s no possessed priestess like the Voice of Marakand, a human carrying the goddess, sharing her self. Your Pakdhala is the goddess born in flesh. An avatar, I believe they call it in Pirakul. It’s much more common there. Whatever name you give her, she is Attalissa, flesh and blood and soul.”
His gaze fixed on Holla for a moment. “As for driving the Blackdog spirit out of you—the Blackdog is not something I want loose in my land, Holla-Sayan. I do not think it would leave such an able host as yourself willingly, not with no other trained and willing host to accept it, and certainly not in response to a threat. I think there would be little left of you, child of my folk, did I succeed in separating you by force. You do not want your body a battleground between us. And besides, Holla-Sayan, I think you do not want to deny the dog, if it means that Attalissa will suffer. I think you love her.”
“That’s the dog,” Holla protested.
“You’ve cared for her as for a daughter, for nearly a month now. A short time, maybe, but maybe not. I think it’s you who loves her, Holla-Sayan. Do you know why you carry my name?”
“I’ve been told, twenty times or more, yes,” Holla said, a little impatiently.
