by K V Johansen
The god smiled, looking back to his carving.
“I’ll tell you again, in case you did not understand the first twenty times. Your parents had two sons, and then your mother bore twins. Daughters. They came too early, and they died. Your mother did not conceive again for several years and began to fear she had become barren. She prayed for another child. And around this time there was a girl from a family over on the north slopes of the barkash. I won’t tell you her name; it’s hers to keep. She became the lover of a married man, old enough to be her father, but when she found herself pregnant he denied her and swore she lied.”
The god frowned. “Swore in my name. Well, that is between him and me, and no concern of yours, what became of him. But this girl’s father beat her, so she went to her mother’s people, and there she bore her son. Since it was a boy, her uncles ordered her to take the baby to its father; they wanted no male bastards, they said, to make a claim on their land. But the man’s wife swore she would let the infant die before she gave it house-room with even the least of her hirelings. So the girl left her baby on the hill up here, and went away and hanged herself, though I told her there should be hope in her life yet. And that morning your mother came to pray again for another child. She called you Sayan, because you were still alive on the god’s hill.”
“I do know this. What of it?”
“The woman you call your mother loved you and you were her child, in the space of a heartbeat. How many heartbeats in three hundred miles? You don’t want the dog driven out of you. You want to keep your Pakdhala your daughter, and watch her stretching out of this cramped, dwarfed thing Attalissa has grown into life upon life. You want to watch her grow to some free and laughing maiden who can ride in the solstice races and be shouted at by you for staying out too late afterwards with some young man. That I can’t do. She is Attalissa, and she will go back to her lake. But if you are her father, Blackdog or not, you can give her the life you think she deserves, or you can try to, as much as any father ever can.”
“If she lives.”
“If she lives. I don’t know what you can do about Tamghat. I don’t know wizards, and the Blackdog seems to think he’s no wizard, anyway. The truth is, I have no more idea of Tamghat’s strength and reach than you, Blackdog. All I know of him I take from you. For myself, I know life, and growth, and the year’s turning cycle. The strength of the hills under the free sky. Let the girl grow strong, and free, and see what happens. What do you want to do, yourself?”
“Go back to the caravans.”
“And your Black Desert harridan?” The god, his god, was laughing at him.
“Maybe. If she’ll have me.”
“That problem, I really think you should work out for yourself.”
Holla acknowledged that with a rueful smile. “Probably.”
“There may be safety in travelling with the caravans. No matter what exceptional powers this Tamghat commands, his magic looks like wizards’ magic, which can be a slow and painstaking work. Perhaps if you keep moving, a wizard’s divination will have difficulty in pinning you down. And I will do what I can to protect her. I’ll lay on her the shadow of my hills, hide her in dust and stone and grass, if I can.”
“Travelling feels to me…to the Blackdog, I mean, safer than drawing Tamghat’s attention to the Sayanbarkash, being cornered somewhere,” Holla admitted. “But Attalissa won’t live to grow into anything. She’s dying, and when she’s born again back in the Lissavakail, Tamghat will take her. And me. Because I’ll have to follow her.”
“I cannot help Attalissa, or cannot help her much. We are too far apart in kind and in place. But for your sake, Holla-Sayan, I will acknowledge this incarnation of hers as your daughter, claim her as of the Sayanbarkash, for what strength she may be able to draw from that. It will be little enough, but,” the god shrugged, “enough rocks will make a hill, enough hills a mountain. It may help, and I know she can be helped. But you need to ask those who can help her more, her sisters of the waters, perhaps even her brothers of the mountains, though I think it would be risking too much, to travel into the Pillars of the Sky with her. In truth, it’s not you who needs to ask for help. Attalissa needs to ask.”
“To ask Kinsai.”
Sayan hesitated. “Kinsai is the only power to ask, where you are now. But be wary.”
“You don’t trust her?”
“Kinsai prefers to take more than she gives. But you have no choice that I can see. Ask Kinsai. Otherwise it will be as you fear, despite what little strength I may lend her: Attalissa’s body will die and because of the way she has shaped her nature, she will be born again in the Lissavakail, and fall into your enemy’s power. But as you travel, she should ask help as well of those who are able and might be willing to give it, her sisters of the waters your caravans pass in the Four Deserts.”
“There may not be many willing.” He remembered Sera’s anger. “With cause, I think.”
“Then she should beg,” Sayan said relentlessly.
“I think we should.” Holla had a sudden image of himself, stern father, marching Pakdhala from spring to well to spring, saying, in his best imitation of his father clutching two furious little boys by their collars, Apologize for your bad behaviour. Kiss and make up. He would have laughed, if he had not at the same time remembered, too vividly, the frail, wan look of the girl as he transferred her to Kien’s arms.
“It’s not much, is it?” Sayan asked. “Love the child, and I will love her, for your sake. I’ll make her mine, and my roots are strong and deep enough to hold her, perhaps even against Kinsai’s flood. You do have Kinsai’s favour, Holla-Sayan, or we would not be with one another now. Do what you must to keep her your friend and Attalissa’s, but don’t let her overwhelm you, take more than you’re free to give. Don’t let Attalissa become the price of her own life.”
Holla-Sayan nodded. The god’s smile was bleak.
“My blessing: no matter where you go, what you are, what you become, you are my son of the Sayanbarkash, and no exile will ever keep your human soul from knowing its home.”
The god tucked his knife into his belt and cupped the carving in his broad, work-scarred hands, breathed into them, and opened them again. A black lark tilted its head, surveying Holla with a shiny obsidian eye. Then in a flurry of wings it was gone, rising into the dawn that had hung at the one clear moment of perfection since he found himself there.
“Go back now, Holla-Sayan, son of my land. Go well.” Sayan rose and drew Holla up. The god rested his hands, heavy, warm, on Holla-Sayan’s shoulders, and kissed him on each cheek, the Westgrassland greeting and farewell.
Above, the new-made lark was singing.
Holla shivered where he sat, stone beneath him, night around him, roar of the cataracts sudden and deafening and the wind cool with the scent of the river. He felt the imprint of the god’s hands still, the light dry touch of lips on cheeks.
“And so Sayan of the hills sends you back to me, does he, Blackdog? What does he suggest I do with you?”
An audible voice, a touch of cool fingers, lingering on his neck.
“Kinsai?” His voice was little more than a whisper. He didn’t look around. Kinsai was no god of his, and no gentle father to the folk who rode the river. “Great Kinsai, Sayan says you could help the girl live away from her lake, lend her strength—”
“Does he, Blackdog? Attalissa’s nothing to me, and I think she’s a fool to have bound herself to such an existence. But she has, and I fear we’ll all come to suffer for it, if she falls helpless into a wizard’s hands. I hear rumours of rumours out of the distant reaches of the Great Grass, that name him wizard and shaman and slayer of demons, and that—that last frightens me, as nothing has in a long age. So. I will help, if she will accept my help. I think she may have learned that much sense from you, at least. But we have matters to settle.”
“Do we?” he asked, with unease. “I should go to Attalissa.”
Her laughter stirred his hair and he fin
ally looked up, turned his head. She knelt behind him and to the side, a hand playing through his braids. A tall woman, brown-skinned, strongly built, firm-muscled, but no slip of a girl. She was matronly in hips and breast, and utterly naked. Her hair was dark brown and streaked with gold like sunlight on water; it fell in waves to the ground as she knelt, and the colour of her eyes shifted and faded, green, black, hazel, brown, blue, silver-grey, changeable as the river roiling over stone, in a face as harsh-boned as any Northron river-trader’s.
“I gave you passage to Sayan, Sayan to you. You owe me, Blackdog.”
“My name,” he said, “is Holla-Sayan.”
“Maybe.” Kinsai laughed again, slid her arm around his neck, across his chest, moving closer, pressed against him. “Maybe. You don’t look like any creature of the Sayanbarkash to me, Blackdog. But I promise you, Holla-Sayan of the Sayanbarkash, as you love this child and call her your daughter, as I have been a mother and will be again, I will do what I can for your Pakdhala. Because I fear what you believe this Tamghat intends.” Her teeth nipped at his neck. “Sayan will have told you to doubt all my motives, if I offer you aid. Sayan is a suspicious old herdsman locked in his hills and too much in his own company. My price for your ferrying is not so very high. I truly doubt you’ll mind paying it.”
Holla shivered. “Would you keep me here, if I tried to leave?”
No, I would not. But I would be very disappointed in you, Blackdog. He smiled despite himself and she chuckled into his hair, tongue brushing his ear. Better.
The Blackdog wanted to get back to Attalissa, and feared Kinsai, feared losing itself in Kinsai. She was the river, strong, unresting, engulfing. She pulled it, and him, spirit and man, and he could lose himself, as he could lose himself in the thunder of the cataracts, the entrancing roar of storm. Be nothing but an unending moment, freed of the world, for as long as he let it hold him.
“Now.” Her breath tickled his ear, and then her lips and tongue again. “Blackdog. What of that fee for crossing the river?”
“You could collect it from Sayan.” He unfolded himself from his cross-legged posture, turned to meet her halfway. She grinned, pulled him to her, falling backwards into water.
“What makes you think I won’t try?” Kinsai’s skin was cool, her hair, wrapping over him, hissed like reeds in wind, river-wet, but her mouth on his was warm. “At the moment, though, you’re far more interesting, Blackdog.”
Holla-Sayan was dreaming, he thought, that he lay on the riverbed, water over him, lying on his side with his head pillowed on his arm, half-waking. If he woke fully…he wouldn’t be there, and it was a good place to be, for now, water around him, in his nose and mouth and lungs. Long banners of weed brushed over his naked body, like a woman’s hair.
The women stood, or floated, a little distance away, upright in the water, their hair and gowns flowing downriver, twisting together. They clasped forearms like kin or friends meeting, holding tightly, silent, or speaking only between themselves. Attalissa—the Blackdog knew her anywhere, and Holla-Sayan could see the child’s round face in the woman’s bones, the serious set of the mouth, the eyes that were his goddess’s no matter what the flesh she wore—Attalissa’s face was tight with pain. She closed her eyes, teeth clenched, bared. The Blackdog surged up and he lost all hold on it, but Attalissa hissed, No! and he hesitated, crouched to spring for Kinsai. He felt, in that moment of contact, the river, not the cool embrace that held him but what surged between the goddesses, the river flowing into Attalissa, harsh and burning as Marakander grain-spirit raw in the throat, alien, but kindling heat and life again. They embraced, rested forehead to forehead, as if both were too weary to stand unsupported, and Attalissa breathed deeply, drank the river in.
The Blackdog settled again, let the weeds wrap him, and which body it was did not seem certain, man, dog, two shadows wrapped together, still dreaming.
Then he stood on the crest of the Sayanbarkash, and it was night, tattered clouds racing over the stars, grass flattened, hissing with sudden spatters of rain. He was there, his own body, but in the river the Blackdog crouched at Kinsai’s feet and she knelt beside him, arm resting on his back, and scratched his ears. They knew one another now, the hand said. No need to bristle and growl. Carry me now, she whispered. Let me see what your Sayan can do for her.
The dog flattened its ears but did not relax its, his, wary watchfulness. Attalissa stood on the hill facing Sayan, and she was only a girl again, wearing Thekla’s old coat over her grubby black gown and red leggings and boots, and her hair had come free of its braids to snarl in knots.
Not for your sake, Sayan said, and he was tall against the sky, a power, as he had not seemed before when Holla sought him out. But it was the Blackdog’s vision that saw him now. Not for your sake, but for the son of my hills you’ve ensnared in your wars. For the honest love of you that’s begun to grow in him. For fear of a wizard who seeks to bind a god. For these, I take you as my daughter in this life, Attalissa of the Lissavakail. Take what strength you can from stone and hill and grass of the Sayanbarkash. Let your mortality be marked by that, by patterns of grass and cloud-shadow, and the ploughed field and the pasture and the wild hilltop, so that those who seek you see only the blood of the Western Grass, and pass over the soul of the Lissavakail hidden beneath it.
The god picked Attalissa up like the girl she seemed. They regarded one another gravely. Then he kissed her, once on each cheek, once on the back of each hand.
Kinsai hissed, and flinched, as though something recoiled on her; he felt the shock run through him, her hand still on the dog’s head, and he growled.
It wasn’t harm I meant her, she protested, but strength to resist your wizard. Your god’s a slow, suspicious farmer, who thinks everyone else a horse-trader out to cheat him.
Were you?
Kinsai stooped and kissed the dog between the ears. Maybe.
Pakdhala put her arms around the god’s neck, buried her face in his shoulder a moment, clinging to him as she did to Holla. Sayan smiled over her to Holla-Sayan. He said nothing, but his smile was sharp and satisfied. The god lifted the girl’s head with a finger under her chin.
You own the Blackdog’s devotion, Attalissa. Remember to be worthy of the man’s. He is mine, and I don’t hold my lives so lightly as you have in the past held yours.
Bitter Hill again, night and stars, windless and calm, and Kinsai whispering, I don’t mean either of you harm. Stay with me a little longer, Blackdog, Holla-Sayan. It’s good to hold a lover who isn’t afraid. And he was not, not of her, anymore. Trust was another matter, but the dog trusted no one. Her hair was still wet with river-water, and so was his.
And then Holla-Sayan was sitting on Bitter Hill, clothed, alone, cold, aching, with the yellow day spreading over the stone and the crunch of booted feet coming up behind him. He lurched up, stumbling on numb legs, and stared uncomprehending at Gaguush, dark with the dawn behind her.
“Hey,” she said, and reached a hand to him as he almost fell, hobbling a step on feet suddenly screaming with the pricks of a thousand needles.
“You’re here,” he said stupidly.
“Well, yeah. So are you.” The corner of Gaguush’s mouth twisted up. “You know how long you’ve been up here?”
Holla-Sayan crouched to rub his calves. “All night. Remind me not to do that again.”
“Three days.”
“Three…no!”
“Yes.”
“Three days! What are you doing here? You didn’t hold up the caravan?”
“I put Django in charge and told them to go on. He’ll manage. I’ll catch up at At-Landi, if not before. I went on a few miles and I thought, the brat’s going to die and the bloody fool will go back to the Sayanbarkash to drink himself to death and I’ll never get my camel back. So I turned around.”
“Gaguush—”
“Yeah, well. Praying three days like some Great Grass shaman. I think you’ve gone crazy, you know.”
“
Probably.”
“You farmers, you can’t handle the desert.”
“Maybe. Might have been the mountains that did it.”
“Damn the mountains.” She took his chin in her hand and kissed him, carefully, as though he might fall apart. Plucked something from his hair, water-weed dried and crumbling. She threw it away without comment. “Three days. You do understand that? You didn’t notice? You’ve just been sitting there the whole time?”
“Three days” he said. “Back in a moment.”
Gaguush politely turned her back.
“Those damn ferrymen wouldn’t let me come up till a few hours ago,” she said, when he returned. She sat, legs outstretched, invited him down beside her with an open arm. Holla sat by her, leaning on her shoulder. He felt weak, light, and empty. No food, that was it. “Told me the gods were with you and I’d better keep out of it. Three days, I’ve been trapped down in that madhouse. There’s dozens of them, you know, and they’re all mad. What gods did they mean? I thought there weren’t any in these hills but the river.”
“Sayan. And Kinsai.”
“Kinsai. I was sort of afraid of that. Really?”
He shrugged, face hot.
Gaguush snorted. “I prefer that to mountain women, anyway. She won’t be dumping bastards on you, at least. You tell me about it, someday?”
“Maybe.”
“And Sayan came to you, too? Your god answered a prayer, this far away? You never struck me as that deservingly holy.”
“How do you know he answered?” he asked, curious.
“I saw the brat. She’s quite definitely no longer at death’s door. I never met a miracle before, but whichever gods you found here, they seem to have helped. The ferrymen—they are good sorts, even if they are all mad—they had Pakdhala in a bed piled with quilts, keeping her warm. And she was just lying there, looking like she’d been laid out for burial, hardly even breathing. They’d pour a few spoonfuls of fish broth down her every so often, pile more driftwood on the fire. And aside from that they just sat there, always a couple of them, watching. Like they were waiting for something. And maybe a little after midnight, last night, she woke up and said, if it wasn’t any trouble, could she have breakfast. Oh, and she said I should wait till morning and then I could go and get you, and I wasn’t to yell at you about anything at all, thank you very much. She’s been tattooed, Bashra knows when, because I’m sure she wasn’t when I first saw her here, and, well, I didn’t leave her alone with those odd-eyed river-folk very often. She shouldn’t be up and running around after so much tattooing, that on top of being so sick. But she looks fine, it’s all healed up. Some sort of little bird on either side of her eyes—”
