by K V Johansen
“Nothing, it’s nothing,” Pakdhala called to the merchants’ guard who appeared at the tent door. “Someone had a nightmare.” She repeated that in the bastard Nabbani dialect the Over-Malagru men spoke. “A bad dream.”
The man muttered a curse and disappeared. By then everyone but Bikkim and Immerose was awake and asking questions, most on their feet, weapons in hand. But, “Cold hells, leave me alone!” Tusa snarled when Zavel reached to touch her and ask what she had dreamed, and in that awkwardness people went muttering back to their beds, except Gaguush, who stalked stark naked around the camp cursing them all. Not that anyone would dare comment.
Pakdhala silently offered her own coat. Hard to say for certain, even with her unnatural night vision, but she thought the gang-boss’s mouth twitched as she gravely took it. Her wrists hung out a handspan or more.
“It’s Tusa’s watch,” Gaguush said, with a glance up to measure the stars. “What’s she doing sleeping?”
“I took it.”
“Unarmed?”
She’d forgotten to get her spear. A grown woman with her adult tattoos, and she went and forgot to carry a weapon on watch. But Gaguush let it go.
“You should be asleep, ‘Dhala. After yesterday—”
“I couldn’t sleep, and I think Tusa’s ill.”
“Bashra grant she’s not. That’s all we need. Ah, hells.” Gaguush ran a hand through her braids. “Fine. Your watch, ‘Dhala. So arm yourself and go watch. Holla, stir the fire up and put a kettle on. I won’t be sleeping again anyway, we might as well have tea.”
“Put some clothes on,” Holla suggested. “You go wandering naked around here, you don’t know who might take a fancy to you.”
“Hah,” Gaguush muttered. “Mentioning no names. It’d serve you right, anyway.” But definitely a faint smile, which faded again, with a glance at the night-fog rising above the cliff.
Pakdhala picked up her spear where it lay nearby on her bedroll, wandered off to check the camel lines. Left her father and Gaguush to their tea feeling a little…alone.
Ivah didn’t so much doze as she rode, as let the empty sameness of the rolling low hills lull her into the state her father called meditation, trying to let her mind become as empty as the land. The horse, a little Grasslander gelding with the wind of the steppes in his heart, followed Shaiveh’s from long habit.
She pretended to Shai it was wizardly contemplation, a searching of the land, even, but what was the point? Farmstead after farmstead, and always the same stupid staring faces with their tattoos and desert-braided hair, the same stupid questions: Will I marry, diviner? How many children? Is this baby a girl or a boy? Will the delivery be safe? Is he coming back to me? To which she smiled and gave the answers the coins gave her, or told her listeners what they wanted to hear, couched in vague enough terms to seem truth, later. She lied and invented when the coins failed her, or when she could not bring herself to say what they told. Too soft-hearted, Shaiveh teased her. Why should she care if some fresh-faced girl was left numb and staring, warned of an early death?
Because people didn’t pay well to hear of misfortune, Ivah told her. Why should she care? She just didn’t like to see their faces, with their lives falling in ruin before them.
Over a year since they had wandered the caravan road west and north to At-Landi, and then across the Kinsai-av into the Western Grass, chasing dreams and the shadows of dreams.
Tamghat knew Attalissa had not died and been reborn in any Lissavakaili infant, since he had obtained faint impressions of her, off and on over the years. His means of doing so seemed to Ivah less true divination than shamanistic dreaming, which she distrusted as a barbaric deception of the weak-minded, but her father put greater trust in the little he learned by what he called dreaming than in even his own divinations. Wearing only a loincloth, sitting on a bearskin with bear-skull braziers at the cardinal points, red-eyed in the clouds of narcotic smoke, Tamghat had rocked and muttered. Ivah, head bent over a scroll of paper, brush in hand, dashed down his words, which read afterwards like scattered sentences from travellers’ tales. He talked of the turf-roofed farmhouses of the Western Grass, of camels plodding through dry winter snow in the Stone Desert and hot summer in the deadly, barren Salt Desert, of broken yellow stone and of the teeming markets of Marakand. He caught fragments of Attalissa’s presence, he said, like a whiff of scent when a woman has passed through a room. But mostly, seeking the goddess by his open-eyed dreaming or by weaving webs of silk thread and lakeside grass, he cursed and talked of finding nothing but wind and sky, an impression of empty land and very, very faintly, the whisper of the lake. He seemed frustrated not so much that Attalissa was not found as by his own inability to find her, the failure of his own powers against her. It was that, more than any doubt in the return Ivah had predicted, that had made him send her out to search along the caravan road.
And in over a year of searching, of weaving her own cat’s cradles and casting the coins to read patterns that were utterly meaningless, Ivah had found absolutely no trace of the goddess.
Sleeping in the firelit halls of the sod-roofed houses of the Western Grass, or in their barns, telling fortunes, asking about other wanderers, mountain folk, a friend of hers, a man of middle years and his little girl, though she’d be not so little now, of course. No one told her anything of mountain folk, beyond this one or that, who’d come back from the caravans with a mountain wife or husband, a child. They met one such foreign husband and child, and they turned out to be from Marakand, another man who had come back with two adopted children, both, when Ivah met them, clearly desert-born, so she gave up hope that the lordless Westgrass peasants would know a mountain man if they saw one. Her divination told her nothing, did not pierce even so far as the shadows her father found. Nothing, as though the goddess did not exist.
Easy enough to miss even someone living openly amid the slow roll of the hills. But somewhere, her father insisted, the goddess was hidden, and a god had a hand in the hiding. There or on the road, but he thought the Western Grass likelier. The road was dangerous, and growing more so; no place to keep a goddess safe.
Ivah had not managed even to determine which god it was who seemed, if she could believe her father’s dreaming, to be sheltering the goddess. One of the greater gods of the great barkashes, the chains of hills, they could assume, not some minor godling of a single ridge of land. She could hardly question a god and watch for the signs of evasion or lie, the careful breath, the face too tightly still. He would be one whose land ran close to the Kinsai-av, perhaps, because her father thought Kinsai, too, cast a shadow on all his divining and his dream-walking searches.
“A conspiracy of gods?” Ivah had asked, and Tamghat had taken it for sarcasm, told her not to be insolent. He persisted in every appearance of confidence in Attalissa’s return before the conjunction necessary for his spell, and yet he grew anxious, and sent her out. The only wizard he trusted to serve him faithfully. But there was a warning, even in the affection with which he said the words. The last wizard he had trusted…that thought lurked behind the words.
She wasn’t his only arrow shot into the darkness. There were folk among the caravans who kept an eye out for him, and had means to alert him, if they thought the girl had crossed their path. By such means he might, slowly, pin her down, if she travelled the road. But they had all been false alarms so far.
In the distance, antelope resolved themselves where there had been nothing but grass, brown fading out of green that had hidden them, till one raised its head, revealing six. How long till she could give up and go home? Not until it was over, and the wandering stars had joined and parted without the goddess’s return. And then it might not be safe to do so. It might be her head, trailing a banner of hair as it fell, if she betrayed Tamghat even innocently, by her own weakness, her own inadequacy as a wizard. Other women her age were married householders or masters of their craft; she could not expect him to give her a child’s licence forever.
; Ivah felt herself sinking, being drawn deeper into silence, into emptiness. She knew better than to fight it, though that was her first impulse; her heart raced, but long training held. She kept herself calm, on the edge between sleep and waking. All the grazing antelopes looked up together now, scenting horses. Grass blew flat; fat clouds scudded. Drift, focused on nothing. Usually he came to her by night, when he might count on her being asleep, her dreams easily entered.
Father?
You should go to At-Landi. Attalissa’s on the desert road.
You’ve found her?
I may have. That was unexpectedly cautious, and Ivah tried not to think so. Her mother had taught her nothing of this magic of entering another mind; perhaps no wizard but her father knew it. She still did not know to what extent he could follow conscious thoughts. He was touched by her emotions, she had learned that much by his reactions.
How? she asked.
One of my watchers.
Caravan mercenaries who fell afoul of his noekar in Serakallash, mostly. Brawlers and drunks, taken from the gaol in the old sept-chiefs’ meeting hall where they were locked to cool off and sober up, threatened with worse fates, offered payment, if they but did as Ketsim, the noekar governor of the town, asked on his warlord’s behalf. A simple matter. A missing girl, perhaps oddly gifted. Any with half a mind knew it was no simple matter and could put song and story to the request, the lost goddess-bride and her demon captor, but along with the set spell, a knotted pattern they could burn as signal to draw Tamghat’s awareness to them should they encounter their quarry, they were given an amulet as payment and thanks, “against the dangers of the road.” Most, being what they were, would have sold any such thing for a drink, it being silver, but the spells engraved on the simple disc drew them to treasure it, and bound them to silence on their commission. Two at least had died and one had killed trying to keep the damned things, in robberies that might otherwise not have turned to murder.
Your watchers have been wrong before. Always. She didn’t need to rub that in.
This one seems…interesting. She tried to fight me when I turned her dreams to memories of the girl, to see if she might truly be the one.
She’s a wizard, you mean? He had said ordinary folk were never even aware of him when he rode their dreams to see the girls they suspected, and dismissed them. Leaving Ivah wondering, as he no doubt intended, if he could enter her sleeping mind without her notice, too. And what he might direct her mind to recall of her days.
I don’t think her resistance was conscious. I think it was shame. Guilt. She’s one…Ketsim didn’t take her out of the gaol. Her price wasn’t the usual.
Tamghat was amused at his own cleverness, and Ivah dutifully asked, What was it?
Something beyond my reach to give. Go to At-Landi, Eaglet. You’re close to the Upper Ferry, you can be there in days. Divine there, knowing the goddess is on the road, very near you. It may give the working focus, break the patterns that hide her.
She thought of antelope, invisible till you realized they were there, but knowing, you wondered how you had not seen.
And then what?
Don’t leave me to do all your thinking for you, daughter. She’s with this woman’s gang, a member of the gang, it looks to me. And the caravans turn back at At-Landi.
Are you sure she’s the one? How is she living away from the lake? You said she’d probably be sickly, an invalid, at best. But a mercenary?
And she didn’t say, no virgin bride for you, then, the reputation of the gangs being what they were. A little twinge of satisfaction on behalf of her mother’s memory.
I can only tell you what I turned the caravaneer’s memories to see, Tamghat said impatiently. The caravan-mistress is a Black Desert woman.
The woman who summoned me is a Grasslander named Tusa, an older woman, nearly forty years, I’d make her.
What about the Blackdog? Ivah asked.
There were no mountain men among the gang in Tusa’s memories. Make of that what you will. As for Attalissa, once she reaches Serakallash you can lure her, trick her, drug her, anything short of her death, and bring her to Lissavakail. I’ll have noekar meet you in Serakallash. Use her as a hostage against the Blackdog, if you can’t elude it. It must have that much reason, at least. Once she’s in your hands, the creature will be powerless.
As you say. But he was already gone and she blinked lazily, then shook her head, rubbed her eyes, and muttered, “Great Gods damn it!” to the horse’s twitching ear.
“What?” Shaiveh reined her in, waiting for Ivah to come alongside.
“Nothing.” She failed him again. Some bribed mercenary found the avatar, while she wasted her time fortune-telling. “We’re going over to At-Landi, as quickly as possible. Straight to the Upper Ferry from here.”
“Not so straight.” Shaiveh frowned at the hills. “Four days at least, and we can’t avoid farms. We’ll have to stop so you can do your tricks.”
“We don’t stop. Who cares if a bunch of peasants think I’m rude? I’ve had an urgent summons to At-Landi, say.”
“How urgent?”
Ivah kept her face impassive. Time Shaiveh remembered who and what she was. “My father needs me to go there, now.”
“Told you, did he?”
“Yes.”
“When?” Great scepticism.
Ivah allowed herself a little smile. “Just now. Didn’t you realize? We’re never out of his reach. My father and I discuss our progress all the time.” Somewhat of an exaggeration that, on all counts, but sometimes Shai’s assumption of Ivah’s general lack of usefulness was galling. “We’ve picked up her trail at last.” She gave the gelding a touch of her heels, taking the lead, letting Shaiveh fall into her proper place as bodyguard, to the side and a little behind.
“My lady.” But she never could tell if Shai was mocking or chastened.
The antelope fled them, white bellies flashing, into the next valley.
Ivah cast the oracle coins, using a charred twig to mark the hexagrams on the hilltop boulder to which she had stuck her stub of tallow candle. It was almost habit, by now; she had cast the coins every morning and evening since they came to At-Landi. On the grass, she had almost given up trying. They never told her anything of Attalissa.
Thirty-six falls of the three coins. Six complete hexagrams: three for the sun, three for the moon. Three for success, three for warning, as An-Chaq had taught her. For the first time she felt the slow heat of anticipation unfurl in her stomach. Perhaps, just perhaps, this was what she sought. She had been beginning to doubt her father’s information.
Although she had committed most of the hexagrams to memory through long, protesting, whining study, Ivah checked each in The Balance of the Sun and the Moon anyway, confirming each reading. The block-printed sheets had been pasted together into a scroll, as was usual, though this was smaller than most, only as wide as her hand. She muttered empty curses as she wound it back and forth, searching for an elusive section, and thought, as she always did, that someday she would have it cut apart and rebound in a Marakander-style codex. She ignored the lengthy and, so far as she was concerned, pointless commentaries that had accrued to each hexagram, and the glosses added by her mother’s master in careless, sometimes illegible calligraphy. An-Chaq’s few elegant notes she paid closer attention to.
The long-sundered paths are joined: meeting, the restoration of the lost. Possibly…possibly…Attalissa was lost.
The ship precedes the wind: wandering, a traveller, a journey with no set end. “Destiny cannot be gainsaid,” An-Chaq had added. That was irrelevant, but a traveller, yes, if this mountain-blooded caravan-mercenary her father had seen in his watcher’s memory was the lost avatar.
Lost until now. A meeting with one who wandered, the recovery of a lost wanderer? Six more throws of the three coins to give her the third hexagram and the completion of the sun set made that more likely. A goddess dances: that was simply water. Or of course, the sign of a goddess taking some
active part. Oh yes, she was right to feel the hot excitement of the threads of power in her hands, the sense that a pattern was coming clear, better than Shaiveh’s touch on her skin.
And the first of the moon set. The mother weeps: a daughter.
Mothers and daughters were much on her mind, lately, perhaps too much so. She had dreamt of An-Chaq often over the past winter, as she never had before, and she could not discover what it meant. When she put the question to bone or coins, her answers were only nonsense, contradictory muddles that told her nothing but left her brooding on those unburied bones somewhere in the Great Grass. It was simply guilt, Shaiveh told her, a bad conscience, a duty neglected. But she could not help but think it was more, hope it was more. An-Chaq’s hand on her, An-Chaq’s love returned, and forgiveness, and care.
In her dreams, dreams she would have prayed that her father never entered, if only she had a god to pray to, Ivah lived again through the casting of the great spell that had moved the army, and saw An-Chaq’s head fly off. She wandered the stone halls and stairs of Attalissa’s temple, searching, she could never remember for what, but she could hear her mother’s voice whisper words just below the edge of comprehension. She watched her father cast the nine pebbles on the painted leather chart of the constellations, and she watched as he drew in charcoal on the paving stones of the courtyard—he disdained brush and ink and paper—forecasts of the movements of the sky, calculating the date when he could again perform the ritual to unite himself with Attalissa. Watching in the dream, as she had in life, Ivah felt that An-Chaq stood at her shoulder; Ivah had only to turn her head to see her. But she never could.
After such dreams she felt furtive and guilty. She feared too much that Tamghat might see, might know, and be hurt and angry at her disloyalty. It was a failure of love, a betrayal of him, to realize she still mourned and missed her mother. But like someone with an uncontrollable habit, drunkenness or hashish or opium, she craved the dreams, the approving smile as they wrote the words of the spell on the earth (no matter in the dream that the smile hid thoughts of betrayal and murder), the sound of her mother’s voice, the sense of her presence. Sometimes she dreamed of her mother weeping, dreamed her mother feared for Ivah’s own life.
