by Greg Keyes
He was something like a ghost, but not a ghost. A memory tickled at him. There were stories of things like that, as well. He could hear the voice of an old woman talking, almost chanting. He could not see her face, nor could he remember the words, or again, her name.
He pulled himself out onto the street. A wind swept over him, channeled by the walls of the buildings on either side. Above, dense layers of smoke and perhaps clouds as well obscured the stars, but he could see a faint, pale luminescence seeping through them that might be the moon.
He was in a long, narrow courtyard. A fountain gurgled not far away. He could hear a baby crying.
This was, he realized, no street in Nhol. He had emerged, been reborn to the world, in the Chakunge’s palace, the very heart of the empire.
As it should be, he thought. As it should always have been.
III
Snow Thunder
Perkar eyed the sky dubiously. “I wonder if we should make camp now,” he muttered.
Ngangata surveyed the ominous black billows edging in from the western horizon. “All bluff,” he opined. “It doesn’t smell like a storm to me. Though …”
“Though what?” Perkar grunted.
“It has a strangeness about it.”
“Oh.” Perkar regarded the skyline once more, straining to sense whatever it was that Ngangata could feel. Nothing unusual came to him: the stormheads remained, to him, mere clouds.
“Sometimes I wonder if you say things like that just to be mysterious,” he grumbled.
“No. Unfortunately, life is already mysterious without any help from me,” Ngangata answered.
Sighing, Perkar leaned forward and patted his mount. “What do you think, T’esh?” The charcoal-and-gray-striped stallion spared him a laconic sidewise glance before returning his full attention to tearing at the clump of grass protruding through the slowly melting snow. As far as he could tell, T’esh had no opinion on the matter.
“I’ll assume you agree with Ngangata,” Perkar decided. “We’ll push on.”
He urged T’esh to a walk, and Ngangata, abreast, clucked to his own mount in the weird, unhuman language of his father’s folk. An eerie banging punctuated whatever he said, like a god hammering a moon-size sheet of tin—but in a distant sky, the black one on the horizon. Snow thunder, Perkar’s father called it—rare and unnatural. A sign that gods were playing games with the heavens. Perkar nearly remarked on the sound—to show that he knew at least something of such signs and portents—but they had both heard it, and it seemed silly to point out so obvious a thing to a hunter and tracker of Ngangata’s skill. Instead, he listened alertly for further noises. The distance, however, was quiet thereafter, as if the heavens had only a single word to speak before returning to stubborn, sullen silence.
The quiet itched at Perkar. His lungs seemed crowded with the necessity of speaking. He cast about for something to say and finally settled upon the obvious. “It’s good to have you along,” he told Ngangata.
The halfling nodded. “I’m eager to meet this goddess, this maker of heroes,” he answered.
Perkar wondered if he should take offense at that—he knew Ngangata’s opinion of heroes—but when he glanced over at his companion, there was no hint of malice on the broad, pale face.
“I don’t know that she will show herself to you. Or to me, for that matter,” he said.
“Then we will have wasted a trip,” Ngangata answered simply.
“No. No, whether she manifests or not, she will hear me. That is all I want, to tell her a few things. To apologize.”
“In my experience,” Ngangata remarked, “gods have little use for Human apologies.”
“Perhaps,” Perkar said. “But she will hear one from me.”
Ngangata nodded as the wind gusted from the north, straight into their faces, numbing their lips into wooden clappers only vaguely capable of shaping speech. Perkar reached to lace his elkskin hood tighter and draw a thick woolen kerchief over his nose, so that only his squinting eyes were visible.
“Something odd in those clouds,” said a voice in his ear, just as his face was warming.
“So Ngangata tells me,” Perkar mumbled.
“Eh?” Ngangata queried, catching his muffled speech.
“It’s Harka,” Perkar explained, and Ngangata pursed his lips and urged his mount on up ahead. He knew that Perkar disliked talking to his sword when others were near.
“Odd,” Harka repeated. “Too far away to see more.”
“Let me know when you can say something useful.”
“Still bitter? At least you answered me this time. It is difficult for me to understand your attitude. One would think you would be grateful. I’ve saved your life many times.”
“So you’ve told me before. And I should be, I admit. But my body remembers what has been done to it, knows that it has died several times now. There is a peculiar ache to that, Harka.”
“An ache I can feel well enough,” the sword answered. “Find some way to free me, and both our problems will be solved.”
“If I can find a way to do so, I will,” Perkar promised the blade. “If nothing else, I will return you to the Forest Lord.”
“How far will you go to make amends, Perkar? The Forest Lord will snap you down like a toad swallowing a bug. As Ngangata said, gods have precious little use for Human sentiment. I should know.”
“It doesn’t matter to me what the gods do or do not value,” Perkar remarked, very softly indeed. “I know what my father taught me: Piraku, the code of honor and glory. I have walked away from the path of my father for too long now.”
“You always command such endearing platitudes,” Harka replied. “Don’t you ever tire of them?”
“Perhaps they are all I have,” Perkar rejoined. “Now let me ride in peace, until such time as you sense danger.”
“Very well,” the voice in his ear conceded, and was thereafter silent.
The dark clouds boiled and spread eastward; Perkar could sense the sleet in their bellies, feel the cold sucking at him from that quarter of the world. Yet, as Ngangata predicted, they did not advance, and by the time evening came, the sky had nearly frozen clear, indigo veined with copper and crimson where a few high, attenuated clouds still clung. When the first star winked brightly at them, Perkar and Ngangata stopped to make camp. They worked silently at erecting the small horsehide tent Brother Horse had lent them. Perkar searched out a few scraps of withered wood in the dying light as his companion tightened the straps of their shelter.
When he returned, Ngangata was chanting over his bow, thanking the god of the tree from which it was made. Perkar considered following his example, but his sword, Harka, was a god, and as they had argued that day, it would be disingenuous to chant a song of thanks to him. Still, he had bragged that he was returning to the path of Piraku, and so after a few moments, he sang the one song that seemed appropriate, though it was alien. He chanted “Thanking the Horse Mother,” what little he knew of it, to show proper respect to their tent, made as it was from the mortal remains of a stallion named Snakeskin. All Mang tents were made of horsehide, and so each had a name. The song he had learned by listening carefully to the Mang as they made and broke camp.
He and Ngangata finished their chanting at roughly the same time. They met back in front of the tent. In the ruddy remains of sunset his companion’s face seemed more alien than usual, stripped of its Human heritage. His dark sunken eyes and low, sloping forehead recalled the deep, awesome forest of Balat where the Alwat dwelt. Perkar remembered the broken bodies of Digger and her family, the Alwat who perished because he offended the Forest Lord, and wondered what he could do for their kin, what solace he could offer, what apology?
“Ngangata,” he asked, staring out at the darkening rim of the world, “did you know the names of those Alwat who died in Balat?”
“I know their names,” Ngangata answered, and Perkar noticed, as he often did not, the faint burr in his voice that no Human Being had.
>
“I would like you to teach them to me someday.”
“Someday,” the other replied, “but only in Balat. Their names should be spoken only there.”
“Ah.” Perkar felt the cold eating into his legs, but he did not yet desire to enter the tent and start a fire. “The sky seems to drink me up here,” he confided instead. He turned to take it all in, noticed the bone bow of the Pale Queen climbing in the east
“I prefer more crowded land myself,” Ngangata admitted. “Like you, my Human mother was kin to pasture, to hills, to mountains. Her blood was fast-running streams, red bulls, and snowmelt. The Alwat, my father’s people, are kin to the trees; they despise to leave them. You and I will both lose our minds if we live long beneath this sort of sky.” He gestured at the heavens with the blade of his hand and half grinned to show that he half joked.
“The Mang live here,” Perkar pointed out. “Surely other men can do it.”
“But the Mang have the blood of horses coursing in their veins. They are horses, in some ways. Without this sky, they would die of suffocation.”
“So they say,” Perkar acknowledged, recalling Brother Horse’s similar claim.
“You seem very thoughtful tonight,” Ngangata observed. “I believe you should take the first watch. Give yourself more time to think.”
Perkar accepted that with a faint chuckle. “Fair enough,” he replied.
Morning was still clear, and Perkar conceded, once again, that Ngangata understood the sky better than he. They rode out without much talking, though at one point Perkar attempted a song. It fell with the rising wind however, and Perkar glumly reflected that he missed Eruka, who would have sung right on into a gale. Eruka, whose voice and laughter were now bleached bones without even a proper burial.
So much to do.
Just past midday, Harka spoke to him again, and even as he did, Perkar caught himself scrutinizing a certain point on the horizon. He was unaware, at first, that his attention was a product of the strange power his sword had to compel him to “see” danger. But then Harka said, “Comes something strong.”
“From the direction of the storm?”
“Where else?”
Perkar could make out a speck now. He pointed it out to Ngangata.
“Yes, I see,” the half man said. “Your sword uses your eyes well.”
It seemed a rather backhanded compliment to Perkar, but he knew it was the only sort he deserved. Ngangata would have seen the approaching stranger well before Perkar, all other things being equal.
Harka, however, made things decidedly unequal, protecting Perkar from much harm and healing even the most terrible wounds in a few days at most. It was difficult, therefore, for Perkar to conjure up any fear of a lone figure in the distance, despite Harka’s concern. Harka, after all, would be concerned if a jay were diving at him, protecting its nest. Even such slight threats were considered worthy of the sword’s attention. Still, a menace to him was also probably a threat to Ngangata, who could be killed rather easily. Perkar did not want that; enough of his friends were already ghosts.
It soon became apparent, however, that the rider—Ngangata said he could make that much out—was moving along the same course as they, rather than coming to meet them. This delayed any worries Perkar might have been tempted to invent, especially because he knew that they should be drawing near the stream where his goddess dwelt, and he was rehearsing what he would say to her. In fact, after some time, the rider ahead of them vanished, not over the horizon but presumably behind some nearer crease in the landscape, obscured by the white sameness of the plain. Perkar’s heart quickened, for such a crease might also hide a stream valley.
Midway from noon to sundown, they breasted the lip of the valley. It was a gentle, gradual dale, nothing like the crevasse the Changeling had dug for himself. Indeed, the crest of the hill was scarcely noticeable as such. The stream was not directly visible, hidden by a stand of leafless cottonwoods and furry green juniper. But she was there; Perkar knew her instantly. He clapped T’esh’s flanks, bringing the horse to a canter, but Ngangata hailed him down. Almost irritated, Perkar turned to his comrade, who was gesturing at the clean snow of the valley—gesturing at a line of hoofprints not their own.
“You make your peace with the goddess,” Ngangata suggested. “I think I will find out who our stranger is.”
“No,” Perkar snapped. “No. Harka believes it to be dangerous. Leave it alone, whatever it is. Just keep your bow out and your eyes busy. I will not speak to her for long.”
“Best not,” Ngangata muttered. “I don’t like not knowing where an enemy is.”
“We don’t know that it is an enemy,” Perkar pointed out reasonably. Then, to Harka: “Do we?”
“No. But strong and strange, certainly. And dangerous, like a sleeping snake.”
Perkar nodded, so that Ngangata would know he had been answered.
“But go cautiously,” Ngangata said. “We should dismount and walk down. Do no good for you to break your neck now—it could take days for you to heal.”
“Fine,” Perkar said, though he would have rather galloped down, heedless.
How old I look, Perkar thought, staring at his reflection in a still edge of the stream. His hood down, he could see the new lines on his face, the unkempt brown hair, gray eyes that seemed rather dull to him, though he had once been proud of their flash and sparkle. He was struck, suddenly, by how much more he looked like his father, and that thought brought an almost dizzying recurrence of his earlier homesickness. Up this stream, far up it, his father’s pasture lay. A leaf fallen there might pass now by his feet. The stream blurred, as tears rimmed his eyes.
“Always so sad,” she said, rising from the water before him, “even from the first.”
She looked older, too. Her skin still dazzled whiter than the snow on the hills around them, her eyes shone purest amber, and yet in the jet of her long hair lay wisps of silver, lines etched on a face that before had been smoothest ivory. She remained the loveliest woman Perkar had ever seen; the sight of her caught at his breath.
“Goddess,” he said.
“The same, but not the same,” she answered. “Farther downstream, more children. But I know you, Perkar, I remember your arms and kisses, your sweet silly promises.”
She stepped up and out of the water, stretched a tapered finger out to stroke his chin. Her touch was warm, despite the chill wind. Her unclothed flesh was raised in goosebumps, but other than that she showed no discomfort.
“What have they done to you, my sweet thing?” she asked, moving her hand down, to the thick scar on his throat where a lance had passed through his neck; across his coat, beneath which hidden scars bunched like a nest of white caterpillars.
“I did it to myself,” he muttered.
“You did it for me,” she corrected.
“Yes, at least I thought I did.”
She moved to embrace him, though his thick coat must have been rough against her. She pressed her cheek against his, and it was so warm it was nearly hot. “I tried to stop you,” she reminded him. She stepped back, and he stood there, not knowing at all what to do.
“I tried to stop you,” she repeated.
He shrugged uncomfortably. “I loved you. I did foolish things.”
She nodded. “I have heard rumors, flying down from the mountain. He sang of you, where he eats me. Do you feel more a man now, Perkar? Do you feel more a match for a goddess?”
“No,” he said, his voice small but firm. “No, you were always right.”
“What do you want of me now?” she demanded, and her voice was a bit sharp. She had always been like that, hard and soft, comforting and angry, all at once.
“I only want for you to forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” she asked, as if she were repeating words in a foreign language.
“Forgive me for killing in your name. Forgive me for …” He searched his brain, but despite his rehearsal, he could not find the words.
&n
bsp; “Forgive you,” she repeated. She shook her head slowly. “So many things men have done for me, over the years—so many stupid things. At first, you know, I did not try to stop them. They amused me. But the blood of this girl, this form you see, oh, it sleeps for long, but sometimes I am almost Human. I feel sorrow, feel ashamed, just as you might—though I hate it. And I feel love, Perkar. You can hurt me, I think. I was always afraid you would hurt yourself and add to my sorrow. And so you have.”
“But I am alive,” he told her. “Here I am.”
“But so terribly hurt,” she said, “so scarred. Can I forgive you for that, for scarring my sweet Perkar?” She shook her head, pursed her lips. “Take whatever you want,” she said at last. “If you want my forgiveness, take that.”
“You have to give it to me, I think,” he replied.
She spread her arms wide, gesturing up and down the river, spreading her naked body before him. “Here is all that I am,” she answered. “Upstream, downstream—anything in me is yours. If you can find forgiveness here, take it—I give it to you. But I cannot find it for you.”
He nodded, unsure what to say next, and she gazed at him long and thoughtfully before she said anything else. Then, with a little sigh, she approached him again and took his hand. Together they gazed into the water. “There are some things I can find for you,” she confided. “Things that have come downstream to me.”
“Yes?” he said hopefully.
“From your father’s people. See, there—and there.” She gestured at the flowing water, but he saw nothing noteworthy.
“What?”
“Blood,” she said, gripping his hand tighter. “It is their blood.”
Perkar did not believe that any news could stun him now, and yet as he walked back up to where Ngangata waited, he felt numb, and not from the cold. The goddess had talked for some time, explained as much as she knew, then left him with a faint kiss on the lips to remind him of his first lesson in passion, so long ago. But even the kiss of a goddess dimmed next to what she had told him.
