The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  “I burned it.”

  “I know. It wasn’t the first time I’d been back. But the ruins of it were gone to the forest, then, and the winters were growing heavier. Late frosts and early, they said, year after year. The folk at Swanesby were talking of leaving, going to seek new lands on the Amunn’aa. So I went down across the Great Grass, and nothing, nothing of you—no songs, no whispers on the wind, no scent, no rumours on the road. And I left Holla. I think he went up to Lissavakail for a time, and down to the south, to the sea where the lotus blooms. And I went home.”

  “I’d gone to Pirakul. Beyond Pirakul. To the eastern edge of the world.”

  “Why?”

  “To see what was there.”

  “What did you find?”

  “The western edge of the world. Trees. A land that perhaps the ships sailed from, to come to the Drowned Isles, long ago. I don’t know. But I didn’t find Jasberek. Then.”

  “Lucky for him.”

  “Maybe. Not in the long run. He came to find me, did I say?”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Ya.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He tried to take Lakkariss.” She shrugged. Said nothing more, beyond. “So? After you left Holla-Sayan?”

  “But then you did come to me, when I’d gone home to wait, and…you would not give up the sword. Not give up what they had set you to do. To kill for them.”

  Her fingertips had found the scars. Followed them, as if nursing her own pain.

  “I sent you away so I wouldn’t see you serving that.”

  She would not leave the scars be. He jerked away, head snapping around, jaws closing about her arm.

  Stop that.

  They held so a frozen moment. Then he let her go. In silence, she rose again, edged back past the horses, chirped to call them on, not bothering with the reins now.

  He followed. Angry without words. Not where he had meant to lead them. Not what he had wanted said. Couldn’t find what, now, to say.

  “Loose stone here,” she called back.

  It rattled beneath the horses’ hooves. Something fell away, long, skittering plummet.

  A yellow land, pale, with darker bands, tawny brown, running through the layers of stone. Sharp-edged where frost had broken it; smooth where time had rubbed it, or running water. A dry land, with the breath of the high desert in the south wind that sucked the moisture from eyes and nose and panting mouth. Something of the deserts reaching down, following the ghost of the Shikten’aa, hungry, to drag the Grass into it…

  It was only a dry autumn wind. Nothing more.

  The cliffs descended in shelves and drops and slopes. Not some single feature, but a region, a land, almost, in itself. Creatures lived here. Little scurrying things, and foxes and snakes to prey on them. Birds.

  Disaster, almost, when a sparrow whirred away under unsteady Lark’s nose. A hind foot slipping. Moth had him by the bridle, coaxing him back, calm—Mikki crossed that crumbling section of the path most warily, and Moth was there, tense, silent, as if she might take him by a handful of fur, tug him on, what slight weight she had against his bulk a useless anchor. He found solid footing again with a huff of breath. Nosed at her, wordless, pushed her on ahead.

  She went, but thumped a closed fist on the top of his head, gently. Eased something between them.

  Great black span of wings, circling against the sky. Eagle. Two of them. Something moving below, pale dun backs. A herd of kulan following a thread of green. Mostly barren stone and sand down there, but pools held water, and there were shadows of sedge-grown channels, greened by rain or seepage rising from below.

  A change of angle, as the way they followed faded out from under their feet. Twisting to face into that south wind, and dropping down, onto a broader way, a layer of that darker stone. She could have used another human body then. He wasn’t much use, though the horses were easy with him now. It had taken them longer to settle into acceptance of the scent of the devil.

  Trying to turn them in such a narrow space, trying to lead them down, that leap below…turned, they wanted to go back, to follow the track before their noses, up.

  Patience, she was, and calm, a rock of it. He squeezed around, not quite slipping over, to put himself between Lark and Fury, to keep Lark where he was, till Fury was down in a sudden rush and scramble. Moth praised him, Westgrasslander words, stroking his sweating neck.

  Reminding him of Holla-Sayan, managing horses. Not something he had often seen in her. Too often forgot she could be. Something Ulfhild had been, that Vartu had rarely needed. She was so offhand, with Storm. Talked to him like a dog, like a contrary human. But the necromantically revived bone-horse hardly behaved as a normal beast anyway. To listen to her tales, he never had, even when he was a living creature.

  She talked to Lark now as she had talked to Mikki himself, those first days after they crossed the Kinsai. Gentle. Careful. Very certain, too, that he would do, could do, what she wanted. Come a little forward. There. And down, easy, there, look, Fury’s gone ahead, there, come…

  Laugh or growl. Going to talk me down too?

  You stay where you’re at till I’ve got him out of the way.

  Lark plunged, a rush, a skidding on the stones.

  “Steady now, steady!” She was between the horse and the tumbling slope, fool, leaning into his shoulder…Mikki was prepared to fling himself down after, to grab her, if they slipped, teeth in whatever it took…

  Of course, falling, she might fly. He and the horse would not.

  The horse calmed. Snorted. Pushed on after Fury.

  Moth waited until Mikki followed.

  The afternoon wore on in the descent, but that had been the worst of it. No discussion, when they came, finally, to the valley bottom. “Camp,” he said, and Moth, after a quick scan around, nodded. The horses rushed to where a trickle of water formed a reedy pool, sending a scatter of blackbirds into the sky.

  Firewood was all small stuff, twigs and brush. No trees, even though this ought to have been a sheltered place, and it was not so dry as he had imagined.

  No fish in the pool, though. He prowled away, came back with a marmot, went back to dig out another. Little enough. Moth had the fire burning and was baking bannock on a stone.

  “You want those cooked?” she asked.

  “You do. You’re too thin. You don’t eat enough.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Get me an antelope, once we’re back up in the grass.”

  Advantage of having no hands. He got to laze on the sun-warmed rocks while she skinned and gutted the marmots, threading the livers and hearts on a stick of green willow. The sun itself was lost to them; they were in the dusk of the high walls, now, but the eastern cliffs glowed golden.

  Going up, once they crossed the broken land between, should be easier, surely.

  She jointed the marmots and since they had plentiful water, for a change, set them to seethe.

  The faintest touch of a goddess lay over this land, an echo more than any true awareness. Shikten, Skitan sometimes, in the north. They had known her of old, in Baisirbsk. So far up her course, she might be almost a different being, far from spruce and birch and moss, far from the vast silence of the ice. Nothing gathered either to welcome or challenge them. A lonely place, the Undrin Rift.

  Warmth was fading from the stone, shadows deepening. Moth was on her knees, feeding the fire beneath the kettle.

  “Soon as you have arms, you can go find me some more wood,” she suggested.

  “It hurts,” he said, nose pressed to her neck. “It hurts, but I’m better, I am. I’m—I just need you here, not—not fussing.”

  “Was I?”

  “For you, princess, yes. You treat me like a wounded dog. I’m not going to—to fall to pieces.”

  “Or bite me?”

  “Sometimes you need biting.”

  Tell me, she said, and sat back from the fire. Challenging. He hurt you. I can’t see it. I can’t help.

 
You do. Just being here, you do. Like getting Lark down that rockface. Were you going to hold him, if he slipped? You made yourself his shield, his anchor, and he trusted the way would be there.

  “This was entirely the wrong path for horses. The winters and the spring rains wear the rock away more than I realized.”

  “Over centuries, yes, they do. You of all people should have remembered that. But there’s an idea, we could turn mapmakers.”

  “Mikki—”

  “I was in a cage,” he said, lowering his head to rest on her shoulder, hairy cheek to her ear.

  “Yes.” She wrapped an arm over him. Restrained herself consciously, he suspected, from compulsively seeking the scars, to reassure herself he was still whole.

  He drew a deep breath, long. Felt it. Clean air, sand and stone and water beneath the sky.

  “I couldn’t breathe. In the cage. I couldn’t feel—the trees. The earth. The forest. My heart…it was torn away from where I would have it be.”

  Demons hid their hearts, human songs declared. Left them behind in their own place, and so unlike gods, they could wander, and yet always be one with their land. It wasn’t so…straightforward. If his heart, a soul-heart, was buried, it wasn’t in a place.

  He had known she would find him.

  Yet the songs caught a glimmer of the truth, faintest reflection on water.

  “I was chained. To him. I could feel him, all the time. As if he were…a tick, feeding on me, but the size of a mountain. A mouth, buried deep within me. Is that what it is, to have two souls?”

  “No. Cold hells, no.” She was silent a long while, as if she considered. “Not for me, at least. I don’t know. Holla-Sayan might have said differently, once. I don’t know. But no, never. We are one, Ulfhild and Vartu. I am one. We always have been.”

  “Good.”

  There was more he wanted said. Much more, perhaps. What did it all come down to, though, but this? Arm, arms about him. Warmth of her, human warmth, and the heat and the cold of the fires that spun life over old bones. A lonely boy’s dreaming, weaving stories around a figure in a tale who cast shadows, such shadows, beyond what the words had ever said of her. Born by her grave, he had been, in the many-chambered tomb that had been old before a demon chose it for her den and it was used to bind a devil down. He was meant for her, he’d always thought, felt, which was that boy’s lonely dreaming, nothing more, and yet…and yet. He was needed. He never doubted that. And in that—

  Something vital, still unsaid.

  I knew you were coming for me, he said. I knew you would find a way. And aloud, “So, princess, how do we get Lakkariss back?”

  She laughed.

  “Beornling, I love you. I do. Let him keep it.”

  “Vartu…” He sat back at that. Sunset, too, overtaking him. The wind might still be from the south, but it was cold, now, raising goose-bumps on naked skin.

  “Why do you think it took me so long to come to you?”

  “Tell me.” He pulled her to him. “Leave the fire to look to itself a while.”

  She’d been so careful of him all this way, and he was—not needing that, now. He might, again. It came and went, the weight of the chains remembered, the cage, the suffocation.

  Not tonight. He got her out of her swordbelt and byrnie and she was laughing, Moth, laughing again, like a girl, and making him do all the work of boots and ties while she clung close, mouth finding the places that made the breath come quick, ear and nipple and back to his mouth, hungry, both of them, as if they had been starved.

  Near on two centuries. Mikki supposed they had been.

  No cold reaching air of Lakkariss laid by them, either. Time enough to ask about that later. Maybe. Time, now, to let all worries go by. For a while.

  The fire would die down before the soup-kettle boiled dry.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  …a new spring, a new year, and the armies of the All-Holy advance on Marakand

  From the Chronicle of Nikeh gen’Emras

  The Army of the South swept over Serakallash while the sept-chiefs were still trying to negotiate a fee for its use of their wells. The fighting lasted a day, the winds and the sand aiding the defenders, who had hoped against hope that they might turn the army aside and drive it to pass on. By sunset, however, the goddess Sera had disappeared into the depths of her spring, the chiefs had knelt to Prince Dimas and submitted to the All-Holy, accepting hasty instruction in the catechism and initiation on behalf, they said, of their folk, although the chiefs and warriors of the Herani sept had defied this decision and fled the town, after murdering the red priests of the mission-house.

  The bodies of all the Herani remaining in the town were presented to Dimas, as part of the surrender. They were laid out, men and women, in the courtyard of the burnt mission-house. The Herani were few in number. None remained alive.

  In his mercy, the sept-chiefs asked, in the All-Holy’s great mercy shown through his princes and primates, let no further vengeance for the murdered priests be taken on the folk of the town.

  And Dimas was merciful.

  And if the dead Herani seemed more to have fallen in battle than to have suffered execution—well, they had barricaded themselves into a warehouse, had they not, and been extracted by their own fellow-townsfolk only with hard fighting. And not one cried out, my son, my daughter, my father, my mother, when Primate Ambert ordered their bodies buried in an unmarked pit in the desert.

  And not one said, Herani? Who are the Herani? Why are they not included in the song of the tally of the septs? Not one whispered in a Westron ear, “These men, these women, died in the fighting in the streets.”

  In the days of Ghatai’s conquest there had been sept-chiefs who willing served a conqueror. In this time, for the little while it mattered, there was a unity of purpose. In this time, they held true to their goddess, in hope and in faith.

  Dimas did not turn aside to climb the road into the mountains. He left a force to occupy the town, under the Knight-Commander Balba, and continued his march, while Serakallashi conscripts—converts almost over-eager to serve, rather—razed a number of houses of the Rostvadim sept and built a fort with high stone walls on the ridge at the north-eastern corner of the town, scowling down over the road.

  A curse blighted the town, it was whispered in the markets, set on the very rock and water in the days when the devil Ghatai ruled them and left the heads of the sept-chiefs to rot in the goddess’s holy waters. Few children were born to them. They were a dying folk. The priests had promised that the All-Holy would bring blessings, and the women would bear children, and Serakallash would grow great again and rule the Red Desert.

  The goddess of the spring appeared to have abandoned her folk.

  But in Lissavakail, in the mountains, the children of Serakallash were fostered among the folk of the high valleys. In the far pastures of the desert edge, the children of the septs lived with distant kin, and in the months that followed those who were found and taken to the school in the fortress were few.

  They, and the townsfolk, were taught their catechism and initiated into the cult, tattooed with the sign and the blood of the All-Holy.

  But the sacred ink, carried with the army over the mountains, thick and dark as tar, was mixed with water from Sera’s holy well. A symbol, an old foreign woman who was said to be the desert-born aunt-by-marriage of one of the Battu’um sept-chiefs said. A symbol of how the All-Holy had conquered Sera and made her folk and her waters his own.

  If it made the Serakallashi happy and compliant, let it be so. Knight-Commander Balba had other troubles to deal with. The old woman with the sketch of feathers tattooed on her cheek oversaw the preparation of the ink before it was sent out with the priests and their needles. She was most gratifyingly eager to be of help, and murmured prayers of blessing over them, calling on the Old Great Gods to shed their purifying light on that darkened land.

  The sixth-circle seers meanwhile warned of traitors within th
e town, apostates who had never truly converted in their hearts, but the place had long been ill-omened for those with wizardry in their blood; all the market-gossip told so. Its only wizard-born left, by and large, for happier lands farther east. Everyone agreed this was so. It was even whispered that the curse that left them so few children took also its toll on those born with the wizard-talent. Certainly the priests and priestesses of the sixth circle were ill-fated in Serakallash. They wandered into the desert night, or walked into dust-storms, hearing the voice of their god summoning them, they said, and sometimes, raving, wild-eyed, they called damnation down on those who tried to prevent them. Sometimes they simply dropped dead in the street, with no one to witness.

  The Serakallashi were an angry folk, and the ferry-folk of Kinsai both angry and inventive. They turned the waking and the dreaming minds of the Westrons against themselves, and waged a war of small and gnawing fears, which, as the worm in the roof-beam, weakened them almost unawares.

  Knight-Commander Balba led a force into the mountains, but was turned back by storm and snow. He chose to leave the mountain-folk be through the winter; they were going nowhere, and his efforts must be to keep the road open for the caravans carrying grain and fodder and mutton-fat from the storehouses of the Nearer Grass to supply the armies through the siege that was expected when they came to Marakand, which was difficult enough. There were raiders in the Black Desert and storms of both sand and snow in the Red. Rumours swept through his soldiers of creeping death-worms, the colour of the sand, which would emerge from the dunes and spit poison; the touch even of their shed husks was death. Patrols did not venture far from the fort, after the first few failed to return.

  In the early spring, as the waters poured in torrents down the valleys, Balba tried again, but discovered that the road that should have led to the town of Lissavakail and the temple of the goddess Attalissa disappeared beneath the surface of an unexpected lake. His scouts reported a river dammed between high cliffs to the west and the dam guarded by a single watchtower.