The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  Jolanan looked, too, and Tashi. She got to her feet, letting him go. Shadows on the mountainside, coming down where there was no path to follow. Big shapes, and dark. They didn’t move like yaks. She squinted, shielding her eye against the higher snow’s glare. Two. No, three.

  Bear, wolf. Bear and wolf and…horse? Tibor not here to make stupid jokes. Honey-gold bear, and the wolf not a wolf but a mountain mastiff like the one that sat alert at Tashi’s side, twice the size. The horse—heavy, feather-fetlocked blue-roan thing, oddly hard to see—there, then just shadows, and climbing easily as a goat where even a mountain pony should not go. They came down slantwise, stones rattling at the last, a rush, a leaping down to the path. Tashi’s dog got to her feet, tail slowly wagging.

  Attalissa ran to them like a girl, arms about the Blackdog’s neck, face buried in his ruff. Silent, for all Jolanan could hear. Couldn’t have said anything herself. Tashi was watching her. He stepped away a little. She didn’t move.

  Attalissa embraced Mikki, then, and stood cheek to cheek with him. If a bear might look exhausted…The dog shook itself, was Holla-Sayan.

  He’d aged. Grey in his hair, just a little. Stupid thing to notice. Wearing it loose, not braided. She’d never realized how very long it was, free, curling almost to his waist. Never seen it so. Liked it. Battered as if he’d come from some long road, though his dusty caravaneer’s coat was new. Unarmed—well, his sabre was at her side.

  “Jo,” he said.

  She went to him then. Ran. Hugged tight and hard, and had to stop herself tearing open the horn toggles of his coat, groping within his shirt to find that wound, the scars, to assure herself the nightmare that came so often was—what, true, a lie, over? He held her so tightly— kissed her, fierce and passionate, and then softly, gently, and held her off. Watching over her shoulder. Then looking at her again. She ducked her head, couldn’t meet his gaze. Couldn’t find words. He tipped her face up. It wasn’t hurt, there in his eyes. Wasn’t betrayal. Just—caring. Kissed her once more, and she could give that back, passion in it, and caring, and—not even farewell. Only something whose time had ended, maybe. He held her off, touched her face, the scars. Smiled.

  “Your horse got left in Marakand,” he said. “Sorry. I think the Nabbani ambassador’s claimed the pair of them.” Nonsense. Because any heavier words might still break something.

  “So you owe me a horse…”

  “Not the blue roan. He’s Mikki’s. And a ghost. Of sorts.”

  “Ah.” She could believe it. Almost. Jolanan took a deep breath, looked back, beckoned. “Two horses. Live ones. Good breeding stock. This is Tashi, of the Narvabarkash. He wants to come to the Western Grass.”

  “Gods bless,” Holla-Sayan said.

  The dog went past, tail still wagging, to Attalissa and Mikki.

  Someone missing. She had her mouth open to ask. Holla-Sayan shook his head. A “tell you later” sort of look. She nodded, let go the hold she still had on him and went to Mikki. He leaned his head against her a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said into his fur. The words that could be so empty, save when they were honest. He didn’t say anything, but he pushed against her a little, like a hug accepted and returned. Looked up, towering over her. She had forgotten how big a creature he was.

  “Iarka.”

  She was riding one of the hill-ponies, Rifat at her side and getting glared at for his hovering, Besni, carrying a spear far too long for him, bouncing up and down the hillsides after them. Iarka reined in, rubbed the small of her back.

  “Now we can go,” she said.

  “Now you can go,” Attalissa said. “Blackdog…”

  “I won’t be coming back.”

  “I know, papa.”

  “Why not?” Tashi asked. Jolanan was glad someone had. She seemed to be holding his hand again. Well—that felt right.

  “There’s—a god in him,” Iarka said, hand on her belly now. Shook her head. “And a devil still. How do you even get along with yourself?”

  “Practice?” he suggested. “How’s the baby?”

  “She wants to go home. She wants the river.”

  “The caravan’s waiting in Serakallash,” Attalissa said. “Twenty of Kinsai’s folk, to travel with Iarka, and four dormitories of sisters as well.”

  “More than we need.”

  “Take them, Blackdog. You’ve had enough of fighting, you and Mikki both. We all have.”

  “It won’t be over. What’s left of the Western Grass—”

  “Is yours to reclaim, and yours to heal, with those who remain, and those who return. Folk and gods both. But you don’t need to be fighting off raiders alone across the Red Desert, at least.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  They went back down to the temple, then. Jolanan walked between Tashi and the Blackdog. She felt lighter in the heart than she had in all this second life.

  They came over the border with the sun setting, and the autumn winds carrying frost off the mountain peaks. Denanbak behind them, and not so swift a passage as Ahjvar would have liked, there or in the desert behind. Storms in the badlands, and one of the three baggage camels lost to a broken leg, but it was the expectation, all along the road, that they carried news from Marakand, that delayed them, gnawed at his nerves. Every chieftain’s hall, once they were out of Taren lands, every god’s shrine, every shaman or desert hermit…the Rihswera of Nabban did not pass so unmarked as he might hope, five, four camels and a gewdeyn he was trying to teach the ways of the lands of the road.

  Too late in the day to make Dernang with any light left, and tired camels, and taking the tracks up the holy mountain in the dark—well, he would, but not with four tired camels and Ailan.

  The guards of the border-post swarmed around, respectful, but wanting to know, wanting word—they had outridden any messengers the ambassador might have sent, or perhaps there had been early snows on the road through Bitha. Few took the road through the badlands. Now he remembered why.

  A courier went, with what brief summary he gave, riding as if in a race for the castle in Dernang. He left the camels to the little garrison’s stabler and Ailan to the cluster of young soldiers, mostly women, so taken with his coppery hair and exotic accent. Food, they were promised, and baths, and bed, and the captain wanted a more thorough repeating of the news, a story made of it, no doubt, for the dining hall.

  Ailan was turning out to be very good at that sort of thing. He seemed even to enjoy it. Leave him to it.

  Thought you’d be waiting?

  I am.

  Dogs, barking, running wild up and down the hillside in their frenzy of welcome, which turned into chasing one another into the sky, dragons tumbling the clouds and a wild wind with a kiss of snow in their passing.

  He found Ghu further up along the ridge, where the ground was rough, tangled with stands of scrubby rhododendron and layered mats of juniper between the thin pines, which whistled in the wind. Stars streaked with cloud, more fitful snow in the air. A full moon rising, silvering all.

  Home. Land and god and man.

  They ended up under the pines, lying on their coats beneath the reaching juniper boughs, where the air was sweet and sharp with spice, wrapped and tangled in one another, hungry and urgent, holding hard each to the other, close and shivering with need in the night; the divided heart made whole, the soul’s own home.

  From the Chronicle of Nikeh gen’Emras

  In the many-towered library of the ferry-folk of the reborn goddess Kinsai, on the black ridge overlooking the Fifth Cataract, there are books, a library to rival those of Marakand, Barrahe, and the Imperial Palace in the City of the Empress. Few even among the world’s scholars and wizards were aware of just how extensive the libraries of Kinsai’s folk were, before the destruction of their castles. Over many long lifetimes, they had built a vast collection of scrolls, bound codices, and unbound manuscripts. Histories, songs, romances, travellers’ tales, works of philosophy and mathematics, the knowledge of the earth
and the stars and the speculations and research of scholars—all that was offered, they were willing to take in.

  What is little known is that in the early days of the two castles, the Lower that has grown into the twin towns of Kinsai’s Crossing on the eastern shore, and Kinsai’s Landing on the west where the causeway of the marshes begins, and the Upper, of which only a few worked blocks of stone remain to be seen in the clear waters of the river, wandering children of Kinsai journeyed into the west, in the aftermath of the wars of Tiypur’s destruction. From those lands they carried away many relics of the dying empire, including books of history, of philosophy, of engineering, and the writings of the priests of the gods and goddesses, including the sacred texts of the priestesses of great Tiy, which told of the river and the journey and the rites of the dead.

  I have spent many years in study of these, which are written in a script and a language ancestor to that of the west in which I was born, but the last rhapso-dists who preserved any knowledge of the ancient speech died in the years of the long tyranny of the cult of the false god Jochiz, and those who could interpret the inscriptions on the ancient tombs with them. Only in the ferry castles beyond the Nearer Grass were there yet scholars who understood, a little, of what they held, and even they were more concerned with preserving than with understanding. That, they believed, was to be the task of others.

  I have made translations of the most significant of these into Imperial Nabbani, at the request of the god Nabban and his Rihswera, in memory of my Teacher. Others have set my words into the languages of Marakand and of the Nalzawan Commonwealth, for their libraries. In Tiypurian, I have written these my own histories.

  Also, Yeh-Lin Dotemon was my teacher, and though she told me little, she taught me to read the ancient scripts, to read and speak and think in the ancient language of my people, that I might find what was so close to being lost. And further, I have had long speech with the god of the northern reaches of the Nearer Grass, who was once a man named Holla-Sayan, and was once the god Sayan, and is now called Hollasayan, and who also, in some part, contains within himself the memories, though not the nature, of the devil Sarzahn.

  And Sarzahn was the great captain of the first rebellion of the Old Great Gods who became the devils.

  Here I make, for those who strive among the tribes of the west to save and to restore something of what was good in our land in the days of the princes and princesses and their towers, who fight with words and with knowledge and teaching as surely as any warrior with sword in hand to defend truth and justice and what is good in the world, to deny oppression and tyranny and the lies of priests who yet serve the evil of the devil who would have made himself a god, a brief tale of the mysteries understood by the priestesses of Tiy, long ago, and the changes that came to the world even before the fall of Tiypur, and again, long after, when the tale of the seven devils came at last to its end.

  If any story can ever be said to have an ending.

  The Old Great Gods were born of that which is beyond the worlds, and contained it within themselves, and observed it in joy and wonder. This is a great and holy mystery beyond all human understanding. We are as children, striving to see what is beyond our horizon. But what is within our reach, is the understanding that the Old Great Gods were the guardians, who held the worlds—not the world of humankind alone—in their hands and in their hearts. Our ancestors understood them as the guardians of the souls of the dead, which is a part of the truth, but only a shadow of it. There were many beliefs in many lands, and all were true, and none, and changed as the ways of the lands and folks changed, but in the valley of the Tiy in the west, and later in all the lands of the empire of the many princes under the emperors and empresses, it was believed that the Old Great Gods dwelt in an underground realm of peace, to which human souls were drawn on death, making their way along a great river of healing and cleansing, and that in time, these souls returned to new life. In later times, indeed in our own time and for many generations before, throughout all the known lands, it was said that the realm of the Old Great Gods was in the distant heavens, among or beyond the stars, and that the souls of the dead made their way to the peace and comfort of those heavens on a long, long road, on which they were healed of the hurts of their lives, and learned to repent and in their hearts to make atonement for the sins of their lives. From this realm of the Gods, few folk taught that there was any returning. But most folk held that the souls of beasts—like those of gods and goddesses of the earth and the demons, returned into the soul, the life, the heart of the world, and were reborn of it, not as what they had been, but as water, which flows to the ocean and is reborn as rain and lives again its many lives.

  The forgotten histories of Tiypur record that in the days of the empire, some among the Old Great Gods became fascinated with human individuality; they desired to preserve it by maintaining souls intact, not allowing them to merge back into the world-soul from which they had been born, as a child may collect pebbles at the seashore, taking them from the shore and treasuring them in a dark box, away from sun and wave, until they are forgotten. Others among the Gods wanted to enter into the human world to shape and guide it. And this they attempted to do, though the nature of the Old Great Gods was such that they could not long exist in their own form within the world, which was within them. They appeared as beings of light, brief enduring, or touched the world only through the dreams and visions of those they drew to speak for them, their acolytes, who strove to interpret their will and who rejected worship of the gods and goddesses of the hills and the waters to worship them as great and all-powerful mysteries. This was the first rebellion of devils; and there were many wars, for humans too often can admit of no complexity and set worship of the Old Great Gods against the worship of the gods of the earth, which had not been the intent of the rebels among the Old Great Gods, but was their crime. This all ended in disaster and the deaths of gods and demons, as Old Great Gods fought Old Great Gods through their followers among the lands of the west, few of whom had any true idea of why they fought.

  It is easier to start a rockfall on the mountainside than to call it back.

  The rebel Gods—the devils, those who had sought to partake of the life of the world by entering into the thoughts and dreams of philosophers and wizards— were defeated and sealed by the victorious Old Great Gods in the cold hells, which I myself have heard those who have spoken with devils describe as a physical place, as real as this earth about us, a world of ice and copper sun, yet that is a mystery and a poet’s metaphor, a truth, but not the truth.

  But after over a thousand years had passed, the seven devils of the stories every child knows escaped from the cold hells, led by Vartu and its—for the Old Great Gods are neither male nor female—beloved companion Jasberek. They tried a new way to exist in the world, binding their souls with that of a human, in order to live in the physical world, each sharing their nature with the other, mortal and immortal. This experiment was a great disaster, as the devils became entangled with human ambitions and sins and lost sight of themselves. Many wrongs were committed in the world because of this act, and much suffering followed.

  And that is a story we all know, which led to a century of terrible wars, and the binding of the seven devils, and their awakening, and the hills and the waters again knew the deaths of gods and goddesses and countless human-folk, as had happened too in the days of Tiypur’s fall.

  And in the end, the devil Jochiz sought to become in himself the god and the soul of the world, perhaps even desiring to usurp the place of the world-soul that contains all. And the devil Vartu destroyed him and herself both, and shattered the seals of the cold hells, and the gates of the far heavens, and released both the imprisoned devils, which is to say the rebel Old Great Gods, and the souls of the dead who were garnered in the heavens, held lovingly, but for all that held against the will of the life of the earth, from flowing again to rejoin the world-soul from which they had been born.

  And what may be t
he nature of the fate that awaits the souls of the dead now, we do not know, but those who dream deepest, the shamans of the birch forests of Baisirbsk, the mystics of the great desert between the Nalzawan Commonwealth and the Rostengan coast, the god of Nabban on his high mountain, in his deep river, say that it may be that the Old Great Gods and devils are reunited, and again hold the world within their heart, and that what is soul may linger long in their care, but flows in the end again to soul, to the world and the life of the world, when its time is ripe to do so.

  And so we are all, every living thing, woman and bird, weed and hound and fish and spider, demon and god and the least worm of the soil, the stuff of life. We are the living, born and dying and reborn, soul of the world.

  We are one.

  FINIS