Touched by the Gods

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Oh, really?” A young farmer named Onnell glanced around the room and noticed Malledd. “Did the gods tell you anything about that, O Chosen One?”

  Malledd, who had been sitting calmly minding his own business, went suddenly cold with anger. His eyes narrowed as he focused on Onnell's face, and the room suddenly fell silent.

  “Shut up, Onnell,” Malledd said.

  Onnell was sufficiently drunk to protest, “I was just...”

  Malledd stood up without bothering to move his chair, and sent the table and his mug of ale crashing to the floor. His fists were clenched.

  “I said shut up, Onnell,” he growled.

  Onnell's face went white. His friends tried to slide away from him without being seen to do so. Gremayan's hand fell toward his boot, where the pommel of a dagger showed.

  Onnell was not a small or timid man; he was, in fact, a great drunken brawling lout, Malledd's second cousin and six years Malledd's senior. For years he had been the largest man in the village, if not quite a match for Hmar in strength.

  Those years had ended not so very long ago when Malledd had come into his full growth.

  Malledd had long since made it known that no one was to speak of the curious incident at his birth, and had enforced this by any means available. In recent days this had included soundly thrashing several grown men, sometimes two or three at a time.

  Onnell got slowly to his feet, and for a moment the two men sized each other up in deadly silence.

  Onnell stood a few inches over six feet, muscled like an ox; Malledd, still growing, was already an inch or so taller, and even broader, with the massive strength that came from hours of beating iron into shape. Onnell had been drinking for hours; Malledd hadn't finished his first ale.

  And Onnell had nothing against Malledd, no long-held grudges or general dislike. Malledd had done him no wrong. Malledd was, except for this one quirk, a very pleasant, if rather quiet, fellow.

  “It was meant as a harmless jest, Malledd,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

  “Jest all you like when I'm not here, Onnell,” Malledd said, “but every man, woman, and child in Grozerodz knows I will not tolerate any mention of that damned priest and his stupid stories in my presence!”

  “I know, I know,” Onnell said, “I'm sorry. Drink got the better of me.”

  Malledd hesitated. His fit of temper was passing, and he knew that Onnell was genuinely contrite. The best thing to do might have been to storm out, but he wanted to hear what Gremayan had to say.

  And he wanted to be there when Anva came.

  “All right, then,” he said. He bent down, tipped the table back into position, and picked up his now-empty mug. He beckoned to Zenisha, then turned to Gremayan and said, “You were saying?”

  Someone laughed nervously.

  “I was saying,” Gremayan said, a bit warily, his hand still close to his boot, “that a new sort of magic is reported, somewhere in the east.”

  One of the farmers snorted. “As if it mattered! Unless they've found a way to make the oracles speak again, who cares what the priests can do?”

  “Ah,” Gremayan said, straightening as he warmed once again to his tale, “but that's what makes this interesting. According to the stories, this new magic can be used by people who are not priests! Naturally, all the high priests and temple magicians are upset about that, but I don't know if there's much they can do.”

  That started several people speaking at once, but after a moment they sorted themselves out, and Nedduel was chosen to ask, “So what does this new magic do? Can it foretell the future, as the oracles could?”

  Gremayan shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that,” he said. “At least, I don't think so. The stories say these new magicians can fly like birds, and heal wounds, and make stones glow, and a dozen other things, but they can't see the future even as well as the astrologers.”

  “Fly?”

  “Like the gods?”

  “Blasphemy!”

  “Madness!”

  Again, a dozen voices spoke at once.

  Malledd's was not among them; he was content to listen.

  He noticed that the older men, Nedduel in particular, seemed to be upset by the news, while the younger seemed, like himself, merely intrigued. He supposed that was because the older men were more set in their ways. Change of any sort would upset them.

  He remembered how they had ranted and raved when word came that the oracles had fallen silent, how Nedduel had, once the harvest was safely in, taken a deputation to the temple in Biekedau to protest.

  It hadn't done any good, of course. The priests had wearily confirmed that the gods had stopped answering questions, had repeated the explanation that the gods thought it was time humanity became less dependent on divine guidance, and had called the temple guards when the farmers raised their voices.

  Apparently there had been several incidents of violence when the news broke. Some people had been completely unreasonable; one group had proposed seizing the shrine in Duvrenarodz, which Malledd thought was totally absurd, since there had never been an oracle there in the first place. Others had suggested marching on Seidabar, which made somewhat more sense – but Seidabar was a hundred miles away, at least, and there were already reports of riots there, riots that were forcibly put down by the Imperial Guard.

  Nothing had come of it, and life had gone on much as before. There had been no great unforeseen disasters, despite the lack of oracular advice. The Empire endured, with the aid of its soldiers and the magic the priests still had.

  There was a widespread suspicion, though, that the silence of the oracles meant that the Empire's best days were past.

  Malledd could see being upset at the silence of the oracles; that was undeniably bad news. This new magic, though, sounded as if it might be very useful, and still the older men of the village were upset.

  Malledd supposed it was the mere fact of change that upset them. After all, there were so few changes in the world these days. The Empress Beretris had been on the throne since before most of them were born – since before his father Hmar was born. The Domdur had ruled all the world for generations; no one remembered a time when they had not. The gods reigned undisputed, the Hundred Moons followed their complex paths through the skies, and all was at peace, and had been for as long as anyone present had lived.

  They weren't accustomed to change.

  It wasn't like the bad old days in the stories, when the Empire was surrounded by enemies and constantly at war, when the gods themselves had demanded that the Empire expand and expand regardless of what its people might want, demanded that mortal men and women die for the Empire.

  A new kind of magic that could be learned by laypeople – that was an interesting thought, and nothing to be afraid of. Malledd wondered what it would be like to fly like a bird.

  Then he shook his head and took a gulp of ale.

  He wasn't going to go off to the mountains of Govya, a thousand miles or more to the east, to learn magic. He had a perfectly good life planned out right where he was. He was his father's junior partner in the smithy now, and when Hmar grew old and retired Malledd would be the only smith in Grozerodz. He would marry Anva, if he could possibly convince her and her parents to have him, and one of the other pretty girls in town if he could not, and would build himself a house on the other side of the forge from his parents' house, and raise a dozen children there. He would go to the temple in Biekedau once a year to make his ritual obeisance to Dremeger, god of metalworkers, and maybe someday he would visit Seidabar to get a look at the Empress, or perhaps someday, the farther in the future the better, to see one of her three children crowned as her successor.

  But he wasn't going to go a thousand miles to Govya, or anywhere else in the east.

  Gremayan was explaining for the third time that he didn't know how the new magic worked when Anva arrived, looking for Drugen. Malledd gulped down the rest of his ale, almost choking on it, and hurried to her side.

 
She smiled at the sight of him, but said only, “I'm looking for my father.”

  Malledd wordlessly pointed out Drugen and his cronies; he was too stricken by Anva's presence to speak.

  It was another hour or so before they managed to get Drugen out the door, with Anva on one side and Malledd on the other; when their hands touched against Drugen's back Malledd started as if he had been poked with a needle. Anva's hand was warm and small and smooth, and he wished he could clasp it in his own without worrying about old Drugen.

  But he couldn't. Together, they escorted Anva's father out of Bardetta's little tavern.

  The sun was down and the rain had become a torrent by the time they got Drugen safely home to his wife, soaking them both to the skin. Anva's mother took one look at Malledd and invited him in to dry off. He was only too glad to accept.

  They sat side by side before the fire, with Drugen slumped in the chimney corner, drying out. Anva's hair hung in dripping ropes – and even so, Malledd thought she was beautiful. He stared at her, at the curve of her chin and the drop of water hanging from the tip of her nose.

  She glanced over and saw him staring, and blushed – but for the first time, neither of them looked away.

  Ten days later the engagement was announced, and Malledd had forgotten his interest in any magic but that special magic the gods give young lovers. He sat beside Anva in the tavern, his arm around her shoulders, as their friends cheered the news.

  “May Baranmel dance at your wedding!” Onnell called – he and Malledd had fully made up their differences.

  The crowd echoed the traditional blessing.

  Malledd smiled and hugged Anva, but somewhere in the back of his mind he wondered whether Baranmel would dance at their wedding. It was a sign of the gods' favor and a promise of good fortune if the god of festivities came to a marriage celebration, and wasn't Malledd supposed to be favored by the gods? Wasn't that what Dolkout's letter promised?

  But in these days when the oracles no longer heard the gods, it might be that Baranmel, the god of celebration, no longer attended human weddings.

  Whether Baranmel and the other gods smiled on him or not didn't matter, Malledd told himself. So long as he had Anva, that was all the good fortune he needed.

  Chapter Four

  Bardetta's nameless inn, where Malledd and Anva sat among their friends, stood in the center of Grozerodz, facing south onto the village square. The “square” itself was an irregular open space, only vaguely rectangular, surrounded by a dozen separate houses and shops, with patches of garden between them. Three lanes meandered away from this center; two rambled out past various shops and farmsteads, while one ran past the graveyard and down to the smithy and a nearby stream.

  In addition to the lanes the square was bisected by a genuine highway. This road ran through roughly fifty miles of gently-rolling hills, from the river port of Biekedau at its northeast end to the hilltop town of Yildau, founded a thousand years before as a border fortress but now a center for mining and manufacture, at the southwest; along the way it passed through the villages of Grozerodz, Duvrenarodz, and Uamor. The road had no universally-agreed-upon name; the people of Biekedau called it the Yildau Road, while the folk of Yildau naturally referred to it as the Biekedau Road. For the most part, the villagers in between called it simply “the road.”

  Biekedau itself stood on the southern banks of the Vren River, just below the lower falls that marked the limit of navigation. Since the reign of Suogai III people had spoken of building a canal and locks around the falls, but so far the merchants of Biekedau had prevented the construction of such a thing, for fear it would threaten their profits. The wisdom of this policy had been debated for some three centuries.

  The hill country ended at Biekedau; once across the Vren, a traveler heading east would find the land utterly flat and largely featureless for well over a hundred miles. The rich soil of this plain had fed the troops of the Domdur Empire from the earliest days of its expansion.

  Almost two hundred miles east of the lower falls of the Vren the plain was broken again by the broad, shallow valley of a wide river. For centuries, as the Domdur spread their power and influence largely by sea, before the gods demanded further expansion overland, the Grebiguata River served as the eastern boundary of the Empire.

  Beyond the Grebiguata the plain continued, extending hundreds of miles farther before it almost imperceptibly began to fade into the rolling foothills of the Govya Mountains. All this open land fell in a single long campaign in the reign of Gogror II as the Domdur marched relentlessly eastward, driving the disorganized natives before them.

  The mountains, however, proved as great a barrier as anything the Domdur had ever encountered, and where a few brief years saw the entire plain captured, a century was not enough to take the Govya Mountains. Pockets of resistance held out in isolated valleys for generation after generation, long after the Domdur had swept through the passes and over the peaks into the lands beyond.

  There were tales that not all the resistance was entirely natural. Stories of black magic, and of things lurking in or under the mountains, persisted.

  Beyond the mountains the ancient, wealthy lands of Matua and Greya were conquered in short order, requiring about a decade apiece to be absorbed into the Empire. The northern wastes of Shibir put up no resistance, and needed merely be occupied.

  To the south, though, the nomads of the deserts of Olnami struggled fiercely against their fate. Under the leadership of the Nazakri clan the Olnami fought a guerrilla war against the Domdur for a hundred and fifty years before at last, in the year of the gods' favor 788, the Domdur general and divine champion Ruamel captured Basari, the leader of the Nazakri, together with his six sons, and forced a surrender.

  Basari Nazakri swore then that he would never again take up arms against the Domdur, and that neither would his sons nor his grandsons; each of his sons swore, as well. An oath is a sacred thing among the Olnami, and that ended all organized resistance; the desert became the province of Olnamia, and the Nazakri disappeared from the Domdur histories.

  They did not, however, disappear from beneath the Hundred Moons, or from their own histories.

  Basari Nazakri died in 791, poisoned by a member of the rival Chisari clan who had declared him a traitor for his surrender. His sons avenged him, though two of the six died in the process – the Chisari were not Domdur, and not protected by Basari's oath. By 802 the Chisari clan was no more – but the Nazakri were broken as well, all but forgotten by the rest of the Olnami.

  Basari's four surviving sons lived out their natural spans – though for Asanli, the youngest, that was brief, as the gods sent a fever that claimed him in the spring of 809. They raised their own sons, and taught them the history of the Olnami, of the Nazakri, and of Basari's oath.

  And they, in turn, raised and taught their sons, the grandsons of Basari's sons.

  With the generation after that the Nazakri were free of their oaths – but by then the other Olnami had lost any interest in fighting the Domdur. The old nomads were scattered, their way of life lost; more Olnami lived in Domdur fortress towns than in their traditional tents. The Domdur had prevailed over the entire continent, from the Forsten Peninsula in the furthest west to the Greyan coasts in the east, and under their rule the land was peaceful and prosperous; the oracles guided the Domdur in governing wisely and generously.

  Some of the Nazakri despaired; some shrugged and went on with their lives; but a handful nursed their ancient hatred of the Domdur and waited, waited for some opportunity, searched for some means, any means, to avenge Basari's defeat and the destruction of the old Olnami nation.

  One such was Rebiri Nazakri.

  Of Basari's six sons, the eldest had sired no children before dying in the vendetta against the Chisari, and the second sired only daughters. The third, Dayeri, had four sons, of whom the eldest, born in the year 798, was named Shaoni.

  Rebiri could trace his ancestry through twelve generations, eldest son
of eldest son, to Shaoni Nazakri; he was the rightful lord of the Nazakri, leader of the clan, and therefore warlord of all Olnami. By rights, he believed, he should be clad in the richest silks and living in a fine pavilion, eating sweetmeats from golden platters.

  On the summer night when Malledd the smith's son announced his betrothal in Grozerodz, Rebiri Nazakri sat hunched over a small cooking fire in a cave in the eastern foothills of the Govya Mountains, wearing goatskin breeches and a tattered woolen cloak, listening to his stomach growl.

  He looked up at the mouth of the cave and in his native tongue elaborately cursed the gods of the Domdur who had reduced him to this, and the gods of the Olnami, lost or dead, who had permitted it.

  His ancestors had left the deserts of Olnami more than a century ago. Inspired by the old stories of supernatural resistance, they had in time come to these mountains searching for some weapon they might use against the Domdur. While they had found many strange things in Govya, they had found no power that could defy the Domdur gods. Rebiri was reduced to shaking a fist at those gods and shouting his spite.

  Sometimes he almost thought he could feel someone, or something, listening to him – but usually there was only empty silence. On this particular occasion his curses seemed no more than useless, meaningless words.

  Then a shadow fell across the opening, blocking out what little daylight remained. Rebiri squinted through the cookfire's smoke.

  “Father?” a boy's voice called, in the Olnami speech.

  “Aldassi?” Rebiri replied, recognizing his eldest son. “Come in here where I can see you. What have you brought?” He thought he could smell the scent of something freshly dead – their supper, he hoped.

  “Duck, Father – I caught a duck!”

  Rebiri smiled. “Excellent!” he said. “Bring it here.”

  The boy obeyed quickly, handing his father a plump dead fowl; the man began efficiently stripping it of its feathers.

  “I got carrots, too,” Aldassi said, kneeling at his father's side. “I ran some errands in the market at Dolya Korien to earn them.”