Fierce Gods

by Col Buchanan

Outside, the gusts had abated for a moment, so that in the darkness Nico could hear something snuffling about near the entrance; a gruffan perhaps, seeking out snow lice with its long snout, even in this weather. Remarkable, just how sharpened his hearing was in this new body.

  ‘You liked living there?’

  For a moment he didn’t know what his father meant, and then he realized he was talking about Bar-Khos.

  He settled back, trying to recall his time living rough in the besieged city, letting the recollections come to him in whatever order they wanted, though what came to him mostly were memories of Boon, his companion and protector for all that time.

  In his mind came the sight of Boon barking at the moons and leaping about on his paws just as Nico did, both of them dancing to the pounding music in the same wild fashion as all the other sweating youths around them. Youths tattooed and pierced like native Contrarè, crested with hair like travelling Tuchoni, as high as the moons they were all howling at, leaping at, crashing into each other to the band’s beating drums, the thrum of jitars, the shrill racing cries of scroo pipes . . . Wolf dancing, they called it, those savage street youths of Bar-Khos, reckless and mad, raised in the rumbling midst of a siege. Wolf dancing to the full moons on the roof of a ruined city warehouse, howling their freedom while the guns of the eternal siege barked away like dogs of war.

  Boon had loved every moment of it.

  ‘Sometimes it was fun,’ he recalled, smiling to himself, wishing that Boon was alive and here with him. ‘When I wasn’t starving, or just trying to find somewhere I could be alone for a while. The city is so packed now.’

  His father was watching him closely now, as though trying to peer through the gulf of space that hung between them, trying to span the missing years since he had left.

  ‘Like father like son,’ he said with a shrug of his head.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You always were something of a loner. Same as me.’

  Nico frowned, knowing it to be true. In his youth he had been closer to his dog Boon than he had been with those of his own age.

  He recalled children taunting him outside the schoolhouse, accusing him of being a coward for having a coward father who had fled the fighting. And he knew they had been like that with him because he had stood alone.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ he confessed. ‘I always feel like a stranger in groups. An outsider. Someone looking in from without. Even when I’m amongst people, I’m not really amongst them.’

  ‘Well, that’s your curse and your blessing right there.’

  ‘It’s felt mostly like a curse, so far,’ grumbled Nico, staring down at the flames in a reflective mood of past heartaches.

  A dry snort of air from his father.

  ‘Only because you haven’t found your feet yet. Do you still go around worrying what other people think of you?’

  ‘No more than anyone else does, I guess . . .’

  ‘Well don’t. You ever look at other people’s lives? Hypocrites and narrow-minded fools the lot of them, and those who aren’t will take you as you are. You just need to live the way you need to live, never mind the opinions of others.’

  Nico prodded a log with his stockinged foot, prompting a crackle of flames. He looked out through the entrance of the hollow tree and saw movement out there, the furry back of a gruffan disappearing into the stormy night. Such a simple life, he thought to himself with a spark of envy.

  ‘About all I can think of right now is what my mother is going through. And that girl we saw today in the slave market. How they’re both hunkering down somewhere hungry and miserable and forsaken, if they’re even that lucky, while we sit here talking in the heat and waiting out the storm.’

  ‘You’re too sensitive, son. You always have been.’

  ‘What, like you?’

  ‘Aye, like me. You’ll break yourself against the world like this if you don’t harden yourself against it first.’

  ‘Great. That really helps me right now.’

  Cole finished wiping down the rifle, or decided he’d had enough, for he placed it away again while he puffed on what remained of his roll-up, thinking to himself, searching for an answer.

  He followed Nico’s gaze outside.

  ‘We stayed not far from here once,’ sounded his voice beside Nico. ‘Visiting my mother’s sister, you remember? Bahn was there too, my brother, with his family.’

  It took him a few moments of grasping, but at last a memory formed in his mind. ‘Yes. They had a rice farm. They flooded their fields for the growing season. So?’

  His father’s eyes were gleaming now.

  ‘You remember how we used to play in the fields with the rainbow fish?’

  Nico leaned back from the smoke of the fire, images flaring in his head. Bright days of sunshine with the white heat bouncing off the water, brilliant sparkles dancing outwards from the ripples of their movements. All of them splashing through the flooded field chasing after the tiny rainbow fish that flashed between the rice shoots and their feet. His mother laughing in that carefree way that she had back then, made ever more giddy by the tickles of the fish darting in around her glittering anklets, her hair flaming against the sun.

  ‘I remember. The fish kept the roots fertilized and clean of pests. They were almost tame. And clever too. They seemed to recognize different people. Even played with them.’

  ‘Yes, but do you remember how you felt in those days? Carefree and full of joy?’

  ‘Like a warm wind flowing through me.’

  ‘Then hold on to that. In your darkest moments, when all the light seems to have gone out around you, remember back to that time. Remember that life is mostly good if you allow it to be, if others allow it to be.’

  ‘But what of hope?’ rasped Nico, and his voice – ground up by emotions – sounded older than his years. ‘Right now some hope would be a bloody fine thing too.’

  ‘You want hope?’

  ‘Yes, I want hope!’

  Cole leaned closer towards him. His eyes were glazed with fire. ‘Tomorrow, we’re going to catch up with your mother on the road. And one way or the other we’re going to free her. By the time we make it back to the city, those charts I left with my brother will have made it into the right hands, and this whole war will be over.’

  He settled a hand on Nico’s shoulder.

  ‘You mean the world to me, son. You and your mother. I promise all is going to be well, you hear me?’

  Nico blinked tears from his eyes, wishing it could be true.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Coya

  In the Council Chambers of Bar-Khos, the high glass windows had darkened with the blackness of night so that they hung like ominous portals over the assembly below, rattling with the strengthening gale outside. Oil lights had been lit in the great crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, bright and trembling. Directly beneath them, a pool of water sunken into the floor shimmered with the reflected faces of the gathered people, all of them turned towards the bald-headed priest in his robes of white silk, arms crossed within the warmth of his sleeves as he spoke.

  The Peace Envoy for the Empire stood alone on the floor of the Bar-Khosian Council Chambers with a dreamy look in his eyes, as though he was intoxicated on something, or mildly concussed, or perhaps simply the kind of man who tended to look elsewhere when he talked, for he gazed over their heads even as his steady voice addressed the crowded, silent chamber, reciting his speech from memory. Something about peace and reconciliation at the reluctant point of a sword.

  By the water’s edge, leaning on the ebony grip of his cane, Coya Zeziké stared down at the pool’s surface only half listening to what the Mannian priest was saying.

  Coya was contemplating other things as he chewed absently on one of the hazii cakes he carried with him everywhere to relieve his pains. Thinking of his wife in fact, back on his home island of Minos. Reminded of her by the subtle aftertaste of hazii weed on his tongue, of all things.

 
Rechelle’s mouth had tasted of the herb the last time they had kissed, lying on her bed unable to rise from it, gazing up at him with her pretty features hollowed out with fatigue – his wife weakened dangerously by another late miscarriage.

  Like a bringer of miracles, Rechelle had been the one to prescribe him the herb in the first place, releasing Coya almost instantly from a lifelong burden of physical agonies which had gradually been wearing him down to the point of immobility. Pains which hadn’t gone away, precisely, but were blunted enough that he could live with them while maintaining the momentum of his life. Rechelle swore by the effectiveness of hazii weed for all manner of ailments, from pain relief to melancholy to those rare cancerous tumours of the skin and organs. A natural herbalist like her mother, she cast the weed into honeyed cakes or as a refined oil, and used it to help her family, friends and neighbours alike with that same warmth of heart he had fallen so deeply in love with; a woman he would always revere, his life companion and lover. Thinking of Rechelle now made him miss her with an ache that overcame all his others.

  Standing over his cane, Coya swallowed down the rest of the dry cake in his mouth, exhaling nosily through his nostrils while the Mannian priest’s voice droned somewhere just above the level of his thoughts.

  Half a dozen steps away his bodyguard and lifelong protector glanced in Coya’s direction, checking to see that he was still alive. Marsh swayed on the balls of his feet, bored as Coya was.

  It seemed as though the Peace Envoy would never stop talking. And the more he talked the hotter he was getting, despite the chillness of the air, so that now the priest dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. Even the Michinè ministers, used to endless dreary pontificating, were beginning to cough and shift about in their growing restlessness.

  Once more Coya drifted away from it all, buoyed on the soothing tide of the herb, thinking of Rechelle.

  His wife had been warned about the risks of trying for another child, that she could lose her own life in the attempt. But she had tried anyway, and indeed she had nearly lost her life in the process, when miscarriage had caused internal bleeding that even now, weeks later, hadn’t entirely stopped. He should be at her bedside now back in Minos, reading her stories and tending to her needs, not here in these dank council chambers in the middle of a siege, risking his life again on yet another errand for the sake of the democras. What if Rechelle’s strength failed to recover and she faded away before he could return? How would he ever live with himself, with the grief and loss and guilt of such a thing?

  He wouldn’t, he knew. Rechelle’s loss would be the end of him too.

  Coya shivered, frowning unhappily. It was cold in this large hall used for banquets and the visits of important dignitaries, even with the several hearths roaring with fires. No doubt a result of all the naked stone walls absorbing the heat, typically Khosian in their austerity, a few hangings thrown up here and there to counter the sparseness of the place, a few rugs and curtains.

  The rectangular pool was an ancient feature sunken into the floor. Around its edges grew copper-leaf creeper vines and bushy dwarf trees rooted in the cracks of the flagging, so that it resembled a little oasis of life within a vault of stone.

  Not all oases are mirages, Coya recited obliquely, recalling a saying of the desert Alhazii.

  At one end burbled a gentle, natural spring barely disturbing the surface, the famed Spring of Awakening. Before the revolution, this hall had been used for the crowning of the old kings of Khos. It was here that the newly endowed kings had imbibed of the waters in order to gain a state of enlightenment from their divine properties; a ridiculous tradition, Coya thought, considering the behaviour of the average Khosian king back then.

  In those days, long after Khos had been settled, and the native Contrarè driven into what remained of the Windrush forest, the settlers themselves had seen the land they now lived on taken from them by force, by their own rulers. Open common lands that had been enclosed into vast estates in which they had been worked like cattle simply to survive. A system that had survived for so long it had become what was considered as normal.

  Such hypocrisies in this world, he thought with a minute shake of his head, and he looked to the priest still spouting his nonsense to the gathered Michinè ministers. Steal a loaf of bread and you could have found yourself physically branded a thief; yet steal a people’s land and you were lauded as a king, a civilizer. Murder your neighbour and get strung up from the gallows; murder a dozen people, a hundred people, a hundred thousand people in the name of conquest, and your name became glorified in the history books.

  The larger the crime, the more noble it seemed to become.

  Coya smacked his lips together, glancing to the shallow waters near his feet. He was thirsty all of a sudden.

  A few Michinè were watching him as he carefully bent down and dipped a hand into the surface of the pool. Expressions aghast, they looked on as he raised the holy spring waters to his lips and took a noisy slurp from them, washing down the last few crumbs in his mouth like some suddenly enlightened king of old.

  The water tasted strangely bitter in his mouth.

  Tasted like a lie.

  *

  ‘I will say it again,’ echoed the voice of the priest through the long hall, finally piercing the space of Coya’s thoughts. Up on the podium, the white-robed Peace Envoy was at last approaching some kind of crescendo, some kind of point to his speech. ‘I will say it again, one last time, so you may remember these words when you formulate your reply. Should the people of Bar-Khos agree to open the city gates for the forces of the Holy Empire of Mann, and to accept our rightful reign, we swear to spare the lives of every man, woman and child.’

  Coya grunted as he straightened over his cane; a young man carrying the burdens of the old, looking up from the water to stare hard at the imperial priest dictating threats to them in their own city.

  It was just as he said it would be. The envoy trying to divide them with his words.

  ‘And if we do not surrender?’ called out Chonas, First Minister of Khos.

  The envoy spread out his arms in a gesture of reasonableness.

  ‘Then when Bar-Khos falls, it will be on your own heads what happens to your people.’

  Their voices rose like a surging tide even as hail hammered the windows along the northern wall. Chonas held up a hand to try and settle their protests. He stood with most of the Michinè Council behind him, or at least what was left of the Council, for some were missing, feigning illness while they were rumoured to have already fled the besieged city by ship.

  ‘You came here under flag of truce to tell us this?’ asked Chonas, raising his bushy eyebrows high.

  ‘I was sent here in the hope of speaking some sense into you, yes.’

  More noisy protests sounded around the edges of the hall, where the rest of the gathering was comprised of citizens from the city Associations, those Khosian street societies which helped to keep the Council somewhat in check. Coya knew their presence here was a hard-won victory for the ordinary citizenry of Bar-Khos. It had taken a revolution and further decades of bitter struggle before they had gained a voice in the processes of power, a time in which the Michinè class had tried every possible means, including murder and subversion, to suppress their rise.

  But now they were united, Michinè and Associations alike, in their hostility towards the lone priest standing in the centre of the floor, this supposed Envoy of Peace.

  The Mannian was dabbing at his clammy bald head with his handkerchief again, looking flushed. But then he turned with everyone else, startled, towards a sudden commotion from the rear of the hall as someone flung open the double doors, injecting a rush of cold air along its length.

  Behind it came the rap of hobnailed boots.

  ‘Surrender or die, is it?’ declared General Creed in his full armour and bearskin coat, striding past Coya’s position, reeking of the smoke and blood of the day’s action. ‘Your people made that same promise to u
s ten years ago. Yet here we are, still standing.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ agreed Coya with a rap of his cane upon the stone floor, gladdened to see the Lord Protector making an appearance. Yet the Michinè only frowned to see him here.

  Again the priest opened his arms wide in a magnanimous gesture. ‘That is hardly what I—’

  ‘Enough!’ Creed growled. ‘What more do we need to hear from this man? Why continue with this charade?’

  ‘Because we are not savages,’ replied one of the Michinè as he stepped forward into the light, and Coya recognized him as Pericules, the new Minister of Defence. A man barely qualified for the position, save that his ailing uncle had recently passed it on to him. ‘He has come here to discuss terms with us. The least we can do is engage with him on the issues at hand.’

  ‘Give me one good reason why?’ Creed asked, clearly as baffled as Coya.

  ‘I’ll give you fifty thousand good reasons. Encamped right now beyond the city’s northern wall, threatening to overrun us.’

  ‘Pah,’ spat Creed in disgust, casting that aside with a throw of his hand. ‘In this weather, in these temperatures, that army out there will already be unravelling at the edges. Diseases will be running rampant. Common illnesses from exposure and worsening morale. It’s all empty bravado and he knows it is. We need only hold on to our resolution here and they are finished. Why do you think they have sent someone to parley with us in the first place? Because they care about saving lives? Or because they worry that they’re facing defeat in the middle of a Khosian winter?’

  ‘They did not seem to be unravelling this morning, when I gazed upon them from the wall,’ said Pericules.

  His words were not at all what Coya expected to hear from the Khosian Minister of Defence, particularly before a representative of their enemy. Perhaps it was only the man’s inexperience betraying his fears to them all, or the usual Michinè belligerence towards the Lord Protector himself for being a common man. But then Pericules spoke on, and what he said stunned Coya into stillness.

  ‘Come now. All of you. There is no one rushing to our aid here. We are alone in this. If we do not make these hard choices to save ourselves, who will?’