Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  He was a dead man. His words were gone. He was alone, trembling, on a stage in the eyes of the city, and the play was ruined and he was a dead man. Mia scrambled to her feet and backed away, gulping sobs, as the guards laid hands on him, shouting for Shouja Wey, demanding, was this the slave Kaeo, was this Kaeo the actor?

  Kaeo was drowning, and a cold wind roared in his ears. He could not move. Kick, bite, curse—the boy he had been in another life might have done so, Dwei Kaeo might have hoped to fight and squirm away and run, but Kaeo of the Flowering Orange had learnt years ago that the only hope, ever, was to cower small inside himself and wait for it to end. Whatever it might be.

  Stupid. His only end was death. But still he could not fight.

  They dragged him from the stage and stripped him of mask and robes. Shouja Wey raged up and down, demanding to know for what cause they came to ruin the performance, did they not know that the second secretary of the office of the Pine Lord of Wizards was a patron of their company?

  Treason, the captain over the guards said, a spy of the rebel and heretic Dan. Wey, generally a most unviolent master, went silent and then kicked Kaeo in the ribs and turned his back.

  Kaeo understood and did not blame him. Mia wept and wailed, and half of the company wept and wailed with her. Fear as much as grief.

  They bundled him, shivering in his loincloth, out the gate. He walked stumbling and as if blind, the very paving stones of the narrow street between buildings and canal seeming to rise and fall like waves, the bridges betraying him, rising in unexpected humps, tumbling downwards. Boats on the canals. He ought to heave himself free and throw himself in to drown, but they had roped him between them.

  Shouja Wey and Mia were taken as well, and in the public rooms of the magistrate’s mansion on the broad South Branch Canal they were all beaten, slaves and master alike, while the magistrate demanded of him things Kaeo told himself he was too stupid to answer or even understand, told himself he did not understand, because he was so very far away and the wind, the roaring water, so loud in his ears. He heard Mia’s sobbing, like the crying of the children, the lost ones, lost Kaeo whose mother had sold him and his sister to feed his younger brothers, to put one more season’s seed into the grudging earth.

  Kaeo told them in the end, of course he did. He cringed and whined and grovelled and gave them the Islander woman who dealt in mother-of-pearl for the makers of jewellery—because they must already have her, or she was traitor. She was the only one who knew his name.

  She was dead. They let that slip, somewhere along the way. Her heart failed under the questioning. She had not been young. Dead, but not soon enough for Kaeo, to whom she had passed small packages, scrolls of poetry, classics wrapped in oiled silk and some secret messages, for those who could read them, pricked in the paper.

  Who did he give them to? He did not know. Men, women. Wey was a kindly master and did not object to his actors and musicians earning some little extra, when an admirer wanted to hire a performer for an evening of poetry recital or music or . . . other things. He took only the half-share the law allowed him, too. A slave might save for their own freedom so. Who did he meet? Kaeo might be hired for an evening of wine-drinking and poetry in some upper room, and find there was no party, no gathering of friends at all, only, perhaps, a private little dinner, one or two people, and he might be invited to join them, and he might be asked to sing or recite, because there had to be a reason for his absence and his meeting, did there not, and if you had Kaeo for the evening, of course you would want him to sing or recite. Was there anything else? Once, he did admit, he had spent the whole of the night. No, he did not know the names of that woman, either. No, she hadn’t paid him, not for that; she was a guard to the old man he had been meeting with and they had taken a liking to one another, he and she. Had he ever taken payment for such—sniff—services . . . ? Of course he had received gifts, but not that night. What was her name? He didn’t know; he hadn’t asked; she hadn’t said. A foreigner, Five Cities, a mercenary. Someone called him a common whore, then, and they were distracted, making him suffer for that. But they remembered their purpose after a while. Was her master a colony man too? No, he didn’t think so. He had no accent. How did he know them? There might be a phrase given, a line of a song, the old folk-ballad of the Brother Swans, and he would hand over what he carried. Never the same person twice, and they were always strangers to the city, he thought; he did not know their faces. The names they gave were only clan-names, Master Lai, Mistress Zhung, which was not the proper form, and often the clan and the accent or face were from opposite ends of the empire. There was even a man of Dar-Lathi once, who carried himself with the arrogance of a prince, and a woman with the ivory-cream skin of the north coastal province of Argya, who smelt so of spices she might have been a merchant, but her hands were calloused and her body hard with muscle. . . . He noticed these things; he kept them to himself as long as he could, and he had no true names, and they were gone, all long gone. The grey-haired man with the missing two fingers and the accent of Shihpan Province in the west he kept and swallowed. He had been only last week. He might not yet have left the Golden City for—for—Kaeo did not know, he did not know, how could he know? He only took the parcels and passed them on, he knew nothing of how they were marked; he never read them.

  Was it Prince Dan he served? The Wild Girls, the so-called queens of the rebel tribes of the jungles and highlands of Dar-Lathi? He did not know, he did not know, he only did what he was asked. . . .

  Prince Dan. The traitor, the rebel, the Traditionalist who defied the manifest will of Mother and Father Nabban and the blessed emperor with his lies of a return to a golden age that never was. . . .

  Eventually, Kaeo gave them even the eight-fingered man. He would surely have fled by now. He surely would flee; to arrest Kaeo so publicly was folly; all the city would talk of it. The governor of the city might have meant a warning to any rebel sympathisers: see, this celebrated actor, this singer beloved of so many—a traitor and a traitor’s death, even for him. But it would be another warning as well. It must be. Kaeo did not want to carry the Shihpan man’s death.

  His pulse was loud in his ears. Drums. The flute rose, coiling about him again, as in the dance of the battle. Yeh-Lin’s mask. . . . A great pressure of words, a flood drowning his heart. “Are you deaf that you can’t hear?”

  He screamed at them, spewing words like the vomit of too much wine. He could not contain the agony, the grief, the helpless wrath. “The children torn from their parents’ arms, the old hungry by the canals, the young dying alone far from home. We cannot comfort them, we cannot reach them, we cannot stand. This weight. They weep in the night. We cry out. Don’t you hear? The broken hearts. Children torn from their gods.

  “A storm comes, a dawn. From the desert comes the scouring wind and in its wrack and wake the land is reborn. The heir of Nabban brings the death of the gods and the birth of the gods and the rising of the folk. The years of the Peony Throne are ended.”

  Kaeo thrashed and twisted and screamed and drowned, and it was not his pain but theirs that flooded him, that tore his heart and poured from his throat.

  “Justice—mercy—the weeping folk set free.” A wind. A mountain wind, cold with ice, roaring through the sea-damp room. They did not feel it. They did not hear or see. They shouted and they tried to pin him against the wall.

  “—before he breaks his neck—”

  “—get him down, sit on him—”

  “—look out!”

  “Possessed.”

  “The word of the gods—”

  “You’ll be for the Isle yourself. A false prophecy of the dead gods.”

  “Blind! Blind and deaf! Don’t you see them? Don’t you hear them? Storm. Wrath. The Peony Throne is broken.”

  They beat him again, into red darkness and silence.

  Later, at the end of it all, there was a dry-voiced man, a wizard of the imperial corps, who, amid the smell of hot iron and smoke, read
a sheep’s blade-bone cracked by the poker’s heat and said Kaeo uttered truth when he denied knowing the true names of any he met, the truth when he named himself a servant of the traitor Dan, seduced by his vision of a land without slaves, truth when he swore his master, Shouja Wey, and the slave Mia, his known lover, were blameless and ignorant of his treason.

  The questioner-wizard saved Master Wey and Mia, at least, named them innocent of all complicity in his treason, though Mia’s hand had been broken by then and she would never again make the smooth, elegant gestures of the seven-flowers dance or grip the painted sword; he had seen her on the floor, half-naked, seen the boot, heard the shriek. Could the wizard not have performed his divination at the start, and cleared them then, condemned Kaeo then, without all this pain?

  But there must still be testimony given, for the record. The clerk of the magistrate’s court kept smacking her lips, pointing her brush.

  Shouja Wey, his voice shaking, as if he were on the verge of tears: “Kaeo has been in my company for fourteen years now. I bought him as a boy, a singer, from the House of Canaries; they look out for likely prospects for me, talented youths. Oh yes, he was one of the best. To hear him recite ‘The Parting of Zial and Wujian’ would make a stone weep. Drunk? No, not before a performance, never. No, he has never shown any signs of taking opium, never spoken any improper sentiment against the blessed emperor, the Exalted, not in my hearing. I’ve never knowingly allowed my people to make improper associations. Well, yes, they do have followers. I don’t let them go with those I think might be harmful to them. Respectable people, I thought them. Merchants, ship-owners. How could I have known? The enemies of the Exalted are subtle. Yes, he can read, I did tell you that. A little, only a little. It is necessary, in my business, that they learn at least the—that they learn the syllabics. Acting is not a mere matter of recitation. As Lady Lai Jilin wrote in her treatise on the five true arts of the theatre, an actor must make himself the mask and the soul behind the mask. He must make the words his own. If they learn only from hearing another’s reading, they will never do more than parrot another’s reading . . .” Master Wey’s voice, which had woken for a moment into a lecturing passion, grew fainter again. “I don’t think reading the texts of the twelve classics could have led him into such wickedness. They uphold the virtues and praise the imperial family most highly. Half of them are about Glorious Min-Jan. I can’t account for it. I was greatly deceived in him. He never showed any sign of rebelliousness; he always seemed to accept the will of the gods and the place they had decreed for him most meekly. A most accomplished liar, born to deceive and betray.”

  The wizard’s voice again, dry, dispassionate. “He is in full possession of his wits. He entered into this treason and heresy of his own will, out of hatred for the Exalted and the gods and the master his fate and the will of the gods had appointed him. And as for the second matter—as for his heresy.” A hesitation. “He has spoken a false prophecy. He has made himself a vessel for the lies of the enemies of Nabban. His words were no true voice of Mother or Father Nabban, whom we know are weak and fading and do not speak. Their will is manifest in the will of the Exalted. To claim otherwise, to usurp the Exalted’s right to speak for the gods, is heresy. For that alone he could be condemned.”

  Kaeo’s eyes found focus. Floor of bare wood. Booted feet. Slippered feet on the worn brocade of a footstool, hem of an orange robe. Magistrate.

  “I have taken the oracles. I testify, this is so. The slave Kaeo of the Flowering Orange is a traitor and heretic, a knowing servant of the renegade Dan, an enemy of our emperor, the Exalted Otono, and of the gods of Nabban, a vessel of lies, damned by the gods themselves for falsely claiming to speak with their voice.”

  Magistrate’s court. He looked higher, to a grey beard, a face smooth with fat, eyes tiny and lost in the folds of it, a silk tasselled hat. The wizard, in a blue court robe with his badge of rank glittering gold on his chest, stood beside the magistrate.

  The butt of a halberd struck between Kaeo’s shoulders and he flattened himself, eyes, teeth, hands all clenched on the pain that burned white, blinding, deafening him.

  The dry voice, when he could hear again, said, as if bored, “He is only another of the tools of the renegade prince, and a rebel himself, a heretic who defies the will of Mother and Father Nabban, a traitor in the household of his master the theatre-owner Shouja Wey, and a whore who has given himself to strangers for money. He is corrupted and unclean. He is damned. You may do your duty to the Exalted with a clear conscience.”

  “The slave Kaeo, an actor of the Flowering Orange company,” said the magistrate, slowly, so that his clerk missed no word. “He is a man in full possession of his wits, not a foolish child led astray. The testimony of his master proves it, for all Wey of the Shouja Clan wants to believe otherwise, being a merciful man. By his own testimony under the question, confirmed by witness of the arts of the Plum Badge Diviner Lai Wisan, servant at the feet of the Exalted, this said Kaeo is a spy of the traitor and heretic Dan. He has spoken heresy and treason in the hearing of servants of this court. He has pretended to prophesy, which is heresy and blasphemy. He was named a fellow-conspirator by the spy Tamareva of the Islands. He has confessed to meeting with agents of the rebel Dan and passing on to them documents obtained from Tamareva, injurious to the rule of the Exalted Otono and the peace of the land. For doing so he is found to be a malicious enemy of order and peace. For the treason he has committed, the slave Kaeo’s life is forfeit. For this treason, he will be delivered to the imperial guard for a traitor’s death on the Isle of Crows. And for his blasphemy, once he is dead, his body will be given to the sea, without prayer or blessing. Kaeo, formerly of the Flowering Orange company, do you understand?”

  A magistrate’s guard kicked him where he knelt, face to the floor. A hero might have defied them. A prophet of the gods, dedicated to restoring justice and the right of every man and woman of the land to stand before them, might denounce the court and emperor and all. In the end, he was only a slave, and the words he had, the poetry of the plays, belonged to others.

  “Have him flogged,” said the magistrate. “Demonstrate to the Exalted and the gods our contempt for his blasphemy.”

  Footsteps departed, shuffling slippers, slapping sandals, boots. The guards kicked him to rise and he could not; his joints were water, and he trembled and could not push himself from the floor. They dragged him.

  Not to the hands of waiting imperial guards. Not yet.

  “They’ll come for you in the morning,” one jeered. “You’re bound for the crows. A nice day out for the palace.”

  They hauled him to a bare stone room, where the tide’s damp lay in the corners and watermarks made white lines of salt on the wall. A high niche held a statue of the Exalted to look down over him—blankly serene, no emperor and all emperors, and no reference to the gods at all. They turned Kaeo face to the wall, wrists tied to iron rings, and took a cutting whip to his back. Why? Because he was so vile a thing, so loathsome. Because they were filled with hatred, fat with it, and must spew its poison somewhere. In the end, the world turned dark about him and he slid away and left it behind.

  CHAPTER III

  Ahjvar, Ghu thought, had nearly forgotten the dead shepherd and the mercenaries-turned-brigand they had lured to a judgement at the blade’s edge, though he wore a dead man’s boots and his sheepskin coat was bought with plundered coin in Porthduryan. They had come, at a guess, over six hundred miles since then on the desert road—a rutted track marked by dung, the occasional bones of camels, and cairns over the graves of men and women dead on the way—crossing sandy yellow hills and a waterless plain of broken black slate, back into a land of tightly folded ridges, all gravel and sand and thorny, winter-dead things.

  A dead man, too.

  He should have ridden by. For all the harshness of the land, the long days on short commons, and the scouring dust on the cold, dry wind that cracked lips and fingers and sucked the moisture from your ve
ry throat, Ahj had been well, as if the clean desert horizons gave him space to begin to find a way back. He had been over a month without the worst nightmares; it was like watching him return to life, to see him take an interest in the world again, in ordinary things: the herds of antelope in the sand hills, the shower of falling stars they watched half one night in the black land, which Ahj said came every year in this season, though in Sand Cove the winters had been rainy and it was the ever-changing sea they had watched when they sat out by summer nights, while before . . . before there had been no one to tell Ghu such things. He had never known Ahj at such peace. A fragile, new-born peace, needing space and calm and silence in which to sink enduring roots.

  But then there was the dead man. He should have gone on, except that the last well had been brackish, and their water was low, and the dogs, with one accord, turned onto the well-used trail that plunged into a deep valley before he had quite sorted out that his unease and the smell of something dead, along with water, was their awareness, not his own. Even then, he might have called them back, but Ahjvar had leapt down to lead his camel on the precipitous path, and so Ghu followed.

  Vultures climbed from behind a wall of interlaced thorn brush. Their wings brushed the air with a noise like pines in the wind.

  “He’s several days dead,” Ghu said, while Jui and Jiot sniffed, lips curling in distaste.

  No need for a dog’s nose to smell that. Rotten-sweet in the sun; what ragged flesh remained to the bones had been shielded by clothing. And seared flesh, like old cooking. Overhead, the vultures circled, waiting for the human presence to be gone. The man looked to have been a hermit: a body in a robe of undyed wool, barefoot. He lay half in the ashes of his own firepit, sleeve burnt away, hand and arm, what was left of them—cooked.

  The ghost of the man was there, a faint presence. Aware, but not pressing. Not present enough to take form that Ahjvar could see, or Ahj was ignoring it, Ghu was not certain. Ghosts had visible form for Ahj, as they did not for him, but Ahjvar had turned away, gone to the wall to look over at the camels.