Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

“Ghu, I need to know. You’re becoming Nabban, you said. You said, come with you, not to be your champion or your captain or your assassin. Why say so? Are you going to need any of those? What are we heading into?”

  He had also said, not my lover. Ahjvar didn’t mention that one.

  “I don’t know, Ahj. I don’t know. Yet. But the land is sick. I knew it, then, when I didn’t understand. I know it now. The gods are dying and the land dies with them. Rots, like a man with a poisoned wound.”

  “And you are the god of Nabban.”

  “Maybe . . . better to say, the heir of the gods of Nabban.”

  “To carry what the gods who defeated Yeh-Lin Dotemon cannot bear? You’re a man. One man, and mortal, and . . . Great Gods, Ghu, you—you can’t even read.”

  He burst out laughing, gathered up his rein and nudged the camel alongside. “Not a necessity for godhead, Ahj. Even in Nabban.” He grinned back over his shoulder as he took the lead again. Ahjvar was not laughing. “Be my clerk, then. Come to read for me.”

  Ahjvar scowled, flicked his crop to set his camel pacing after Ghu’s. “Ghu, there are priests, there’s an emperor, there’s a whole great empire and its folk that pay so little heed to their gods they sell their own children in the marketplace. I know what you are, or that you are something—Nabban, if you say so, because—because I’m still here in the world. Because what but a god greater than the gods of Praitan could have—”

  “Not a god. Not yet. A mortal man. As you said. Mostly.” Sometimes. Somewhat. He had not been, not in that night.

  “—could have taken me from my goddess and freed me of the hag? But how do you make the empire know you are even the heir of its gods? What are we doing?”

  “Going to Nabban. All else follows. You’re right, though. There is something I need to know, something I can’t see. Would you make a divination for me, tonight?”

  Ghu glanced back. After a moment Ahjvar shrugged. “If you ask, I’ll try. But it’s been a long time, and you know what they say about Praitannec wizards.”

  Ghu shook his head.

  “It takes three wizards of Praitan, soaked to the skin, to tell you it’s raining.”

  “In you I have faith, if it rains hard enough.”

  So weak, the wizardry in her, but the narrow channel is enough. He can set his hand to hers. He can teach her to write what must be written. A seal of their dedication, he says. A promise of their faith.

  A barbarian art. She brings a mistress of the art from the city, a free woman, but free, slave, what does it matter? She is empress of Nabban and Daughter of the Old Great Gods; she takes what she desires and the woman will never go home to the islands again.

  Her own blood in the ink. Sacred, he tells her. A rite of dedication, the blood of the Chosen Daughter of the Old Great Gods.

  A Northron wizardry, he does not say. They went to the kingdoms of the north in search of new magics, he and his sister, his lover, who betrayed him at the end. Buri-Nai will never do so; she cannot. She has no claim on his heart. The sickle does not betray, when it is put down at the end of the day’s reaping.

  She insists on binding the prophet. It does not matter. Her dedicated, her faithful . . . strong souls, fierce, single-minded. But he will have dreamers, too, and from them he will weave a web to bind the others as they are, in the fullness of time, gathered in.

  A harvest.

  CHAPTER VII

  Asword. She dreamed it. The blade was black, polished glass. Ice. Obsidian, frozen fire. The silvered hilt held words, a voice, a will laid in its words and she could not read them. Yeh-Lin strained to see, to tilt it into the starlight, but the light flowed like water and could not be held on the silver, and the flowing thorny lines filled in niello shifted and twisted and vanished under plain rough leather that was braided to wrap the grip. Hoarfrost grew into flowers, feathers, a delicate fringe edging the blade, but then it was not she who held the sword and the blade was levelled at her throat. No fringe of rime; it kindled the air to a burning edge of fire, blue and white and cold, and a wind rushed past her, into the blade, which was not stone but a rip in the night, a hungry wound to swallow her.

  She could not see the hand that wielded it.

  Yeh-Lin opened her eyes. She sat at a roadside fire, sharing tea with a family of travelling players heading down towards Sea Town for a clan wedding, a caravan of three wagons. The dream had been but the thing of a moment, a breath and gone. She shivered, and a boy called her “grandmother” and refilled the earthenware cup, offered her a second blanket. She smiled brightly, assured him it was but a passing chill, a breeze down the neck. She wrapped her headscarf more tightly.

  Old woman travelling alone. They were kind. She would leave them as soon as she could without causing alarm; a mistake to have fallen in with them and their slow-travelling oxen, but it was exhausting to ride the winds for long, and she had chosen to vary that with walking, as a vigorous old warrior might. Good to keep an ear to the roads, to the voice of the lands she travelled through. Perhaps a poor decision, to have adopted the face of her latter years when first meeting this gregarious clan, since they would not countenance the thought of an ageing woman travelling alone in these barren hills, a warrior armed and able to defend herself or not, but their ways would part soon when she took the road to Porthduryan and the desert edge. Invent old friends who expected her there, assure them she was expected, that she would be alone in this brigand-plagued land no more than a day and a night. Strange, though, how often she did choose to wear that image of herself. Strange that she felt herself more free. It was not that old woman who had learnt the lessons that set her on this road; that had come later. Perhaps she simply did not want the bother of fending off young men.

  Or the emotional complications of failing to do so, as the case might be.

  Not on this particular road, at any rate.

  Yeh-Lin shut her eyes and sipped the tea, trying to shut out the sound of singing, of laughter, of the baby fussing until a teat quietened it. The vision, though, did not return.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Snow on the mountain. Cold wind, biting. Cold water, the river’s depths. Dark, dark. Kaeo is drowning deep in the dark.

  The wind smells of snow, dry, cold, burning his nose, his throat, sucking the heat from him; lips crack, bleed in the cold. Rank barnyard stench. Animals. Something groans, some beast. He cannot see it; he sees only the stars, the distant stars falling. They leave streaks of light like the colours inside the shell of a mussel. Faint crunch, rocking. A canoe crossing the great pool of the market by deserted night, the stars over him, under him. Stars over him, cold and sharp and close in the blackness, white expanse and the wind wails like a trapped ghost. There are ghosts trapped in Yeh-Lin’s sunken palace in the Golden City, damned to guard it forever.

  Sharp pain. She has struck him in the face. She does, when Kaeo does not see what she wishes, when the words leave his tongue and pour from him meaningless, or when she believes they do. She is a fool, a fool; the empress is a fool to believe herself a goddess and the chosen daughter of the Old Great Gods. She is a fool who wishes to see and punishes him when he does not see what she desires.

  But he does see, he does, he does. What dreams the gods dream come only fractured, broken to smallest fragments. Shattered and tossed in the ferment the tea makes of his poisoned mind.

  The desert. Snow in the desert. Stone like a madman’s dream. Corals in the desert. A beetle, he, dragging a slow way through a forest of lichen frozen to stone, old logs rotting in the lord’s forest preserve to grow mushrooms, delicacies for his table and they’ll be beaten at the very least if they are taken here, poaching, and his sister clings close as something shoots by but it is only a woodpecker, big as a crow, black, white, flash of red. His mother beats them; the lord might take them and brand them his slaves for their crime, but she cooks the mushrooms. It is the next spring she sells them. Stone formed like lichen, like mushrooms for the lord’s table, towering high against the
stars. He is the madman. He is the dream. Stone. Storm.

  The desert, the empress says, seizing that. He comes from the desert. The badlands. Fool, ranting of mushrooms. Who is he? The false heir of the gods, who is he, how do I know him? The messenger of my Gods cannot see him. Tell me, tell me, how can he die?

  The heir of the gods, the child of Nabban. The false god is here, false, lie, dupe of—

  She strikes him, or maybe it is the fist of the captain of giants. He did not know he had risen to his feet, but he must have because he falls, he feels himself falling, a long time falling, like a star, and like a star he bursts in shards and fire.

  A star, a broken shell, crushed, all meat prised out, empty, dead. She prays to raise a storm, and storm rises in the night. The heir of the gods of Nabban will not die of a storm, he says, not like the wives of the Exalted Otono, sent into exile on the island province of Vansaka and sunk in an autumn storm, which is why the Kho’anzi of Lower Lat Province, father of the second wife, made a treaty with the Wild Girls of the tribes and withdrew his army from the border, letting the hordes who had slaughtered the governor of Dar-Lathi and burnt the fortress-town of Ogu pour out, across Lower Lat and into Taiji, a flood rolling inexorable now towards the lands of the Imperial Demesne. The high lord suspects sabotage; he does not suspect the storm itself. Buri-Nai’s fan clatters a threat. She does not want to hear his opinions. The queens of the tribes are cannibals, barbarian headhunters of no account; the reverence the chieftains hold them in founded on the lie that they are the daughters of the paramount god of the highlands, the perverse marriage ritual enacted in every generation ended by Bloody Yao’s civilizing conquest. The Old Great Gods will never let them come within sight of the Golden City.

  His tongue is thick and swollen again, and he chokes on blood and bile. The tea is yellow as bile, and he has given up resisting when they bring it to him. When the empress wants the prophet of the Daughter of the Gods to dream for her, they will pour it into him regardless, and he will choke and gag and dream the same in the end.

  Prophet of the Daughter of the Old Great Gods. Prophet of the empress. Prophet of the gods she says are dead and gone but their dreams flow through him when drinks the tea, and she has killed five wizards, diviners who dreamed, since she brought him to the palace, trying to see if their dreams would show her the enemy she wants to see.

  She strikes him. The guards throw him to the floor. It has happened, will happen. It is happening again. She cannot see. She is the mask and the mask wears her, the mask hides unseen and she strikes him, the guards throw him to the floor. He dreams, but he is only an actor, a singer of songs, his words have never been his own. He vomits at her feet, but that is the poison they steep for him, yellow as bile, bitter in the throat, in his nose, foul on the tongue, churning his stomach so he cannot eat. She is only a ghost, he says, a forgotten ghost, nameless.

  The heir of the gods comes from the desert and the north and the snow and his shield is fire and ash and bone. The heir of the gods comes like a king and the sky is the banner over him and his horse is white as snow. He is the wind that blows off the mountains; he will sweep you all away.

  CHAPTER IX

  Her breath made clouds in the cold air, drawn into the smoke of the fire, rising with it to the stars. Ivah blew on her hands, fingers going numb and shrivelled, scooped up the three Gold Harbour silver gulls she kept for divination, and plunged her hands back into her sheepskin mittens. The coins were not telling her anything useful anyhow. She did far better when it wasn’t her own meanings she sought. Too conscious, too much an observer of herself.

  In the Palace of the Moon, the sleeping goddess turns her face away. Death, abandonment, rejection, said The Balance of the Sun and the Moon. She didn’t need to look up the hexagram. She hardly ever did, these days, having transcribed herself a new copy and bound it into a practical codex in the great library of Marakand, to replace the scroll she had inherited from her mother, lost when the Red Masks took her. The copying seemed to have fixed it in the mind better than all her childhood study, spurred on by An-Chaq’s fan rapping knuckles or ear at Ivah’s far-too-frequent faltering. The book was in the deep square pocket of her sheepskin coat, folded in soft antelope leather, but she didn’t bother to dig it out, even to read the half page of further commentary.

  She had begun to distrust the Nabbani manual of divination, with its strict division, like the questioning of the sheep’s blade-bone, of all readings into sun and moon, positive and negative, male and female. It had never sat comfortably in her mind, and Nour said his tutor, a woman of Gold Harbour he had spent a year with when he was a young man, had told him that the wizards of the Emperor Min-Jan had burnt all the old books of commentaries and written others at his imperial order, in the days when the old gods of Nabban were recently dead or dissolved into the great new deities of the Mother and the Father. Min-Jan had been notorious both for his distrust of the female, a reaction against his usurping, devil-bonded mother, and for his tyranny, which came close to equalling or surpassing the Empress Yeh-Lin’s own. The coin-diviners in the tradition of the Five Cities argued different interpretations of the hexagrams, but all their commentaries and alternates to The Balance of the Sun and the Moon were recreations from memory, or old books so muddled with later copying, intrusions, and outright inventions that Ivah found Nour’s explanations worse than what she started with. But then, Nour admitted he was no scholar, and of no great note as a diviner, either.

  Dreams. Perhaps what she ought instead to try was a divination in the Grasslander manner, with the coloured pebbles, red, black, yellow, thrown onto the painted calfskin that charted the constellations and their stories. That might have a greater truth for dreams, being more dreamlike itself. She had been working, since they left Porthduryan, on making herself such a sky chart, finding herself more and more drawn to her father’s technique, though she had no intention of taking to some of his other methods, the Grasslander shaman’s trance-inducing smoke and the like. Besides, she had the feeling it might be best to come to Nabban as a Grasslander, despite her more-Nabbani-than-not looks.

  Her chart wasn’t completed yet, though. There was little time to spare for such work when they made their evening camp.

  Dreams. What she wanted, truly, was not a divination, but just to tell someone. It had been Nasutani and Haliya who had the watch before her and Wolan. Woken into the cold in the low tent she shared with those two, the dream heavy and frightening—and why it had been frightening she could not yet understand—she had almost caught at Nasu’s sleeve to ask her to come out to the fire, to talk. But self-preservation had reined her tongue. “I had a dream about a man—” was going to have to struggle through a thicket of good-humoured teasing before it got to any common sense. And what could Nasutani tell her? A good friend, a most cheerful and indomitable heart, a fellow Grasslander who spoke the same native tongue and had the same song of the grass and sky in her blood, almost like the kinship of sharing a god, which they did not—but Nasutani was not a wizard or a shaman or one who wasted much time on deep thought.

  Footsteps crunched on gravel, and Wolan, a greying, slightly-built man originally from Choa Province in Nabban, though he had gone to the free city of Bitha after his marriage and to the road with his son after his wife’s death, came down the slope to the fire, squatting to warm his hands.

  “Bit of dust to the south,” he said. “Nothing much. Bit of high haze, too, in the north. Might be snow coming in a day or two.”

  “I’ll take a look.” She was still learning the signs of the eastern deserts, the meanings of the colours of the horizon, the shapes of the clouds. Ivah picked up her spear and climbed to her feet to take a turn wandering the camp.

  An odd sort of family, a caravan-gang. The caravan-master, Kharduin, was from some tribe of the deserts south of here—territory they would not be crossing. Nobody seemed to know details, but Nasutani hinted, with the air of one confessing forbidden secrets, of outlawry and a raide
r past. His partner Nour was from Marakand; Wolan and his son Koulang from Nabban or Bitha, depending on how you counted them; hawk-tattooed Haliya from the deserts, a different tribe from Kharduin, though; and Nasutani and Ivah from the Great Grass. Then there was Guthrun the camel-leech, a pale-skinned Northron; Seoyin, who was colony-Nabbani from Two Hills and his cousin Buryan, a Praitannecman from the Duina Noreia; Vardar, a man of the Malagru hillfolk; and Debira, a horse-tattooed woman of Serakallash—though one already gone to the eastern road in the days of that town’s conquest by the warlord Tamghat, for which Tamghat’s daughter was greatly relieved. Folk of so many lands and gods, drawn from across half the world. They were happy to enfold her into their family: Nour’s friend, Nour’s saviour, the great wizard and hero of Marakand.

  Abandonment. Rejection.

  Not they of her. Truth in the coins. She of them. This wasn’t a life that could hold her. Oh, she could be a caravan-guard and she could do her work well; she knew camels, she was trained to sabre and spear and bow from her youth, and she was moreover a wizard such as few gang-masters could dream of hiring. With her along, Kharduin and Nour could have offered their protection to merchants carrying the most precious lures for brigands, northern amber, ambergris, the rarest dyestuffs and medicines of Tiypur . . . but the pair of them rarely took merchants in convoy, doing most of their trading on their own behalf or for their Nabbani-side patron, the high lord of Choa himself. Kharduin didn’t need a great wizard, only a moderately competent one to set wards about the camp against hostile wizardry of raiding tribes or to warn of dangers unseen, storms that came suddenly without that warning haze on the horizon. And every one of them, even Seoyin the cook, was a competent camel-driver and a fighter at need. They didn’t need her, and she needed something more. She felt . . . dulled, a blade rusting, already, and this was only one journey. What would a lifetime do to her? Out here there were no thoughts but the camels, the weather, the animal wariness of movement on the horizon, and the spark of hunter’s eagerness that went with it.