Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  “Not to be my rihswera?” Ghu asked. A king’s champion. Teasing. Neither to be my champion nor my lover, he had said after the battle at the Orsamoss.

  “I will be, if you will it, but need me for that, no. You don’t. You have Yeh-Lin for a weapon and the Kho’anzi for the shield of a lord’s name. You have the place of the gods to fill. You don’t need me to face the bloody lords who destroy this land and this empress who thinks she’s been made a goddess, or whatever drives her to oppose the will of the gods.”

  “I need you to see me,” Ghu said soberly. “No one else does. To know me. To remember me. No one else ever will.”

  “I do know that. I saw it, in the castle. I don’t know how long I can give you. But what I said before: I will try. Each day. That’s all I promise.”

  “As long as you will. No longer. It’s enough.”

  Later, they went back down to the ruin of the shrine in the slanting afternoon sun, walking, horses and dogs following. Ghu dipped his hands in the pond above the terraces and stood a long time by the grave, but if he prayed it was without words, eyes open. Inside the enclosure, he walked a circuit of the fence, still silent. Ahjvar trailed him, not certain what he did. His path took him spiralling in to circle each of the springs, then the stone and the dead tree.

  He hurt. Ahjvar could feel it. Deep, deep hurt, he and the goddess within him. No. Not two. What she had been was within him, growing to something new. Ghu was god, in this place, and not a child whose hurt could be eased by a kind touch and a word. Ahjvar put a hand on his back anyway. Thought of the acorn, found again in the pine mould, and took all three from his purse, held them out in his palm. After the dead, the dead tree was somehow the deepest wound in this place, as if it, rather than the hot springs, had been the sign of the goddess here. Zhung Musan’s soldiers had not only stripped its bark away but hacked great gouges in the exposed roots. He didn’t recognize its species, bark or form or stillborn buds; it might send up suckers in new life, but it might not.

  “These wouldn’t grow, would they? Too harsh a winter.” Almost a profanation, to speak, but Ghu looked at him, blinking some—some humanity—back into eyes distant as the night sky. He took one, rolled it through his fingers.

  “They might, here. The springs warm the air. They might, with a god’s blessing. But do you want to plant them?”

  “They’re in my mind,” Ahjvar said. “I shouldn’t need to carry them. Better they send down roots and live.”

  Ghu abruptly pulled him close and kissed him, hard; clean fire of warmth and light, a hearth of life and he could have let all thought go and lost himself, drowned in that, but for the hand clenched over his and the acorns held between them.

  “Yes,” Ghu said, turning him loose. “Do. And the forest is called in. This place will be holy again, someday.”

  Ahjvar paced off distance enough for a full-grown cork-oak to be content at three points around the black stone, dug with his dagger and planted an acorn at each. Ghu had leapt to the top of the boulder and perched there cross-legged, watching, looking more like some ragged and wild forest demon playing with human form than any god.

  “Or at least,” Ahjvar said, sitting back on his heels, the last acorn pressed down near where the young priestess had lain, “there will be an exotic treat for the local squirrels to dig up.”

  “They wouldn’t dare.” Ghu’s smile flashed. “Browsing deer, now—”

  “Ghu, do the deer in this forest eat meat, or was I hallucinating?”

  “Hallucinating what?”

  “Deer with fangs.”

  “Oh, those. No. I think they fight with them.”

  “Ah.”

  “And grub up seedling trees, probably.” He vaulted down, solemn again, and walked a circuit of the ground Ahjvar had claimed for his planting. He had cut three symbols into the earth, wounded with fire and blood and pain as it was, one for each tree that might be; they were oaks, but he had made the sign of cypress for healing, elder for rebirth, and elm, which was for peace, and holiness, and godhead.

  “Priest of Nabban,” Ghu said, coming back to where he had started. Ahjvar had not told him what the ghosts had called him. “Be that, for me, and rihswera too, if you will. The tree and the sword. Come. We’ll take the main track down. Still a few hours till sunset.”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  The pebbles fell and rolled in a wide scatter, red and black and yellow, over the painted calfskin. Barrast, the ox of evening, who had carried the dead heroes of the burning river to the stars. Irtennin, the seer of the white waters, whose father had been a demon of the steppes. Etic the archer. Both Irtennin and Etic had died in the battle of the burning river, among the heroes all named and honoured in the map of the sky. Etic’s daughter had taken up her mother’s bow, a gift of the gods, and led the band of demons and heroes to victory over the mad god of the eastern hills, in days of legend long before devils ever walked the earth. What did such a casting mean?

  Death was what Ivah read. Sacrifice and upheaval. A changing of the world, as the world of the Great Grass had been changed forever when the river burned, and humankind learnt that even gods could die at their hands, and the betrayed tribe of Irtennin went to the west across the Kinsai’av. The daughter takes up the mother’s bow . . . and her unknown brother, her father’s son, had come riding from the north to join her, with his demon-forged spear, and together they had rallied the grief-stricken warriors who had followed the twelve heroes of the river and . . .

  Hooves. Ivah looked up. Sun speared through broken cloud, dazzling off the water, making a golden haze where wind gusted pollen from a bankside tree.

  It had been the coins had led her here, to this road, the coins and a restless unease that kept her from sleep, hovering on the edge of dream in the back kitchen of the inn.

  Blue banners, blue as sky, whipping free, flying, turned to dragons white and muted gold, and the white horse climbed into thunderclouds and its rider turned his head, almost, to summon her, but the camel could not climb the clouds. . . . She always jerked out of her dream at that point, the rider turning to a banner-lady armoured in black, long black hair rising on the wind, staining the blue banners like ink, and red fires deep in the woman’s eyes, and she woke sweating, hearing a pounding on the door that was all her imagination. If Yeh-Lin came for her, it would not be with soldiers and some pretext for arrest. There would be no knocking at the door. She did not suppose there would be a door for very long.

  The coins had called her to the road that led to the mountain, but it was waiting, not journeying, that they had both foretold and counselled. She had spread the sky-map in the shadows under the bridge, squatting on heels, let the sound of the flood-swollen stream, not her father’s narcotic smoke, carry her into that place where dream and sky and pebbles all danced a pattern for those with eyes that saw beyond to see.

  The god was coming. The devil had promised him to the folk of Dernang, and before he came there, she would see him, and she would know. True god, or devil’s lie. She could not, being prepared, be deceived. Old Great Gods, please.

  Hooves, and coming swiftly. Not couriers from the outpost at the border, not on this road. She abandoned the painted skin and the pebbles and her pack lying on the cold stones beneath the arch—caught up her sabre only by a lifetime’s instinct—scrambled up the bank, at the border between dark and day, blinking the water-glare blindness from her vision.

  Shredding cloud, black and thunderous, and the sun pouring like water. Wind rising with a spit of rain and the blue, the blue . . . She was still caught in the seeing dream, the shaman’s trance, and her pulse was a drum in her ears . . . No caution. She was falling into the sky.

  She stepped out onto the bridge just as they took it, flying.

  Not flight, not rout, not courier’s haste but a race, a grin changed to a warning shout and they swerved one to either side, whiff of horse, flash of colour—bright as a mountain peak, dark as oiled teak.

  Ivah spun around—to ca
ll, to run madly after them—but they had wheeled in the road and the bay was on her again. Touch of steel, resting on her shoulder, but she didn’t even see the rider.

  The black-legged white horse circled the both of them and came to a stand before her, and the light and sky fell around the man, shimmering like water.

  “You’ve cut your hair,” he said, in the Nabbani of the road, and—it was not even a jerk of the chin, just the slightest of movements, and other man turned his horse aside, the pressure of the blade leaving her shoulder, though he did not put up his sword. Some far-away last ember of common sense noted that.

  “You’ve let yours grow—I thought you were dead,” she said. The words seemed to come out of dream, foolish and small.

  Ghu laughed—Ghu! He was not that hunted boy from Marakand, who had been older than she thought him even then when she looked at him properly, and was older now, lean and with a weight of weariness on him, in the haze of her vision, but he had not laughed like that in Marakand. All dark eyes and gravity and worry, there, searching for his friend.

  “Me? No, but you . . . what are doing here, Ivah?” And that was the boy, who spoke with a child’s simplicity.

  “Waiting,” she said. “Nour said—Nour survived, too. A friend found us—we were saved. Nour’s gone to Bitha with his caravan but he said—I dreamed and he said . . .” She shook her head. “Was it you, all along? I was waiting for you?”

  The man she had again forgotten spoke from behind her, deep voice and lilting words; she recognized the rhythm of her gang-mate Buryan’s speech, the tongue of Praitan. Ghu said, “No, she’s not.”

  Not what? Drunk? Mad? She rubbed her temples with the back of a hand, blinking, and the vision of sun and a sky flying like banners faded. Only a slight young man, lean and shadowed on a white horse. She looked around, because something was cold and prickling warning of the uncanny on the back of her neck, but there was only the other, a yellow-haired man of her own years, maybe, but aged by illness, she thought, gaunt and grey about the burning blue of his eyes. He wore a bright headscarf pulled down about his neck and a blanket in a more muted plaid slung as a cloak and pinned with gold like a twisted flame, but his shirt was stained and scrubbed almost to rags. Beggar king of a ballad. His hands were torn and black, with scabs that seeped yet, dirt ground in, as if he had dug his way out of a grave, why such an image in her mind? He carried death like a shadow, a second skin, and he watched her utterly without expression, like a hunting cat. Ghu’s lost friend, whom she had thought surely dead even while Ghu was searching. Ghu’s assassin, she thought now, remembering what he was and why the pair of them had been in the city—this was the killer of the Voice of the Lady, the catalyst of all the catastrophe and rebirth of Marakand.

  “No horse?” Ghu was asking.

  She blinked again, broke away from the tribesman’s unwavering stare. “Camel. The army took it in Dernang.” Inane.

  And she had learnt on the road to alter her speech, the words her mother had used, especially the first person that had made Wolan and Koulang laugh at her, saying she had learnt her Nabbani from old puppet plays of the emperors in the Five Cities . . . and she forgot again, and used the “I” that none but the imperial family might claim. Ghu didn’t appear to have noticed, but he had not, in Marakand, either.

  “Better come up, then.” He offered a hand.

  “Wait.” She dodged away, leaping and sliding down the bank to retrieve her belongings, hastily scooping the pebbles into her pocket, rolled the painted skin and bundled it into her pack, bow-case, quiver—slung the belt of her sabre over her shoulder. Low voices above, both of them speaking Praitannec. The tribesman, at odds with his chill study of her, sounded amused about something. Ghu laughed softly and answered in the same tone.

  “Ivah,” Ghu said, introducing her to the Praitannecman as she climbed back to the road. “A scribe and wizard of Marakand?”

  “Of the Great Grass, I think,” said the other, in good Imperial Nabbani, the accent of a scholar of the Five Cities, bizarrely clashing with his appearance, and he gave her a nod.

  “This is Ahjvar.”

  A name belonging to the eastern deserts, not to Praitan, but she returned the nod.

  “And Snow, and Evening Cloud.”

  “Gorthuerniaul,” Ahjvar said, but whether that was formal greeting, or what, she didn’t know. It made Ghu laugh again. Ghu had seemed to be introducing the horses, which didn’t surprise her somehow, that he would, and the white stallion had lowered his head to sniff her at his name.

  “And Jui and Jiot have gone off hunting, I think.”

  “Dogs,” Ahjvar explained.

  Ghu offered his hand again and this time she took it, a foot on his foot, to swing up behind him. The white horse flicked his ears and strode off without further remark on the extra weight, the bay matching him stride for stride like a wagon team. They did not resume their flying race.

  Ivah felt oddly shy, this close to him. Ask a man you had abandoned to die at the hands of Red Masks in the street if he was actually your god . . . ? He wore no coat and his shirt was torn, and though she was careful not to touch him, her hands resting on her thighs, she still felt the heat of his body, the barest space between them. He smelt of camels and horses and earth and smoke . . . camel was the sheepskin coat beneath her, insecure pillion. She did not know what she felt. Not attraction. It was almost fear.

  “Castle or town?” Ahjvar asked.

  “Castle, I think.”

  “Assuming she’s left it standing.”

  She. “Ghu—” Ivah said. “Ghu, there’s a devil in Dernang. She’s saying she serves the—the heir of the gods. She’s killed the imperial general and his lieutenant, a week ago, and taken control of the town. She claims she speaks for the lord of Choa and all his folk are as obedient as if she does, but—is it true? You do know what she is?”

  “We killed the general,” Ahjvar observed. “Or I did, when some fool took him on with a knife.”

  “Hah. What was I supposed to do, since you weren’t handy to hide behind?”

  “There’s a devil,” she repeated. “One of the seven. Yeh-Lin Dotemon.”

  “We know that.” The assassin’s tone was mild. “How do you?”

  There was challenge under the soft words. Skin prickled. She looked to see him watching her, unblinking. Mad, she thought. But no. Not that. Not quite. But deeply, searingly scarred—trailing tendrils of other sight still wrapped her. Something broken and reforged and all the veiling skins that folk grew over their raw bones of the soul to deal gently with the daily world pared away. Which might be to say mad, after all.

  “Dotemon is my captain, for the time being,” Ghu said, as it were an everyday thing to speak so. “I do trust her.”

  She pulled her eyes from the assassin. “You’re my god,” she said, to Ghu’s back. She could not have said it to his face. Wondering. Certain. “You’re my god, and you were running from the street-guard in Marakand—but I dreamed of you, in the desert.”

  “Great Gods, another one,” Ahjvar said, and followed it with something incomprehensible, which made Ghu snort with sudden laughter.

  “No,” he said. “I think not.” He turned his head and she glimpsed a flashing grin at the assassin.

  Half a guess as to what that was about. She could imagine he drew women, yes, now that he wasn’t hiding himself. Her face heated, but the grin was catching, and the laughter. “No,” she said, and managed almost to sound indignant. “Not that sort of dream.” It was Ahjvar chuckled then.

  Ivah made an effort to speak soberly, though she felt almost drunk, still walking the edge of vision. “Yeh-Lin Dotemon. Your captain.”

  “She says she’s mine,” Ghu observed.

  “Says.”

  “How did you know her?” Ahjvar persisted, as if the brief flurry of—of not-flirtation had not been. But he looked less burningly intense now, less like a predator about to strike.

  “I—” she picked careful words
, not to lie, and again forgot care in others. “I’ve met devils, before.” Ghu cocked his head and considered that, and again did not remark on her royal form of the pronoun.

  “So have you,” she said in haste, to distract him. Man. God. He might know all her secrets. But he would not take them; he would wait till they were given.

  “Have I?” Ghu asked. “You mean the storyteller in Marakand, the Northron skald. You knew her.”

  “Ulfhild. Vartu Kingsbane, they called her in the north.”

  “Ah.”

  “There was more than one of them there?” demanded Ahjvar.

  “I did tell you,” Ghu said. “One of the bad nights, when I talked halfway to dawn because you wouldn’t sleep and kept dreaming awake, you said.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “She was telling stories. I told you the story she told. I didn’t know what she was, then, in Marakand. Not for certain. Not till later.” Ghu considered. “She knew me. She saw me. I didn’t see myself.”

  The assassin said nothing to that but went suddenly alert like a hound scenting prey and put his horse a little ahead. She saw then what he had—a dark movement that was not the sway of roadside willows but distant riders. The road had descended and water lapped the verge of it here as if they followed a causeway, the flooded fields a wind-riffled lake. No way to avoid a meeting. Banners unfurled, a pale blue without device.

  More movement, another and larger company away east and south, just breaking free of the dark scribble of the taller trees that marked the true bank of the river. They flowed up what might be some flooded lane, a dark blot against pewter, stretching out and still coming. Ahjvar unslung a crossbow, freed a foot to span it and slot an arrow in without dismounting. His attention was on the far, not the nearer, company.

  She considered her own bow, wrapped and strapped to her bundle, but began pulling off lengths of yarn and leather cords she had slung around her neck instead, knotting them into loops, doubling and redoubling those loosely about her wrists.