Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  “You want to be pretty now that you’re a lowlander, to live up to your name,” Gaguush told the girl, and smiled, showing teeth drilled and filled with patterns in gold.

  The desert tribes were all crazy.

  Holla felt Attalissa trembling on the edge of weary, frightened, utterly human tears, and took her chilly hand in his own. He winked at her as Gaguush turned away, and surprised her into a smile.

  “She’s all striped like a pot. I like your snakes and leopards better,” the girl whispered, fingering Holla’s arm, tracing a spotted, stretching cat. “And the owls on your face. Owls are nice. But leopards are best.”

  “Those are cheetahs.”

  “We have leopards in the mountains. With really long tails. Not cheetahs. And I don’t want them red.”

  Gaguush, not yet out of earshot, hooted with laughter. “This pot says, you come and have something to eat, Pakdhala. You look like you’re fainting on your feet. Doesn’t your papa know enough to feed you? It’s no wonder your mama didn’t want to keep him.”

  In the days of the first kings in the north, who were Viga Forkbeard, and Red Geir, and Hravnmod the Wise, there were seven wizards. And two were of the people of the kings in the north, who came from over the western sea, and one was of a people unknown; one was of the Great Grass and one of Imperial Nabban, and two were from beyond far Nabban, but the seven were of one fellowship. Their names were Heuslar the Deep-Minded, who was uncle to Red Geir, Ulfhild the King’s Sword, who was sister to Hravnmod the Wise, Anga-nurth Wanderer, Tamghiz, Chief of the Bear-Mask Fellowship, Yeh-Lin the Beautiful, and Sien-Mor and Sien-Shava, the Outcasts, who were sister and brother. If other singers tell you different, they know only the shadows of the tales, and they lie.

  Usually the nightmares were Moth’s own: old battles, old failures, old betrayals.

  The blade of the sword is obsidian, drinking the light. The hilt is silver, traced with scrolling patterns in black lines of niello. She knows it, has carried it too long already. Lakkariss. It stands point down in the snow, and frost glitters on its edges. The night is black and white, stark shadow of spruce and naked larch, pale birch and the starlit glimmer of the drifts that shroud storehouse and bathhouse and bury the garden fence and the beehives.

  The sky shivers. The stars are dimmed by an upwelling of light from the north, shifting fans and curtains and lashing whips of green and red. Sound scrapes the air, just on the edge of hearing.

  Waking. Hunger. Death. Go.

  These dreams were new, and bitter with the touch of the Old Great Gods.

  The bear lies panting, breath shallow and too rapid. She cradles his head in her lap, writes runes between his eyes to call him back: Sun for life, Boar for strength, Demon, to name him what he is, to strengthen that side of his blended blood. But the eyes are empty, the ribs unmoving, and he is cold, cold beyond any power of hers to warm. She cuts her palm, in desperation writes Life, Breath, Heart, in the secret runes of the Old Great Gods, but his hidden demon’s heart has been stilled, and there is no waking him. The night shivers with the presence of the Gods, opalescent shimmer in the corner of the eye. She starts to her feet, leaving him, taking the sword from the snow, from the other dream, and the Gods fall back, but it turns on her, she is falling, the edge of the obsidian blade is a tear in the night sky and the cold claws of the frozen hells reach out…

  The house is burning, the storehouse in flames, the bathhouse, the smokehouse, all pouring angry red light into the night, smoke eating the stars. The trees lie flattened, stripped of needle and branch, charred poles pointing away from the blow of the heaven’s lightnings. White bones under the roof-tree.

  Lakkariss cold, a shard of black ice lying amid the flames.

  Moth woke, cold as the sword despite the weight of fur blankets and sheepskins. Mikki lay beside her, one cool-fleshed arm trailing over her ribs, and she listened to his slow breathing in the darkness. A breath. A long stillness. Another. Midwinter. He might not wake for days. If she left him now…But there would be no lying before the Old Great Gods. Leaving him would not stop her caring, and so long as she held to that one last unbetrayed faith, she was powerless against them. The sword was not to her throat, but to Mikki’s.

  She lifted his arm aside and crawled out of the cabinet-like bed. The air bit at naked skin. Fire first, before anything else. Her body might not mind the cold, but her heart hated it. She stirred up the embers in the baked-clay stove, fed it with birch logs and watched the new flames born, sitting on her heels. The bronze cauldron of water that sat on the stone hearth began to tick and pop as it felt the heat. She went back and closed the folding side of the bed, not to disturb Mikki’s sleep, and only then wrapped herself in a cloak of winter-white hareskin.

  The cabin was low and dark, but snug against the wind, its walls a double thickness of upright logs. Mikki had lined it with painted wainscoting like a king’s hall, and the floor was not beaten earth but good planed boards. Mikki had made himself a bit of a reputation as a woodworker down in Swanesby on the Shikten’aa, a settlement of Northron farmers who had pushed so far west and north. He took his dugout south up the river in the autumn to trade the cured skins from her year’s hunting—hare and deer, because he would not have her kill anything they did not eat—worked a month or two of lengthening nights on building barns or houses or boats, sometimes crafting fine furniture, and came back with rye and oats and cheese, butter and perhaps a bolt of cloth or a cake of black Nabbani ink for the sagas she wrote on sheets of boiled birchbark, since the exotic imports of Swanesby did not extend to vellum. A tale of a demon carpenter in Swanesby might spread, eventually, but there was nothing in that alone to make anyone come seeking them, Mikki insisted. A demon carpenter, a demon farmer, was not the same as a demon smith, with magic in his craft to draw humans seeking fated blades and charmed spearheads. He only made chairs and cradles and roof-beams; there was no doom in those and no virtue beyond that of good crafting, nothing to draw the attention of kings and heroes. Or did she want to give up bread and butter?

  What Moth did not want to give up was this undeserved peace, this unending round of seasons, digging and sowing, the hunt and harvest, the ever-renewed struggle to have enough firewood, the petty warfare against the musk-deer and hare in defence of her cabbages and beets, and the long, still winters when she wrote her histories and roamed the frozen wilderness with skis and bow while Mikki slept. She would be a homesteader’s wife. Her great defiance of fate would be to set down the old lays of the drowned isles that were forgotten now in the kingdoms of the north, and to write sagas of the deeds of those first kings, true sagas, not overlaid with the romance of later times. Even if she had no one to read them.

  But that was not her doom, and she only pretended otherwise.

  The chest sat in the darkest corner, the oldest piece of their furnishings. Mikki had made it for her when they built the house, carving it with swan-breasted ships. She moved the quern and storage jars that sat atop it and raised the lid. The leather hinges were cracking with age and disuse. She should have kept them oiled. She pushed aside bundles wrapped in greasy woollen cloth, smelling, faintly, of rust, and pulled out a leather pouch, stiff and crumbling with age. The thong knotted around it broke when she tugged at it, and she flung the broken pieces in the fire. She pulled from the little bag a roughly squared slip of age-greyed wood, set it with deliberation on the broad stone hearth supporting the stove, followed it with two more before she looked down at them. All three lay carved-face uppermost, the sharp angles of the runes stained dark. Old blood, very old.

  Need. Journey. Water. Three more, arrayed below the first, gave her Ice, Devil, Divinity, and a further three, Sword, Hail, Boar.

  Need was danger, hardship, struggle. Journey might be sudden change. Water was often change, but natural and not sudden, and also life, with strength sleeping in it. Ice warned of dangers unseen and the paralysing loss of will. Devil could tell of pride or treachery, rootless wandering, risk and chance an
d fear, and Divinity was rooted confidence and power and strength of will. Sword for war and violent death, but also for protection arriving from without or the one who stands alone and watchful outside the door of the hall. That had been her, once, in all its faces. Hail for sudden loss and unexpected turmoil, but new growth, new shapes could follow from it. The Boar for hidden or waiting strength, the guardian animal of the holy places of the vanished little first people, before there were ever kings in the north—strength that could hide too long, be forgotten and wither away, or become a foundation for power and movement.

  That was how the Northron wizards might read these runes. On the other hand, they might all, or nearly all, hold literal truth. Sword, in particular, she did not want to see. Sword and Journeying, and Devil. Across and down and corner to corner, there was consistency.

  They told her nothing the savage dancing flames of the sky in her dreams had not already said.

  She had hoped for more. Or less. Hoped she merely had bad dreams.

  Moth swept the rune-carved slips of yew into the stove.

  She lit the stub of a sweet beeswax candle at the fire, dragged aside the bin that held the summer’s beets, and lifted a trapdoor in the floor. Farther south, they might have had a root-cellar. Here the pit beneath had been cut down through the thin black earth that so grudgingly allowed a short season of gardening, into frost that never thawed. Cold struck up from below and the candle flickered and snapped.

  Frost clung to the edges of the pit, and the shadows in the corners were thick, heavier than night should be. All that it held was a sheathed sword, lying alone in a web of ice.

  There was no ladder. Moth set the candle on the floor and jumped. Ice snapped. Crystals of it formed again around her bare ankle, melted, reached again. She ignored the creeping tide, wrenched the sword free of its cocoon. She caught the edge and swung herself up again, quietly lowering the trap, but the side of the bed had been pushed open. The heap of furs and fleeces stirred. Mikki watched her, his head pillowed on an arm.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Moth shook her head, set the candle on the table. “What woke you?”

  “An empty bed?” he suggested. When she failed to smile, he said soberly, “You’ve brought up the sword.”

  Moth nodded. She cradled the sheathed sword against her breast like a baby, dewed with melted frost. “It called me.”

  Perhaps it had been calling, unheeded, for longer than she thought. She had not had nightmares for years after they stopped wandering and went to earth in Baisirbska. After Ogada died, she could never bring herself to reach back into the snarled, fraying web of power with which the Great Gods had bound the seven, to feel out if any were gone, or awake and working against their bonds to struggle into the world again. She had not wanted to know. Now…she felt for the traces of that ancient spell and as she did so, the lines of the Great Gods’ power clung to her, barbed threads seeking to renew their hold, to draw her in again, the coldness of a death of the body that was not strong enough to be death of the soul. She found what she sought and pulled away, back to the waking world, and staggered, steadying herself with a hand on the stove. Flesh welcomed that little heat unburned.

  “Two,” she said.

  “Two what?” Mikki asked. “Don’t do that, wolf. It’s worrying.”

  She showed him a palm not even blistered. “Only two still bound.”

  “Ah. Who?”

  Moth shook her head.

  “And how long have the others been free?”

  “At least one, a few-score years. The others, I don’t know. I’ve dreamed, I think—”

  “Dreamed what?”

  “Nothing to tell me anyone threatened the world again.”

  “Perhaps they don’t.”

  “Or didn’t. Something’s changed.”

  The Gods might have their plans, but fate ruled all, and it was not the Gods, in the end, who shaped the worlds, much as they liked to think so. There was some comfort in that, scant though it was.

  Mikki yawned. “It can wait till spring, can’t it? Even the likes of we should have better sense than to travel in a Baisirbsk winter.”

  “Lakkariss is awake, Mikki.”

  “Spring.” The man yawned, chuckled, and reached out a broad hand and an arm muscled like a smith’s, furred with golden hairs. “Tell the sword to wait, my wolf. It may be awake, but I don’t want to be. Come back to bed.”

  Moth stood, her head bowed over the sword in her arms, hair hiding her face. He did not know what she risked, if the Gods decided she was refusing them. But it cost them such effort to touch the world, for all they watched it, dimly. That she did take Lakkariss from its grave should be token of good intent. She turned away and laid the sword on one of the benches along the wall. The scabbard was covered in plain dark leather, unornamented; even its mouth and terminal, silver once, were blackened with the years. Ordinary enough, but the scrolling, knotted lines incised on the hilt drew the eye, and could drag the unwary mind into dreams a human soul should not have to endure. She would wrap the grip in leather again, to break the pattern.

  “Spring, then. But once the rivers open I have to go.”

  “We have to go.”

  “You don’t need to come.” Leave him behind, wean her heart away…it would break, and the Great Gods would have no hold on her, and she carried a sword that even they should learn to fear.

  He did not bother to answer, only laughed, showing eyeteeth too large for a human jaw. “Where are we going?”

  “South, I suppose.”

  “Yes, well, up here, we’re beggared for choice, aren’t we? South I could work out for myself. Even half-asleep.”

  “South will have to do, for now. Perhaps the Great Grass.” Why that? Nothing in the runes suggested it. But she trusted such impulse, when it felt of certainty.

  “Bear-fetishists,” he said with distaste.

  “They used to be.”

  “I wouldn’t mind, if they’d worship them living. It’s the obsession with skulls and teeth.”

  “You could start your own collection of teeth.”

  “If we spend too long there, I might be tempted. Are you coming back to bed, or going out to terrorize the woods?”

  Moth stood staring down at the sword, her face expressionless. Then she blinked, looked up, and gave him a faint smile. “Hungry?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I was gone all last week and you never woke to miss me. There’s a brace of hare hanging outside the door. I’ll stew them. A change from smoked fish. It’s too late to start bread if you’re hungry now, but I could make oatcakes, and there’s plenty of butter and honey still. Mikki, if you won’t stay behind, you’ll have to abandon your bees. I’m sorry.”

  “The bees can look after themselves. Anyway, the winter came so early this year, they probably won’t make it through. Next time you want to lose yourself in the wilderness, pick someplace bees can thrive?”

  “Someplace with a longer summer night?”

  He grinned. “That too.”

  “At least we won’t have to dig the garden this spring.”

  “What do you mean, we, princess?”

  Moth laughed and dropped her fur cloak over the sword. Pinching the candle out, she crossed the floor in a few long strides to scramble into the bed. The man yelped and disappeared beneath the heap.

  “Great Gods, no! If you’re going to stand around half-naked in the cold, wolf, don’t think you can warm yourself up on me!”

  Frost began to settle on the cloak over the sword, spreading across the bench, white as bleached bone.

  These wizards were wise, and powerful. They knew the runes and the secret names, and the patterns of the living world and of the dead. And the stories of their deeds are many, for they were great heroes among their peoples. And these all can be told, if there be golden rings, or silver cups, or wine and flesh and bread by the fire.

  But the seven wizards desired to know yet more, and see yet mor
e, and to live forever like the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters and the demons of the forest and the stone and the sand and the grass.

  In his own mind, his name remained Tamghiz, though he knew he was Tamghiz Ghatai and that it was Ghatai, mostly, who drove him. Calling himself Tamghat freed him to play at games he had long exhausted, petty ambition and wizardry and lordship. He had been royal, once, clan-chief of the Green Banners by right of birth and his father’s choosing, by right of victory over a brother who did not bow to their father’s will and tried to split the clan. Tamghiz had made the Green Banners the paramount clan on the Great Grass, and made the shaman’s cult of the bear he followed the paramount faith over all the gods of the hills and the goddesses of the waters. Such victories were empty, in the end. The Great Grass was a small world, bounded by its own narrowness of mind, its own celebration of brute strength, which led to treachery and betrayal, till a man could not trust even his wife, even his children, to follow to his vision’s end.

  But it was amusing, to make himself Tamghat, less than he had ever thought to be, mere wizard, mere warlord, clanless. A game, while he followed the path the stars laid out.

  In the galleried apartment that had been the incarnate goddess’s, and still bore evidence of her in child’s clothing—a certain lack of evidence of childish amusements, poor thing, not a carved horse or a skipping rope, a pet dog or a songbird—Tamghiz breathed on the pebbles in his hand, nine of them, three black, three red, three yellow, and tossed them over the unrolled calfskin on which was painted the map of the Grasslander sky.