by K V Johansen
On the other hand, a hunter who made no qualms about shooting Tamghat’s folk might be one of those who trained with her secret village militias, or he might be one she should recruit.
And he should know the right path to Narvabarkash.
Her hand was sticky, fouled, and she could hardly sheathe the sax as it was, but dismounting to clean it was a horrible labour. By the time she had worked her way down, hung a perilous moment tangled in her petticoats, and cleaned sword and hand, sleeve and shawl as best she could, in the thin dead grass that clung between the rocks, the hunter had looted both mercenaries, caught Rying’s brown pony, and heaved both bodies over the unhappy beast’s back.
Attavaia hobbled after him, leaning on her pony, the crutch in her other hand. He led back towards the ice field. The white pony milled about on the edge, still nervous, flinching at the sight of them, but the hunter crooned to it, holding out a hand, and it came like a dog, cautious, but relieved to have a human taking charge.
“There’s no way down,” Attavaia said. “Is there?”
“Not for you. But if you want your boyfriends to disappear, a crevasse is the best I can think of.”
“And the ponies?” she asked doubtfully. She couldn’t see killing them and dragging their bodies anywhere out of sight, and didn’t like the idea, anyway, innocent beasts caught in the quarrels of humans. But to leave them straying, where some villager might claim them and find himself executed as a murderous rebel…
The hunter gave her that amused flash of a grin again, dark brown eyes in a brown-burned face of the high peaks. The fringe of beard framing his square jaw was trimmed short, and he was cleaner than the average hunter. He had turquoise pendants in each ear, rather than the usual gold rings. Maybe he hunted leopards.
“They’re worth too much. And both young mares, too. I know a place that’ll take them, where Tamghati soldiers won’t see ‘em. Hold the ponies here, would you, Sister?”
He hauled a body off, hesitated only a moment, and rolled it over the edge. Attavaia watched expressionlessly as the second followed, arms flailing.
“It’ll be three of us dead at the bottom, if I try carrying ‘em down,” the hunter said, with a hint of defensiveness.
Attavaia nodded and found a rock to sit on, holding the reins of all three beasts, as the hunter disappeared down the steep sheep-track after the corpses.
She could leave him, take all three ponies and he would never catch up. Or he might; she was a townswoman, and though she had been learning the mountains for two years now, she would never read them as a man like that did. He would track her down, if he wanted to, and he probably would, since the ponies no doubt represented a fairly substantial windfall of wealth for him.
Attavaia made it well over an hour, by the march of the shadows, before the hunter returned. She was cold and stiff and her leg was throbbing; she didn’t think she could haul herself back into the saddle without help.
He looked more than a little relieved to see her still sitting there, or maybe it was only the ponies he was glad to see. He took the reins of the mercenaries’ two from her and offered a hand up. Kept hold of the hand, once she was up.
“What happened to your leg?” he asked, looking down.
“Broken. A horse fell on it.”
He frowned. “Death,” he said flatly. “Where?”
“Serakallash,” she answered, rattled. “In the battle, when Tamghat took it.”
“Ah. And whose side were you on?”
“The right one.”
He snorted, smiled, and let go her hand. The air was cold, after his warm grip. “You’ve missed your trail. It’s back that way.”
“I realize that.” A pause. “Which trail?”
“To Narvabarkash. Or thereabouts. You don’t want to go to the village itself, anyway.”
“Where are your dogs?” Attavaia took a firmer grip on her crutch. Sweet Attalissa, she’d sat here an hour or two waiting on the man and never thought to wonder that. A hunter without dogs? Without spears?
“With the yaks.” A wide-eyed, innocent look, playing with her as much as the damned Grasslander. A sudden smile, not innocent and much, much to be preferred, as of a joke shared between friends. She found herself smiling back, even not knowing what the joke was. “We’ve been expecting you, Sister. I’m Tsuzas. I was expecting a goddess, actually, for some reason, but,” he shrugged, “you’ll do. Can I help you up?”
She didn’t answer, hauling herself belly-down over the saddle from the off side, swinging her good left leg over, but he caught and steadied her, impersonally intimate hands on her hips.
“I don’t see how you can expect me, since my business isn’t with you, and you can expect all the goddesses you want, Tamghat’s made sure there aren’t any around here, hasn’t he?”
“You tell me, Sister.” He swung up on the brown and followed her back along the trail, pausing only to bundle up the looted gear and strap it to the white’s saddle. Attavaia kept going, but a clatter of hooves warned her as the man caught up.
“I may be wrong about the goddess,” he said, sounding almost contrite. “It’s often hard to know what anything means.”
She looked back over her shoulder. Too clean for a hunter living wild on the mountains, Great Gods, yes.
Handsome men, Enneas had said.
“You’re from Narvabarkash?”
“Didn’t I say so?”
He had not, and the limpid, lying-innocent eyes said he knew it.
“You’re Narva’s priest,” she accused.
“Tsuzas,” he said, touching his chest with a little bow. He grinned, shrugged. “Priest as the god takes me. Today I’m herding yaks and hunting goddesses. So I’m told. Turn south, here, up over this ridge.”
“There’s no trail.”
“So?” He pushed the brown pony past her, with the white at heel. “This is a shortcut. Actually a spur of Narva’s peak itself, but we cross over. If you were heading for the main village, you’d go over and turn back west, but we go east, and then up, into the stones and Narva’s heart. We won’t make it before dark, but then, you wouldn’t have made it to the village by sunset, either.”
He kept looking back, as though he expected her to suddenly bolt, or perhaps merely to slip gracelessly off over the pony’s tail. The latter didn’t seem so unlikely. She wouldn’t have tried this ridge, herself, even if it had shown a trail.
“She’s with you,” he said abruptly, waiting for her on the height.
Attavaia clung to her saddlebow, concentrated on breathing evenly, staying upright. Her head pounded with her leg, and she felt cold and clammy. Her teeth had started to chatter. Something pushed at her, cold, like the winter air crawling off the ice field. Angry, a will of hate. It found its way into her, squeezed her heart.
They had a shorter, gentler ride down into the next narrow valley, where half a dozen yak cows grazed, watched over by a pair of the big black dogs. Attavaia found it no easier. Her ears buzzed, and spots danced before her eyes. Mountain sickness, maybe, or the fever striking back into her leg. No place to fall ill.
“The goddess with you—she isn’t Attalissa.” Tsuzas was looking as grey as she felt when the dun came up beside him. He shook his head violently, as if to clear it of buzzing flies. “Death, you said, in Serakallash.”
“Didn’t,” she muttered. “You said that.”
“Sera.” His eyes had gone black, pupils dilated. Then the fit seemed to pass and he only frowned. “You’re in no condition to be riding around the mountains.” He whistled. It sounded like a string of birdcalls. The dogs, who had stood watching warily, scenting strange horses as well as their master, no doubt, went racing about their business. The yaks, black ones splashed with white, like magpies, grumbled and grunted and bunched up, trudged the way they ought, she supposed. Tsuzas, with another look at her, took the dun’s reins. “Just hold on, Sister. It’s a long ride yet, and your order’s not so welcome on the peak.”
Understandin
g hit her, sharp as the pain now jolting up her spine with every step the pony took.
“Your god’s going to kill me.” Attalissa was gone, and so conquered Narva stirred—why hadn’t she realized that danger?
Because Narva had never been more than a legend, a story of old days. Attalissa was all the god the mountains owned, for several days’ travel in any direction. She had to leave this place while she still could. The goddess of the desert spring wasn’t hers, to demand her life in service.
“Sera,” she said, through clenched and chattering teeth. “She said to take her and hide her in the mines of Narva, take her back to her spring when Attalissa returns to defeat Tamghat. You take her. I can’t go with you. I can’t. He’ll kill me.”
“He damned well better not.”
“I’ll go to the village, friends there. Sisters go to Narvabarkash all the time.”
“No. Now he’s got a hold on you, he might not let go, not anywhere in the barkash. Great Gods, I’m sorry.” Tsuzas, presumptuous man, wrapped his own shawl around her shoulders and held it there. “He’s not…all there. What people say about peculiar old relatives? Blind and deaf and dumb, in a way. He just reacts to things. Like an animal.”
“Bloody stupid god to worship.”
“You get to pick yours? At least you chose your priesting. I was born to it. The rest of the barkash is Attalissa’s now, but us, we’re stuck with him, father to son.”
“Emissary from Sera. He can’t hate Sera. He can’t know Sera. Narva, hear me—Sera sent me, from the desert.” Attavaia could hardly get the words out. A weight of hostility, like rocks, like crushing ice, settled more heavily into the half-knit bones of her leg, finding the flaws, the cracks, the scars, pressing on them. Red flecks danced and clustered before her eyes, bees swarming.
“He can’t hear,” Tsuzas said, despairingly. “He can’t understand. Shouldn’t have brought you this far. My fault: priestess and goddess, my grandfather saw you were coming, and it never occurred to me, when he started talking of goddesses, that even in Attalissa’s strength your sisters can never come to the true mines.”
“What true mines?” Talk, any nonsense, just so long as there was sound, tying her to the world.
“There’s the Narvabarkash, the district, and then there’s the Narvabarkash, the mountain peak, the god’s heart. And there’s mines, ancient mines, your sisters never found. Even your assassin Blackdog never found his way through them to the deepest shrine. Not that there’s any stone worth cutting in the old workings any more,” he added, inconsequentially.
“That’s what Sera meant. Take the stone, you take it and hide it there. I’m going…” Back over that ridge, the valley where she had met the mercenaries. It was some border of Narva’s, that was why she hadn’t been able to find the path, why she got lost, she and the mercenaries both, always back at the ice field, they said. If she could stay conscious, stay mounted long enough, she would be safe. If she passed out here, she knew she would never wake. Crushed beneath a mountain of blind old malevolence. Sisters did die, around Narvabarkash. Mountain hazards. Avalanche and rockslide and falls. More often than was quite to be expected. She tried vaguely to turn the pony’s head and found she was leaning on Tsuzas, almost falling between the two animals.
Tsuzas had his long knife in his hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Give me your hand.”
“No.” Her voice slurred like a drunkard’s. The Narvabarkashi simply seized her left hand, forced her fist to unclench with hands too strong to resist, and dragged her palm across the blade.
She slammed her other arm and fist into his face.
“Cold hells!” But he wrestled her half-off the pony and onto his lap, leg an agony this barely increased, used his upper arm to pin her right arm against his chest, held her left. “Hold still,” he said, mildly and indistinctly. Drops of blood spattered her. His nose was bleeding, or a lip, she couldn’t twist her head to see. She was seeing double, and everything heaved sickeningly, as though she rode a galloping camel again. Her pony, with its ill-timed instincts, pulled away. She screamed at the wrenching in her leg and Tsuzas dragged her more securely into his embrace.
The dun pony, perverse beast, stopped and looked back, as if wondering how she had managed to get over there, on the brown.
Tsuzas had let go of her hand, but her own body was in the way and she only flailed feebly as a child, trying to strike him again.
“Don’t keep squirming.”
“Squirming!” she repeated, amazement, outrage, she couldn’t have said what. She thought she said it, at least. All she heard was a sort of mewling whimper. She survived Tamghat and the temple, survived Serakallash, and she was going to die here in her own mountains, killed by a god, when she only thought to serve the gods. Not her own mountains, as Narva chose to remind her. With a mad priest.
The mad priest managed, despite her struggles, to bring the knife to his own left hand and cut across his own palm, with a hiss of indrawn breath.
“Here.” He caught for her hand again, interlaced fingers with hers, clasping bleeding palms together.
“Blood and blood,” he said, and sniffed loudly. His bleeding nose dripped down her face. “Mine to yours, yours to mine, in the sight of Narva and the Old Great Gods, till the worlds end and the sky falls. Say it.”
“Blood—What? Why?”
The ringing in her ears was fading, a little, the red swirling fog clearing, enough she could focus clearly, the bleeding hands squeezed tightly, not so much blood, after all. It was mostly his nose.
“Say it. Blood and blood…”
She swallowed an urge to throw up, still too stupefied by the pounding in her head and leg and the sense of weight pressing on her chest to think. Repeated, at Tsuzas’s reiterated prompting, his words, stumbling and slurring and barely audible to her own ears.
Headache ebbed. Pounding. It was his heart; she leaned her head on his chest. For a moment it was a very comfortable place to lean. Warm. Solid, and the world spun less, as though the heat of his blood flowed into hers, drove strength through her again. Leg, dully aching, no worse than it had been, before he led her over the ridge and into mad Narva’s awareness.
“Bastard!” She pushed away from him, slid, and he clutched her indecently under the arms, held her so she could get her good leg on the ground.
Backed the brown pony away, as if he thought he might need the space between them, and wadded the hem of his jacket to his nose.
“Sorry,” she added, foolishly. “Did I break it?”
Tsuzas shook his head.
“What was that? Magic?” She clenched and unclenched her hand. The cut was deep enough it was going to scar, not deep enough to do permanent damage, she hoped. The bleeding had already stopped, which was more than could be said for the priest’s nose. She shivered. Her clothing was damp with sweat, and she felt strangely hollow and light. Shaky.
“You look better,” he said cautiously. “Are you better?”
Attavaia took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“You were…your lips were blue. You looked…like a corpse. Stopped breathing for a moment, there.”
“Yes, well. You could have told me what you were doing. What were you doing? Was it magic?”
Tsuzas made a vague noise, muffled by the jacket pulled up to his face.
“Here.” Her crutch was out of reach on her pony, but she staggered a step or two, held out his shawl. He took it, gripping his nose and tilting his head back.
“Last person gave me a bloody nose was my sister,” he said resignedly. “Can I say, women, in tones of despair?”
“No. Your dogs and the yaks have disappeared, by the way.”
“They’ll stop when they realize they’ve lost us. We keep a herding hut just in a fold of the mountain, there, that’s where they’ll be. They know the way. We bring them down to graze this valley often. It gives a good excuse for wandering off towards the road, keeping an eye on things. You can alw
ays say, ‘Oh, sirs, looking for a straying yak.’ And there’s the herd to prove it. Can you find my knife?”
“What are you planning to do with it?”
“I thought,” he said, “that before I bleed quite all over this utterly ruined shawl, which I can’t help noticing now actually belongs to my sister, we both might want to wrap up our hands.”
Attavaia found him his knife, dropped on the ground, and he dismounted, used the blade to rip the clean end of the shawl into bandages. She submitted to having a folded pad pressed onto her hand, another strip knotted tightly round it. Wrapped his for him, pride driving her to do as neat a job, and not to tighten it so as to make him wince.
“You still haven’t answered. Are you a wizard? What sort of spell was that?”
“Not a spell,” Tsuzas said awkwardly, and went to catch her pony.
“So?”
“So,” he said, and helped her into the saddle, helped her settle her skirts around the stiff unbending leg as politely as if she had been his nose-bloodying sister. “So, like I said, Narva is not all there. He doesn’t perceive things the way we do. You can’t argue, you can’t reason, you can’t explain. He just reacts.”
“And?”
“And now you’re his, in a way. So you can walk on the peak and enter the holy mines—which no sister of Attalissa’s has ever seen despite what you all think, and if you tell your temple, when you have a temple again, I may have to kill myself.” He said that unexpectedly sombrely, as though it was not a joke. But then he flashed that grin, his face filthy, blood in his beard. “Honoured beyond the dreams of the greediest Old Lady. But the turquoise is long gone.”
Attavaia let the insult pass, thinking of her brother Rideen and his friends, all dead now, the sorts of games and leagues and solemn vows boys of nine and ten indulged in.
“Like children, making blood brothers? Your god thinks that counts, somehow?”