Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  Embarrassment. Defiance, beyond whatever it was she still hid.

  How many generations of Attalissa incarnate, and the temple women sworn to celibacy to honour her? You’re too young. But you’re older than me and in the end you’re not my daughter and maybe I don’t have a right to object. Go away and let me sleep, brat. Now that I know you’re safe and I can.

  It was interesting. In a rush.

  He snorted, and that time Gaguush did wake up, at the sudden heave of his chest. Sayan, don’t tell Bikkim that. ‘Interesting’ is not what a man wants to hear, ‘Dhala mine.

  Relief. He wants to marry me.

  “Holla?”

  I should hope so!

  You know, no one would say that if I were a boy who’d gone off with my first woman.

  Don’t start talking like Immerose. She only manages to get by because she’s got brothers and sisters willing to take the poor unwanted babes she keeps producing.

  Go to sleep, Blackdog.

  “What?” Gaguush asked.

  “An amusing dream.”

  “Yeah? Was I in it?”

  “Could have been.”

  “Oh?”

  Foxes yipped at one another somewhere over the hill, and bats darted, shadows against the night. The grey edge of dawn already lightened the sky. Pakdhala turned, pillowing her head against Bikkim’s chest, stared into a darkness there was no escaping.

  Hareh. His name had been Hareh. A young wizard, a wanderer, who came from Tiypur in the days of the death of its empire, after the wizards’ wars there when the Westron gods died, long before there were kings in the north and the wars of the seven devils. He came into the Pillars of the Sky, and he stayed. Hers, her lover, when Lissavakail was a cluster of fishers’ huts and the temple islet a place of grass and trees and the cave where they sheltered, laughing, from the rain. She was as Sera, then, or Kinsai, true goddess, no mortal body, taking physical form at will. And that was when…that was when the mad devil—or whatever it was, an animal in its madness, no rational creature, but a devil in its strength—the mad devil that hunted the peaks on the edge of her territory, possessing the body of one animal after another, turning them to monsters, bear and leopard and herd-dog all warped and changed, sent the folk pleading to their gods, to her, to Narva, to other gods of the peaks and goddesses of the mountain rivers. And when no power of any earthbound god could do more than drive it for a time to some other deity’s land, Hareh recalled that he had read speculation, nothing more than philosophers’ musings, in ancient books of Pirakul, on the binding of devils.

  He was no great power, as wizards went. It would take more than he could ever hope to become to master a thing of such strength. And somehow, slowly, they formed their plan, by which she would gain the powers of a mortal wizard, a strength and a form the devil-creature would not fear, as it did not fear humans, and which could lure it into her heart, and strike, with human wizardry, to contain it…

  But she lost him. Her Hareh, her clever, laughing man with the wanderer’s heart that chased always after new horizons, new wonders. She was born, of a village fortune-teller, she drew power into herself, a wizard great as the children of Kinsai were…a child. Hareh was there to watch her grow, to teach her, to travel to Marakand and bring her books, the wisdom and secrets of the great Pirakuli and Nabbani scholars and mystics…he loved her. As a daughter. And so she lost him. And lost him doubly. She grew to adulthood and they fought the monster that roamed the mountains, a half-formed thing of bone and shadow. They bound it, as they had planned. And Hareh became the first Blackdog. But her heart had never changed, and so she vowed herself to celibacy, because she could not imagine, did not want to imagine, another man who could take Hareh’s place. Though by then there was a fisherwoman he went to, in the nights, a widow with grown children, a woman of his own age, and she would not let herself resent it. She invited two of his stepdaughters to attend her on her island, and they were the first priestesses…

  And the Blackdog…his stepson bore it after him, and then that man’s nephew, and Hareh, she buried memory of Hareh away, buried all that pain, had to demonstrate that it was all worthwhile, until the mortality for which she sacrificed his love became the shape, the purpose of her existence. Until she forgot. And remembered, lying flesh to flesh beneath Bikkim, so young and strong and passionate, as Hareh had been when he first walked by her lake.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, but the tears leaked through. She did not know the way back; she could not see it; she was trapped in her humanity till death freed her, only for the pattern she had laid so long ago to begin again. But the Blackdog, the true form of the thing flung on Tamghat unexpecting, unprepared…perhaps that could save her, save Lissavakail, save Serakallash, save Kinsai from the fate she feared as Tamghat grew and grew, devouring gods.

  And that, she knew how to accomplish. That was simple, if she made it back to Lissavakail. Easy. But Holla-Sayan would be the first whose soul the monster devoured.

  Morning came too early. Pakdhala watched the shadows of the grasses on Bikkim’s face grow to sudden sharpness, fingers of golden light slanting over him. She kissed him, softly, felt him waking, his mouth opening to hers. When he opened his eyes she sat up away from him.

  His smile faded, the old lines finding their place again around his eyes. Age that shouldn’t have been his.

  His finger touched her lips, moved away. It would be easier if he spoke, but he did not.

  “We can’t,” she said, and found her voice cracked, unsteady with the tears she would not give in to. “We can’t do this again. I mustn’t. I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t right.”

  “We should marry,” Bikkim said.

  “We can’t.”

  “You’re young. Not too young. Holla-Sayan—”

  “It’s nothing to do with Holla-Sayan! It’s…Bikkim, I can’t. There are…things are different for me.”

  “Different? How? This idea of Gaguush’s about apprenticing you to a wizard? You know I’d go with you. Wherever you went. I have no home to give you.”

  She shook her head. “I…Bikkim, give me time.” A coward’s way out.

  He sat up. “I didn’t…Sera, I didn’t, last night, I didn’t take you into anything you didn’t—”

  She put a hand over his mouth, to stop the words. “Bikkim, Bikkim, no. No! Don’t—don’t think that, ever. I…I wouldn’t change what’s done if I could, I’d never, I wish it could be like this, I wish this could be my life, with you, I do. But I can’t be with you again. I mustn’t.”

  “If I talk to Holla-Sayan—he’ll say you’re too young, and scare me half to death, and Gaguush’ll sit on him, and he’ll come round.”

  “My father’d be happier with you than anyone,” she said hotly.

  “He—” knows. Yes. “Bikkim. I’m not ready for marriage. If I was…there’s no one else. You know that. No one but you. Just…give me time.”

  “Go back to yesterday?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Please.”

  He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close, half-dressed as they were. Great Gods, the scent of him, and the heat of his skin…

  “If you ask me,” he mumbled into her hair, “if that’s what you honestly want, I will try. But don’t just say time. Tell me—how long?”

  “Till Marakand.” She said it unthinking. Till Marakand. She would not be going to Marakand.

  “Is that all?” He let her pull away to arms’ length. Even smiled. “’Dhala, that’s not so bad.”

  Pakdhala gave him a weak smile in return. “Months.”

  “A few months. I’ve been waiting years.”

  She shut her eyes, tears stinging.

  “’Dhala?”

  “Thank you.” She yawned, rubbed her hands over her face, rubbed away the betraying gleam, she hoped. “Think we can sneak into the caravanserai, or is the whole gang going to be hanging out the gate watching for us?”

&nbs
p; “Leering, Great Gods, I hope they’re still sleeping off Varro’s meadu.”

  “Father wasn’t drinking, was he?”

  “No. True. So we won’t live to come to Marakand, and we don’t need to worry about the future at all.”

  Pakdhala squeezed her eyes shut again. Slid her hand free when Bikkim kissed her knuckles, and crawled away to gather up scattered clothing.

  “Spider in your boot,” she observed, tossing it to him.

  Bikkim shook the spider out, made a face at her. “Spider on your backside.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Made you look.”

  She threw a shirt at him, discovered too late it was hers, which rather spoiled the nonchalant morning-banter of the caravan campfire she had been trying to recapture, when she had to wrestle it back from him.

  Dog. What do I tell him? I can’t.

  If you’re old enough to decide to sleep with him, you’re old enough to have thought of that, and to deal with it now on your own. But you don’t, by the Old Great Gods, hurt my friend.

  It’s too late for that, Holla-Sayan. I didn’t mean…he loves me. So marry him and give him babies and let the damned lake look after itself.

  She felt him wince, shudder, some contest with the dog.

  Dog, we have to go back to Lissavakail. Now. This trip.

  A silence, in which Bikkim’s worried hand found hers. She squeezed it, hated herself, then, giving him even that hope.

  The Blackdog knew she was still no goddess in her strength.

  And what do we do then? Die?

  I know a way. Maybe.

  I—we—see none.

  I do. Maybe. I…I won’t tell you yet. I need to think. Very faintly. Trust me, Blackdog.

  “And the nineteenth set in the Palace of the Moon?”

  “Realization of difficulty. Opposition to difficulty. Bending with difficulty.”

  “And what is the explanation of each?”

  Ivah moved around behind the girl as she began to recite the commentary on the first of the nineteenth of the Palace of the Moon, word for word from the scroll she held closed in her lap. At first, Pakdhala had always wanted to put the commentaries into her own words, to explain the implications of the symbols as she understood them, to debate alternatives. That was the wretched mercenaries’ upbringing, always looking to quarrel, opinionated without education. Ivah had been firm: that was not the correct way, not how her mother had taught her. Pakdhala had given her a doubtful look under which lurked an unfittingly adult and indulgent amusement, and had thereafter recited word for word. Ivah had feared she was going to run out of things she dared teach the girl—true spells and allowing her to throw the coins were right out—since she learned to read the Nabbani ideograms so unnaturally swiftly, but the gang worked the goddess like a bondservant. There was little time for study, though they let her off more once the road turned east away from the Kinsai’av and Pakdhala seemed to grow vaguely ill, which the gang all took for granted. She found the desert air hard, being half of mountain blood, one of the Marakanders explained when Ivah made some fishing comment about it. Ivah would have expected her to grow stronger as they drew nearer Lissavakail. But then, she would have expected the avatar to have died years before, when the Blackdog first carried her away. If she could have found out how it was done, how a goddess lived away from her waters, her father would have praised her. But she hadn’t. Another disappointment to him, or it would be when he found out. He had not come to her dreams since the first night she joined the gang. Some storm had boiled up suddenly in her dreaming mind and his touch had vanished. She had woken sweating, shivering, to find Shaiveh and the goddess both sitting up in their blankets, staring.

  “You were yelling,” Shai had said accusingly, as if she’d done it on purpose. The goddess had said nothing. The others, woken as well, had made a few jokes about nightmares and gone back to sleep, and it had never happened again. Perhaps it was because she was so close to the goddess. Ivah just hoped Tamghat was going to do as he had promised, and have an escort of noekar waiting for her. Relays of fast horses might outrun the Blackdog, but she felt sick with fear when she thought of trusting her life to that alone. It was all very well for her father to say she could threaten to harm the goddess if the Blackdog attacked, but none of the stories suggested to her that the Blackdog was a thing you could reason with. It was a mad animal; her father himself had said that, on other occasions. And she did not think the Westgrasslander it had possessed was any too rational either.

  Holla-Sayan—did Pakdhala really believe he was her father?—had been acting more and more irrational the further they went along the desert road, prowling around the camp all evening as though the watch were not to be trusted, refusing almost to sleep, disappearing into the desert at night, saying something followed them. The friction with the bad-tempered gang-boss had finally erupted into a shouting match three days ago, in which she called him a madman to his face and told him to damn well go back to the safe walls of his father’s farm if he couldn’t cope with the open sky. They hadn’t spoken since, and that had set the goddess, who seemed to be of a withdrawn and glum disposition anyhow, into a bleak misery almost as silent. But she kept up her studies as though it was some distraction, a way of not having anything to do with the seething unhappiness in the rest of the gang. The Grasslander husband and wife didn’t seem to be speaking either, and their son had come to blows with the young Serakallashi man, until one of the Stone Desert men knocked them both down.

  The malaise was contagious. Shaiveh ignored her, flirting with the boy Zavel and the Northron Varro impartially, and grew increasingly sarcastic about the “pretty little camel-groom” when she did speak.

  Was it possible Shai was jealous of the way she spent all her evenings with Pakdhala? Ivah couldn’t imagine her being such a fool. How was she supposed to be a tutor to the girl if she didn’t make some effort to teach? Bah.

  There was Zavel coming towards them carrying cups of tea, and there came Shai, plucking one of the cups from his hand, putting an arm round his shoulders, leading him off. He looked over his shoulder at the goddess, caught Ivah’s eye and flushed as he was steered away. Ivah scowled and began picking at the knotted yarn on one of Pakdhala’s many braids. She was the one who ought to be jealous.

  “What are you doing?” the girl demanded, at the first tug on a braid.

  “I’m going to comb your hair. I don’t understand you mercenaries. You fuss over your camels like they’re fine horses or pet dogs, and you never bother to get the dust out of your own hair.”

  “I bathed every day all along the Kinsai-av,” Pakdhala said indignantly. “And we always go to the bathhouse when we’re in a decent town.”

  “I’m teasing.” But it was true. “You have a headache, I can tell by your frowning. This will help. I’m not trying to seduce you or anything,” Ivah added, which was effective in preventing further protest. Pakdhala was the sort of girl who would not want to insult Ivah by having Ivah think she had thought…and so on. Ivah untied the knotted yarn on the last braid and drew her fingers through the hair, gritty with desert dust, dirty as that of a herder bondman’s brat. How could the Blackdog, knowing who she was, allow this? But he was just as dirty. She didn’t notice that when she looked at him, just those deadly eyes, watching her, always watching her. It had taken the goddess herself losing her temper with him, yelling at him to stop being a fool, there was no harm in learning a little of what Ivah had to teach, to stop him appearing almost from nowhere the moment Ivah came near the girl. He still watched, but from a distance.

  The braids ravelled out, Ivah took her own tortoiseshell comb from her coat pocket and began on the goddess’s hair, working her way up from the bottom. What a mess. The Serakallashi paused on his way past to the well, Nivlan’s well, they called it, though Ivah didn’t think such an insignificant scrape in the desert could really have a goddess. Pakdhala turned her head to look at him, wincing at the pull on her hair, then loo
ked down, unrolling the scroll once more. Bikkim dropped his own gaze, walked on, his face closed. Pakdhala raised her eyes again to follow him.

  “You like him,” Ivah said sympathetically. They spent so much time looking at one another, those two, and yet they seemed almost to work at never being alone together. “I don’t see why he can’t be kinder, spend more time with you. Your father can’t watch you every moment, and anyway, he must expect you’ll marry someday.”

  Some of the gang seemed to assume the two were a couple already, but that was like her father always trying to pair her off; it didn’t mean there was anything to what they snickeringly hoped. Ivah hoped so, for the man’s sake.

  The goddess merely sighed and rolled her shoulders, as if Ivah hadn’t spoken. “That is nice. Thank you.”

  “You need to take more pride in your appearance. A woman’s hair is her glory, you know.” That was something An-Chaq had used to say.

  “Is it? What’s a man’s hair, then?”

  “Just something to keep the sun off his head when he loses his hat.”

  Pakdhala looked over her shoulder, laughing, which she hardly ever did, and combed a lock forward with her fingers, started braiding it again. A shame it had to be done. Her face was quite pretty, framed in the rippling soft waves. Tamghat should see her like that, not looking such a scruffy, dirty little creature. Though Ivah supposed she wasn’t any better. Baths. Two days, at most, and she could bathe, and have servants wash her hair properly, with perfumed soap and hot water. And if she wasn’t dead, her father would have to be proud.

  Ivah dropped the comb, snarled with a rat’s nest of soft black hairs, into her pocket.

  Elsinna left her pony in the stable under the rock and headed into the dark cave of the house. She had been hoping Attavaia might be visiting. The so-called wife of Tsuzas—and Elsinna would have paid a great deal to know just how much that marriage was a play to fool her brother’s mad god and how much it was something more—must have been and gone. Attavaia’s wanderings among the scattered groups that watched and waited, prayed and trained, for the day of Attalissa’s return were unending.