Gods of Nabban (10 page)

“Yes. I liked it. Shall we go to the hall before your fingers freeze on the strings?”

“Before we give the old man an attack of rheumatism,” said Rozen, climbing to her feet. “Devils take this frost. I was meant for warmer lands.”

“Old?” demanded Faullen. “Old enough to know that if I plant my bony behind on the frozen ground I'll give myself piles, as you and my lady are so set on doing.” He gave Deyandara a hand and hauled her to her feet.

“In the kingdoms of the north, they'd call this a fine springlike day, Rozen,” Yeh-Lin said. She did like the folk of Praitan. Here was the rightful queen of the land who had stood aside for one better suited to lead it, and a scout and groom and a wandering foreign wizard—princess and her banner-lords, as her own folk would name them—and they all strolled companionably together and joked and grumbled, and gave respect and trust where it was earned. Sometimes she wished it could feel like home to her. Sometimes she wished she could stay.

She would not spoil the girl's evening. Deyandara sang often as a bard's apprentice, but it was no small thing, to offer a new song. Nor would Yeh-Lin betray friendship and oaths by vanishing in the night. She had sworn service; she would seek leave. It would be given. They had gone east, those wanderers Deyandara saw in her mind's eye beneath the moon. One should be dead and gone to his road by now, though the girl, she thought, had not understood that was his doom and she would not tell her so. The empire drew the other, but there was something coiled waiting in its heart. Yeh-Lin did not think he ought to face it alone. Deyandara would not think so, either. She trusted the child for that.

CHAPTER VI

The northerly road might be the straighter route, for the crow, or vulture, but once it descended into the barren lowland, it began to twist through narrow ways that set Ahjvar on edge, taking the crossbow from its bag and slinging it at his knee, as if he expected ambush. Difficult to be certain of the road; the wind seemed to have scoured most tracks away or buried them under shifting drifts. Their path wound through strange pillars of stone, striped russet and grey and yellow, smoothed and rounded as if by years of rushing water, and oddly sculpted, so that, wherever the way broadened out, it seemed they rode through a forest of giant toadstools. In other places, boulders balanced precariously atop more boulders that seemed mere pebbles, or dark cave mouths glowered down from cliffs curved and rounded as a sleeping woman's flank. The wind whistled and sighed and gusted oddly, but at least there was no smell of smoke, no sign of human habitation.

No gods, either, though Ghu would have expected one amid all this stone. There was something, though.

“A goddess, I think,” he said aloud. “But she's faded long ago. The stones remember her.”

Ahjvar looked around the heights above. “You mean we're at the bottom of a lake? Or is it a dead river like the ravine of Marakand? How long ago?”

Ghu shook his head. The world had its own life that rose and faded regardless of humanfolk. “More what we would call a demon, maybe,” he said. “Maybe they're not so different after all. Long ago. Very long. She was a spirit of the living earth, nothing more. Before humanfolk ever walked. No shape, no voice, no memory. Dead and gone, or changed out of all understanding.”

They rode in silence a little longer, the camels striding on soft pads, no bells on their harness to proclaim their passage to the world. A hawk cried out of sight. The dogs appeared and disappeared, weaving their own way, hunting for the same small, fluffy-tailed rats the hawk would be after. “What happens,” Ahjvar asked suddenly, “when a god dies?”

“Life fades to life. After that, I don't know.”

“The gods of Nabban—the tales I heard growing up said Nabban's gods were lost in a devil's war and became Mother Nabban and Father Nabban. Lost, died. Were eaten by two of their own to become greater, strong as devils themselves.”

“Not eaten. You should ask Yeh-Lin. She was there.”

“I'm hoping we don't see her again. Anyway, do you think she'd tell me the truth? Don't you know? Ghu, when we come to Nabban . . .”

“I don't know,” he said, a bit desperately. “The gods and goddesses of Nabban, the old gods, they became two. No, they put themselves into two, dissolved and merged, the two greatest of the northerly lands of Nabban, the god of one mountain, the goddess of one river, to stand against the devil. To be greater, to be all the land. It was a willing sacrifice.”

“And now?”

“The gods of the earth and the goddesses of the water shouldn't be so. They were only one mountain, one river, and now they hold all the land and all the folk of the land, north and south and west and the coast, and it's too great a weight, one they're not fitted to carry. They're
tired
.”

“What happens, when we come to Nabban? What happens to you?” Ahjvar turned his camel across to cut Ghu off.

“I don't know.”

“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.