Gods of Nabban (58 page)

“Ride fast and hard,” Ghu said, opening his eyes, breaking the silence that had followed Ahjvar's grim reminder. What had he seen? Something, Yeh-Lin was certain. “Fast and hard and secret as we can be.” Ivah and Ahjvar exchanged identical looks.

“Cattle-thieves,” Yeh-Lin said.

Almost a smile, from the dead king. “Damned right, old woman.”

“But first,” Ghu said, “we move in force to hold Choa and the crossing of the river from Numiya. Let them see that, let word of that go south, as it will, because if it's known we've left Choa, it might begin to seem good to her lords bordering us to take it.”

“And we want them to know the north is in arms behind you, waiting.” Dan nodded.

“Waiting, united,” Ghu said. “Let them think we might fall on them across the river, whether we really have the strength to do so or not. Let them think Numiya and even Solan within our reach.”

That, she hadn't expected from him. It was the dead king's thinking. Numiya might even be possible, depending on what provisions might come from the north or Dan's provinces, and once they held Numiya, then the rich fields of Solan and its harvests . . .

“We need to take this to the Kho'anzi and the lords,” Yeh-Lin said, and sighed. “Dwei Ontari will argue.”

“Dwei Ontari will remember his oaths to me,” Dan said. “It's time to gamble our last coins, isn't it?”

“I think so.” Ghu seemed apologetic, now he had them all—where he had meant to have them, from the moment he and the dead king came to find her with the dawn.

They dispersed, then, Dan collecting Willow and his child from the antechamber to go in search of the Kho'anzi and Lord Ontari, Yeh-Lin's pages sent in search of Lords Raku and Yuro, Governor Zhung Huong, and Lady Ti-So'aro. Ivah went to summon the other wizards, dream-drowned Nang Kangju and timid Gar Sisu, the young woman of Hani Gahur's staff who had witnessed the challenge and his death.

Ghu flowed like a cat down from the windowsill, a hand on Ahjvar's shoulder. The dead king had moved to be there. Did he feel how the god's own being began to wind through him, like the finest roots of some great tree? Did either of them?

It was wrong. Such surrender was wrong.

Time was she would have destroyed him, destroyed the both of them if she could, and thought she saved the land from the horror of a god turned necromancer.

Ambition. Power.

Dotemon, here. In this land, his land. Dotemon's hand on the wretched boy the gods think to make lord of their land. Dotemon's hand, Dotemon's games, mocking, seducing, twisting all to herself, even the dead, now. Playing the games of the Northrons, raising the dead from their bones? There is necromancy about them. It must be she who has dragged the soul from its proper road and set it to walk in life again, with the scent of the stars and the well of night still upon it. Set it in play to seduce the godling, to make him her own, bound to her, though no doubt she would rather have done that herself, that being her way. No doubt a disappointment to her, to find the heir of the gods not amenable to her usual wiles.

Clever, though. The dead and not-dead man is more than a Northron bone-horse, more than a usual necromancy, and very hard to kill.

He will learn how it is done, before he unravels that binding and takes the soul for his own uses.

The days were full and wearing. The nights were restful. In the darkness, there was—not silence, but a quiet that the daytime lacked. The many-layered noise, the weight, almost the battering, of the souls about wore at him. In the night, fewer were wakeful, and those that were, were—closer to themselves, for the most part. In the night, their burdens might seem even heavier, but they were more clearly seen, too. In the night, it was easier to come close to them without foundering in their noise. The night made a silence in the hearts of the folk, where a path, narrow, winding, not certain, not untroubled, but still, a path, might begin to be found, to some better way.

And simply, there was quiet, and not folk hunting him to fill the place of general and king and priest, none of which he meant to be, for all he might use the authority some were so desperate to give him, to coax, to lead, to drive them where he needed them to go.

He needed the river. More and more often Ghu found himself seeking her shore once darkness fell, rather than the garden of the Father. The guards at the castle gates rarely noticed or remembered that they had let him pass out or opened to his return. Waking or sleeping, he was a dream to them when he drifted by, once sunset came. Ahjvar trailed him, silent in his silence. An oak at his back, bedrock beneath his feet. Hearth in a cold night.

The river was broad here at what had become his favourite place, upstream from the castle, deep and wide, though by late summer it would run shallow and fordable over a flat bed of stone. The banks were shelving stone with elms rooted in the cracks, not the willows down where the village boats put ashore, where Yeh-Lin's company of riverers camped and worked, and where the log-built skid-road from the uplands came to its end.

Here, there were no fires, no sleepers, no smell of timber and tar and smithying and muck. Here, the dreams of the sleeping and the wakeful were so distant as to be less than the sound of the wind in the riverside weed. Only stone and water and the frogs singing, the water a music, coiling over and under itself, changing its note with the seasons, but unceasing.

He could lie in that current, on the stones, let it flow over him, through him, lose himself, find himself in it. Ahjvar's tolerance for nighttime wanderings would probably be pushed too far if he began sleeping in the river. He would take Ahj into the river one day. Not yet. For now he simply sat listening, learning, taking into himself the currents of his land. All too soon there would be no quiet nights, no escape to solitude. Not till all was won or lost. Ahjvar lay stretched out behind him, not quite sleeping and close enough to touch if he reached back, sword held with arm against his chest, like a child clutching some necessary toy.

Not quite sleeping, but near enough, and Ahjvar muttered suddenly, nails of his outflung left hand scraping the stone. Falling into the claws of nightmare, catching himself before it seized him. For a moment Ghu was fully there again, stone, night air, a few gasping breaths behind him, a sigh as Ahj forced himself into slow-breathing stillness again, resumed his watch of the circling stars. Ghu shut his eyes again, let the river reclaim him, let himself go, now, till awareness of stone and frogs and stirring leaves, even Ahjvar's careful soft breathing, was left behind and there was only the water. If he breathed himself, he did not know it.

PART THREE

CHAPTER XXXI

Damn Dotemon. What game does she play? She stalks him, stalks the empress. If she understands what he wants, she may yet deny it to him, destroy her own tools to keep them from his hand.

Empress of Nabban with a god leashed to her hand? An empire in the east? Would Vartu ever ally with Dotemon again? Would Nabban follow Yeh-Lin the Beautiful, twice rid of her before?

She is nothing to fear. She never has been.

He does not want her loose to interfere regardless. Difficult to destroy her.

Drown her, break her, leave her trapped in long years to pull herself back together. The best course. And it will shake their confidence in their slave-born god.

Over five thousand men, nearer six, marching, but not on the highway, which swung away from the river to hug the shadow of the escarpment. The river road was shorter, though in this season it was also muddy, puddled, and outright gone half to swamp. They had no wagons and wrapped in the river's breath, they were harder to see. So said the heir of the gods.

The important thing had been to get them out of Dernang, which could not feed them. They were joined by straying bands of rebels and fugitives, drawn to the banners of the god and Prince Dan, who would be making his base at the fort of the Dragon's Gorge. One could not have two cooks in one kitchen, in Yeh-Lin's opinion, and two lords in one castle, even serving the same master, would be ill-advised as well. Leave Dernang and the rule of Choa to the Kho'anzi, leave his lieutenant Daro Raku to command the sizeable garrison left behind to guard it against brigands and banditry, or against some counter-rebellion of hidden imperial support. Zhung Huong remained as governor of the town under the two Daros to deal with the day–to-day practicalities. Dwei Ontari was sent into Alwu with Dan's orders, which he would follow where he would not have followed the god's. Couriers were sent to Shihpan, announcing their prince's restoration, commanding the borders be held against any imperial incursion, summoning certain lords to their prince at the Gorge. Couriers were sent, less openly, out south and east, carrying messages to the shrines, or to hunt those priests and families of the shrines who had fled into hiding. The dreamer Nang Kangju had been left with Lord Daro Korat. The young wizard Gar Sisu, who had given her oaths to the heir of the gods, travelled with that part of the army sent down the river and was to remain with Prince Dan.

And all in less time, Yeh-Lin thought, than any army had ever been stirred to move in all Nabban's history. A few thousand men and, as the strays joined them, women as well, still winter-weary, many still barefoot, for all the soldiers might be somewhat better fed than they had been under Zhung Musan. As they wound their way down through Choa they could see the village fields being planted and tended again, and they did not raid them, nor trample them. But the river could not feed them all with its fish. If Dwei Ontari proved false . . . but she thought him true to his lord, willing to set aside his own doubt for Dan's faith in the heir of the gods, so long as the god's aims seemed to follow the same path Dan had committed to when he raised his banners the previous year. So long as the heir of the gods did not drag Dan to death in his confrontation with the empress. Nothing to lose. They were condemned traitors, both Dan and Ontari; if the god proved true, then well and good; if a deluded madman who journeyed to his death, at least he left the north in better order than he had found it, and under Dan's hand. And the restoration of his prince to himself would count for much with Ontari, she judged. So he would come with the cavalry of Alwu. The eastern ferry landing, where the river made a border between Alwu and Choa, was very close to the border with Numiya. It would be held for them.

Her mirror showed her nothing of the empress, though Yeh-Lin sought her almost nightly. Nothing. Divination—hers, Ivah's, Gar Sisu's—found nothing. Even the dead king was persuaded to make a drawing of the wands in the Praitannec way, but no revelation came to him. It was as if Buri-Nai, and whatever force she travelled with, had vanished from the world. Enclosed in a devil's fist.

A worry. But it was a long way from the Golden City to Choa, even if the empress went first by sea to Kozing Port or the fishing towns of the lower mouths of the Wild Sister, and the imperial armies of recent history moved broken, crawling, driven by fear at an oxcart's pace.

Yeh-Lin was impressed with what young Nabban had, by contrast, inspired
—persuaded, driven—his folk to achieve. Speed, most of all. They marched light, and in hope and trust of their god. They were organized in half-companies, bands small enough to start to feel kinship, to know and maybe to trust. In the five weeks they had been encamped at Dernang after she took the town, she had seen that their officers drilled them with spear and what swords they had, and new crossbow companies had been formed.

It was her rafts freed them to move. No clumsy platform of logs but a shaped thing given form by their layers and lengths, higher in the water—a vessel, not a desperation. They rode the water as if it carried them willingly, and maybe it did. Even the one that had run aground the day before was floated clear undamaged, losing none of its load. The god blessed his own. The riverers, proud of what they had achieved and in so short a time, held themselves to have become the personal followers of Nang Lin, the god's captain-general. That she had named herself after a devil in her challenge to Hani Gahur was her biting humour, and they loved her for that, as well. It was that brought her out onto the rafts. She would rather have ridden ahead with the advance guard, who were also hers and who would have the camping ground chosen, hearths and latrines and laneways marked out with flags before even the rafts, always the last to leave and the first to arrive at any camp, ever arrived, but it mattered to the raft-captains and the folk who crewed them that she be among them sometimes, that they not lose her entirely to Prince Dan's army before they came to their end and their craft were broken up for their timbers. While they had the river and their unity as a company, they wanted to have her.

Nabban was somewhere out here on the water today, too. He, too, had come to understand the need to give himself to his folk, to share himself.

The chill of fog stroked over her skin, but there was no fog. The raft, heavy thing that it was, nevertheless danced with the water, no contrary wind catching their load like a sail and sending butting waves to make them labour at poles or oars to force their way downriver. The two sisters at the great steering oar at the stern sang with it, a song of menfolk left behind and the river's freedom. Ti sat out of the way, as enrapt as if he listened to one of the great poets. Folk had sung that same song on the river in Solan when she was a girl. Jang and Kufu were up in the bows sitting with the grizzled raft-captain, who was teaching them, so far as Yeh-Lin could overhear, the river, talking of currents and winds, floods and storms she had known, the lore of the sky as it related to winds and water. The rafts did not keep the strict order of the marching companies and half-companies. Sometimes, where it was broad enough, two might even race, raise a bit of sail on stubby double masts, if the wind was right. One swung close now. Half a company of the archers on that one, rather than tents and provisions, a great offering of souls to the river if they tore one another apart. Though every raft-captain seemed to fear the shame of carelessness, with the river's very eye upon them.