Gods of Nabban (6 page)

Kaeo's eyes found focus. Floor of bare wood. Booted feet. Slippered feet on the worn brocade of a footstool, hem of an orange robe. Magistrate.

“I have taken the oracles. I testify, this is so. The slave Kaeo of the Flowering Orange is a traitor and heretic, a knowing servant of the renegade Dan, an enemy of our emperor, the Exalted Otono, and of the gods of Nabban, a vessel of lies, damned by the gods themselves for falsely claiming to speak with their voice.”

Magistrate's court. He looked higher, to a grey beard, a face smooth with fat, eyes tiny and lost in the folds of it, a silk tasselled hat. The wizard, in a blue court robe with his badge of rank glittering gold on his chest, stood beside the magistrate.

The butt of a halberd struck between Kaeo's shoulders and he flattened himself, eyes, teeth, hands all clenched on the pain that burned white, blinding, deafening him.

The dry voice, when he could hear again, said, as if bored, “He is only another of the tools of the renegade prince, and a rebel himself, a heretic who defies the will of Mother and Father Nabban, a traitor in the household of his master the theatre-owner Shouja Wey, and a whore who has given himself to strangers for money. He is corrupted and unclean. He is damned. You may do your duty to the Exalted with a clear conscience.”

“The slave Kaeo, an actor of the Flowering Orange company,” said the magistrate, slowly, so that his clerk missed no word. “He is a man in full possession of his wits, not a foolish child led astray. The testimony of his master proves it, for all Wey of the Shouja Clan wants to believe otherwise, being a merciful man. By his own testimony under the question, confirmed by witness of the arts of the Plum Badge Diviner Lai Wisan, servant at the feet of the Exalted, this said Kaeo is a spy of the traitor and heretic Dan. He has spoken heresy and treason in the hearing of servants of this court. He has pretended to prophesy, which is heresy and blasphemy. He was named a fellow-conspirator by the spy Tamareva of the Islands. He has confessed to meeting with agents of the rebel Dan and passing on to them documents obtained from Tamareva, injurious to the rule of the Exalted Otono and the peace of the land. For doing so he is found to be a malicious enemy of order and peace. For the treason he has committed, the slave Kaeo's life is forfeit. For this treason, he will be delivered to the imperial guard for a traitor's death on the Isle of Crows. And for his blasphemy, once he is dead, his body will be given to the sea, without prayer or blessing. Kaeo, formerly of the Flowering Orange company, do you understand?”

A magistrate's guard kicked him where he knelt, face to the floor. A hero might have defied them. A prophet of the gods, dedicated to restoring justice and the right of every man and woman of the land to stand before them, might denounce the court and emperor and all. In the end, he was only a slave, and the words he had, the poetry of the plays, belonged to others.

“Have him flogged,” said the magistrate. “Demonstrate to the Exalted and the gods our contempt for his blasphemy.”

Footsteps departed, shuffling slippers, slapping sandals, boots. The guards kicked him to rise and he could not; his joints were water, and he trembled and could not push himself from the floor. They dragged him.

Not to the hands of waiting imperial guards. Not yet.

“They'll come for you in the morning,” one jeered. “You're bound for the crows. A nice day out for the palace.”

They hauled him to a bare stone room, where the tide's damp lay in the corners and watermarks made white lines of salt on the wall. A high niche held a statue of the Exalted to look down over him—blankly serene, no emperor and all emperors, and no reference to the gods at all. They turned Kaeo face to the wall, wrists tied to iron rings, and took a cutting whip to his back. Why? Because he was so vile a thing, so loathsome. Because they were filled with hatred, fat with it, and must spew its poison somewhere. In the end, the world turned dark about him and he slid away and left it behind.

CHAPTER III

Ahjvar, Ghu thought, had nearly forgotten the dead shepherd and the mercenaries-turned-brigand they had lured to a judgement at the blade's edge, though he wore a dead man's boots and his sheepskin coat was bought with plundered coin in Porthduryan. They had come, at a guess, over six hundred miles since then on the desert road—a rutted track marked by dung, the occasional bones of camels, and cairns over the graves of men and women dead on the way—crossing sandy yellow hills and a waterless plain of broken black slate, back into a land of tightly folded ridges, all gravel and sand and thorny, winter-dead things.

A dead man, too.

He should have ridden by. For all the harshness of the land, the long days on short commons, and the scouring dust on the cold, dry wind that cracked lips and fingers and sucked the moisture from your very throat, Ahj had been well, as if the clean desert horizons gave him space to begin to find a way back. He had been over a month without the worst nightmares; it was like watching him return to life, to see him take an interest in the world again, in ordinary things: the herds of antelope in the sand hills, the shower of falling stars they watched half one night in the black land, which Ahj said came every year in this season, though in Sand Cove the winters had been rainy and it was the ever-changing sea they had watched when they sat out by summer nights, while before . . . before there had been no one to tell Ghu such things. He had never known Ahj at such peace. A fragile, new-born peace, needing space and calm and silence in which to sink enduring roots.

But then there was the dead man. He should have gone on, except that the last well had been brackish, and their water was low, and the dogs, with one accord, turned onto the well-used trail that plunged into a deep valley before he had quite sorted out that his unease and the smell of something dead, along with water, was their awareness, not his own. Even then, he might have called them back, but Ahjvar had leapt down to lead his camel on the precipitous path, and so Ghu followed.

Vultures climbed from behind a wall of interlaced thorn brush. Their wings brushed the air with a noise like pines in the wind.

“He's several days dead,” Ghu said, while Jui and Jiot sniffed, lips curling in distaste.

No need for a dog's nose to smell that. Rotten-sweet in the sun; what ragged flesh remained to the bones had been shielded by clothing. And seared flesh, like old cooking. Overhead, the vultures circled, waiting for the human presence to be gone. The man looked to have been a hermit: a body in a robe of undyed wool, barefoot. He lay half in the ashes of his own firepit, sleeve burnt away, hand and arm, what was left of them—cooked.

The ghost of the man was there, a faint presence. Aware, but not pressing. Not present enough to take form that Ahjvar could see, or Ahj was ignoring it, Ghu was not certain. Ghosts had visible form for Ahj, as they did not for him, but Ahjvar had turned away, gone to the wall to look over at the camels.

Smell of burnt flesh.

He should have ridden by. But they were here now. Ghu ducked into the low doorway of the domed drystone hut, pushing the sheepskin curtain aside.

“Ghu?” Ahjvar muttered something about fools and half-wits, which sounded more like Ahj and reassured him, before crawling after.

The hut held nothing but a pile of dingy sheepskins for bedding, a few baskets and leather sacks hung from pegs driven between the stones, and some hand-shaped pots and bowls.

“Don't take the food,” Ahjvar said. “We're not so far gone this time that we need to steal a dead man's stores, are we? Leave it for the truly desperate.”

Ghu was not so sure of that. They lost time by hunting everything from antelope to speckled sandgrouse, so as to leave more of the dried peas purchased in Porthduryan for the camels, and he was not certain how far yet they had to go and whether they truly gained anything by such diversions. He had asked about the road, but estimates of the stages of the journey varied wildly. There was still a dividing of ways before them, a choice between longer and easier, or shorter and more dangerous. Winter deepened over them. The real killing cold was yet to come, but even now, though the sun stood at noon, the shallow scrape of the well outside the thorn fence here had been iced too thickly for the camels to break. They would water after and then be on their way, though the recently broken ice was going to be another sign to the unseen caravan that followed them that there were travellers ahead. He knew it was behind by the dust when the sun slanted down into the west, and every time they turned aside to hunt, it gained on them.

“Maybe,” he said, about the food. There wasn't much. A small sack of peas, another of millet, a brick of tea, partially carved away, shrivelled garlic. A very meagre existence the hermit had lived. Various dark and dusty herbs, carefully sorted into bowls and little bags, did not smell like anything for cooking. “Ahjvar?”

Ahj came crouching over; he couldn't stand upright. Even Ghu had to duck. Ahj rubbed leathery, dry black things that might have been some sort of mushroom, sniffed his fingers and shrugged, but held up a fistful of wizened, once-fleshy roots, scraping a little of the scabby dark skin away with a thumbnail to show fibrous yellow flesh. “This one I know. We call it tranceroot. Poison yourself with that, all too easily.”

“Wizards use it?” Maybe that was what had killed the man. Fallen dead and into his own fire.

“
I
don't,” Ahjvar said pointedly, and returned it to its place. “It comes from the desert, though. One of the shaman's nine holy herbs, I think. The apothecaries call it dreamer's yellowroot in Nabbani.”

He hadn't heard of it by either name. It probably meant, though, that this was a holy man of the tribes whose territories lay hereabouts. But not a priest with frequent visitors.

“We should go.” Ahjvar had a tight, weary look about the eyes again. It wasn't the death; it was the burning. Ghu led the way back outside, leaving even the brick of tea. They had plenty of that, at least. Now, if there had been coffee . . . hah, the Leopard of Gold Harbour wouldn't be above looting coffee, no.

“Yes,” he said, but when Ahjvar headed for the gap in the thorns he turned aside to crouch by the corpse, taking up a handful of ashy dust.

“A wandering god?” The ghost's voice—thought, perhaps, more than voice—was soft, bemused. “So far from your land. A river. Are you? A man and a river? Are you come here seeking answers?”

“No.”

“They do come.”

“Who?”

“The folk.”

Ahjvar stopped and turned back to him, knelt down, a careful hand on his shoulder. “Ghu . . .”

“Do you see him?” he asked.

“The ghost? Old man. Yes. A little. Thin old man.”

“Wandering god. And a web of bone and fire. Why do you hold this man here, when he should be gone to his road?” Not accusing, just mildly curious.

“Don't.” Ahjvar backed away. “Ghu, let him go. Come away.”

“A wandering god. You should hurry home. They'll take your land from you.”

“Who will?”

“A fallen star.” The thought drifted, attention sharpened. “A lie. A hungry fire. The road . . . it calls, and I cannot answer. Let me go?”

“Would you have us bury you? Do you have kin near, someone we should take word of your death?”

“Oh, let the birds feed. They are the desert. I am the desert. Let me go back to the desert, bone to dust. It was always kinder than kin. They would have taken me back to snuffle and dribble in their tents, scolded and babied in the smoke and the squabbling. Better it came this way, quiet and quick and kind. I only fell, a little pain in the heart and I fell, and . . . and then I was free. Why do they make death so difficult? They will find the bones, when they come again, and bones are all we are, bones and dust and the fire of the stars . . . You ride to war, young wandering god. Is it worth it? Why do the gods demand the blood of their folk to feed their land?”

“Why say so? It's the folk who make war, not the gods.”

“Not you. Not your land. Not the one who hunts you.”

“Who?”

“A lie. False god, false truth, false hope for a dying land. A waking devil. Is she? Not she, hunting, but you are the quarry none the less. A false true god, yes, hunting. Take care, young river, take care lest you fall and fail and fade and leave an emptiness and an empty folk that will welcome what crouches quiet, waiting, in the west and reaching fingers even into . . .”

“
Ghu!
” Sharp fear in Ahjvar's voice.

The presence of the ghost drew in on itself, shivered small and weak and afraid. “You should not linger on the way, child of river, child of mountain.”

Ghu held up a hand to Ahjvar, who stooped to take up a handful of sand and would have cast the ghost away with it.

“Do you say I do?” he asked. Ahjvar swore and turned his back.

“I say nothing. I only dream. I would drink the tea and dream true visions for you, wandering child, but . . . I am gone. Am I gone?”

“You're dreaming still.”

“I do dream. I always did. They are heavy, dreams. Too great a weight to bear, sometimes. They said I should not have killed him, because he was my brother, but what choice did he give me? But the dreams are heavy. Must I bear them to the road?”

“The road takes all.”

“So the gods say.”

“So the gods know. Go, find your way.”

Ghu scattered the ash and sand, sat back on his heels, dusting his hands and watching Ahjvar, standing now in the gap in the thorn fence, looking away. Something had frightened him, and nothing waking ever did. Some echo of nightmare.

Old man. Seer. Hermit. Murderer?

Gone to his road now, anyhow. And wanted his body left to feed the birds. Well, it was a rite among some folk, or so he had heard, and why not? Ghu straightened the disordered limbs at least, scrubbed his hands in the sand, though dead flesh was a scent hard to lose.