Gods of Nabban (77 page)

“Yes,” she said steadily.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would be too easy to become so. Go to the Wild Girls for me, Yeh-Lin.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“And come back.”

“For a while?”

“Ivah might need your advice. For a while.”

“We will,” said Ahjvar, “be watching.”

“Dead king, I do expect so.”

Couriers riding, it seemed day and night. Shihpan embattled along its border with Vanai, a lord declaring himself a free king. Daro Korat and Zhung Huong the governor of Dernang sending accounts of village councils established and lands given to the shrines to keep for the god, and serfs of the manors to hold each their own, under, ultimately, the god. The governor of the Old Capital sent his submission. The widow of the admiral of the fleet, who had killed himself at news of the empress's death, sent hers, with thanks and her oath as her husband's successor, which might or might not be let stand. High lords were raising their banners or sending their submission, but the folk were rising, too, for their god, and it was not good to be a lord who denied the god of Nabban, and the empress, and the changes they would make in the land.

A great senate. A council, and not only of the lords or the merchants or the heads of the clans. Voices which might speak for all the folk. Let them throw the stones to be chosen, and come to the capital, the Old Capital, which was new again, for a term of three years. Fools and the wise, appointed by chance. The voices of the land. The empress would hear them, and would remember that the god most certainly did.

Always.

EPILOGUE

They have been coming for six months, the lords of the land, and the common folk too. Pilgrims. Priests and priestesses of the shrines. The tomb had been intended to stand alone, visited perhaps on certain anniversaries, formally, but that is not what the folk want of it, and she belongs to the folk.

The tomb is built into a green hillside in Solan, south of the Wild Sister, looking north over the river. It is stone quarried of the hills in Numiya, where the empress won her first battle, its pillars and the swooping eaves of its porch reflecting the entrance of a keep. The path down the hill descends in shallow steps, the way marked by stones carved with verses by the poet Yeon Silla, who was the empress's lover for half her life. The poet herself is buried nearby; it was seeking a place for her that led the empress to choose this hill for her own tomb.

There are horses and hawks in flight carved on the sealed doors, and the sun ascendant over them. Groves of flowering trees are planted, making the hill a garden. She began this with her own hands, setting lilacs about Yeon Silla's simple tomb.

She would have had her own the same, and set by Silla's, but the senate of the land and the Emperor Sanguhar, her son, wanted to do her greater honour. It was grand, but not overdone. They did not aspire to the opulence of the Min-Jan. She had sent the emperor and his younger sister, as he had later sent his three daughters, to be fostered for two years each in turn in Choa, on the mountain, and they learnt simplicity there. Humility. Service. Among other things.

“The emperors must learn the ways of the god,” the empress had said. “We will not become the Min-Jan again. We will remember that we serve the land, and why.”

That they came back horsemasters to satisfy even a Grasslander, and rather better with knife and sword and the arts of unarmed fighting than had been the Nabbani custom of imperial youths previously, was not considered, by the House of the Grass, any ill reflection on their god or his man.

For six months, the folk have come to the tomb. It had not been considered how the folk of the land have taken the empress to be their own. She fought for them, they say. She is theirs, and a saint of the holy one, of Nabban. They come, and they leave scraps of prayer, gifts of verse. Through her, they address their god.

The tomb must be meant to be a shrine, the emperor says. There will have to be a priest to tend it. Not a large establishment, not a temple, as some shrines near the towns have become. A shrine like a shrine of the wilderness, with its sacred tree and boulder and spring or well. A hermit, perhaps, or a couple. Someone will come. It is the way of things.

But meanwhile the pilgrims come, and leave their prayers.

It is evening, and the sun is setting, dusk spreading through the young trees. The pilgrims are gone. The wind stirs the prayers and the poems, which the folk leave pinned to the bark of one of the few older trees, a camphor that stood before the hill became a grave.

A hawk circles in the fading light. A white owl. It lands, wings spread, ruffles its feathers and is a woman, tall, lean, harsh-boned. Not Nabbani. Skin very pale, hair the colour of old flax-stalks in a long braid. Northron, and her eyes are grey. She wears a cloak of silk sewn with feathers and a mail hauberk, a long sword at her hip, its hilt gold and garnet, and another, the grip wrapped in leather, at her shoulder. She reads Yeon Silla's verse on the nearest stone, and does not hesitate over the Nabbani characters. Walks to the door of the tomb.

“She is gone, you know.” A soft voice. “I'm sorry. You've come late.” She turns.

A man, and another at his shoulder. Horses, maybe, wait, dim and ghostly. The light is fading. Dogs watch her. One marks the tree of the prayers. The men themselves are dim, there and not there.

“Seeing,” she says. “It's not knowing. I thought I might have time.” Her Nabbani is accented, harsh, overtones of both the caravan road and archaicisms long forgotten. She sets a hand to the sealed door. The empress's daughter the Princess An-Chaq, whose wizardry takes its form in carving, has made the roundel of running horses interlaced.

The men are more present in the darkness. Sound of footsteps, brushing cloth. Scent, too. Man, horse, pine trees, snow, wood smoke.

The tall man is not the sort she likes moving to stand behind her, and he knows it. He has a Northron sword, older maybe than he knows. One of the demon-forged from the isles, though a lesser and later smith claimed the work than the Wolf who made hers. Its name is lost. He keeps his hands from it, at least, but he does not like his lord standing so close to her. She keeps her hands from her sword. From either sword. Sets her back against the door instead, to watch them both.

“This is the storyteller, Ahj,” the god says. “I don't think she means any threat, here.”

“No,” she says.

“Ulfhild Vartu.”

“Moth,” she says.

“Yeh-Lin said you might come, someday.”

“Where is she?”

The god smiles. She does remember him, that odd, half-understood creature in Marakand, human and not, god half-formed, watching her, listening to the tale she performed in the market square.

“I sent her away.”

“Where?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“No,” she says, low, intense.

“Ivah,” he says, “said you were set to destroy the devils. All of them. She says you killed her father.”

“Yes.”

“And the Lady of Marakand.”

“Ya.”

“And have you come for Yeh-Lin Dotemon?”

“Should I tell you? What does it matter, if she's not here?”

“It matters.”

“No. I came for Ivah. To—say farewell. Only that. I should have come sooner.”

“She wasn't your daughter.”

“No.”

“She remembered you with—” The god shrugs. “Respect, honour, affection.”

“Ah.”

“She left a message for you,” the tall man says. He is a strange thing, not exactly a bone-horse like Storm, whom she has lost somewhere in Marakand, and his skull has probably been ground up to fertilize the fields long since, poor faithful, cranky ghost of a horse that he was. This man is a thing that is a part of his god, as a demon is a thing of the world, and yet like a demon is his own self, whole and certain. A beautiful thing. This world is always a miracle, in what it finds it can be.

She envies the pair of them.

She misses the bear with a pain that she cannot let out, even so much as the glimmer of a candle in the night, or she will not endure it.

The god's man is waiting.

“A message?” she asks, as he wants her to ask.

“Ivah said, ‘Ulfhild will come. She must. If she comes too late, tell her. I left the skull and Mikki's axe and chisels with the god Gurhan, when I set out from Marakand. Tell her, she has to go find Mikki. She can't do this to him. Tell her, the Old Great Gods do wrong. Tell her, for Yeh-Lin, for the Blackdog, for herself, she must find a way to refuse the Gods. Tell her, she can't do this to Mikki. She must find him. He needs her, as she needs him.' She never did say who Mikki was.”

“Who's Mikki?” the god asks, with childlike curiosity.

“A bear. Sometimes. A man. A half-demon. I . . . left him. He was safer so.”

“Ah,” the god says, and the word is heavy.

“He was.”

A gesture, an open hand.

“I need him,” she says. “I forget who I am, without him.”

“Yes,” the god says. “Why chisels?”

“He's a carpenter.”

“Ah. A maker of things. Not a breaker.”

“Mikki? Yes. He is that.”

“Good.”

“Something for you,” the man says. He holds out an open hand. In it is a small thing, a lump of fired clay that looks as though it was formed to a rough disc by pressing between two hands. Symbols inscribed on both sides, which she can't read, and a thumb-print. The characters are Praitannec, she guesses. She's seen such writing before, on stones in the Malagru mountains. That fits with his looks, not Nabbani, not Northron for all his pale hair, and the plaid cloth around his shoulders.

She takes the clay disc. It is . . . cold.

“What is it?”

“A sliver,” the god says, “of the soul of a devil. We think.” He shrugs. “I don't understand such wizardry. Ahjvar doesn't.”

“Jochiz,” the blond man says.

Her turn to say only, “Ah,” closing her hand over the disc.

“Take it out of Nabban.”

She nods. They all stand in silence, as the full moon rises.

“She is gone,” the god says again. “I'm sorry. But she thought well of you, always.”

She nods.

“Go find the one who helps you remember who you are,” he says. “That matters.”

“Does it?”

“Always. Ahj?”

“Yes.”

They leave her, quiet on the hillside. Some few words together, not meant for her, in a language which she does not know, but who does speak Praitannec anyway? They mount the horses and move off into the mist seeping up from the summer grass. They are gone before they should be, dissolved into the night.

Someone whistles, and the dogs abandon their sniffing to follow.

Moth stands for a time at the door of the tomb.

Better not to have seen her become an old woman anyway?

No.

“You did well,” she says, her hand on the carved horses. “You did better than I ever did. Safe journey on your road, Ivah.”

She draws the Northron sword. Kepra, it is named, Keeper of the hall.
The Wolf made me for Ravnsfjell
, the blade says, and,
Strength, courage, wisdom.

Until the last road and the last dawn
, is the inscription on the guard.

It is not a blade for carving, but it cuts the wood of the door like an engraving chisel, fine lines, deep, above the horses. Old runes of the north. A blessing.

Journey. Joy. The harvest.
Which is completion, and success, and a victory.

The fragment of the soul of Jochiz is heavy in her satchel.

She turns away, the cloak of feathers swirling, rising in the wind. The owl flies west.

The last road and the last dawn foreseen by the Wolf may not be so very far away.

Finis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I leaned on my friends for advice and assistance on various aspects of this one, and many, many thanks are owed them for taking the time to answer my questions and guide me to the right resources for further research. Psychotherapist Brian Walsh advised me on PTSD and nightmare disorders and also found me some very useful articles to read. Jason Johansen-Morris, P.Eng., gave me two pages of equations, diagrams, and notes on the construction of a bridge of rafts. (I have, of course, woven my secondary world's cosmology and wizardry into their primary world psychiatry and engineering. Do not try this stuff at home.) Connie Choi helped out with some more names. Tristanne, Marina, April, and Chris were, as always, there to be talked at during plot emergencies, as were a few others from time to time—particularly Jenna, Paul, Laurie, and yes, the Twitter gang. Ivan, the Wicked White Dog, kept Jui and Jiot honest—and Jonathan Harpur supplied the alphabet pretzels.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Chris Paul

K. V. Johansen was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where she developed her lifelong fascination with fantasy literature after reading
The Lord of the Rings
at the age of eight. Her interest in the history and languages of the Middle Ages led her to take a Master's Degree in Medieval Studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a second M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, where she wrote her thesis on Layamon's
Brut
, an Early Middle English epic poem. While spending most of her time writing, she retains her interest in medieval history and languages and is a member of the Tolkien Society and the Early English Text Society, as well as the SFWA and the Writers' Union of Canada. In 2014, she was an instructor at the Science Fiction Foundation's Masterclass in Literary Criticism held in London. She is also the author of two works on the history of children's fantasy literature, two short story collections, and a number of books for children and teens
.
Various of her books have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish. Visit her online at
www.kvj.ca
or find her on Twitter—
@kvjohansen.