Blackdog

Published 2011 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

Blackdog.
Copyright © 2011 by K. V. Johansen. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover illustration © Raymond Swanland
Map by Rhys Davies

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johansen, K. V.
     Blackdog / by K. V. Johansen.
          p. cm.
     ISBN 978-1-61614-521-7 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
     ISBN 978-1-61614-522-4 (e-book)
     I. Title.

PR9199.3.J555B53  2011
813’.54—dc22

2011019202

Printed in the United States of America

E
vening prayers took place on the flat-topped bell-tower that rose above the gatehouse. Otokas was not a particularly devout man. Prayer had always seemed a pointless ritual.

The sun, sliding between the peaks at the western end of the lake, turned the Lissavakail's waters to molten copper, while the swallows made their last scrolling passes over the waves. The chief of the priestesses, whose title was simply “Old Lady,” swayed back and forth as she chanted the prayer that was chanted every evening. Thanks for the day past, hopes for the day to come. Plentiful fish, millet in the terraced fields, fertile yaks, healthy babies, happy folk—peace and prosperity for the folk of the goddess Attalissa, the folk of Lissavakail, which was both lake and town.

The goddess met his eyes and smiled, a neat, correct figure standing against the west, patience itself in a girl's small body. Attalissa had heard the prayers as many times as he, the same words wearing the same deep grooves in the memory, until one did not hear them at all and could not remember if the ceremony were ending or had only just begun. She wore layers of stiff white silk embroidered in indigo and gold, gold rings in her ears, conical crown of gold filigree and turquoise plaques on her hair, dangling pearls over her brow. The priestesses whose turn it was to attend evening prayer fanned out before her, a flutter of indigo-blue gowns, except for the pair flanking her, who wore wide-legged blue trousers and shirts of scale armour, and carried broad-bladed spears.

Their armed presence was a formality, as so much of life on the holy islet of the temple adjoining the island town was formality; there had been no attack on the temple in generations. Still, the warrior priestesses of Lissavakail were more than ceremonial guard for the living goddess; they were sought out by the villages of distant valleys when raiders were troublesome, and they served as mercenaries, guarding wealthy travellers, gem-traders, and the chieftains of the gold-washing villages on the wild mountain tracks.

Otokas was more than ceremonial guard himself; he remembered raiders coming up from the desert, seeking control of the gold-bearing rivers of the mountains. He remembered years when the communities of the high valleys warred among themselves, with the encouragement of their gods and goddesses or in defiance of their pleas. Born forty winters before, he remembered centuries. He was the Blackdog, and the only man permitted on the temple islet.

The words of the prayer ran on. Did they make any difference, and had they ever? Would the snows refuse to melt and fill the streams, or the hot desert winds sweep up from the north to blight the sprouting grain, or the butter fail to come in the churns, if evening and dawn prayers were not said?

Attalissa met his gaze, expressionless, black eyes deep, unreadable, in her round child's face. She had caught, he realized, the shape of that private thought. A year ago she would not have. She grew, slowly, into godhead.

Prayer is for them, dog, not for you and me
, she told him, in the silent speech, mind to mind, that they shared. She had seen eight summers, this incarnation of Attalissa. When Otokas first took on the burden of the Blackdog, Attalissa had been an elderly woman, older than his grandmother, older than the grandfather who had served her as Blackdog before him. When Attalissa died herself Otokas had wept as though she were his grandmother. But nine months later a newborn baby had stared up at him, cradled in his arms, and he had seen Attalissa recognize him, ancient familiarity in the infant's startled eyes.

Attalissa lived, and died, and was reborn in a girlchild conceived the day of her death. Some goddesses shaped themselves a physical body only when they so desired, remaining for the most part a spirit within the waters or appearing as a mist or a dance of light, but Attalissa returned, mortal life after mortal life, in a human body. Thus it was said she never grew remote from the concerns and the suffering and the joys of her folk; that was part of the fervent love the people of Lissavakail professed for her.

There were only a handful of the goddess's folk gathered at the western end of the red-lacquered bridge that arched from the temple islet across the channel to the island town. A pair of old women, eyes fixed devoutly on what to them must be only a cluster of blue figures and a tiny, occasionally bobbing, gold crown. A young couple, their minds quite evidently on something other than devotions. A family in their best clothes, indigo and red, the wife wearing her bride-gift circlet of gold coins across a weather-worn brow. They were not from town, by the cut of their clothes; peasants from one of the high villages. The children were paying more attention to the young couple than to the remote figures atop the tower.

They used to pray on the town's end of the bridge, the Blackdog remembered, meeting the townsfolk there. The folk had come to sing hymns for Attalissa, and she had held their babies and blessed them, kissed the foreheads of the brides and the grooms, exchanged stories of the old days with the old folk whom she had kissed as babies.

What Otokas was…no tradition of the temple preserved, if it had ever been known. Old, as old as the goddess, or older, perhaps. God, demon, spirit of the wilds—even the Blackdog no longer remembered what it had been, before it became Attalissa's guardian, bound, like her, to human life.

The litany tottered to its end; the women bowed to the goddess, who bowed in return, carefully, to keep the tall headdress from falling. And then she cried out suddenly and dropped to her knees, at the same moment Otokas heard, smelt, felt—a crack like a thunderclap all about them, hot metal, a shock like an avalanche, mowing trees before it…

He had his arm around the girl the next moment, kneeling by her, sword drawn, though there was no one to defend her against that he could see. The armed priestesses had moved as he did, barring the stairs, the only obvious entry for threat.