Blackdog (12 page)

“What's her name?”

Holla shrugged. “She had some mountain name, but I'm through with the mountains. I'm going to call her Pakdhala, for my grandmother.”

“Pretty name,” Gaguush said, wavering between kindness and a tone that suggested the girl did not quite measure up to the name.

“You going to tattoo her for Sayan? You should, if you really want to put the mountains behind you, make her Sayanbarkashi.”

A challenge, there. Maybe she had minded Timhine more than she let herself admit.

Attalissa stared in something like horror at Gaguush, whose face and hands were nearly solid colour, the black and red bands of geometric pattern used by the Black Desert tribes. Much of the rest of Gaguush was similarly decorated beneath her baggy striped trousers and long, loose cameleer's coat. Her dark skin proclaimed a princess's wealth and rank in the desert fashion; she was the daughter of the chieftain of the Bashrakallashi, but a divorce followed by a quarrel with a brother had sent her into exile and the mercenary's life.

“You want to be pretty now that you're a lowlander, to live up to your name,” Gaguush told the girl, and smiled, showing teeth drilled and filled with patterns in gold.

The desert tribes were all crazy.

Holla felt Attalissa trembling on the edge of weary, frightened, utterly human tears, and took her chilly hand in his own. He winked at her as Gaguush turned away, and surprised her into a smile.

“She's all striped like a pot. I like your snakes and leopards better,” the girl whispered, fingering Holla's arm, tracing a spotted, stretching cat. “And the owls on your face. Owls are nice. But leopards are best.”

“Those are cheetahs.”

“We have leopards in the mountains. With really long tails. Not cheetahs. And I don't want them red.”

Gaguush, not yet out of earshot, hooted with laughter. “This pot says, you come and have something to eat, Pakdhala. You look like you're fainting on your feet. Doesn't your papa know enough to feed you? It's no wonder your mama didn't want to keep him.”

In the days of the first kings in the north, who were Viga Forkbeard, and Red Geir, and Hravnmod the Wise, there were seven wizards. And two were of the people of the kings in the north, who came from over the western sea, and one was of a people unknown; one was of the Great Grass and one of Imperial Nabban, and two were from beyond far Nabban, but the seven were of one fellowship. Their names were Heuslar the Deep-Minded, who was uncle to Red Geir, Ulfhild the King's Sword, who was sister to Hravnmod the Wise, Anga-nurth Wanderer, Tamghiz, Chief of the Bear-Mask Fellowship, Yeh-Lin the Beautiful, and Sien-Mor and Sien-Shava, the Outcasts, who were sister and brother. If other singers tell you different, they know only the shadows of the tales, and they lie.

U
sually the nightmares were Moth's own: old battles, old failures, old betrayals.

The blade of the sword is obsidian, drinking the light. The hilt is silver, traced with scrolling patterns in black lines of niello. She knows it, has carried it too long already. Lakkariss. It stands point down in the snow, and frost glitters on its edges. The night is black and white, stark shadow of spruce and naked larch, pale birch and the starlit glimmer of the drifts that shroud storehouse and bathhouse and bury the garden fence and the beehives.

The sky shivers. The stars are dimmed by an upwelling of light from the north, shifting fans and curtains and lashing whips of green and red. Sound scrapes the air, just on the edge of hearing.

Waking. Hunger. Death. Go.

These dreams were new, and bitter with the touch of the Old Great Gods.

The bear lies panting, breath shallow and too rapid. She cradles his head in her lap, writes runes between his eyes to call him back: Sun for life, Boar for strength, Demon, to name him what he is, to strengthen that side of his blended blood. But the eyes are empty, the ribs unmoving, and he is cold, cold beyond any power of hers to warm. She cuts her palm, in desperation writes Life, Breath, Heart, in the secret runes of the Old Great Gods, but his hidden demon's heart has been stilled, and there is no waking him. The night shivers with the presence of the Gods, opalescent shimmer in the corner of the eye. She starts to her feet, leaving him, taking the sword from the snow, from the other dream, and the Gods fall back, but it turns on her, she is falling, the edge of the obsidian blade is a tear in the night sky and the cold claws of the frozen hells reach out…

The house is burning, the storehouse in flames, the bathhouse, the smokehouse, all pouring angry red light into the night, smoke eating the stars. The trees lie flattened, stripped of needle and branch, charred poles pointing away from the blow of the heaven's lightnings. White bones under the roof-tree.

Lakkariss cold, a shard of black ice lying amid the flames.

Moth woke, cold as the sword despite the weight of fur blankets and sheepskins. Mikki lay beside her, one cool-fleshed arm trailing over her ribs, and she listened to his slow breathing in the darkness. A breath. A long stillness. Another. Midwinter. He might not wake for days. If she left him now…But there would be no lying before the Old Great Gods. Leaving him would not stop her caring, and so long as she held to that one last unbetrayed faith, she was powerless against them. The sword was not to her throat, but to Mikki's.

She lifted his arm aside and crawled out of the cabinet-like bed. The air bit at naked skin. Fire first, before anything else. Her body might not mind the cold, but her heart hated it. She stirred up the embers in the baked-clay stove, fed it with birch logs and watched the new flames born, sitting on her heels. The bronze cauldron of water that sat on the stone hearth began to tick and pop as it felt the heat. She went back and closed the folding side of the bed, not to disturb Mikki's sleep, and only then wrapped herself in a cloak of winter-white hareskin.

The cabin was low and dark, but snug against the wind, its walls a double thickness of upright logs. Mikki had lined it with painted wainscoting like a king's hall, and the floor was not beaten earth but good planed boards. Mikki had made himself a bit of a reputation as a woodworker down in Swanesby on the Shikten'aa, a settlement of Northron farmers who had pushed so far west and north. He took his dugout south up the river in the autumn to trade the cured skins from her year's hunting—hare and deer, because he would not have her kill anything they did not eat—worked a month or two of lengthening nights on building barns or houses or boats, sometimes crafting fine furniture, and came back with rye and oats and cheese, butter and perhaps a bolt of cloth or a cake of black Nabbani ink for the sagas she wrote on sheets of boiled birchbark, since the exotic imports of Swanesby did not extend to vellum. A tale of a demon carpenter in Swanesby might spread, eventually, but there was nothing in that alone to make anyone come seeking them, Mikki insisted. A demon carpenter, a demon farmer, was not the same as a demon smith, with magic in his craft to draw humans seeking fated blades and charmed spearheads. He only made chairs and cradles and roof-beams; there was no doom in those and no virtue beyond that of good crafting, nothing to draw the attention of kings and heroes. Or did she want to give up bread and butter?

What Moth did not want to give up was this undeserved peace, this unending round of seasons, digging and sowing, the hunt and harvest, the ever-renewed struggle to have enough firewood, the petty warfare against the musk-deer and hare in defence of her cabbages and beets, and the long, still winters when she wrote her histories and roamed the frozen wilderness with skis and bow while Mikki slept. She would be a homesteader's wife. Her great defiance of fate would be to set down the old lays of the drowned isles that were forgotten now in the kingdoms of the north, and to write sagas of the deeds of those first kings, true sagas, not overlaid with the romance of later times. Even if she had no one to read them.

But that was not her doom, and she only pretended otherwise.

The chest sat in the darkest corner, the oldest piece of their furnishings. Mikki had made it for her when they built the house, carving it with swan-breasted ships. She moved the quern and storage jars that sat atop it and raised the lid. The leather hinges were cracking with age and disuse. She should have kept them oiled. She pushed aside bundles wrapped in greasy woollen cloth, smelling, faintly, of rust, and pulled out a leather pouch, stiff and crumbling with age. The thong knotted around it broke when she tugged at it, and she flung the broken pieces in the fire. She pulled from the little bag a roughly squared slip of age-greyed wood, set it with deliberation on the broad stone hearth supporting the stove, followed it with two more before she looked down at them. All three lay carved-face uppermost, the sharp angles of the runes stained dark. Old blood, very old.

Need. Journey. Water.
Three more, arrayed below the first, gave her
Ice, Devil, Divinity
, and a further three,
Sword, Hail, Boar.

Need
was danger, hardship, struggle.
Journey
might be sudden change.
Water
was often change, but natural and not sudden, and also life, with strength sleeping in it.
Ice
warned of dangers unseen and the paralysing loss of will.
Devil
could tell of pride or treachery, rootless wandering, risk and chance and fear, and
Divinity
was rooted confidence and power and strength of will.
Sword
for war and violent death, but also for protection arriving from without or the one who stands alone and watchful outside the door of the hall. That had been her, once, in all its faces.
Hail
for sudden loss and unexpected turmoil, but new growth, new shapes could follow from it. The
Boar
for hidden or waiting strength, the guardian animal of the holy places of the vanished little first people, before there were ever kings in the north—strength that could hide too long, be forgotten and wither away, or become a foundation for power and movement.

That was how the Northron wizards might read these runes. On the other hand, they might all, or nearly all, hold literal truth.
Sword
, in particular, she did not want to see.
Sword
and
Journeying
, and
Devil.
Across and down and corner to corner, there was consistency.

They told her nothing the savage dancing flames of the sky in her dreams had not already said.

She had hoped for more. Or less. Hoped she merely had bad dreams.

Moth swept the rune-carved slips of yew into the stove.

She lit the stub of a sweet beeswax candle at the fire, dragged aside the bin that held the summer's beets, and lifted a trapdoor in the floor. Farther south, they might have had a root-cellar. Here the pit beneath had been cut down through the thin black earth that so grudgingly allowed a short season of gardening, into frost that never thawed. Cold struck up from below and the candle flickered and snapped.

Frost clung to the edges of the pit, and the shadows in the corners were thick, heavier than night should be. All that it held was a sheathed sword, lying alone in a web of ice.

There was no ladder. Moth set the candle on the floor and jumped. Ice snapped. Crystals of it formed again around her bare ankle, melted, reached again. She ignored the creeping tide, wrenched the sword free of its cocoon. She caught the edge and swung herself up again, quietly lowering the trap, but the side of the bed had been pushed open. The heap of furs and fleeces stirred. Mikki watched her, his head pillowed on an arm.

“What is it?” he asked.

Moth shook her head, set the candle on the table. “What woke you?”

“An empty bed?” he suggested. When she failed to smile, he said soberly, “You've brought up the sword.”

Moth nodded. She cradled the sheathed sword against her breast like a baby, dewed with melted frost. “It called me.”

Perhaps it had been calling, unheeded, for longer than she thought. She had not had nightmares for years after they stopped wandering and went to earth in Baisirbska. After Ogada died, she could never bring herself to reach back into the snarled, fraying web of power with which the Great Gods had bound the seven, to feel out if any were gone, or awake and working against their bonds to struggle into the world again. She had not wanted to know. Now…she felt for the traces of that ancient spell and as she did so, the lines of the Great Gods’ power clung to her, barbed threads seeking to renew their hold, to draw her in again, the coldness of a death of the body that was not strong enough to be death of the soul. She found what she sought and pulled away, back to the waking world, and staggered, steadying herself with a hand on the stove. Flesh welcomed that little heat unburned.

“Two,”
she said.

“Two what?” Mikki asked. “Don't do that, wolf. It's worrying.”

She showed him a palm not even blistered. “Only two still bound.”

“Ah. Who?”