Gods of Nabban (16 page)

“What's Letin?”

Words. Words were good.

“Godless Letin, they call it, in a song we still sing in the north of Nabban. It was a great city where the queen of all Denanbak was wed to the god, but the devil Dotemon duelled and slew him, sword to sword, in fire and thunder and the breaking of the sky. The tower of his worship fell. He was the paramount god of Denanbak and the queen the overlord of all the chieftains and all the tribes, so Nabban took Denanbak and made it a province of the empire. There was a hero united all the tribes again and drove Nabban out during the rule of Yeh-Lin's grandson, a descendant of the last queen, maybe, but we don't sing songs about that.” He chuckled. “Probably the Denanbaki do.”

No folk dwelt there now. It had the emptiness of utter desertion. When they followed the pillared avenue towards what might once have been the city's heart, they found that good water still welled up from a broken fountain, oozing over its own mound of ice to fill a stone-curbed pool. It flowed away down a channel overhung with bush-willow and red dogwood and dead reeds, bridged with occasional slabs of stone, all that was left of some culvert through the city.

“Camp here,” Ghu decided, though it was little past noon and usually they would only stop to rest the camels a while, before going on into the dusk. “It should be safe enough. Let the camels forage. You can rest. I'll hunt.”

Ahjvar didn't argue. Ghu didn't expect he would; too much effort. They offloaded the camels, working in silence, one to each side. Ghu let them wander free of hobble or picket and they headed for the bushes along the broken culvert. Don't fall in and break a leg, he wished them, but it was mostly eroded to a slope-banked stream now, nature taking back the course it had followed before ever a city grew at the god's feet.

That was the emptiness he felt; not that the people were gone, but the god.

He cleared snow, sent Ahjvar with the axe to cut branches, and built a lean-to in one of the hollows, in the corner of two walls below the wind.

“Make a fire,” he said. “Make tea. Sleep. Stay warm. I'll be back by dusk, and I'll leave Jiot to keep watch.”

Ahjvar just watched him, kneeling on the floor of brush he had made in the shelter. As if the words made no sense, as if Ghu suddenly spoke Denanbaki or some tongue of Pirakul, sound without meaning.

“Ahj . . .” He dropped down by him, helpless, hurting so badly.

Ahjvar touched the swollen corner of Ghu's mouth. That hurt, too.

“It's all right,” Ghu said.

“It isn't.”

“I was tired. I wasn't fast enough to wake.”

“Old Great Gods . . .” Ahjvar bowed his head to Ghu's shoulder, shaking. “I am damned. I can't . . . I can't . . .”

“Hush.” Ghu held him, tight against his shivering, rocking him. “You'll find a way out. You will. We will. Remember the desert, before the badlands? You were better in the desert. You will be better again. You will come through this.”

“What if I don't?” That was a whisper, a breath.

Ghu didn't need to answer. He pressed his face to Ahjvar's hair and thought, not yet, not now, and let him go when Ahj sat back on his heels, eyes shut, hands fisted on his knees.

“Do you want me to stay?”

“No.” Ahjvar opened his eyes, swiped a palm over his face. “Go,” he said hoarsely. “Go. Don't get yourself taken for poaching. I'm in no state to talk you out of some angry chieftain's stronghold peaceably.”

“Yes, Ahj. Ahj . . .”

“What?”

He caught up Ahjvar's hands. A tremor in the right. In the cold, scars were blanched dead white against the brown. He raised the hands and kissed them, and left Ahj kneeling there. A sharp whistle brought Jui to his side. Ghu headed down the watercourse, gathering pebbles as he went. Jiot remained without a word needed, lying alert in the sun.

Ghu was gone, and the silence heavy. Wind over the stones. A distant raven. A flock of grey juncos flitted and twittered into the brush and weeds rooted along the edge of the fountain, taking flight again when Jiot, lying atop the wall, turned his head to watch them.

Cold. Ahjvar got to his feet, stiff as if every year he had lived lay on his body. Fire, Ghu had said, but he didn't think fire would warm him. One word, three maybe.
Let me die.
All he need say to end this, to end everything. He could still feel the touch of Ghu's lips against his hands, still a smear of blood on the right. He pressed that angrily to his own mouth, going out into the sunlight, taking his shield from the baggage, climbing up to a broad plateau and into the harsh wind. Jiot followed, chose another stone. The dun dog turned his head into the wind, sniffing, alert, but after a moment settled and lay down again. The camels browsed unconcerned among the bushes away below, eating with determination. Ghu and the white and grey dog were already lost to sight in some fold of the land.

Ahjvar stripped to his shirt, laying his coats, sheepskin and camel-woollen, on a bare patch of wall. Jiot, being a dog of good sense, immediately moved over to lie on them.

He drew his sword and, slowly at first, set himself to work through all the practice-patterns of his long-dead boyhood sword-masters, as he had so rarely since leaving Sand Cove. It hadn't seemed to matter, when the sword was no longer his first weapon and he had thought he was riding to a final death. Again, and yet again, until he had trampled a great circle in the snow, like a courting grouse's dancing ground, and was soaking in sweat, folly in this land and season, aching in muscles that had not been so driven since they took to this road. It was something to do. He thought it might shut his mind away, but it did not. No stillness here, no peace.

Better he were dead. Better dead than dangerous as a mad dog. Better dead than casting divinations that warned so vaguely of doom and forces they had already survived more by chance than any power of their own—if he could be said to have survived, useless as he was.

Yew and pine. Death and the Old Great Gods. The devils and hope. Betrayal, the berried holly of battle, peace and peace unmade.

Did he tell Ghu anything he did not already know, or only confirm it? Confirm something Ghu wanted denied. His simpleton boy was foresighted. He had known that much years ago.

Ghu should be seeking a shaman of this land if he wanted a true divination for the shape of his return to Nabban, not the wreckage Ahjvar had become. He was no wizard to put trust in. He never had been. If anything, it was the king's champion that the heir of Nabban would need, and not a damned sick and broken madman and self-doubting wizard who cried out at dreams that had no power over him—
no power over him
, burn that into his heart—and struck out witless at his bedmate.

Friend.

Whatever.

Ghu was peace, yes. A stillness he could hide in. Useless, to be a child and hide, loathing himself, to let someone else ward him against the world and the screaming in his own mind.

He could try, at the least, to be a king's swordsman again. And maybe exhaust himself to the point the body would sleep, deeper than dreaming could reach.

Ghu brought down a pair of cock pheasants so intent on their rivalry he could almost have walked up to take them by hand as they danced and strutted with the first stirrings of spring in their blood, but he kept going after that, the birds hanging at his shoulder, for all it felt an effort to put one foot ahead of the other. Jui flushed a hare. He added that to his catch. Two men and two dogs to feed, and he wanted to make good time the coming day. Something was making him edgy, the dead city, maybe, or . . . he couldn't say what. He wanted to be out of this naked land. He wanted mountains, trees, white water over stones. This land was too quiet, and he began to feel he moved across it a bright and alien thing, out of place, a glitter of forces that did not belong. Kingfisher-bright against the snow, to senses that could see. Something watched. In his own land he might be a quieter thing. You didn't see the kingfisher in the woods for all its brilliant blue.

The wind gusted wildly about him, snow rising in a sudden flurry, a whirlwind. Jui set up a great outraged barking, leaping as if a taunting crow circled him.

She plunged from the sky in a swirl of colour, peacock-blue and green, red and brown. High boots and red leather leggings, short gown of quilted silk brocade, a confusion of bright flowers wrapped tight with a broad embroidered sash. Incongruous Praitannec plaid blanket worn over her shoulder, Praitannec plaid scarf about her neck, and her sword on her back. The scarlet tassel of its hilt tangled with her black hair loose and long, streaming like a banner in the wind that still gusted around her. Her face was all elegance—high cheekbones, deep brown eyes, warm complexion. A little taller than he. Perfection of beauty. He loved beauty, could see it in even those, man or woman, the world called plain, but she left him cold.

“Dotemon.” He did not reach for his knife.

“Nabban.” The devil, the usurping empress of Nabban, the conqueror of Denanbak and Dar-Lathi, north and south, bowed with full and formal mockery. “Yeh-Lin, please.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you.”

“I thought you took oath to Deyandara. Broken so soon?”

Yeh-Lin shrugged, and waved a languid hand. The captive wind settled and died away. Jui had retreated behind Ghu's legs, where he grumbled softly.

“She doesn't need a tutor any longer. She's betrothed to the king and gone to the bards. I told her I wanted to go to you and she released me. Here I am.”

“We don't want you.”

“We? Catairlau is with you still?”

“His name is Ahjvar.”

“He should have died. I thought you were going to take him from his goddess and let him go. It was for that I put his mad goddess to sleep in the earth.” A red ember woke in her eyes. “You did not leave him walking this world with that hungry thing still in him.”

“Hyllau I destroyed. Ahjvar is free.”

“He can't be free. He is—”

“I know what he is.
He
knows what he is. He comes with me by his own will and I will let him go when
he
wills it. And you will not touch him, Dotemon, or Nabban will see you into a grave there will be no escaping.”

Wind raised snow about them, snapped at her hair.

“This is not Nabban,” the devil said, and did not step away, but he saw it—almost she had.

“Ask him what he wants, if you doubt me.”

The fire he had seen faded. She did take a step back, to bow again, no mockery this time. “I do not think you would lie to me, Nabban, or to him. Young fools, the pair of you. Is he even sane?”

“He's—better. Sometimes.”

“Poor fools. Take care not to damn him before the Old Great Gods. They're jealous of what they've marked as their own.”

“The dead, you mean? He isn't. He may have died, but he lives and breathes and bleeds and keeps his soul. As do you.”

“
I
am not under discussion.” She shrugged. “Even I have no idea what to call him, truly.” Her lips curled up. “But ‘dead king' does annoy him so.”

“Well, don't annoy him. I won't stop him hitting
you
. What do you want?”

“Your company.”

“We don't want yours.”

“No? You might need it. What exactly do you plan to do in Nabban? They are at war, you know. Civil war, the surviving children of Emperor Yao, who died a year ago, fighting for the Peony Throne. Uprisings of slaves. Lord and generals seizing what they think they can hold, and revolt of the tribes in the highlands and jungles of Dar-Lathi. I've seen it in the mirror. I can show you.”

“No.”

“Will you retreat to the wilderness of the gods and fade to sleep? Nabban will break and die around you.”

“No.”

“What, then?”

Ghu shook his head. “I don't know. Yet. I will know, when I see.”

She studied him. “You do know. You do see—”

“I don't know what I will do,” he snapped. “I only know what needs to be done.”

“And that is?”

“None of your concern.”

“It is,” she said. “I sowed the seeds of it, did I not? This rot that you must mend?”

She spoke the truth in that.

“You do need me. What do you know of war? You may fight well in a corner and your dead king was a captain, yes, but the armies of the Praitannec tribes are rabble and their idea of a war is a hundred riders on a cattle raid.”

“Not entirely true.”

“Not entirely untrue. They're a folk who esteem geldings as warhorses!”

“For raiding, yes. They find them quieter when they're stealing their neighbours' mares. So?”

“They didn't defeat Marakand by any tactical skill or strategy of their own; it was the loss of the Red Masks and the Lady's fall let the kings claim the day. It was you and your dead man gave them their victory. Catairlau—”

“—Ahjvar—”

“—has no more idea what to do with a real army than you have.”

“I'm sure he's read a book on it.”

“A book! You—” Her brows lowered and she snorted. “Not a matter for joking, Nabban. I swear—”

“Don't. You make oaths too lightly.”

“Deyandara sent me to you. Truly, she did. The damned Old Great Gods be my witness—”

“Don't. Don't swear.”

“By the tree that held me and released me, whom I do respect, I will not cross the border without your leave. I put myself at your service, Nabban.” She went down on her knees in the snow, like a Praitannec spearwoman exchanging vows with her lord, offered her hands. “If you won't take my oath, how do I prove that? How do I give you some word you will believe?”

“No words. By your deeds, Dotemon. Day by day.”

And that, how could he lay that before his dying gods? That he brought Yeh-Lin Dotemon, whom they had sacrificed themselves to vanquish, back to Nabban?