Gods of Nabban (33 page)

The castle was a maze of interconnected baileys, buildings, towers, lanes, and narrow passages on many levels. The main keep was a serene and lofty island floating amid gardens at the centre of it all, stronghold without, palace within. Neither slave nor free servant of the outer castle crossed those gardens on the green moss of the lawns or the white-gravelled paths unsummoned. Ghu was not sure he would even know the way, but the keep wasn't his aim—not yet. He threaded a path between walls, through gates, across cobbled yards and hard-packed earth, along narrow alleys, up and down steep, shallow steps and around broken-backed turns, making for the stables near the western gate, but taking a shortcut he would not have dared as a boy, along the bamboo-laid pathway from the house-slaves' quarters. Burnt ruin of a weaving-shed. Burnt ruin of the soldiers' kitchens. The potters' building with its doors smashed in. Gates into yards wrenched off their hinges. Truly a village, this, but one made to be a maze as well. Dawn could not be far distant. Past the household troop's barracks, its doors hacked open, a reed screen hung to keep out drafts. No one kept a watch there, though many slept within. The stable complex, beyond an intact granary, was familiar. Strong scent of horse. He crossed the square of it to the western stable block, with its grand entry porch and low square tower over it. Sacked, Meli had claimed, but the damage could have been far worse. The general would have wanted the castle whole and fit to live in. A watchdog stirred and came to him, nosing at his hand. Not one he knew—he had been gone almost a dog's lifetime—but it did not growl even at Jui and Jiot.

Here, he risked a whisper, a few words, sending Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin to wait, with the dogs, in a corner behind a stack of straw. Ahjvar stood a moment, but then followed Yeh-Lin in silence.

Through the door. Not a homecoming, no. He had a strong impression of the ruined broch on the cliff with the unending sound of the sea below, smoky, salt air, the shaft of light where their attempt at a turf roof had fallen in. A deep and painful yearning to be back there, not here, not in this place again, whelmed up in him, choking, but horses stirred, and horses were welcoming. He quietened them, not even a word, urged the boys asleep in the far corner room with the lord's most expensive harness to sink deeper in their dreams, and took the stairs to the tower room.

The door opened silently when he lifted the latch. Much as he remembered, smell of horses and oiled leather. He found his way to the side of the bed, a pallet on the floor, without tripping on anything. The room seemed smaller than he remembered, only a few paces to cross. He crouched just out of reach. The shutters of the windows were closed against the night. It was some sense other than vision that assured him this was Horsemaster Yuro. Fortunate he was here, and not over the river with the foaling mares. In a nest of blankets in the far corner, like a dog's bed, a child curled sleeping. Ill, Ghu thought. Usually the ill of the stables were handed over to Baril, who oversaw the eastern stable wing and the girls and womenfolk of the horses, especially if they were female, as this child was. Baril was the one who made the salves and the potions for drenching. Fever on the child. Her dreams were formless, fearful, dark things, hard to grasp.

“Master Yuro?”

The man stirred.

“Master Yuro! Wake up.”

He woke with a groan and a snort and a mumbled, “What is it? Ghu . . .?”

Eight, nine years it must be at the least since he had gone off down the river—time was a bit vague before he came to Gold Harbour, and he had been a boy then. The man couldn't know his voice.

“Ghu,” he confirmed. “Master Yuro—”

“What?” More alert now. “Is that—? No . . . Who?”

“It's Ghu.” The room was cold, no embers in the brazier, nothing at which to light a candle. He rose and opened the shutters. From here the fog was a sea of white, hugging the ground, but the sky was clear and there was enough light to make out shapes; the moon would not set until after sunrise. Yuro folded a gown around himself. “Oh, Sen. What is it?”

“No, it's Ghu, Master Yuro,” he said patiently, and stood still while the man trod close and peered into his face.

“Ghu? No.” Hesitantly, “I was dreaming of Ghu. Come back drowned out of the river looking for that damned white colt.”

“Yes.” Words fled him, but Yuro thought he still dreamed. He must speak. “Not dreaming, Master Yuro. The gods' truth, I'm Ghu. I've been in the west.”

“Ghu. Ghu! You damnable
fool
, what did you want to come back for?”

Ghu turned aside from the swinging arm and hooked the man's feet out from under him, reflex more than anything, as the failed slap had been. Yuro lurched up and flung a punch, not now the mere back-handed cuff that had driven so many words home when he thought a boy wasn't listening. Ghu knocked him flat on his back, standing off warily as the man gasped for breath. The dog down with the horses barked once at the thump, which would likely wake someone, but if nothing else followed they wouldn't bother crawling out of warm blankets . . . No one called out, not even Ahjvar.

Yuro sat up, didn't move to come after him again, so Ghu offered his hand and Yuro did take it to help himself up. Ghu gripped his wrist and jerked him close. “Don't hit me. Ever. I have a friend down below will kill you for it.” His own anger surprised him. Yuro had never had too heavy a hand, compared to some.

The horsemaster stood frozen, till Ghu let him go. He moved away, rubbing his wrist. “You're not Ghu. The boy's long dead.”

“I am. Truly.”

Master Yuro groped on a shelf, seeking flint and steel, from the sound. Eventually he struck a spark into a dish of tinder and lit a tallow candle at it. The yellow light showed his hair grey-streaked, which it had not been, his broad weathered face more lined than formerly. He brought the candle too close to Ghu's face, peering at him, only half a head taller now.

“You look like him. Maybe. Grown up.”

“It's been a long time. If you didn't think it was me, why hit me?”

“I thought I was dreaming.”

He could hear Ahjvar's acidic comment on that. Even in their dreams, people hit him.

“You shouldn't have come here. They'll burn your face for you.” A glance at the heap in the corner. “At best. They've killed her, I think.”

“Who is she?”

“Doesn't matter. Let her sleep. Maybe she won't wake ever. What in the cold hells did you come back for, if you actually survived to get away? I figured you were in a ditch with your throat cut years ago.”

“I needed to come back.”

“I used to dream you were drowned. I don't know why. It was the snow nearly took you.”

“But I was drowned.”

“That. No, you weren't. You were alive and wailing when Gomul fished you out.”

“I know, I remember. But I was drowned, regardless.”

“You don't remember; you were a newborn babe.”

“I do.” Smell of mud and water and crushed green reeds. Cold water that wasn't cold, that carried him . . . The boy whose hands felt so hot they burned, though it was only that he was cold as the water himself, when they plucked him up, thumping his back, and words . . . no meaning in the words then. It was a long time before words had meaning. The world had been such a vast and overwhelming thing . . .

That Dar-Lathan girl, the one they had to keep in chains . . .

They spread them around the imperial manors, after the last battle of the war. Never too many. Gave them to the lords. They didn't make good slaves, the warriors of Dar-Lathi. A lot of them died, one way and another.

She got the baby on the long march north . . .

Wouldn't give suck to the infant . . . They kept her chained to stop her killing it. To stop her running.

The lord didn't know they'd chained her. He wouldn't have stood for that. Old Duri's orders . . .

Worked the staple out of the wall and walked into the river in her chains, with the baby . . .

It was Gomul who named him, and the stable-folk used to hold him to suckle among a litter of puppies until the scandalized and furious house-master Duri found out about it and, since the Kho'anzi forbade that he be thrown back to the river, which Duri at first ordered, made one of the under-cooks his wet-nurse. Gomul was dead of a bad fall by the time Ghu was sent back to the stables, four years old, maybe, or five, not old enough to be any use among the horses but judged too slow of mind for the kitchens, and mute besides.

He remembered the smell of the kitchens. Disorder wild like a storm. Incomprehensible noise. Heat and shouting and the kitchen-master who struck out with an iron ladle at any failing or slowness. The stables were better.

He took the candle from an unresisting hand, stuck it back in the horn-paned lantern on the shelf. “Sit down, Master Yuro.” But it was the polite honorific of the road he gave him, not the Imperial word for one's owner or a higher ranking servant of the house. Slightest of differences in sound, a world of meaning. Yuro raised his eyebrows at it, hand folded across a probably-sore midriff. Ahj didn't always hear that difference when he snarled about it.

“Where do they have Lord Daro Korat? I need to find him.”

“Old Great Gods have mercy, do you not know what's been happening here?”

“Don't shout. Yes, I do. I need to get the Kho'anzi away. I need his name, to take this province.”

“
Need?
” Yuro, who had not sat, took a step back. “The province? Do you know what you're saying?” A frown. “You never used to put enough words together to make sense.”

“I've had to learn. My friend growls at me when I don't.”

“You're not the boy. You look like him, maybe. If he went north. All sorts of wild things in the Denanbaki hills and the desert. Demons. Spirits of the wind and the sand. The stories the caravaneers tell . . . You're not him. Something's putting words in your mouth. His mouth.”

“I went south, Yuro, and east. To the cities and the sea. And west, after, to the Five Cities and beyond. Now I'm back. Do you want Daro Korat to die?”

“No! Never such a death as they mean for him.”

“You didn't join Sia.”

“Lord Sia was a fool and damned all his family. Once he had the Kho'anzi, the general said he was going to kill even the children. Don't know if he meant it, but the ladies poisoned them to spare them. Their own children.”

“Who's the girl?” Ghu tilted his head towards the heap of blankets.

“Lady Daro Willow.” Yuro's lips thinned. He had not meant to answer.

“The baby?” The Kho'anzi's third and last daughter's baby. A scandal, that had been. She had been refusing a betrothal to a young lord of Musa Clan in Taihu, an alliance the old emperor had strongly hinted would be to his liking, when her pregnancy became obvious. The father had never been named that Ghu knew of, but it ruined her marriage prospects. She had always wanted an officer's commission in the couriers anyway, not to be lady of a household. She gave that up, as well, to raise her baby herself and not leave it entirely to slaves and her brother's wife. Or maybe she had had other reasons for not wanting to leave the castle . . . riding down along the river, and a man who thought himself out of sight in the willows at the stony spit where the coltsfoot bloomed so thickly in spring.
Take my dogs for a good run, Ghu
, she said.
Take both horses. I'm going to sit and watch the water. . . . 
Lord Sia's confidential secretary, he had been, secreted in the willows, some minor banner-lady's younger child, landless, rankless. No fit match for a high lord's daughter. Ghu had always understood the baby's name, if nobody else did.

“So you know who the child was. Doesn't mean anything. You could know what's in Ghu's mind, maybe, what he remembers. Whatever you are.”

“Two of the Kho'anzi's family left to him. And he himself.”

“One.”

“I am Ghu, Yuro. And if I did not talk much, I listened. Are you going to let your father be sent to die in the Golden City, or will you help him?”

Yuro sat, then, as if the wind had been knocked out of him a second time.

“Where did you hear that? Old Great Gods, not even—no one—”

“It's in your heart,” he said gently. “Every time you stood before him. And in his.”

Yuro said nothing, so Ghu bowed and turned away. It would have to be the river, then. The punt would not hold so many, once they had Lord Korat, but he could swim the moat, and they could raid the village on the mound southward for a proper boat—would the Kho'anzi in hiding be enough to rouse the province, with an imperial army in Dernang? He needed—he knew what he needed and could not see any way to it, but through the devil.

To start so . . .

He paused by the girl. “What did they do to her?”

“She ran from her aunts—her mother's dead. I mean, two years dead. Died in childbirth with a second baby and no father known for that one, either. Though—Sia's secretary had died of winter fever not long before and I saw the life going out of her with that, if no one else did.” He added, “She always liked the horses.”

Yuro had had affection for her, then, the sister who did not know him her brother. Ghu had liked her too. It spoke well of both of them.

“But Willow, she hid, when the family—did what they did. House-master Duri couldn't roll over fast enough for the Zhung general. He told him who the girl was, when they found her halfway down the fishpond overflow drain. General Musan said a bastard Daro brat wasn't much of threat if she was put in her proper place and ordered her branded for Zhung Clan and set in the castle records as a captive of war. As if she were a foreigner! They sent her to the kitchens, and I don't think that lot were any too kindly. Scared for their own skins if they were, maybe. So the child took the punt across the moat, three nights ago now—the flood hadn't come up so high yet. She stole a horse from a courier station—no one knows how she managed that—but they caught up with her, of course. Don't know where she thought she was going. So Musan marked her as a runaway.”