Gods of Nabban (76 page)

Not a swift death, that. Ivah rode over and leaned to slash her throat, though it was a mercy she gave because she thought it was right, not one she was inclined of her own heart to give. That one was the last of those women of the Wind in the Reeds.

A man slid from his horse and went to his knees, his surcoat proclaiming him of the Shouja Clan, the badges of his helmet, his ribbons, marking him a lord, a captain-general of this army, or a part of it. Others, seeing this, dropped as well. Banner-ranked men and women, greater lords of the court in arms, the empress's own folk.

“Stop this,” Yeh-Lin said. Their god was gone. Someone had to stand at their head now; they could not wait for his return. “Signal your companies to lay down their arms, and stop this. You make war on your god in the name of a lie, and a fratricide, and an usurper who would have given this land into the hands of the worst of devils. Do not damn yourselves further.”

Ivah rode to her side. She meant only to say that Dan—anyone but Yeh-Lin Dotemon—should formally take the surrender of the empress's lords, but Yeh-Lin gave her suddenly a most wicked grin, a dragon's grin, and bowed, standing at her stirrup.

“The captain of the archers of the god of Nabban, Lady Ivah, banner-bearer of the god of Nabban, heir of Prince Dan, princess of the Tamghati of the Great Grass, and daughter of Princess Min-Jan An-Chaq, will take your surrender.”

CHAPTER XLV

—drowning in deep water. Not the Lady's well, not the sea.

River. Current, pushing him. Dimmest of light, golden, faint above. Ghu, holding him against the push of the water that would carry him away, lying with him, and water filling his mouth, breathed in. The pain was in hands and chest and eyes and he had burned.

Not even a voice in his mind. Only a touch. There was quiet. Safety. Water neither cool nor warm, wrapping close, and he could lie back against Ghu and be still. Not burning. Not drowning.

Better.
That, Ahjvar did hear, and feel as a touch at the same time.

Water, current wrapping his hands, calming the fires. Water like lips brushing over closed eyes, lips against his ear, but the words were still in his mind.
You're not burnt, Ahj. You're safe. He's gone from our land. Lie still.

You're not burnt
was a lie, but Ghu never lied and Ghu had him, so he was safe.

“Cold.” His voice was a croak. He was soaking wet, shivering.

“It's raining.”

So it was. Rain, and breaking clouds, and shafts of sun. No people. No voices. Only the sound of the river, loud over stones. How had they come there? Not the important question.

“Have we won your war?”

“I don't know.” Ghu had an abstracted look, hand wound in Ahjvar's wet hair. Listening. Or searching. “Yeh-Lin's looking after things, and Ivah is. Buri-Nai's commanders have offered their swords, though.”

“I hope the devil broke them.”

“She has let them keep their heads. I was—not so inclined. For a little. It's as well as I was not there. You say you're not safe. I don't know; I'm not sure that I am, either. They obeyed Yao, they obeyed Otono, they obeyed Buri-Nai—not for any great fear, even, but because they were lords and emperors and that was how things were meant to be.”

“The ones who chose not to didn't manage to achieve much.”

“Dan, you mean. At least they chose to try.”

“Daro Korat. Daro Sia. Slaves and the poor run off to the edge of the wild and only setting up armed masters over the weaker again.”

“Yes. They don't know anything else. They can't see anything else. Their stories hold nothing else, any longer. Ahj, this land makes me so—angry.”

“Change it. Give them new stories.” New heroes. The slave who overthrew a tyrant and set free the folk and drove a devil from the land.

“To shift all the weight of the land?”

“My granddaughter would say so. Your little bard. But someone's going to have to set new laws and take thought for new order. That can't wait. Harvest coming. Winter. Start somewhere. Choa.”

“Village by village, manor by manor, city ward by ward. Province by province. Yes. Did I say law-speaker?”

“You said clerk. Be your clerk. It wasn't imperial law I studied. Five Cities is very different.”

“Different may be what we need. Law of the Five Cities, law of the
duinas
, law of Marakand. There was a code of laws before Yeh-Lin. I don't know what it said. Different, though. Different after Min-Jan, too. Do you think we could make a senate of some sort work?”

Ahjvar didn't want to think about it. A land the size of Nabban, a village council, which was what the senate of Marakand was, grown grand and full of itself, with all its factions and family compacts. Or the Five Cities, where the clan-fathers lived in their fortified houses and warred by assassins.

“God of this land. Will you be emperor too?”

“No.”

“Then you can't do more than push them to face the right direction. They need to find their own paths, if anything they make is going to endure.”

He hurt all over, and felt his age, which was considerable. Good just to lie where he was, with the sky over him and his head on Ghu's lap, Ghu's hand over aching scars. Unmerciful Great Gods—Yeh-Lin's blasphemy—his head throbbed, and there was no coffee in all this land. His chest ached, too, and his hands felt raw.

“Ghu, did I—” He held up a hand, studied it. It shook, and hardly seemed to belong to him, for all its familiar old lines and scars. “Was it nightmare, again, or shaman's dreaming, the place where I burnt the stone?”

“Does it matter?”

That was not an answer. He struggled to sit up.

“Did I burn again?”

“Hush. Lie down. I held you. I said I would. I couldn't let you go like that.”

Curled away, into darkness. Far away, far as he could get. Tasted tears on his face, not his own, cheek pressed to his cheek.

“Ghu.”

“I'm here.” In the night. The water sang over its rocks. They were by the rapids. The gorge. Leaves whispered, and a bird was singing. Time lost, as it had used to be, on the road, in hills of the eastern Over-Malagru, in the desert.

“Don't leave me alone.”
I thought I was better. I thought I'd broken this.

“I don't. I won't.”
You are. You have. This, you'll pass through too. Old scars opened. They'll heal again. Give yourself time.

And oak trees.
Almost a joke. A shaky one.

Time and the cork oaks.
Mouth moved against him. A smile, a slow kiss. “You put the devil out of Nabban, Ahj. Yeh-Lin didn't do that. Ahjvar, you know you don't—” Breath against his ear. “Don't—bind yourself here, for my sake. Go, if will. If you need to. I didn't think, when—when you cried out of the fire, that you—I do not think I should be trusted with what you give me. I took you into the river instead. I didn't think you knew what you said.”

“And you ask now?”

“Yes.”

“You still want company on your road?”

“Yes, Ahj.”

“Good. Don't let go of me.”

“No. I have you still.”

CHAPTER XLVI

Nabban came and went about the camp at the ferry landing and those set up and down the road, a few miles from the battlefield and the hill of his death and rebirth, which they were calling the holy hill, now. There was an old shrine high up there, forgotten and overgrown. The folk of the nearest village had come back, proudly protective of it, and were clearing the old path that snaked up along the ledges, between strange pillars carved in the rough shape of a human figure, head and shoulders, featureless. A holy place before there was Father or Mother, made holy again. Would the god send them a priest, they asked? Their lord and his sons and daughter were all dead in the fighting and his household fled. It was the smith, a serf of the dead lord, who came to them, and Awan who went up the steep path, leaning on his stick, to see the old holy place.

“There's a spring,” he said, when he came down again. “A spring, and the altar-stone, and a pine-sapling growing by it, and they will build me a cabin once they've cleared the yard within the old stone fencing. I think I'll keep a cat for company.”

They buried Kaeo in the Nabbani fashion, in the earth, and set a stone over him. Rat had tied her river-stone amulet about his neck. A promise, as it had been to her, when she took the smooth, holed pebble from the Little Sister's bed, that dreaming night when she was fourteen. She would come back someday, Rat thought, while she was still Anlau, before she went to the river. She would gather his bones and take them to her father on the mountain. Dwei Kaeo had died for Nabban, but it was the Little Sister who would remember his name.

Something remembered. Ahjvar found Ivah, claimed that splinter of the devil's amulet from her. She had cocooned it in thread and hair, a binding he did not trust to last, but did not want either to disturb. He took it to Ghu.

“Empty of souls, I think,” Ghu said. “I think . . . seal it, as your goddess sealed your wizardry, till we know better what to do with it. I don't suppose an ordinary fire would do much to it at all.”

And he did not want to burn again, no. Ahjvar cased it in river clay and wrote his own bindings on it: elm, rowan, hazel. Ghu set his thumb-print in it, like a seal, before they fired it.

“Bury it at Swajui, under the roots of the oaks,” he said. “They'll hold it till we need it.”

“What are we likely to need it for?”

“I don't know. We may, though. Someday.”

“I am not your emperor,” Prince Dan said. Lords, officers, rebels and imperial conscripts, village folk—and priests, because there were priests coming into them from hiding in the hills, day and night—they were gathered to witness. Folk in their thousands. Most could neither see—except that there were small figures stood on the bed of a wagon beneath the blue banners—nor hear. “It is not my place. It never was. I am a servant of the god of Nabban, a servant of Nabban—as the emperor must be, first and foremost of all his servants—but that is not the service I am best able to give. I will retire to the mountains of Choa and keep a shrine to Nabban there, and watch a child I have adopted as my daughter grow. You have heard the prophecies that were spoken. The Peony Throne is cast down. The rule of the sons of Min-Jan is ended.”

“The holy one will be emperor!” some soldier called, and
Nabban
,
Nabban
, they echoed it.

Ivah saw Ghu, all in black and half lost in shadows behind Dan, shake his head in denial. They saw that refusal, the front ranks, at least.

“Nabban says, the Princess Ivah will serve him in this. A daughter of Nabban, a daughter of the Great Grass, his wizard and his captain of archers. If she is Min-Jan, the daughter of my lost sister An-Chaq, she is also Tamghati, come out of the west, and her house is the house of the Grass. It is a new era. We start again.”

They cheered, whether they had heard or understood or not. They would have cheered anything.

No gold, no jewels. Archer's leather and her hair in a warrior's knot, not a caravaneer's braids. She wore sky-blue and black for the god, a robe sent from Dernang by Lady Willow, something that had been the girl's mother's, the colours a fortunate chance. She left it sashless, open, showing her leather and sabre beneath.

Empress might mean something more like a high priestess. She would make it so, and make certain her heirs, however she came by them, remembered it.

She might wish for Nour's good sense here, but Kharduin was not a man to bring harmony and reconciliation to a land, unless it could be brought by knocking heads together. It was her father's example she needed, strange thought. His leadership, but not his ambition and his evil. No mound of heads. His warband had followed him with loyalty and affection and respect, and not for fear. Her father's example, in some things. And she had known good men and good women, and had seen how they lived, and how they dealt. She might try to be so. She must.

A morning of clear skies and warm winds, and the birds singing up the steep sides of the gorge. Yeh-Lin came to them there, where they were clambering among the lilacs that covered the slope, with the river growling white below. Not there for any great and divine purpose, only that it was a quiet place, open and wild, and there were no people there.

“Nabban. You wanted me?”

“Yes. Something for you to do. Go south.” Ghu nodded to Ti, who followed in Yeh-Lin's path. “Take your pages, since they'll only follow you anyway—”

Ti nodded, edging up beside her. “Even Kufu,” he said. “You scared him, my lady, but not anymore.”

She took the boy's hand.

“Your pages, and good horses, and a few of Yuro's folk to look after them. Yuro, if he's fit to ride and wishes to go with you. Go as my ambassadors, and as Ivah's, you and Lord Daro Yuro. Go with the priestess of the Little Sister and speak with the queens.”

“Me? Are you out of your mind, Nabban?”

“You began this. You end it.”

“All the lands drained by the Little Sister?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because they were Lathan long ago, and no one asked my mother's name.”

“Jochiz tried to take you, you know. You understand that. You could have turned on him. Fought him for his soul. Taken him into yourself, as he meant to take you. Did you not even think it, you and the dead king between you?”

“No,” Ahjvar said.

“What would we have become, if we had?” Ghu asked.

“Something—the world has not seen. God and Great God.”

“Devil,” Ahjvar said.

“Yes, that.”

“Something,” said Ghu, “to break and burn the land, to let all anger loose and leave Nabban barren and lifeless as they say the deadlands are along the Kinsai'av?”