Blackdog (22 page)

Darkness overtook him before he reached the summit, and the moon was only a low sickle in the west, chasing the sun, but the Blackdog's vision let him pick his way as easily as by daylight. There were no trees on Bitter Hill, even in the cracks where thin soil accumulated and where thorns and wire-grass would be found on most of the rest of this range of hills. Not even the noxious fleshy-leafed weeds that clung to the ground around the bitter springs of the Salt Desert grew here, and the broken landscape looked shattered rather than merely crumbled by wind and sun. This was the highest of the sandstone hills. To the north, the black stone stretched away, like an island between the Kinsai-av and the Great Grass that ran for unknowable distances east and north. The sandstone felt good, old and at peace, whatever powers had left it a wasteland long leached away by sun and wind. A good place to pray, as the ferryman said.

From a cleft in the yellowish stone, pale blue eyes watched him.

He had never seen a demon this close, not so clearly. Flitting shadows at night, sometimes, drawn near the fire by music, that was all. This demon was very like a striped hyena, but a pale ash-grey with darker markings the blue-grey colour of Westgrassland oxen. Its—
her
—large, delicate ears swivelled, following his slight movement aside.

“Sorry,” Holla said, feeling as awkward and out of place as if he had wandered into a strange woman's private room. There was something naked and panicked in her wide, staring eyes, blue as Varro's. Something almost horrified.

She could see the Blackdog. Ah.

“I won't disturb you, Mistress,” he said, as if she were that strange woman. “I was just…the ferryman, Kien, said this would be a good place to pray.”

The demon flicked an ear. They could speak, or so all the tales said. She obviously felt no need to do so.

“I'll just go, um, over there?”

The demon blinked.

“Thank you.”

She simply disappeared from the corner of his eye as he picked a way along the crest of the hill. A flicker, and she was gone. Holla shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, like a dog shuddering off snow. Something cold had run over his mind, then, with the demon's vanishing. The demon's awareness, darting in for a closer look? He kept the Blackdog from stretching out to pursue her in turn. She was no threat.

Holla settled cross-legged atop bare stone, facing northwest. Home. The Sayanbarkash was across the river there somewhere, west and north, almost due west from the First, the uppermost, of the Five Cataracts. He had no koumiss, no bread, no jug of wine, none of the gifts one took when one went seeking Sayan. They had no priests in the Western Grass. When you needed your god, you went to him or her and spoke. And he, or she, might come to you, and share a drink and a meal, and offer the advice you sought. Or not. No koumiss, no yoghurt. Not even a broken piece of journey-bread or a gourd of water. His throat was parched again, and his stomach grumbled.

Holla shut his eyes on the last dull red glow of the horizon, shut his mind to thirst and hunger and the prickling between his shoulders that was more than a mere demon's attention on him. The dog slipped almost to the surface, a shadow on him, and he knew his eyes would be glowing yellow-green, if he opened them and there were any to see. He could hear. An owl called, and away to the east a pair of hyenas yipped to one another. Much closer, stone slipped and rattled, some small thing rootling for prey. A hedgehog. He could smell it. A snake's belly-scales rasped over rock. Dogs barked, down at the ferrymen's castle, howled not for any unhappiness but because it was night and they enjoyed the noise of their own singing, their unity. A woman shouted with no real anger in her tone, and they were silent except for a pup's brash yip, claiming the last word. Under all, over all, the cataracts roared, throbbed, like the current of Kinsai's blood.

He had never gone to pray to Sayan needing aid. He had gone once, when he was a boy, after one of the wandering bards had done the first of the agonizing tattoos that marked him as of the Sayanbarkashi. Once when he was a man, and the full drawing of face and arms had been completed, the snakes that meant one had reached adulthood coiling on cheeks and upper arms, twining into the eye-flanking owls and the knotted, spiralling cheetahs of the forearms. Once before he left home, he went with a skin of koumiss just to sit a night with his god and to take away a stone from Sayan's hill.

Once when he was an infant, he supposed, but he did not remember that.

What did you say to a god, when you truly had need of one? And this was Kinsai's land. There were no gods in the broken hills of the eastern bank, only Kinsai in her river, and Sayan was a couple of hundred miles away as the raven would fly. Gods did not reach beyond their own land. That was why he was here. Begging for help.

“Sayan? I need you to hear me, please.”

Truly talking to himself. Holla opened his eyes, pressed a hand, palm down, to the stone, and looked to the west. Stone, the bones of the world. Stone was the favoured talisman to carry of a wanderer's own land. Stone bound you to home. Stone ran forever, under desert and forest and river and the fabled ocean, salt and unending, on whose shores Varro swore he had been born. Holla-Sayan pulled out the white pebble from the pouch about his neck and took the knife from his belt.

In the songs, the wizards of the kingdoms of the north sealed their spells with their own blood. Stone, bone, water, blood. Earth and life. If stone and blood of the Sayanbarkash could not reach by stone and water to the Sayanbarkash, prayer here would be empty as Thekla's prayers, a Westron who knew her gods were long dead, who prayed only because men and women should pray, to remember them.

He cut the palm of his hand, not deeply, but enough for the blood to well up quickly, clenched that hand around his talisman-stone and held it out to watch the gleaming drops spatter onto the dusty hilltop. It did not bleed for long, the cut knitting almost as quickly as the blood began to clot.

“I am Holla-Sayan of the Sayanbarkash,” he began again. “Please, carry my words through the stone, through the water, through the earth, to Sayan where he walks on the hills of the Sayanbarkash. Please. Let him speak to me. I am of the Sayanbarkash, and I need his aid.”
Sayan, please hear me. I don't know what to do. Pakdhala's going to die.

He felt the attention on him, that watching awareness, grow stronger, until it was almost a touch, a hand running up his spine, stirring his hair, a breath on his ear.

And then words, in his ears, in his mind, in his blood.
Well then. Clever, but the Blackdog should be clever. Though wizards know better than to bind gods with their blood, or do anything so suggestive of that, as you have done. But earnest and innocent one, you are certainly no wizard. I will let your words be carried by the bond of your blood and soul and the bones beneath the earth to brother Sayan. Perhaps he will come to you. Perhaps I will allow it. For a fee.

The voice, if it was a voice, was almost affectionate but at the same time mocking. There was breath on his ear, on the nape of his neck, someone there, a cool hand cupping the side of his face. And nothing. Perhaps he was asleep, and it was only the wind. Grass whispered, spring-soft and sweet in the air, and the air was wine-rich with the scent of damp soil and growing things, the spring grasslands. The sun was rising over the Sayanbarkash, pale yellow light casting long shadows ahead of him, clear sky, the last bright star fading. Black larks climbed singing into the air over him. It would be like this on the heights of the Sayanbarkash in a spring dawn, but it was summer now, and night. This was memory, the time he went and took a stone away with him. It was too much what he remembered to be otherwise. Dream, yes. He was dreaming, Holla did not doubt that, and did not doubt the reality of it, either.

He sat, cross-legged on the earth, and rolled the bloodstained pebble between his palms, wondering if he would find the same stone still in the gravelly soil if he parted the grass. When he looked up, the god sat by him, intent on a knife and a knot of wood in his hands.

Sayan looked a great deal like Holla's father, stocky, weathered-brown, his black braids tied with careless knots of multicoloured thread, his eyes, when he looked up, narrowed against the sun, nested in fine lines. But they were like pools of dark water, bottomless, and his skin was without tattoos.

“Holla-Sayan.” The god gave him a nod, dropped his gaze back to the work in his hands. He carved something, with careful, tiny flicks and curls of the knife. And he did not call Holla “Blackdog.”

“What desperate need demanded that?” Sayan cocked an eyebrow at the pebble, now cupped in Holla's hand. “Did you stop to think what Kinsai might ask of you in return?”

The god sounded like his father, as well. Holla sighed, and felt a weight rising from him. Even in dream it eased his soul to be back in his own place, his own land, the custom of his own folk, where the gods were
of
the folk, simple and sane to be with.

“Of course not,” Holla said, but his voice betrayed him, not half so careless as the words. “If I stopped to think before getting tangled in gods, I wouldn't need your aid now.”

Sayan snorted. “No, of course not. And what, exactly, did you think I could do for you? Blackdog.” He frowned, paring away the merest shaving of wood, and held what he carved close to his nose, turning it to catch the light.

Holla-Sayan took a deep breath. This was what he had sidled around in his thoughts, all the way from Serakallash, keeping the hope in shadow, in the corner of his eye where the dog might not notice. Say it quickly, before the Blackdog could panic.

“Drive this thing out of me. If you can, drive the goddess out of the girl, let her be a human child and live. A human shouldn't die because she leaves her home. Attalissa can go back to her lake and fight the damned wizard herself.”

The Blackdog stirred, disturbed at anger fixing on thoughts of the goddess, but not at all alarmed. Amused, even. So Holla knew, before the god spoke, that the cautious hope he had kept hidden all this way was no good. And that amusement again made him believe that the Blackdog had a mind, somewhere, that could see itself beyond the goddess.

Sayan sighed. “Separate Attalissa and the girl? I can't do that, Holla-Sayan. The child is not a creature with two souls, as you have become. She is the goddess incarnate. There is nothing else. She's no possessed priestess like the Voice of Marakand, a human carrying the goddess, sharing her self. Your Pakdhala
is
the goddess born in flesh. An avatar, I believe they call it in Pirakul. It's much more common there. Whatever name you give her, she is Attalissa, flesh and blood and soul.”

His gaze fixed on Holla for a moment. “As for driving the Blackdog spirit out of you—the Blackdog is not something I want loose in my land, Holla-Sayan. I do not think it would leave such an able host as yourself willingly, not with no other trained and willing host to accept it, and certainly not in response to a threat. I think there would be little left of you, child of my folk, did I succeed in separating you by force. You do not want your body a battleground between us. And besides, Holla-Sayan, I think you do not want to deny the dog, if it means that Attalissa will suffer. I think you love her.”

“That's the dog,” Holla protested.

“You've cared for her as for a daughter, for nearly a month now. A short time, maybe, but maybe not. I think it's you who loves her, Holla-Sayan. Do you know why you carry my name?”

“I've been told, twenty times or more, yes,” Holla said, a little impatiently.

The god smiled, looking back to his carving.

“I'll tell you again, in case you did not understand the first twenty times. Your parents had two sons, and then your mother bore twins. Daughters. They came too early, and they died. Your mother did not conceive again for several years and began to fear she had become barren. She prayed for another child. And around this time there was a girl from a family over on the north slopes of the barkash. I won't tell you her name; it's hers to keep. She became the lover of a married man, old enough to be her father, but when she found herself pregnant he denied her and swore she lied.”

The god frowned. “Swore in my name. Well, that is between him and me, and no concern of yours, what became of him. But this girl's father beat her, so she went to her mother's people, and there she bore her son. Since it was a boy, her uncles ordered her to take the baby to its father; they wanted no male bastards, they said, to make a claim on their land. But the man's wife swore she would let the infant die before she gave it house-room with even the least of her hirelings. So the girl left her baby on the hill up here, and went away and hanged herself, though I told her there should be hope in her life yet. And that morning your mother came to pray again for another child. She called you Sayan, because you were still alive on the god's hill.”

“I do know this. What of it?”

“The woman you call your mother loved you and you were her child, in the space of a heartbeat. How many heartbeats in three hundred miles? You don't want the dog driven out of you. You want to keep your Pakdhala your daughter, and watch her stretching out of this cramped, dwarfed thing Attalissa has grown into life upon life. You want to watch her grow to some free and laughing maiden who can ride in the solstice races and be shouted at by you for staying out too late afterwards with some young man. That I can't do. She is Attalissa, and she will go back to her lake. But if you are her father, Blackdog or not, you can give her the life you think she deserves, or you can try to, as much as any father ever can.”

“If she lives.”

“If she lives. I don't know what you can do about Tamghat. I don't know wizards, and the Blackdog seems to think he's no wizard, anyway. The truth is, I have no more idea of Tamghat's strength and reach than you, Blackdog. All I know of him I take from you. For myself, I know life, and growth, and the year's turning cycle. The strength of the hills under the free sky. Let the girl grow strong, and free, and see what happens. What do you want to do, yourself?”