Gods of Nabban (19 page)

‘Yes,” he said, before the tide of his fear could start to rise and swamp him again. “We should go. We don't want to cook here where I've been burning poisons, and we owe Ketkuiz all the help we can give. Poison. They forced the folk of this land to aid them against us by poisoning a child. There's no cure I know, but she wasn't dead yet when the shaman set out with the assassins. Lin?” He in his turn made the shortened name a question.

“Ah,” said Yeh-Lin, eyes narrowing. “No promises. Tell me.”

He did, as briefly as he could. Weariness, now that he had stopped moving, seemed to crawl his veins. Cold beyond hope of warmth, and words a labour. He would not let it pull him under, not yet. Not his doing, this child's death, but nonetheless . . . he felt the sin of it. It came because they were here, in this land.

“Maybe,” Yeh-Lin said briefly. And to the shaman, “I don't think our lord—” and no whiff of irony touched the words, “—can help you, but I know something of medicine and of healing wizardry. I can promise nothing, you must know that, except perhaps to ease her suffering until the end. But I will try what I can do. If,” she said, with what still seemed utter sincerity, “my lord Ghu says I may try.”

The look Ghu gave her was unreadable.

“Yes,” he told Ketkuiz. “We'll help if we can. But we know nothing of these assassins. We're only travellers. We're only going home.” As the shaman bowed to him again, he gave Ahjvar's shoulder a reassuring touch before climbing back to the top of the wall and whistling. Only Ahjvar failed to look impressed when the camels appeared shortly thereafter, looking down and snuffing inquiry.

They walked, the laden camels following, no need to lead them. Ahjvar fell back to Ghu's side. They had no language between them that the devil did not speak, but a glance was enough. Ghu shrugged.

“For now,” he said.

Yeh-Lin, walking beside the shaman, looked over her shoulder and smiled.

CHAPTER XIV

The winter camp of the shaman's tribe was a village of houses half dug into a south-facing hillside. Riding the horses Ketkuiz and the assassins had left in a gully a mile from the ruins, they wound their way up to the wooden gate between walls of turf and thorn; sheep, roan cattle, tall horses, a few camels—some corralled, some free in the valley below where they could dig for grass—raised their heads to watch them pass. Dusk filled the sunken lane with darkness. Armed warriors met them at the gate, three men and a woman eyeing them with suspicion, two spears crossed to bar the way.

Ketkuiz called out and launched into long and hurried speech in her own language. Ghu listened, head cocked to one side.

“You speak Denanbaki?” Ahjvar asked.

“No.” But then he added, “Not yet.”

The spears were raised, one man setting off uphill at a run, the woman going to take the camels' heads.

“She will see your animals tended and your gear bestowed in a guest-house,” Ketkuiz said. “Come to my brother.”

Houses and outbuildings were clustered with no defined yards except here and there a pen of hurdles sheltering a calf or ewes with the first of the new lambs, but the chieftain's long hall was set within its own low bank of turf, more symbolic than practical as a fence. As with the smaller huts, even the portion of the hall downslope was dug into the earth, while at the rear the roof rose nearly from the ground. They dismounted there and a girl—a sister, maybe, for she looked very like a younger copy of the shaman—flew at Ketkuiz and hugged her, before inclining her head solemnly to the strangers and driving the horses off towards one of the outbuildings.

“This way.” Ketkuiz led them into the hall, but it was empty. A clay stove, cold and dark, ringed by an earthen bench, held the centre, with cushions and rugs laid out in arcs around it. Not a dwelling but a meeting-place of the chief men and women of the settlement, Ahjvar judged. A heap of hunting dogs, sleeping on the rug-covered dais at one end, stirred and stared in silence, offering no challenge to Jui and Jiot. Ketkuiz hesitated there.

“No,” she said, half to herself. “He will not come. He will not leave her now.” So they followed Ketkuiz through and out a door on the other side, to a house not distinguished from any other, except by its location within the hall's yard and the presence of the man who had carried the news from the gate now standing at the door.

A few anxious words were exchanged. Ahjvar could imagine. Of course strangers must be brought before the chief to learn his will, and courtesy also demanded he greet his sister's guests, if that was what they were, but to intrude strangers on the child's deathbed. . . .

A second man came to the doorway, wearing feathers in his braid and a many-stranded necklace of pierced coins over his chest. He didn't embrace the shaman before strangers, but his look of relief was telling, and as she spoke, giving their names and possibly much more, his eyes measured them. He inclined his head to Ahjvar, but his attention was mostly for Yeh-Lin as Ketkuiz spoke on.

“Ganzu my brother offers his thanks for the deaths of the poisoners, Ahjvar,” Ketkuiz said. “He says, if you are enemies of this ruler who sends assassins to poison children, then you are welcome as our guests, though there will be no fire in the hall until the seven days of the funeral prayers are over—no, she is not dead, but it must be soon.” Her voice cracked. “My lord Ghu—”

“No lord,” Ghu said quietly. “No physician, no healer. This isn't my land. It's Lin you must let see her.”

More urgent Denanbaki, to which Ghu added a few careful words. Neither Ketkuiz or Ganzu the chieftain seemed surprised by that. Nor had Ketkuiz questioned Yeh-Lin's appearance, though by her own witness she knew only two had made camp in Letin and that Ghu had left to go hunting alone.

Dreamshaper.

“Come,” the chieftain said, in rough caravan-Nabbani. “See. You cannot help. No help her. But you see. You carry my vengeance to Nabban.”

“I want to know more about what exactly you plan to do in Nabban,” said Yeh-Lin, as they all ducked in the low doorway. “Two of you, both half dead on your feet, and an empire that is already trying to kill you?”

Small though it was, woven rugs hanging from the beams partitioned the house. These were mostly tied back, bedding rolled up for the day, leaving two bed-platforms covered in cushions for seats, with a loom against the wall between them, but a third corner was screened from view. The small clay stove was roaring, the room stiflingly hot.

Ahjvar could hear the laboured breathing from the doorway and the sudden muffled drumming, like distant hooves, of a body jerking in convulsions.

“I can't,” he said, not knowing he had spoken, till Ghu said, “Stay,” and left him, pushing back the hangings of the secluded corner and going down to his knees at the bedside.

“Ah, damn,” he heard Yeh-Lin say, following Ghu, and for all she spoke Praitannec, her tone could be no comfort to the family. “This is ugly.” The room smelt of urine and bile and sweat, stronger than the smoke, and he had to look. Several women knelt by the bed, two elderly, one younger. Ketkuiz knelt too, arms around the largely-pregnant younger, and they clung together before the shaman sat back and, voice unsteady, began to sing. A prayer, no magic in it. A raw plea, but he thought the goddess of the spring had already done all she could to delay the inevitable a little longer for a hope they all knew was futile, that the assassins had not lied and carried some cure. The girl was tiny, four maybe, or five, and she briefly made a shrill whining as her body arched and began to jerk again. Then the chieftain, who had stood for a moment holding the hangings, crouched down by the pregnant woman's side, pulling her head to his chest, and the striped rugs fell back to hide the spasming heap again.

Ahjvar set his shoulders to the doorpost and found Ganzu's guardsman his reflection. The man gave him a nod. Waited, which was all such hands as his could do, in such a time. There was nothing wizardry or gods could do but still her and, in mercy, send her on her way.

He heard a murmur from Ghu. “Hush. Sleep.” A slowing of the gasping breath, maybe. At least a stillness.

“Give me your hand,” Yeh-Lin ordered, still speaking Praitannec.

“I'm no god,” Ghu said. “Only, Nabban that might be, and this is not Nabban.”

“Nevertheless you are shelter and shade like a rock-rooted pine, a weight even in this place. Don't you know? The shaman saw, for all she does not know what she sees. Give me your hand. I want some anchor of this earth.”

Ahjvar closed his eyes, but he could not help seeing another room, another deathbed, where he had waited because he was being paid to wait, in the days when he was still new to trading in death. The senior-most clan-father of the Sea Town Daisua, who had sent assassins to kill all the family of his own ambitious nephew, even the young children. The man had tried to hire Ahjvar for that and been turned down; he had been on retainer to the Sea Town Aka Clan then, and the nephew had, in defiance of his uncle, taken a high-ranking Aka wife. They had been warned, the nephew and his family. They had been guarded, not well enough. Ahjvar had refused the bodyguarding. As well put a mad dog to keep your sheep safe, though he'd given some other excuse to the Aka clan-mother who thought she had him on a leash in those days. But he had done what the Aka lady asked of him, after the family's death. The wife had been her daughter, stepdaughter, he didn't remember now. Remembered he had bought the poison himself; she wanted rumour, she wanted it known the Leopard would come for the clan-father of the Daisua and what it was he should be fearing. That fat little apothecary in the crooked street just up from the harbour. He couldn't remember the name. It ran uphill with a dog-leg turn and the shop had had yellow shutters. The mind held on to such odd and trivial things. That was eighty years ago. Before he had gone to Star River Crossing for the first time. The reason he had gone to Star River Crossing . . . he had met Miara, in the years he lived wild in the hills upriver and worked in that city . . . don't think about the Star River Crossing years. He'd gone all the way down to Noble Cedar Harbour after, under yet another name, though he always came back to the Leopard, whatever else he called himself. That fat little apothecary, what had she said . . .?

“Ye—” He caught himself and turned it to a cough. “Lin!” He crossed the room in a few strides and pushed through the hangings, his fellow guard warily at his heels. “There's said to be an urchin in the deep waters off Tiypur, the colour of garnets, with venom in its spines. It causes deadly seizures if handled, if one gets caught up in a fisherman's nets. If that's true, that venom may be a component of this poison. At least, someone told me so, once.”

“Yes?” She sat kneeling with her right hand spread on the child's bare chest, her other hand holding Ghu. The child Shui was still now, corpse-still. Her face was skull-like, skin sunken, all a child's proper fleshiness gone. Face and chest smeared with a thousand pinpricks of weeping red. Did she even breathe? Yes. Yeh-Lin looked up at him, and there was something cold, an emptiness, to her eyes, and an ember of light that should not have reflected there. “An urchin. So. A thing of water, not earth, or so your wizardry would say. One could try to work against that, to find a balance, but that is not the true pattern of things and I think you would fail. Besides, there is so much damage, nerves, muscle . . . the heart is a muscle, dead king, did you know? And the mind lives in the brain, which is the greatest web of the nerves of man. It is only the beginning, to call back her soul when she stands with her face to the road and her feet on its threshold, and that we have done, her goddess aiding.”

“You,” said Ghu.

“We. But she will nevertheless die. I must restore what has been burnt and scarred and utterly destroyed and that is no work of this earth. There was more than this poison of the sea in what she was given.”

“I said so.”

“You did, Ahjvar, yes. I'm talking to myself. The bleeding looks like arjibe-seed oil, which is not necessarily fatal, wouldn't you say? Not in small doses, at least. Whatever caused the purging is long gone out of her. So. But this is beyond human skill, even for the greatest of the wizard-surgeons and healers, and they are all long dead.”

The devil began to murmur to herself in something other than Praitannec. It might have been a prayer, but he didn't believe so. The air grew cold, Ahjvar thought, and Ghu suddenly hissed, as if in pain.

“Felt that, did you?” Yeh-Lin asked, as if from very far away. “I don't know that you can really call yourself human any longer, heir of Nabban. Think on that, and speak for me to the goddess of this folk if need be. She watches us in the shadows. She may have seen. Or maybe not. She is a small thing, and we are such a confusion of powers, we three, all hidden and tangled in your holiness.”

“Not,” said Ghu through gritted teeth, “yet—a god.” Ahjvar put a hand on his shoulder. He was shivering.

“We three,” said Yeh-Lin, in clear Nabbani, “are servants of the gods of Nabban. Small lady of the spring of Galicha, what was done was done by no will of the true gods of Nabban, but by their enemies, and in the name of the gods, we will do what we can to make amends to this child of your land.”

He could not see what the devil did. No wizardry, for all her talk of elements, but he thought for a moment that there were threads of light woven through her flesh, and they extended and sank into the girl, growing like root tendrils, and it was Ghu who caught at him, then, before he could make any move towards her, and said, “Leave her, Ahj. It's all right.”

Nothing changed, but a heaviness in the room seemed to lighten. The presence of the goddess of the spring, carried in the shaman's prayers? Yeh-Lin finally released her hold on Ghu, who sighed and brought Ahjvar's hand to his face. The man was cold, chilled as if he had been standing out in the bitter wind, and he shivered, leaning on Ahjvar's leg. Lin folded the child's hands over her chest and drew the blankets up to her chin, brushed the sweat-soaked hair back from the little girl's forehead, and bent to kiss her cheek.