Gods of Nabban (25 page)

Kaeo found a smile from somewhere, though in truth he was so tired he had no energy left for worry over what they meant to do with him in the morning, if only they would let him sleep now. “You think your sisters would have let you keep the empress's dog?”

“Only if it could sing.”

No whimsical kissing here, just a brief tightening of her grip on him before she turned away, back to her sisters and their council and the fire.

Water, plain rice, a quiet corner. Toba seemed a civilized man of quiet good sense, not a headhunting cannibal shaman. The last thing Kaeo saw as sleep pulled him under its darkness was the wizard sitting nearby, his lantern-pole stabbed into the earth, its light glowing dimly over a pattern of small white bones that he gathered up, breathed on, and threw again. Maybe not civilized. They were human finger-bones, he was certain.

Toba looked over at Kaeo. Nodded. Gathered, breathed, threw again.

CHAPTER XVI

The fleet begins to arrive with the dusk, ships dark on the lagoon. A strong wind has blown from the east all day, as they came along the southern coast of Nan-Ya. He promised the empress it would be so, once she summoned the admiral. She is the Daughter of the Old Great Gods and the empress of all Nabban. The Gods bless her and by their grace the winds will serve. But now they grow wilder, swinging, shifting. They swing to a southerly, bringing cloud and rain, and the summer warmth of the ocean, unseasonably early. Not the following wind she will no doubt wish for, but it will serve.

I am weak in your world, he reminds her. The heavens are very far from me.

“The palace will burn,” her prophet told her, and she believes his words, all his words, even the ones that were spite.

The fleet could have carried soldiers from Kozing, could have landed them, driven the Wild Girls back, but—why bother? The south does not interest him. Why should she struggle to hold it? It is in the north that the heir of the gods is moving, shifting the currents of the land.

The palace will burn. She does not intend to be there.

All the first half of the night, there has been much stir. Torchlight and lanterns moving, and noise, too, human voices like the distant babble of waves, rising and falling and never ceasing.

Wait, he says, when Buri-Nai would go, the last of all with her company about her. Look back, he tells her.

Buri-Nai obeys, impatiently.

What? she asks, shaping the word with lips and tongue, no breath. The Daughter of the Gods must not mutter and whisper to herself, but sometimes she treats him as a tutor, a counsellor—an irritant who forgets she is empress and divine, by his own testimony. He intends to teach her otherwise, eventually. Not yet. The messenger of the Old Great Gods must be patient, kindly even when stern.

Her urgency to be gone is not fear, which rather surprises him, but Buri-Nai has a serene and utter confidence in her sanctity and her invulnerability. Merely, she is finished with this place. Through. The Wild Girls can sack it, for all she cares.

That suits him.

He asks, Should the throne of your ancestors be left to those who will pick through the wreckage here?

He feels her pleasure as she considers that wreckage, the ruin to come of the palace so long her cage.

“The years of the Peony Throne are ended,” she says aloud, quoting her prophet, who vanished in the first abortive attack on the palace walls. Stolen, he presumes, by Dar-Lathan assassins who thought him of some value. Their mistake. They seem recently to have killed him, perhaps in some jungle rite of their wizardry. A soul stolen from the braid he weaves, the foundation he lays. Aside from that, the man is no loss, though she was angry. He did not bother to search when the man was first taken, though she turned humble, asking him to. Obstinate, clinging to the idea that secrets of the gods might be revealed, if only she pressed him hard enough. Or an ageing woman besotted with a once-attractive face. He was annoyed, though, to lose that soul as he had, opened as it was to vision and dream, stronger than the man who had borne it.

Yes, he says patiently. The Peony Throne will be cast down. They say so, in the markets throughout the provinces.

“A prophecy for me or against me?” She laughs, her hand on her amulet. “Or does the Daughter of the Old Great Gods cast down the Min-Jan throne along with the laws of Min-Jan? I shall.”

The air grows tense with the breath of storm. He takes her, courses through her. She draws a breath that is almost a gasp; there is pain in the white light that burns an instant through her veins. Lightning tears the air.

The throne is split from carved canopy to seat, fallen into two halves, and the edges, and the delicate patterning of the floor, inlaid in many woods, smoulder.

“No cannibal tribeswoman is going to defile the throne of my father,” she says. “And what need have I of it? The years of the Min-Jan are ended. These are the years of the Daughter of the Gods.”

She turns on her heel and strides from the long throne-room, walking like a warrior, not with the soft steps of a courtier. He has taught her that. Carry yourself as what you mean to be.

The dark of the moon. Beacon Hill is spattered red with the fires of the tribal horde. By the time the dawn comes, Buri-Nai and all the folk of the palace, those she has not sent to the city to have them out of her court, are aboard and the ships are nosing out the gap in the breakwater, seeking the open sea.

By the time the dawn comes, the palace is a beacon, burning, to be seen far offshore.

Let the Wild Girls have the ruin and gloat in their triumph, for the short time they can. The heir of the gods is in the north, and he must come into the empress's reach.

Far out to sea, the winds shift. The waters stir uncertainly.

The heir of the gods is coming home . . . Kaeo thrashed himself out of smothering blankets, awake, heart thudding. Echo of a dream.

Toba woke. The old wizard had been physicking him with assorted unpleasant brews to stop the headaches, the vomiting and the shaking, that had kept hitting in waves over the first days of his freedom. He was better, now, but one of the less-foul teas, which Toba still insisted he drink, still gave him dreams. Vague and troublesome ones, mostly, elusive on waking. This . . .

“The queens,” he said. “The empress is gone. The god . . .”

He was hardly coherent.

Come dawn, they stood on the crest of the highest of the Beacon Hills, looking down. The queens in armour, jade in their hair, their ears, about their throats, heavy collars of it. Faces painted for battle that, apparently, would not come. Rat looked older, a stranger, almost, masked in green and brown swirls like light through leaves and birds in flight, till she winked at him.

They had been already awake. Only he, drugged on his pallet in Toba's little hut, had slept through the uproar of the sentries, the messengers going to and from the Council House of the queens, the preparation for the attack that had not come, as the palace went up in flames.

The ambassador of the Kho'anzi of Lower Lat was with them, speaking of his lord's most certain trust in their promises . . . He thought it some great wizardry of their own.

“You dreamed,” Nawa, the eldest of the sisters, said.

“The heir of the gods. The one the prophets speak of. The empress has gone—some threat against him, I don't know. Some—” Sometimes he dreamed her outlined in fire, sometimes the last emperor, falling, the lightning drawing him against the sky. “Some
thing
is with the empress, and it means death to the god, it does. We need to go to him.”

“We have the Golden City,” Nawa countered, and he should feel afraid, that he argued with a queen. He did not. “The empress has realized she can't retake Taiji, now that Lower Lat has turned against her. She couldn't even take the Imperial Demesne back.”

“We don't have the city,” Jian said. “We have no ships. Unless you want to paddle over in stolen canoes to burn it, and what would be the point of that? Send to their lords or their rich grandmothers or whoever will surface to rule now that the court is gone, and talk them over to us.”

“The god,” Kaeo said. “We—you should send someone to speak for you to him. When he comes. If he does. If we can find him.”

“Listen to him,” said Rat. And her sisters had a brief conversation in Lathan.

“No,” said Nawa. “The empress has gone to make war on him. You would only be putting yourself in her way, and she knows you now.”

“Who looks at a slave?”

“A slave who stole her prophet. And it might not be the empress who recognizes you. You said yourself, some other power was there in the palace.”

“But we need the god,” Rat said simply. “What do we have? Provinces we can't hold, once Nabban settles its quarrels within itself. A border hard to defend, because we can keep no standing army. We need—to talk.”

“So wait, to see what happens in the north.”

“Yes,” Jian agreed.

Rat shook her head, but she made no further argument. The queens ruled so. Argued themselves into some consensus—not always a majority. But Rat was letting this go, for now.

At least until her sisters left them.

“We will go, Kaeo,” she said. “I—am sure of it. A few days, a week or two . . . we need to go. We will.” Smiled at him. “Sorry. Prophecy's your game. Ignore me. Sometimes I get feelings, that's all. I'm sure I'll grow out of it.”

“We'll go,” he said, more certain than she. “But just the two of us?”

“We'll be enough. Faster that way. Less arguing. Best leave Jian and Nawa here, and Toba's too old. He'll throw the bones of his grandmother for us before we go.”

His grandmother. Left to him on her death, as the wizard said he had left his own bones to his newest grandson, who already showed signs of the wizard-gift.

A strange people. Kaeo did not like to think of someone handling his fleshless bones after he was dead. But it was the way of the mountain folk south of the Little Sister.

Bones clean and wrapped in a straw-woven rug, a cave high on a mountain, the place of a god. It is very peaceful there, and the sky is very blue, like banners. The forests below are green and dark and hide secrets of the highland folk and the jungle folk, and the river guards their border, and the folk go freely over and back.

“We remember his name,” a white-haired old woman says. “He was mine.”

As fragments of dreams went, there were worse.

“We don't need the bones,” Kaeo said. “We go north. I'm not his—the new god's. I never asked to be made a prophet. I never prayed, or thought that much on the gods at all. I honoured the Father and Mother, but . . . it was Prince Dan and what he promised that I served. The gods weren't my concern, ever. They still aren't. I only want—a life of my own. But I can find him.”

As surely as knowing he faced the sun, Kaeo thought. He did not entirely like that feeling. As if a part of him had been taken, enslaved, however accidentally, by the dying gods, as he was dying on the Isle of Crows.

PART TWO

CHAPTER XVII

“Papers,” the young soldier said, and Ivah, bowing, dug in the pocket of her caravaneer's coat for the short section of bamboo that held the rolled paper. One only needed a pass if one was travelling between towns, but here in Dernang imperial officials had gone house to house making a census of inhabitants, each vouched for by the others, and any deemed suspicious investigated further. Suspected runaway slaves had been stripped to check for brands.

General Zhung Musan still searched the town for agents and sympathizers of Prince Dan's and held executions every morning, before he allowed the market to open. The road to the south was a stinking riot of crows, the heads of Lord Sia's banner-lords and officers and all who remained with him to the end as they were driven back into Dernang. The old lord had refused to open the gates of the castle to them. The young lord had refused, so they said in the town, refused to ask him to, so that the old lord could not be accused of aiding his son's rebellion. Dead now, or as good as, prisoner in his own castle and doomed to a traitor's death on the Isle of Crows with the empress presiding.

Ivah the Grasslander, formerly a caravaneer, now servant of the priestess Daro Aoda of the shrine of Father Nabban in Dernang in Choa.

The soldier, a boy still high-voiced, frowned over the brief few characters and the red stamped seal, lips pursed. Illiterate. They were all conscripts, Aoda had told her, poor tenant-farmers' sons summoned to the emperor's service and eating no better now than they had been before they were impounded for this duty that might, after a few years, release them, maybe far from home, to become beggars and vagrants and bandits on the road. Sons only. Conscripted girls were too likely to end up pregnant.

Ivah kept her face impassive, bored. She had seen this particular soldier around, watching her as she did Mother Aoda's marketing, seen him watching the shrine of Father Nabban. Looking for an excuse to harass them in the name of the empress, the new goddess of the land, she assumed; twice they had been searched for fugitives from the rebel army. The most recent time, the soldiers had taken the last of Aoda's yams and barley, along with the copper bells that had chimed in the wind on the holy pine tree. There was nothing left to loot, unless they plundered her library. Now the soldier held the paper turned sideways. Ivah resisted the urge to correct it for him. A caravaneer who read court Nabbani would be suspicious.

“Good,” the soldier said, looking up at Ivah, his stare intense. “You work for the priestess.”

“Yes,” she said, carefully using the form of the word that indicated submissive respect. It did not often enter her vocabulary. And she must be very, very careful with her pronouns. Remember how Wolan and Koulang mocked her use of regal forms. It wasn't teasing she'd bring down on herself here, letting her mother's speech slip through.