Gods of Nabban (28 page)

“Don't—”

“Too late. And it's only small wizardry. It won't hold you if you fight it. So don't fight it. Let it be. Sleep.”

“Don't.”

“
Sleep.
”

The weariness was too heavy and the panic that wanted to break free was muffled, stilled against warmth, a song half-whispered.

“Not a horse.” Mumbled protest. Ghu sang to horses. But he gave up the struggle, did not want to wake, after all, to remember he had forgotten the knife at his wrist. Ghu had him still, lay down with him on their coats. Ahjvar curled against him, head on his chest, held to Ghu as if the night might yet tear him away. Yeh-Lin piled blankets over them and retreated to the fire. He shut his eyes, not to see the flames reflected in hers.

Sleep
, she said, or maybe it was memory.
Know you dream. Learn to fight the dreams, not your friends.

The sun was high when Ahjvar awoke, standing almost at noon. The fire was down to embers and no one was near but the dogs. He crawled out of the nest of blankets and coats chilled and stiff. Spring, maybe, but winter's cold had rolled down off the mountain in the night. Splashing, out of sight. Under the densest pines the ground was clear, soft-carpeted with bronze needles, but where the canopy was thinner, leather-leafed bushes were snarled and woven into impenetrable thickets. He wound around several such and found Ghu downstream, crouched on stone, wringing out a sodden bundle of greyed linen in water already climbing its banks.

Shirtless, roughly-shaved—and that was his little knife tossed into the moss—wet-haired, and goose-bumped. “You missed breakfast, Ahj, what there was of it,” Ghu said over his shoulder. “Soap, there, on that rock. Wash off one layer of grime at least and make the devil happy.”

“We can't go on avoiding settled areas much longer, can we?” Ahjvar asked. “Soldiers? City guard, that sort of thing?”

Better lost in the wilderness forever?

“Checkpoints on the road, on gates, yes. Probably more than usual, with the fighting the Denanbaki warned of. We'll need to dodge all that. We don't have papers.”

“At some point there'll be people.”

He did not want people. It had been a relief, like a weight taken away, when the Denanbaki left them.

“Yes, Ahj.”

“Let me look at that brand.”

Ghu rose and mutely turned his back. The slave-mark was old and silvery white against the skin of his left shoulder.

Ahjvar traced the outline, a round-cornered rectangle long as his thumb, three fingers wide. Not too distorted. Born into slavery, but at least they hadn't set the iron to the little child's flesh. This had been done when he was nearly full-grown, or it would not be still as legible as it was on the man. He had never given it much thought. The old burn was puckered and hard beneath his fingertips.
Daro Clan
, it said within, in ornate and searing calligraphy even the blind could read.

“How do they cancel it for a freedman?”

“A second brand set near it. And papers, too. There's always papers. Everyone in the empire needs papers, if they travel even so far as the next town.”

“Another brand. Great Gods be merciful.” Ahjvar flattened his hand, hiding the scar. Dripping black hair brushed his fingers. Ghu usually hacked it off before it grew long enough to reach his shoulders. “Papers I can forge, if I have the wording and the pattern of the seal. Well, and ink and paper and brushes too, but—”

“Yes. Ahjvar, don't do that unless you mean it. It's, it's very hard not to notice. I try, but—gods, don't do that. Please.”

He had, unthinking, drawn his hand down, thumb tracing the spine.

Ghu turned against his hand, solemn, watching him. His eyes were not dark brown but black, truly black, night and deep water. Not men, nor gods, Ahjvar had said, what seemed very long ago. It had always been women who drew him, women he had tangled, in the long dark years, with his memory of that waking, of Miara dead, so that he never forgot, ever, what he had become, and desire died stillborn. Mad. Unclean. A horror in the world. He had grown to be sickened by almost any human touch at all, however casual, knowing what he was, what his hands had done, but Ghu had never—he had never feared Ghu near him, his mere presence a refuge and a stillness that he had craved before he ever recognized that deep enfolding calm as what kept him from trying too hard to drive the boy away.

This, though . . .

Ghu was . . . Ghu. Only Ghu. Water-chilled skin warming to skin.

The chiming of the brook over stones sounded very loud.

He still tried to kill the ghosts of his past in the night. His mouth was dry. The knife had bitten flesh. An edge fit to shave with. It could have been Ghu.

“Children,” Yeh-Lin sang out, from the camp farther upstream. “Someone come gut these fish for me. I did not come back to Nabban to be your cook, but if I must, I expect help.”

“Can you cook?” Ahjvar called over his shoulder. He retreated a step, dropping his hand in something like relief.

“Can I cook? Champion of the Duina Catairna, I grew up in a one-room hut in a village of Solan, on the southern banks of the Wild Sister where she grows tame and broad among the canals. I was a virtuous maiden planning to marry the son of a woman whose hut was across the village paddies from ours, until a banner-lord's son murdered him thinking thus to make me his mistress. Which is when I ran away to what they call now the Old Capital, to seek my fortune, as they say. Can I cook? If there is anything to cook, I can cook it. I can also butcher a pig, heckle hemp, spin, weave, milk a buffalo, drive an ox, and handle a boat. You'd be surprised. But that doesn't mean I enjoy it or that you get out of gutting fish.”

Ghu caught Ahjvar, hand on the back of his neck. “Later,” he said on a breath, and left him.

“Do you darn?” he heard Ghu asking Yeh-Lin with easy interest in his voice. “Because we have quite a bit of mending that no one ever seems to get around to doing.”

“Not unless you have your pet assassin put a knife to my throat do I do any kind of sewing.”

“Could arrange that.”

“Do you want another war with me, Nabban?”

“Not this morning. You caught fish. Did you find my fish-hooks? I thought them lost.”

“I learnt to tickle trout in the kingdoms of the north. These are not trout, but I caught them just the same. And look—cresses. Greens! And eggs! I found a duck's nest, and do not look at me like that; it was not a full clutch and she wasn't setting yet. I took only three, which is one each, if you don't insist the dogs have their share, and left her with a blessing that nothing else would disturb her nest. The world returns to life. Don't stand there dripping and shivering at me. Hang that shirt by the fire—at least it will smell of fresher smoke then—and wrap up in a blanket or something. Dead king, you with the knives, come and earn your keep!”

Ahjvar ignored her, stripped and waded into the deep pool below the rocks instead. Ice cold and numbing, and when he did trudge barefoot back to the fire, his knife reclaimed, and the few bits of ragged clothing he thought he could spare for the afternoon washed, after a fashion, and dripping in one hand, the fish were sizzling on skewers and the eggs just boiled in the tea. Taking the time to wash, even in ice-water, had its merits.

“Unmerciful Great Gods,” Yeh-Lin said, eyeing his chest as she passed him tea in a cracked earthenware cup. “Has everyone you ever met in the past century tried to take a slice out of you?”

“Yes,” he growled, and pulled his coat on shirtless to hide the scars, for all that probably undid the good of ever having washed. It reeked of camels.

“Perhaps they weren't entirely to blame.” She rubbed a fist over her ribcage. “So, here we are. Home, I suppose. Now what?”

“I . . . go to find my gods,” Ghu said.

And what then? What point asking? If the gods claimed Ghu and took him from the world, there was little Ahjvar could do.

Die, he supposed. At last.

Ghu said he did not know this forest, these valleys, and yet, when they set out again, he led them with the assurance of familiarity. Unknown birds whistled and carolled overhead and flashed away, half-seen flecks of colour. Small deer no bigger than a goat broke cover and darted across their path, crashing through brush and vanishing. A leopard, dapples fading into dappled light, stood and stared with burning yellow eyes. The dogs froze, flattened themselves to the ground. Ahjvar reached slowly for the crossbow, but Ghu, in the lead, held back a hand, not looking around.

“Go on,” he said softly, and the leopard blinked and paced on her way, not a rustle of leaves to betray her as she vanished from sight.

“Reminds me of someone . . .” Yeh-Lin remarked.

By evening, they were smelling smoke and seeing signs of human activity, stumps of felled trees—saplings, mostly—and trampled patches along the brook where the tightly coiled new fern fronds had been gathered. The ground was marshy here, flooding as the brook rose, carrying meltwater from the mountain snows. They spread out away from the watercourse, the dogs slinking and silent, not a sound from Ghu or Yeh-Lin either. Ahjvar paused to span and load the crossbow, worked his way ahead of the others again. No sign of any outlying sentries. A rooster crowed. If it was a village, there should be fields.

No fields, but, abruptly, a lean-to of poles built against the trunk of a pine, roofed with bark thoughtlessly stripped to kill that same sheltering pine. Ahjvar knelt slowly, shielded by a tall stand of some thick, winter-yellowed grasses. More huts were scattered about, no order to them, built against trees or freestanding, with just one communal fire in the centre. An old woman in a ragged gown sat on her haunches, turning the stone of a quern and tugging at a naked little child, leashed with a rope about the middle, whenever he tried to crawl away. Another woman milked a goat. Lean swine rooted around the shelters, churning the ground to muck with their tusks. Women worked at the fire, chopping fish into chunks for a steaming pot. Children, more women young and old, a handful of old men, were away on the other side of the encampment, grubbing up roots and trying to turn the soil around new-felled trees with spades and hoes. The smallest ones worked in the rough furrows, dragging baskets, planting and tramping down some brown tubers. Hardly any adult men, and they all looked half-starved; all wore little more than knee-length gowns and maybe a headscarf or a shawl. The naked child began to wail and was cuffed to a snivelling silence.

The ones in the field straightened up, watching, with a sort of sullen blankness, three newcomers, two women and a man. Better clothed—loose trousers, sandals, jackets, though all of brown or undyed cloth. One woman had a spear over her shoulder, the other a short, single-edged sword slung from a scarf knotted into a baldric of sorts, the man an axe.

“Nothin' for the pot tonight,” the man called as they crossed the field, paying no heed to what had just been planted, and the older of the two women laughed and mimed a thrust at a child with her spear when the boy wasn't fast enough to get out of her way. What game had they hoped to take, trampling and kicking along as they did and with only a single spear between them? The younger woman yelled in what sounded indignation, spotting the swine, and began shouting at the nearest children to get them out of her hut, though one only was poking its head in a doorway. She ran at them herself, beating with the flat of her blade, kicking snouts with her heel, and the creatures scattered, squealing and grunting. Her comrades flung themselves down by the fire, made no move to help the women preparing the food.

Gods, but Ghu could move like a cat when he wished. A touch on Ahjvar's shoulder, a shadow in the corner of his eye. He had heard nothing. No sign of Yeh-Lin or the dogs at all.

“Fugitives from the fighting?” Ahjvar guessed, hardly more than a whisper.

“Likely. I know her.” Ghu raised his chin at the young woman, now picking her way, grumbling, around the stumps and muddy patches towards the stream. She was pregnant, enough to show but not yet heavy and slow.

“Send one of the kids for water,” the other hunting woman shouted, but the young one retorted, “Snares,” and kept on her way, scowling.

“Friend?”

“No.”

“Who is she?” Deserter, adrift from the fighting, would be his guess.

“Meli. One of the girls from my lord's estate. A household slave's daughter. They were training her for a silk-weaver.”

“Not your lord.”

“No, Ahj.”

“Good. Remember that. Don't say it.” A conversation they had had years ago, he was certain.

“No, Ahj.”

“Will she know anything useful?”

“How she came here may be good to know.”

“Yes, then?”

“Yes,” Ghu said, “if you think we can get away without a hunt raised for us, after, and without harming her.”

Ahjvar retreated into the trees, eased off the bow and returned the bolt to the quiver. Ghu trailed him, around through the forest, down towards the water again, moving quickly, but his quarry turned their way, leaving the muddy ford where the animals watered and following a path along the bank upstream. Ahjvar shed his pack and slipped through brush still winter-bare, into a stand of some gnarled, broad-leafed evergreens, and rose to pull the woman down, hand over mouth, arms pinned to her sides, when she bent to glower at an empty sinew snare. He dragged her, kicking and twisting, back to clearer ground. Ghu plucked her chopping blade away and shoved it through his own belt. Still too close to the camp. Ahjvar gagged her with her dirty scarf, heaved her over his shoulder and set off upstream, until he found a place they could cross, keeping dry on stones. Ghu, with both packs, followed. She didn't weigh all that much more than a child and hung limp, as if resigned to her fate. He wouldn't make the mistake of thinking she was.