Gods of Nabban (54 page)

“They've destroyed the Father's shrine,” he said, when Ahjvar came up beside him.

It was only the entry porch to another earth-walled courtyard house like all the rest of the town, but the gates were broken down, and beyond, the pillars of the gallery were scorched, its posts and railings charred, one side of the gallery consumed and a ruin of tile and blackened timbers edging a square of mud and weeds and broken stone, a pine tree hacked down and left lying.

“The priestess is dead,” he said.

“Aoda,” Ivah said behind them. “She—spoke a prophecy and jumped from the wall of the empress's temple. They hanged her corpse. They burnt her library, but I have a book. . . .”

“Aoda, yes. I remember her. She fed the beggars, always. Every day.” Ghu took a breath, wheeled Snow. Light in his eyes again. “I have your book, Ivah. But I lost your sword.” He added, when she said nothing, “Sorry.”

Half-wit boy.
Ahjvar didn't say it. Ghu gave him half a grin for it anyway, and called, “Captain Lin, Castellan. Who governs the town?”

It was Yuro who answered. “We've set Lord Zhung Huong, Lady Ti-So'aro's brother, over the guild-masters and the magistrates, for now. There's been much ruined. But he's with the Kho'anzi waiting for you. Holy one.”

“Who's seeing people fed?”

Uncertainty.

“Houses burnt and robbed, and storehouses burnt and robbed, and landless lawless lost folk everywhere? Are there even granaries unlooted?”

“Only the castle.”

“Better we feed the people here now, and the soldiers too, than hoard it longer. Call these masters of the town together, and tell them both these shrines, the true one and the false, must be made places where the folk who have nothing can come, to share out what there is. They must eat, Yuro, and the soldiers too, or how are any of us going to stand?”

The dogs came trotting after them, panting, muddy, but looking well content with something, as they rode over the bridge.

The old lord had come to meet them, afoot, with his granddaughter grave at his side, her face black with healing scabs, her cropped hair uncovered, unashamed.

They saw that, the folk who crowded at the town end of the bridge to watch through the open gates, saw the high lord of all Choa creak down to his knees and Ghu, a ragged beggar with the sun still catching him, leap down and offer a hand up, and speak, and turn to say something to the stable-hand who came to take Snow's reins, too.

Yeh-Lin knew the play of a court. All a game, a display, here, before the soldiers, and the town, and now the castle, because Ghu had not let her make a show of him in the aftermath of the castle's fall. And yet she was right: the folk must see their god and know their god had come among them, and that their lord acknowledged and honoured him. . . . With a word and a pat, Ahjvar left Gorthuerniaul to a shy-smiling woman and strode after Ghu and Daro Korat.

No surprise to find the Grasslander moving to the other side, as if she belonged there.
Gewdeyn
of the god, maybe. What would her folk call it?
Noekar
? A lord's vassal. She offered no oath; Ahjvar found he accepted her there as Ghu did. Wondered at it.

The dogs are not what they were. . . .

Neither was he.

Long meetings, after greetings, and introductions, and oaths given again unasked. Food, plain and simple fare; perhaps the Kho'anzi had after all begun to take thought for provisioning town and army through a long, hungry spring. The day spun away. Ahjvar was
rihswera
of the god and stood at his back, and kept silent, mostly, since words grew too heavy. It had been too long since he was a king's councillor, and the law he had made a study of in the Five Cities was not the law of this empire. Yeh-Lin was better fit to understand what they must deal with. Ghu said little, but listened, and patiently drew them back to his points when they strayed too far. The folk, the folk of the land, always first and foremost, and what they would do, they must begin here in Dernang and Choa now, not later, not someday—now, here.

There was no grace given to a land whose folk were chattels.

Lady Daro Willow came to order her grandfather away to his bed, with a smile at her new-declared uncle that suggested conspiracy, and Ghu and Ahjvar were harried out, in the end, from argument—debate—with Lord Ontari about the possibility of bringing barley across the Wild Sister from Alwu on rafts, since boats seemed in short supply, by unexpected small tyrants whom Yeh-Lin declared her pages. The holy one, they said, must bathe and sleep and in the morning ride again to the town, to bless and reconsecrate the shrine of the Father his father. And to be seen again by more of the folk. She did not have the children say that, but she might as well have done.

Ghu seemed very small and weary, following the children down more stairs. Bathhouse, very grand, cedar-panelled, wall-carvings of willows and dragons and naked women with streaming hair, goddesses. The Wild Sister—who was, now, Ghu? That made Ahjvar's head ache. The pools were tiled, blue and green and white, and there would be some stove beyond the wall where the water was heated before it was allowed to flow in; no doubt slaves tended it and had been told they were greatly honoured to heat the holy one's bath and probably believed so. Which also made his head ache. Slaves no longer. The Kho'anzi would declare it tomorrow, and set proclamations through the town and the baileys of the castle, even. No branding of freedom, either. Just—free, and taking on the name of the Daro Clan, which—he was not sure he would want, if he carried that brand on his shoulder. And their service to their lord would continue as folk of the lord's household, and maybe . . . all else would be worked out, later. Ahjvar did not think the family connection of tribe, that brought folk to serve in the king's hall for their keep and gifts and mutual honour, would work in a land of cities and long oppression, no matter what the Kho'anzi himself said about all being the family of the castle, but for now, for tonight . . .

Steaming water. Though he had washed, repeatedly, in the cold spring of the Wild Sister's rising.

“Not,” Ghu said, “the slaves' bathhouse.” A wry smile. “Have you asked Yeh-Lin about the rancid
rykersyld
?”

“I don't want to.”

“No. But I think Ivah speaks a little Northron, if we ever get curious.”

Ghu stripped, regardless that one of the pages laying out towels was a girl a bit too old to be stripping in front of, and slid into the water, sinking beneath it.

“Out,” Ahjvar told the three of them, and the tallest, the girl, with the littlest half-hiding behind her, bowed, and said, “Yes, my lord, we're to go bathe Jui and Jiot now, but Lady Lin says we have to tell you to wash your hair. And the holy one's, too. And there is a comb. And a razor.”

“You've told me,” he said levelly. The smallest boy was afraid, though the elder two were old enough to sense they were being used, and they seemed to trust it was not to their harm. Yeh-Lin was cruel to use any of them to carry her jokes, regardless. “Now go tell her you've said so.”

He waited for their retreat and wedged the door with a knife, since there seemed no other way to hold it against casual entry—it was mostly Yeh-Lin he expected to stroll in, truth be told. But he laid his sword unsheathed on the pool's edge before he ever took of his boots. Ghu had resurfaced and watched him undress, eyes solemn.

“
Are
you going to wash my hair?”

There was soap, good Five Cities soap smelling strongly of lavender, left pointedly by the pages. Ahjvar threw it at him.

Better to think of Yeh-Lin as playing auntie again than as quietly appointing herself overseer and master of the god, as though he were some favoured pet being groomed to perform well and prettily for guests. The children had left clean clothing for them, and all the outer garments, trousers and smock-like shirt and quilted knee-length coat, low boots, were black. The style of north Nabban, not the light gowns of the south. Wool and cotton, not lordly silk. She risked no arguments from Ghu on that point. Ahjvar might have objected, but even he had to admit their old rags were better burnt. These were not redyed cast-offs but hasty work by some seamstresses, he suspected. Everything fit his height and length of limb. The work of slaves, again. Praitannec blanket and headscarf he kept, and found she had been into their belongings. Ghu turned from shaking out a coat to hold up the leopard-headed bracelets that had tumbled from it.

Ahjvar, strapping on knives, shook his head.

“Wear them,” Ghu said, and brought the gold to him. “Yes.”

So he did not argue, but let Ghu put the royal bracelets of the Duina Catairna on him, turn him and tie back his hair.

“Respectable?” he did ask.

“No.” A slow curl of smile. “But something.”

The last of the sunset had faded from the west and fog was crawling over the castle's curtain wall, rising from the flooded lands that had made them an island; rising, too, from the ornamental pond, flowing up the narrow alleys between the walled gardens and courtyards. No pages waited like herd-dogs to chivvy them, only Jui and Jiot, fluffy and chastened and smelling of rosemary against fleas, not that they had had any. No lurking devil. The castle appeared to sleep. The moon rode, a waxing crescent, high overhead, a narrow boat hidden and revealed in a churning sea of black cloud. The wind gusted uncertainly.

“Is she waiting to corner us again?” Ahjvar asked, and found it easy to stand with his arm around Ghu, there in the dark, taking his leaning weight.

“Probably.” A yawn. “Can you sleep, if we go in? Under a roof?”

“No.” The old panic edged nearer at the thought, the closeness of people, of lives, breathing. His grip tightened on Ghu, whose head turned against his shoulder in response.

“We neither of us belong within walls anymore,” Ghu said, muffled against him. “Not these walls. Come.”

They found a walled garden, a small place all moss and stone, dead feathery grass bleached white by winter, new shoots rising from the heart of the clumps, sculpted junipers scenting the air. Art making an echo of the wild.

“I never knew this was here,” Ghu said. It was a shrine to the Father, of course. There was an altar of sorts, an unshaped slab of stone, half wrapped in junipers and tall grass.

Again, Ahjvar jammed the gate with a broad knife. Ghu pulled him in under the layered trees with the altar at their backs, out of the drizzle that was beginning again, breathless suddenly, urgent, not yawning now, stripping sword and knives and coat from him and not worried where they fell.

The soap may have been scented with lavender; Ghu's skin and hair smelt of moss and water-splashed stone and crushed ferns, like the springs above Swajui. Ahjvar breathed him in, tasted him, lips, fingertips, gave himself up to the hands and mouth that travelled the shape of him in the dark, teeth, tongue, till they were wound together skin to skin and he was lost in darkness, dissolved in the chill of rain and drowned in the deep moss under him, and the man was a river, and starlit snow, and stone. If he cried out, it wasn't in protest at his dreams. Slept, holding Ghu curled half over him, head on his shoulder, and woke only once clenching his fingers in Ghu's hair, the sparse flesh of his ribs, the bone beneath. Ghu made some faint moan, caught at his hand without waking, fingers coiling to ease the grip. Ahjvar was shivering but silent.
No.
Only dream. No fire, no burning flesh. He forced his breath to slow, turned his face in Ghu's hair.

Warm. Held. Safe.

CHAPTER XXVIII

A sea coast, somewhere. Jagged grey stone slick with bladderwrack, conifers Yeh-Lin did not recognize tilting over and tumbling down a seamed cliff, clinging with roots like snakes. Towering things, the ones more firmly-rooted, marching inland, bigger around than the house in which she had been born. Tree like a mountain, to hold up the sky. A small shape, bird-tiny, moved among the broken stones where the low cliff crumbled, climbing, but the size was illusion cast by the trees. A human shape, a tall woman all in grey and earthen-brown, her hair a long, pale braid. Hardly to be seen when she stood still. She did move with the surety of a bird over the stones, swift and balanced, never hesitating over a foothold, hardly needing to use a hand to steady herself, even where the tumbled rocks were steepest. She reached the top and stood looking into the trees.

Yeh-Lin knew her. Surely.

Two swords. A Northron sword belted at her hip, gilded hilt, a flash of garnets. Slung on her back, another. Black scabbard. Silver hilt. There was . . . a heaviness to it. Something that drew, not the eye, but the centred heart of her, as if deep in Yeh-Lin's chest a lump of iron were pulled to a lodestone. Where? She had never seen such trees.

The woman turned, met her watching awareness. Knew her presence, as Yeh-Lin knew that pale, harsh-boned Northron face. Smiled, not in welcome. Yeh-Lin would have spoken regardless, called to her, but the waves rolled and curled, foaming white as they flung themselves up the rocks in a sudden gale that whistled through the needles, moved branches like scudding clouds, like rafts against the sky, tore leaves from the heavy green undergrowth. And she was gone. Lost in that wild movement, slipped away into the forest, or flown like a leaf ripped free.

Yeh-Lin reached into the vision after her, but there was nothing to grasp, no trail to follow. The Northron might never have been.

“Vartu!” she shouted anyway, breaking the silence of the night.

No answer. Of course not. Only the children in the outer room stirring, mumbling.

“Go back to sleep,” she whispered, and felt them sink away again, into quiet dreams. She put her mirror aside and rose from the pallet that was her bed to cross to the window in this upper apartment of the old north keep. The shutter was lifted, letting the night air in. The scent of the river was strong, the fields to the north pale with moonlight. Bats, owls, foxes out there . . . all the creatures proper to the night. Nothing more.