Gods of Nabban (56 page)

Ivah tugged Dan along out of the way, into the shelter of a far corner of the gallery, where old wood met new. He trembled like a man in a fever.

“Just sit,” she said. “Wait. He'll come back in a moment.” She put his hands together, clasped her own over them, studying his face. He was younger than he looked. Pain there. Defeat. He had been losing his war, had led thousands to die for a freedom they had never achieved. How was Ghu to do any better?

Not with the sword, in the end.

She was no healer, but she knew enough to wonder how much of the man he had been might be left to bring back. Lost. Or destroyed. Those scars. Head wounds could have strange effects. But he still understood speech, and he had been taking care of the child all this time, which suggested a mind still intact. The little girl was grubby but looked better fed than she had been, surely an achievement in this town.

The wagon emptied, Ghu came over to them dusting hands on his clothing. Ivah moved aside and he settled cross-legged before the prince, taking his hands. Ahjvar found his usual place, leaning against a wall, watching everyone. Willow drifted after him, squatted down a respectful distance off. Others followed, and followed Willow's example, sitting, standing, silent.

Awaiting miracles.

Ghu smiled at the little girl, who had her thumb in her mouth.

“Don't be afraid,” he said, though to which of them, Ivah didn't know. He leaned forward and touched the scars that ran up the side of the man's head just in front of his ear, bald ridges through his matted hair, then touched his temple, his lips. Sat back, frowning. Ivah almost held her breath. She thought the watchers did. Even she was waiting for a miracle of the gods, like lightning from a clear sky . . . but Ghu only said softly to her, “Lost, as you said, but not beyond recall. The channels of his sight are broken. He might find his voice again, though, if he can come back to himself.” He sat in silence for a while longer, eyes closed. Thinking? Praying? Did those who harboured godhead need to pray? No one else dared speak; the castle servants whispered together and then turned the oxen with muted commands and tugging on horns, prodding of haunches. They trundled off, leaving behind the armed Daro woman who was Lady Willow's bodyguard. The shrine grew very quiet, children hushed, beggars and strays all sitting out of the way. Waiting wide-eyed on wonders.

Ghu still held Dan's hands with his own wrapped around them, still sat with his eyes closed, but something had changed. They all felt it. Ivah shivered. The wind was off the mountains that morning, finding its way even into this enclosed corner. The smell of snow, clean and cold, sharp-edged, like moonlight on angry waves. She remembered winters on the Great Grass, the dry wind cutting, the horses and cattle standing tail-to, heads down, and the sky grey, the ground like stone. The injured man didn't seem to react, but then he raised his head, attention, if not sight, focussed on the holy one. Something in his face that had not been there before. Listening, she might have thought, but Ghu did not even whisper.

“My lord,” the prince said. The merest broken whisper. The little girl stirred and sat up.

“Dan.” The holy one opened his eyes. “People have been looking for you, you know.”

He released the prince's hands. Dan rubbed his eyes, blinked, and drew a deep breath, putting an arm about the child. “Have they? I didn't know.” His voice was weak and cracking like an old man's. “I'm sorry. It's all been—dark.” He touched his eyes again. “All shadows, like leaves against the sun. In my thoughts. Just shadows and glare. I don't—but I thought I heard my sister An-Chaq calling me. I was a child again . . . But you came into the darkness, my lord. I saw you. You were there and you led me out.”

“
Yes
,” Willow said, agreement like a prayer.

“We need you, Dan,” Ghu said. “Dwei Ontari thinks we're doomed. He'll hoard his forces over in Alwu like a miser for fear of losing them, keeping them against some future need of yours that will never come, but we need more than Dernang, more than Choa Province, to stand behind us, when we go south against the empress. I need the lords of the land to stand behind me and the folk of the land to see that we can do what we say, that we can break this empire and remake it, one province at a time if we must. Or we lose Dernang and Choa and all Nabban. Forever. I need you to bring me Shihpan and Alwu, to stand with Lord Daro Korat and Choa in the eyes of the lords of the land. Buri-Nai doesn't serve her own ambition in claiming to be a goddess, whatever she herself may believe.”

“Does she believe it? I thought she only spread this new faith to justify her breaking of Min-Jan's law, a way of claiming the throne.”

“No.”

“What is it, then?”

“I think . . .” Ghu said. Hesitated. Lowered his voice, hardly more than a whisper, not to carry to the witnessing crowd. “I think we won't speak of that yet.”

“Did she,” the prince also whispered, and his voice went high. “Holy one—did she kill Otono, then? We didn't, my lord, I never asked that of my wizards or prayed for such an end.”

“I don't know, but it wasn't any act of the gods. Or of wizardry. Knowing that, will you come, Dan?”

“My lord, you called me and I heard. I'm yours. Command me.”

His sightless eyes were leaking tears, though his face didn't change. The child climbed up, clutching him, wiping at them with her dirty sleeve. The prince sniffed, most unprincely, laughed, and pulled the child down to his lap, wiping his own eyes and then his nose on his own equally grubby sleeve.

“This is Jula, lord,” he said. “I couldn't find her grandmother again. I think Musan's men killed her, and the brother. Jula, look for me. This is our god.”

The child stuck her thumb back in her mouth, studied Ghu gravely, then buried her face in the prince's chest.

Willow rose then and came to crouch by them. She touched the prince's hand and said, “My prince, I'm Lady Daro Willow, the heir of Kho'anzi Daro Korat. Come to the castle, you and the child. My grandfather will be eager to welcome you back, and your cousin Dwei Ontari is there, too.”

It broke the solemn air of folk gathered for a ritual. People picked themselves up, murmuring together. Blessed, witnesses to miracle. Retelling, already, what they had seen, to those who had also seen. But the story would be out into the market and the town and the camp even before they walked back to the castle. And probably by the morning the god would have arrived in light and glory and restored the mad, mute prince to health and voice and sight and strength with bells and thunder.

That he was still blind, and the lines of pain in his face put ten or fifteen years on him, and that he pushed himself from the ground carefully as an old man, taking Ivah's arm when she touched his hand to offer it, would make no difference to how the tale grew. He had heard and answered his god, and that, whatever poetry they dressed it in, was the story they needed carried through the land, as much as couriers to carry his own words to his lords and officers in Shihpan and Alwu and out to the lords of all the provinces, who might, they could hope, only be waiting for some change in the wind.

CHAPTER XXX

The vast hall was very dark, but Yeh-Lin recognized it. She had been brought there once, in chains and escorted by twenty-four wizards sworn to her son's service, her own daughter among them . . . She hadn't survived long for all her great abilities, poor betraying and betrayed An-Chi. Min-Jan had been as paranoid as some of his descendants. Yeh-Lin had warned her . . . The artists had still been working on the wall panels then, carving the delicate flowers and leaves and insects that made it a wonder of the world, picking out the colours with gold and the metallic sheen of butterfly wings.

Dark with smoke. The ranks of pillars, wood painted to resemble marble blue as the twilight, were bubbled and charred. No carved panels now. No glazed butterfly wings.

Stumps of pillars.

The peony throne had been a work of art greater than the walls, some held: more leaves and blooms, jewels sparking throughout. The carved canopy had always looked to her like a trap for dust and spiders. She did wonder if anyone ever climbed up to dust it.

A moot point. A few boards, scabbed with charcoal, might be its remains, down in the ruin of the dais of nine steps. Omen. One could make much of the destruction of the throne, for either side. Though when the word came north would be time enough.

It wasn't the throne she needed to see, but the one who claimed it, who was not here.

She drifted. Fallen beams. Posts where walls had been. Shattered roof tiles, water making deep pools where cellars had been. That was all that remained of the central palace. Many of the satellite buildings had been smashed to kindling. A few still stood. Doors open, clothing chests flung over, shelves half-cleared. In a range of kitchens, braziers abandoned, some with pots still sitting on them, most overturned. Few bodies, though. A woman struck down by falling roof tiles under the eaves of a gallery, a man in a room of scattered documents, buried under a wall of pigeonholes. A few dogs who roamed furtive, wary of her. They would probably find their way out of the gardens to the marsh and go wild.

“What happened?” she demanded of the ghost of the woman, but her presence was too tenuous, and the ghost could not hear her. She let her vision flow outwards to the wider expanse of the gardens, was awed, then, at the destruction. Whole groves lay flattened, rubbish flung everywhere: weed, stone, shells, dead fish, timbers, spars, rope, an anchor, a doorframe, boats . . . no bodies. Or a few, lost in brush and other wreckage. Overlooked. Skeletal, now. There was much upturned ground, great squares of it, green with new-sprouted weeds.

The pits into which one would dump bodies in haste.

Many dead. She tried to shift her vision, to remember what had been here. Men, women, children. Townsfolk in the gowns of merchants and shopkeepers, townsfolk in artisans' smocks, crop-haired slaves in hemp shirts or fine quilted cotton, boatmen in loincloths, pigs, buffalo, dogs, cats . . . a dolphin. Drowned, battered, swept inland. And all the marsh about was flooded, sluggish with flotsam . . . trees, house timbers, the broken wrack of ships, bodies pulled down to the mud, lost, to wash ashore a bone at a time over a century of storms and tides to come . . . Trapped in the pool of the dykes, which were broken, but not enough to flush clean with the tide. That had always been a problem with the lagoon, once she built the breakwaters.

The Golden City, her beautiful city floating on the mists of the lagoon.

Gone.

Stumps, sandbars, jagged islands of ruin. Her palace, long abandoned, cursed by An-Chi at Min-Jan's order to remain forever derelict, still stood, but roofless.

No ships in the harbour.

No harbour.

Inland . . . there was life on the Beacon Hills and in the shelter of their western slopes. A palisaded camp above, almost a Praitan hillfort, and below, a village, a town, of tents and shacks built from salvaged timber and canvas and bundled reeds. A well-worn track led away through the hills, and coming down it, trotting, were riders wearing the badges of the lords of both Upper and Lower Lat. They were met by a skein of men and women on rough ponies, their faces painted in swirls and spirals. Amicably, if formally, met, and escorted towards the fort.

In the distance, a pack-train of asses and buffalo plodded towards them.

What story here? Dar-Lathans allied with two provinces; they had conquered Taiji and the Imperial Demesne months before, that rumour had come north. She tried to see, to find memory. Wind. Waves. Darkness like night, and it was day. A wind impossible to stand against. The city taking to boats, to ships, to anything, in hope of safety on shore among the feared tribesfolk—waves towering to the rooftops, houses that had stood since her day collapsed, folded in on themselves by the waves, collapsing, sandbars and pilings washed away.

The empress. The imperial corps of wizards. The folk of the palace. Drowned?

Ships. Gone, gone with the storm called after them, and the city abandoned behind.

“I will see you,” she said aloud. “
Now.
”

A woman, her outermost robe shot through with gold thread, glittering and glinting in the purple-black brocade, a coat of scale gilded so that she resembled some glittering fish as she passed along an avenue of soldiers. Her hair poured loose down her back. A carriage awaited her, gilded, enamelled, a suffocating box on high wheels for all its doubtless cushioned luxury. Ten oxen to pull it, snow white with gilded horns. She strode, masterful, light-footed. It was the people surrounding her whose feet scuffed or tramped. Four women, two with long hair dressed with jewelled combs, two with the short hair of slaves or labouring folk, but all in brocade court robes. Eight men of towering height, their armour coats, their greaves and helmets, even the shafts of their polearms gilded.

Buri-Nai, goddess and empress. Murderer of her father and brother. Murderer of the Golden City. Murderer, with her word, of the priests of the shrines who resisted her assumption of godhood. Yeh-Lin brushed against her, tasting her, as a snake tasted the air. What was she? Anger, a deep anger. A life of years sped too quickly and yet too slowly, too much the same, waiting, always waiting, waiting for nothing, while anger grew. Purpose. A purpose fixed like a rock, regret and excitement in that purpose. A fierce devotion, born out of emptiness, of searching, searching, and then discovery, like a beacon blazing in the night. A flood of love, of being loved, wanted—chosen. A choice made.

There. A fleeting touch, a scent on the wind like that which told of the passage of an animal through the forest—city folk did not think a human could know such but they were wrong. Faint, but—scent, colour, the feel of the shape of the light—

Buri-Nai stopped and looked back over her shoulder, her silk-gloved hand clapped to her heart.