Gods of Nabban (7 page)

“He wished his body left for the birds to clean,” he told Ahjvar, who only gave a jerky nod. “He died of his age, is all, his heart failed and he fell over where he sat. Nobody meant to burn him. It's all right. Go break the ice so we can water?”

Another nod. The camels were nosing at the ice, the dogs waiting patiently by. Ahjvar used the axe to cut a hole, filled their depleted waterskins before the animals drank. Ghu cast a look around the horizon of this long hollow in the grey-gravelled waves. Nothing to show that anyone had been or gone in the past days, but the wind might erase all tracks. It felt like the whole of the world for a moment, empty, desolate, lifeless.

“Wait,” he said, and went back for the peas and millet. Ahjvar leaned on his camel's shoulder and shook his head at the sky.

“I have no idea,” Ghu said, “how far we have yet to go.” He made the sacks fast to the baggage frame behind the saddle, about his camel's second hump.

By noon, when they would usually halt to rest the camels for an hour or two, they had come to a fork in the road; the dividing of the ways of which he had been warned, so many weeks ago. North or south? He knew which pulled him.

“Which?” Ahjvar asked.

Ghu considered the horizon and their choices, trying to discount the pull in his blood, trying to think of Ahjvar, and the camels, and the husbanding of their strength. Both roads led, in the end, to the border town of Dernang. South, they had told him in Porthduryan, had better wells, a safer road, but was a longer way by several stages, maybe a week, maybe more. They had also told him he was a fool to think of setting out on the desert road without the protection of a caravan. One lamed camel, one mistaken path, and they would die, especially at this time of year. Only a few caravan-masters would have risked the journey even then, and in a few weeks more, they said, it would be too late altogether to set out. But what choice had he had? The caravan-masters of Porthduryan had eyed Ahj askance, a tall Praitannecman with a mane of yellow hair and an untidy beard, blue eyes fever-bright in a face gaunt and grey-tinged, shadowed like old bruising. He startled at sudden movements and flinched from anyone who passed close enough to touch, hand on his sword. They said they were not hiring guards, nor grooms, no, nor cooks. Not, at least, if they had to take on Ahjvar as well as Ghu. He had not told Ahj of that part of it. Nor of the caravan-mistress, a fox-tattooed woman of the eastern deserts, who had made him another offer. He might have taken her up on it; she had been good-humoured and not overly pressing, handsome, too, dark and lean and clean. Not an unappealing offer, by any means. He'd done worse, endured worse, willing and otherwise, but she hadn't wanted Ahjvar along either.

“That one's mad,” she had said, with a jerk of her head back towards the tea-house doorway. Her braids, all wound with silver rings, had danced and tinkled. “Watched you prowling about town with him trailing like your shadow. Wondered about you, but him, I've seen those eyes before. Boy I used to know went off as a mercenary to fight in Nabban's wars in the south. Came home, married the girl who'd been waiting for him, cousin of mine. Don't know what had happened to him in the wars, but he was broken like that. Smothered her, one night, and cut his wrists. That friend of yours is the same. Dangerous mad, the sort that's quiet till someday he kills for no reason and maybe takes someone else with him. You don't want to be the one standing next to him when that time comes.”

“He's not mad,” Ghu had said. “He's getting better.” Which was perhaps not quite the contradiction he had meant it to be. And he had collected Ahjvar, waiting propped against the wall outside because he would not go into a crowded room, and they had gone back to the hill of the god and the shepherd-priest who let them shelter in his shed in return for Ghu's help doctoring the lame asses and coughing sheep of the hillfolk. Neither god nor priest spoke ill of Ahjvar; they had left him space and quietude. It was Porthduryan had set Ahjvar sidling and tense as a misused yearling, but he hadn't trusted Ghu to be safe there without him. He would do better by the time they came to Nabban. Ahjvar healed. He must.

Ghu rather thought it might be the silver-ringed eastern desert caravan-mistress whose caravan trod so close on their heels. She had been preparing to leave about the time he decided Ahj would be better off if they went on their own, and that he himself could not wait in Porthduryan all winter. Travelling as they did, they should have pulled well ahead of any caravan that followed, but with so much wandering aside, they lost what they gained in travelling light and at a faster pace than the heavily laden baggage train could maintain.

Time. He should not feel time gathered and began to outrace him, flowing like the tide. But it did. Ghu knew it. Powers moved of which he understood nothing, except that Nabban lay beneath their uncaring feet.

They left the camels, already fed from their nosebags, browsing some twiggy brush that Ghu trusted wasn't poisonous, to climb the nearest height. The northerly branch of the trail continued more easterly, heading down into a sinking, stony land, ridged and tightly folded. To the southeast there were higher hills, yellow-dun with old grasses between the drifts of sand, and the right-hand road angled into these, rising, falling, curving. It was clearer, the same well-trodden, well-dunged track that they had followed all this way. The northerly route was more difficult for the eye to follow. Southerly, too, lay the lands of the eastern desert tribes, pastoral, nomadic folk from whom so many of the eastern road caravaneers came. Their gods were many and small; they drifted between them on their yearly cycle of grazing, so that the folk of one tribe, one family even, might be born to different gods, depending on the seasons of their births.

“South?” Ahjvar suggested.

Common sense said it was safer to stick to the better-travelled road. The caravan-masters knew what they were about. Yet, there was that caravan behind. It would likely swing south of the badlands. Most did. The flowing tide tugged at him . . . 
You should not linger on the way.

“The northerly road is straighter,” Ghu said.

“And worse terrain,” Ahjvar countered. “Stone.”

It was lying up a day with a lame camel, a blister turned to a deep sore in the sandy one's pad, that had first let the never-seen caravan creep up on them. He had remembered caravaneers' talk in the market of Dernang, of patching a camel's pad. Eventually, they had improvised a boot for her instead. It seemed simpler than trying to truss her, just the two of them, and stitch a patch to the pad itself, and the boot had lasted long enough for the foot to heal, though he'd done something to speed it and to keep any other sores from going so bad or deep.

“I know,” Ghu said. “But I think nonetheless . . . the left-hand way. We'll try the badlands.”

Ahjvar didn't debate the point further, only nodded. They headed back down to the camels, mounted, and set out again. Yes. The northerly road pulled at him, drawing him.

“Maybe we'll be able to buy grain from the tribes in Denanbak, if we go among them,” he said, mostly to drive that fish-on-a-line feeling from his mind. “We'll come to settled lands sooner this way. We'd run short of feed for the camels and food for ourselves both before we came to Dernang or even to the winter camps of lower Denanbak, if we took the southern route here.”

“Does that matter? We have no money left. Do we?”

“A few coins,” Ghu said guardedly. He had no idea if any trader of Denanbak would even take the three diviner's coins he carried, they were so old. Maybe they'd have some value for the weight of the blackened bronze. There were Ahjvar's bracelets, though. A lord of the west, decently outfitted as such, could sell his barbarian gold if he chose, though they would melt down the lovely work, no doubt, and never see the beauty in it. Truth was, he would like to see Ahjvar wear them again, well and whole and bright in the sun on a good horse. . . . “The gold—it's the same problem, bring trouble after us, I think, selling or trading it in that land. Better to wait for Nabban and the cities. But I have a book I can sell. A thing like that won't draw half a chieftain's hall out after us the next night in hope of more as the bracelets would, but they would take it, thinking to sell it on to some caravan wizard.”

“You have a book? Ghu, you can't read.”

“It's not my book.”

“You can always be counted on to have something that doesn't belong to you. Purses. Horses. Camels. Now books. I thought gods were more upright and moral. Let me see.”

“It doesn't matter, Ahj. It was a friend's, but she's dead in Marakand, I think.”

“Let me see. You'll have no idea what it should be worth, will you?”

Ghu, with reluctance, twisted around to root through the bag closest behind his saddle. What he passed to Ahjvar was a fat leather scroll-case, worn, but well cared for. Ahjvar slid the scroll out and unrolled the first pasted paper page of it, to study close, fine Nabbani writing. Ghu craned to see. There was also an illustration of a lord and lady, sun and crescent moon raying their respective heads, and an ornate seal stamped in red, a flower surrounded by characters, which overlaid the elegant calligraphy of the title. Another few turns and Ghu could see bold black lines making little blocks of tracks down each page, surrounded by much dense writing.

“The hexagrams for coin-throwing,” Ahjvar said. “The book's called
The Balance of the Sun and the Moon.
Nabbani divination.”

Yes, Ahjvar could probably read it. He said he had learnt to read the court characters long ago, when to pass the years he had studied for a lawyer in Star River Crossing. Why, he didn't seem too clear on himself. Maybe because the Leopard, or whatever he had called himself in those days, had needed some cloak of respectability.

He also said, small wonder they had turned to a syllabic script in Yeh-Lin's day, and generally from there he moved on to the subject of Ghu learning to read. Not this time, no. Ahjvar said only, “Your friend was a wizard.”

“Yes.”

“The Red Masks.”

“She was taken by Red Masks, she and another man I met, another wizard. If they were made Red Mask by the time I freed you, then they were already dead, Ahj. You didn't kill them.” He added, because Ahjvar kept looking at him, “I couldn't go after them. I had to follow you.”

In silence, Ahjvar rolled the book up and returned it to its case, handed it back.

“It's old,” he said. “It's valuable, yes, but not uncommon. Something every Nabbani wizard would have a copy of, but this is a fine one, beautiful calligraphy, worth a decent price for that alone. And it's stolen. It has the seal of the imperial palace library stamped on its first sheet.”

Ghu shrugged. “Better to sell it before we come to the Golden City, then.”

If they did. He had not thought about where they would go in Nabban, but . . . there must be destination. A time and an ending. A place. A chill touch on his spine. He had kept Dernang and the castle of the lord of Choa ever in his mind, never looking beyond. But that was the half-wit boy again. He could not wander blind and trust to the winds of chance. Not now.

CHAPTER IV

The sound of the wheeling gulls was loud overhead, and the crows clamoured . . .

The man whined like a miserable dog. They were tearing his dirty loincloth from him, leaving not a rag for his modesty, shaving his head.

That a human being should come to this. His bruised and bloody face, his raw back, turned her stomach. It was wrong. Whatever the treason, the heresy, he had committed, it was wrong. He could have been a monster, a cannibal, a tormentor of children, and yet such a death as this would have been wrong. Of course the empire would execute those who worked against it, the spies, the rebels, which this man had been; one expected that; one knew it one's doom when one took on such a task, but a headsman's axe made a sufficient end. He had been taken by prophecy in his agonies, they said. When the gods of the land moved a man to speak and their words were met with this . . .

The man's entire body was blackened and swollen in broken lumps; blood seeped down his legs; his hands were crusted black with it. Why the magistrates bothered with torture, when they had every right to send at once for an imperially-licensed diviner . . . but that was not how things were done in the Nabban Bloody Yao had made.

Kill him and have done with. It had been this Emperor Otono's father who instituted the death of disembowelling. His brother had rebelled against him, and Yao had made certain his death taught his lords and generals a lesson of loyalty, and perhaps his own children too, though it did not seem they had learnt it well. There was one prince dead by suicide while still a youth and a daughter who had fled, pursued by assassins for the defiance of fleeing. Rumour was, whispered most warily, that she, wizard-talented and permitted only the most minor of studies, in accordance with Min-Jan's law forbidding imperial daughters and sisters to wield any power, had secretly achieved the rank of Bamboo Badge, the highest tier under the Pine Lord. Or perhaps rumour exaggerated and lost Princess An-Chaq had been only Plum or Palm. No matter. No second Yeh-Lin, Min-Jan her son had declared. Imperial women were also forbidden holding any minor office, or undertaking any scholarship even of a non-wizardly bent, or having lovers, male or female. Might as well smother them at birth, in Rat's opinion.

Most recently Dan, the youngest prince, had risen in rebellion, fleeing the palace for his maternal Dwei-Clan cousins in Shihpan Province in the northwest the night after his father's death. Yao had died of an apoplexy this past spring, falling dead from the Peony Throne in the act of condemning to death his Minister of Festivals in a rage. A punishment of the gods, striking him down? The Minister had been executed by Emperor Otono as his first act in his father's memory, followed by the proscribing of Prince Dan as traitor and heretic. Dan was inspired by such very prophecies as this man had spoken, the fool's dream of the golden age the Traditionalists celebrated, a time when lords were answerable for how they used their folk, the emperor a mere priest of a land of petty princes and shrines, and slaves were debtors with a term to serve, no more. Or unknown.