CHAPTER XII

…some twelve years or so before the All-Holy crossed to the east of the Karas

In the depths of the river, he dreams. A mother, a goddess searches. Children, lost.

Children, not children. Not a goddess. Only a shape made in the dreaming, a metaphor, to be understood.

It is a wholeness, and it is not whole. That which should be of it, in it, is lost.

Is taken. Held away.

Hoarded, sterile.

Ghu draws himself together. Wakes, in the deep water. Wondering.

Far in the east of the world, beyond Nabban and eastern sea, beyond the vibrant cities and the fertile plains and the broad river valleys of Pirakul, the hermit waited, empty of all thoughts but one, empty of all but the need, the message he would have understood. He lay on his bed, which was only a frame strung with rope and a thin mattress stuffed with coarse heather. Eyes were open on the darkness, hands folded on his chest. Eyes open, and soul. Every night. As the darkness thinned, dawn seeping around the cowhide curtain that was all the door he had, he would rise and kindle a new fire in the clay stove, brew his morning tea and set his barley porridge to simmer. He might walk down to the scattered cabins of the village, where he would tend the sick and receive gifts of food and the greater gift of human warmth and kindliness. Or he might walk on the mountain, climb through the forest until he was above the highest trees and could see the peaks unfold, blue and white to the horizon. Every night, he lay down again and emptied himself of the day, to fill his soul with one thought, one message, if only it might be heard, be answered.

I want to come home.

Over him, the stars turned in their cycle, and the fleeting years passed.

Always, Nikeh remembered the fear. It never left her, marking her like a secret tattoo, a colour sunk deep that she could not alter or scrub away.

It was, perhaps, her eighth summer. She was never certain quite how old she was. Such things were mangled, discarded as unimportant, in after years, and by the time they were important again, she had forgotten. She called it her eighth and counted from there when people asked her age. It would do.

Her parents worked dawn till dusk in their smithy that summer. Heads for arrows and spears they made, mostly. Smiths from outlying villages brought what they could. Her father’s gold circlet went, and much of the small treasure of the princess’s tower, for iron ingots off a Northron ship. She always remembered how the big sailors fascinated her, so tall in their bright-coloured tunics, their eyes so pale in faces ruddy from the sun, wild and shaggy like bears, the men unshaven. Even their speech sounded like growls and barks. There was one woman who carried her brother Birdy piggyback all up and down the cliff-path, neighing like a horse and making him laugh.

Aunty did not approve.

“Take the children away,” she whispered to papa. “Foreigners steal children, and Northrons trade with the caravan road. They sell children in the east, even for…” and her whisper went even lower.

For what? Nikeh wanted to know. She hated secrets. Wanted to know, to understand.

Later, she would understand that by that time there had been no slaves in Nabban for almost two centuries. She would write that the tribes of the west were ignorant and even among the heathen folk, it was the red priests who shaped their view of the world beyond the Kara Mountains, seeing it through fearful eyes.

“Take Birdy and go back to the house,” papa said.

In her memory, she did not fuss or argue. This seemed improbable. Most likely she had. Likely she had even earned a swat on the bottom. The Northrons were so appealingly bright and loud and free of fear.

Better if that copper-haired woman had stolen Birdy away when their high-prowed ship sailed, taking with it all the remaining gold and silver of Emrastepse, and a goodly share of the last harvest’s olive oil and of the year’s salt production as well.

The defensive ditches were dug deeper, the earthworks built higher and new ones added, making angles and traps. Even Nikeh and the other children helped, using adzes to strip bark from tree-trunks, as ox-teams dragged in logs from the chestnut forest lower down for the building of new palisades.

Hannothana further down the coast had fallen, and its prince had been captured. They burned him alive on a great pyre, with his crippled wife. Their daughters had died in the fighting. Some of that tribe’s surviving folk fled to seek shelter among the folk of Emrastepse; it was impossible to keep their stories from the children’s ears. Folk of outlying villages mostly submitted. They learnt and recited their catechism under the tutelage of the red priests; they swore great oaths to serve the All-Holy, and they endured the tattooing that marked them of his faith. They gave up their children to the tutelage of the priests in the new dormitory which conscript labour began, before the ashes of Hannothana itself were even cool, to build at the foot of the new prince’s tower. Folk of the prince’s town themselves were slaughtered even after their surrender, in a blood-hungry fury.

Those were the stories that came to Emrastepse, like tales of long ago and far away, except that mama’s own father had been a man of Hannothana. It was a real place.

“Like sharks,” a woman whispered, in tears. She was sitting at table with the family of the smiths. Nikeh did not remember her, other than that one incident, as though it was a little scene carved in relief on an old tomb, a moment frozen in stone. Perhaps she was kin of mama’s. “Like sharks. They tore my nephew to pieces and cried he was a devil-worshipper. I saw. I saw. This is truth.”

More refugees came, hungry, dirty, desperate folk, carrying little or nothing with them. But only a few. Papa and mama spoke low-voiced and sometimes sent Nikeh out of the house, or took themselves away to the smithy to whisper together. They had frightening things to talk about in secret, which was more terrifying than if they had just told her. She imagined, every day, how the red priests would come. She had nightmares. In her dreams the red priests were red all over—their hair, their skin, their eyes red like blood. She knew that was not how it was. Missionaries of the cult of the All-Holy had come to Emrastepse in past years, usually around the time of the harvest festival, when there was communal feasting and a welcome for all. They won few converts. They were only ordinary men and women. She knew that. Muddy red was merely the colour of their robes.

There was a new prince in Hannothana, a cousin of the tower. The new prince was the puppet of the counsellor appointed by the All-Holy, and the counsellor was the real ruler. Nikeh considered, and decided for herself she understood. She was not a baby like Birdy, to think this meant the prince wore strings and sticks to move his limbs.

The other cousins of the tower had been burnt or hanged, if they survived the fighting. But some had killed themselves. They had jumped from the tower roof as its doors were forced.

Papa was a cousin of the tower of Emrastepse.

The forces of the All-Holy were coming.

An envoy, first. Red-robed priest riding a fine horse, with a dozen soldiers on foot about him, all in bronze scale shirts and leather kilts. Their helmets bore a knot of red ribbon for their god. Nikeh climbed like a squirrel up the palisade and hung there, arms hooked around a pointed log, bare toes braced against the wood, to look down on them. Her mother was with the princess and her young son, up on the watchtower by the gate. The priest spoke very arrogantly. His words did not stay with Nikeh, only his tone. She would never speak to the princess so. The princess would never speak so to her own folk.

He demanded the princess come with him, to learn the creed of the All-Holy and forswear the perverted worship of demons and devils and dead gods on behalf of all her folk.

Nikeh was indignant. It was right to honour the memory of the dead goddess of Emrastepse and her demon lover and they did not worship devils, nobody worshipped devils, they weren’t real, only winter-tale real, story-real, not true like the goddess Emras and the woman-man-eagle Melnarka who had fought at her side and died with her in the war that destroyed the gods and the empire together. Everyone knew that, unless they were an utter fool.

The priest stood with his mouth open. His horse pranced in place, its ears back, tossed its head. The breast of his red robe grew dark, as if in drinking he had spilt his wine. Nikeh looked over to the watchtower again. Her father was there too now, standing at the princess’s side. Just standing, a bow in his hands. She could see how he looked down, his head bowed, the great sigh that moved his chest and shoulders, as if he had finished some taxing labour, but he was a strong, strong man and drawing a bow was no great feat. She did not understand. The princess put her hand on his back, as if she comforted him.

Thus Emrastepse answered the All-Holy.

The All-Holy did not come himself, not for a campaign against such small tribes as lived along the coast. His divine magic was not needed to overrun Emrastepse’s walls, as it had not been for Hannothana’s.

Perhaps it was some traitor within the village, some secret convert to the cult who had hidden the tattoo on their wrist and had not been driven from the village when news of Hannothana first came to them. Perhaps soldiers of the All-Holy somehow climbed over the wall undetected. Someone killed the watch and the gate-guards and took their place, to open the gate in the dawn even as the alarm was sounded from the roof of the princess’s tower.

Nikeh saw, as the night’s dark washed away. She had gone looking for her mother. Few adults, warriors of the tower or not, had slept in their own beds that night, so the children had roamed, escaping the care of the elderly or their slightly-older cousins.

Thus she was on the roof of the princess’s stone tower, which was castle and storehouse and meeting-place for all the folk. She saw how the dark thinned, and thinned, and suddenly there were dead men and women where there should not have been, on the ground all about the watchtower. Others, in plain tunics like any other person of Emrastepse, only one wearing a short-sleeved coat of dull scale armour, were pulling open the leaves of the gate.

“Go back to Aunty!” mama shouted, shoving her at the stairs. “Look after Birdy.”

That was the last Nikeh ever saw of her. Mama had a place among those who would guard the princess and the little heir, who was a few years older than Birdy, not yet named.

When she thought back, trying to remember, she thought the princess’s husband was killed on the wooden watchtower. Already dead. Papa may have been as well. They were close friends, he and the husband of the princess. They would have kept watch together.

Beyond the tower’s forecourt Nikeh stopped in the lane to stare. There was fighting at the gate. She had never, in all the words of all the stories she had ever heard, imagined such a sight, such a sound. So many people packed so close, as if by their bodies alone they would block the way. The mass seethed and heaved and did not, to her eyes, seem to be made of individuals at all. An amorphous sea-beast, limbless, headless, writhing and pulsing.

It broke apart in a din of shout—scream—hammer-blow—thunder.

Perhaps she imagined the thunder.

She fled to the house behind the smithy.

“What’s happening?” Aunty demanded. She seized Nikeh by the shoulder and shook her, which she resented greatly. She was angry, as if that might burn fear away.

“The red priests,” Nikeh told her, and some of what she had seen, all jumbled, words spilling. Birdy began to wail. Nikeh grabbed him and shook him, as Aunty had her. “Be quiet,” she told him. “Be quiet or they will come and kill us all.”

Aunty heaved him to her hip and took Nikeh by the hand.

“Quickly,” she said.

There was a cellar under the back room of the smiths’ house, where oil and cheeses and wine were kept. A small, low-ceilinged, close place, dry and dusty, full of spiders. They went down, Birdy first and Nikeh following, careful and one-handed on the ladder fixed below the opening, carrying a clay lamp that Aunty must have lit at the hearth and given to her. She did not remember, only it was there, in her hand, in her memories. The flame flickered with her breath. Above her, there was noise, which made her moan in fear, but it was only Aunty throwing things about as if she had gone mad—a crash of jars, a thump as the lid of a wooden chest was thrown back, a clatter of who knew what. In the cellar were already blankets, and the smaller water-jar, and a loaf of bread. Aunty came partway down the ladder. “Sit,” she told Nikeh, pointing at the blankets. “Hold your brother. Don’t go crawling around and knocking things over.”

Nikeh took Birdy and sat, obedient, dragging a blanket over both of them.

“Want mama,” Birdy said. “Don’t want Nini. Don’t want Aunty.”

“Nini’s all you’ve got,” she said. “Hush. We’re hiding. Mama will come find us, but we have to be quiet and hide. You can do that. You’re a good boy.”

Aunty still stood on the ladder, her head and shoulders lost to view, doing something.

Nikeh was suddenly terrified. “Come down,” she begged. “They’ll see you. They’ll find us. I don’t want to be burned!” Her voice rose to half a scream, of which she was immediately ashamed.

“Quiet, fool child.” Aunty leaned at a strange angle, dragging something up the slope of the half-opened trap door, gripping its edge. She bent almost backwards and fumbled her way down the ladder, dropped the door.

“Perhaps that’s covered it,” she said, not to the children, but for her own reassurance, it seemed. “If they just glance in they won’t see the cellar door at once, only a disordered room. Maybe they’ll think someone’s already searched.”

Nikeh was silent, hugging Birdy.

Aunty came to sit beside her. There was a spear on the floor, and a long knife. Aunty touched them, to be sure of finding them in the dark, and then she blew out the lamp.

In the dark, blacker than any night, they sat. The cellar began to seem cold. The air felt damp. Nikeh ached with sitting. She shivered. Aunty beside her was warm, but she shivered, too, and whispered a brief prayer. “Memory of Emras, give us strength.”

Birdy squirmed and fretted. He needed to go pee-pee, he said.

Nikeh took him over to the corner behind the ladder, groping her way.

Birdy squirmed some more. He was hungry. They ate bread and cheese and water with a splash of wine in it for the warmth. She needed to use the corner herself. Aunty did. Birdy began to fuss. He wanted mama. He wanted papa. He wanted out. He was tired of hiding.

They could hear nothing from above, until there were muffled shouting voices. Not words, just the noise of them.

Nikeh hugged Birdy and put her hand over his mouth. He squirmed and tried to pull the hand away.

“Quiet,” she whispered in his ear. “Quiet, or the bad men will come and kill us all.”

He was still, a little. There were heavy feet on the floor above. Something fell and crashed. Birdy clung to her. Aunty dragged Nikeh close to her, whispered, “Sh!” as if she had made some noise, which she had not. Nikeh could feel the old woman shaking.

The footsteps left the floor above. Birdy was beginning to gasp, not from her hand, but the trembling deep breaths that worked up to a fit of bawling.

“Mama!” Her hand did nothing to stop that cry.

“Quiet!” A whisper like a shout.

“Old Great Gods have mercy, give him to me,” Aunty said, and dragged him from Nikeh’s arms, squirming and whimpering.

“Hush,” she said. “Hush, hush, Aunty’s got you, be still, be still.”

But his gulping sobs gathered again. Nikeh heard him. She knew how he could shriek to be heard over even papa’s greatest hammer, once he began in earnest.

“Old Great Gods, Great Gods, child, be still.” Aunty sounded as if she would wail herself, and she seemed to be thrashing around. Trying to cover Birdy’s mouth, muffle him with her body, Nikeh thought.

A strange sound, as if she swallowed a cry, or Birdy did. She panted, wheezed.

“Don’t!” Nikeh whispered urgently. Don’t what, she did not know, but she was suddenly terrified. She reached to take her brother from Aunty. Aunty was shuddering and Birdy was in Nikeh’s arms, Aunty was letting go of him, pushing herself away.

He was warm, and heavy, and soaking. Nikeh thought he had wet himself. He was only just beyond diapering, after all, and he was afraid.

It wasn’t his little bottom on her lap that was sodden. It was his torso, hugged to her own.

Wet. Hot. The smell of a headless goose. He was limp against her, and his head flopped, and his arms hung loose.

She screamed.

“Be quiet!” Aunty screamed back at her. “They’ll come. They’ll hear him and come.”

They were not going to hear Birdy. No one was, ever again.

Hear Nikeh, all too likely. Aunty reached for her. Nikeh did not know if she meant to cut her throat as well or merely shake her into sense, but she jerked away from the old woman’s grasp and flung her brother’s body at her, banged into the ladder and swarmed up, banged her head on the trap door and heaved it back, and the straw mattress that had partially covered it, and scrambled on hands and knees through the mess Aunty and the soldiers of the All-Holy between them had made of the furnishings of the room. She found her feet and ran through the main room of the house, out the door, which stood open, unthinking as the hare with the hounds behind her, into the yard. The smithy was aflame, burning as though it were the heart of a furnace. Men saw her. Mouths gaped and yelled and she ran and scrambled away over the drystone yard wall. Little Squirrel had been her baby-name, because she began to climb and clamber as soon as she could crawl. Over the wall—her secret shortcut to the sloping rough ground where geese and goats strayed, behind the smiths’ house and the tower, walled not by palisades but by the rising cliff against which the village set its back.

Blackthorn shrubs that even the goats did not devour. People there. Struggling. Or clutching close in screaming, wailing knots and the blades rose and fell. A man with a red surcoat over his armour who watched one such butchery wheeled his pony, whirled a hand-axe and came after her.

The pony did not like the rough ground. There were fissures and boulders and middens. Nikeh evaded it, flung herself into thorns by the cliff-foot, scrambled along behind them shredding clothing, tearing skin and hair. Later, she would find a thorn broken off in one heel and one piercing like a nail through the palm of her hand. Then, she felt nothing. Fortunate that she did not lose an eye. Along the cliff and to where a near-vertical seam rose, like a ditch climbing the cliff. Forbidden, very forbidden. In every generation, some foolhardy youngster died trying to make that climb. She had been halfway up and safely down, and gotten her bottom justly tanned for it, only a month before.

Up. No higher than the top of the concealing blackthorns. She wedged herself into the crack, perched like a swallow’s nest on a ledge of stone so small even her child-toes were not supported. They curled to grip the edge.

The soldiers of the All-Holy searched along the bottom. They even looked up. The rising crack was crooked, shadowed. They did not see. Maybe a branch obscured her. They went to look for easier game.

Nikeh could not see. She could only hear. She could smell the smoke. She could smell the blood. That was most likely her own tunic, sodden, slowly cooling and gluing itself to her skin.

She could hear, all the long day. What she heard—

She would never think of that. Never.

There was smoke. The sky, for a time, was dark with it.

Her joints seemed slowly to freeze. They ached for a while, but then they stopped feeling. Assorted cuts and scratches and punctures throbbed. Tears, silent, ran down her face, dried there. Her heel was very bad, though she did not then know why. She used her teeth to worry the thorn out of her hand when she finally noticed it. At some point as the sun lowered she had to wet herself. There was no other choice. She was bizarrely ashamed. So small a thing.

Night came, but it was not dark. It was red-lit, hungry.

She moved. Fingers first. Toes. Wiggling. Stretching, carefully. One arm, another, leg and leg, unfolding, keeping her balance. She pulled her soiled drawers off in disgust and dropped them down into the branches. To be rid of them seemed important, if irrational.

Then she began to climb.

Memory, and feel. Mostly slow, crawling, going by touch. Not caring much if she fell. It would be a clean and good death and she would find herself on the road to the Old Great Gods. Each one travels the road to the Gods alone and the innocent child is gathered swiftly into their arms, but regardless, she pictured in her mind how she would find Birdy there and take his hand. They would find mama and papa, and they would all walk the road together. Aunty would not be with them. Aunty’s would be a long and grim road. She had done something terrible. Nikeh would not think of her. Nikeh would die, and Birdy would be waiting for her, and the Gods would welcome them into their land of light.

Or she would make it to the top, and the wilderness of the mountains. And she would find a weapon, and a teacher, and she would learn to kill. She would kill the red priests wherever she found them, and she would kill the All-Holy, because it was a lie he was blessed by the Old Great Gods. She would burn him in a furnace, like raw ore being smelted, till he was ash.

She slipped, more than once, and always caught herself again, though her wounded hand and her foot were burning. Little Squirrel. The cliff did not so much reach a plateau as merely become less steep, wild fig and gorse and more blackthorn growing in cracks. She went blind into unknown terrain, crawling as much as she limped, and perhaps the memory of the goddess Emras was truly with her, some ghost-shadow familiar with these mountains taken into her bones with the water of the sacred spring from which she had drunk all her life, that she did not plunge into a ravine or an old copper-pit. In the distance, human voices made animal sounds of savagery and pain. Dogs barked and howled and were brutally silenced. Farther and farther away. At some point she simply fell asleep, like an animal, unable to go on.

Light woke her. Nikeh cried, but her mouth was dry and there were few tears. Her hand was red and puffy, front and back, and she found the broken thorn in her heel, which she could not dig out. She limped onwards, lost, now, among unfamiliar stones, but keeping the sun, which was high, almost to the noon, on her right. She found rainwater held in a depression in the rock and sucked it dry. She wandered on.

Not that day but perhaps the next or the one after, Nikeh found herself in a small green valley, enclosed on all sides, but with the shadow of a track running through it, a long forgotten pack road from the days when there was still copper to be found in the coastal mountains. There was a tarn, and narrow paths showed where ibex came down to drink. There were no trees, only grass and brambles and stones. She could go no further. She had nothing. No sandals, no belt, no knife, no flint and firesteel, not a cape or a blanket to cover her back, only the sloe-dyed tunic, so pretty she had thought it, faded blue as the sky. It was brown now with her brother’s blood, stiff and ragged. She was a child who had only been given her grown name and learnt her letters a few years previously, too young, too small to be any use to a great warrior even to hold their horse. Not that one would ever stumble into this lost valley. Not even in a winter’s hero-tale of the ancient wars. All she could do was weep and die and with her death feed the foxes and the vultures.

To be a hero does not mean one lives, her teacher would tell her. It means that, among other things, one does not lie down and die while there is still any means of going on. But that, of course, was later.

Nikeh did not lie down and die. She drank from the tarn. She threw stones at rabbits and birds and perhaps bruised one or two, but killed none. She was not a farmer’s child, to have been set to driving off birds with a sling. There were no fish in the tarn. Once she caught a frog. It looked at her from golden eyes. She looked at it. It blinked. She could not stand to kill it, to hold it dead in her hands as she had held her brother. She let it go. She ate watercress and mint from the shores of the tarn, and the leaves of dandelions and daisies, brambles and sorrel, along with other greens that were perhaps not so wholesome, because once she vomited for what seemed half the night. Her hand and her foot both swelled and oozed and were hot. She could not drink enough water, it seemed. She curled up beneath a tangle of brambles, no fruit on them yet, and did not crawl out but to drink and pee, and then not even for that. She could not stand.

Her mother came and picked her up. Mama smelt like horses and roses. She gave Nikeh drink, sweet and bitter, and cool towels for her aching head, and wrapped her in warm blankets. There was searing pain in her hand, her foot, but then much of the aching went away.

Aunty came and tried to cut her throat and she screamed and struck and kicked at her. Mama rocked her in her arms and sang, but her words were nonsense. Birdy came and looked at her and stretched out his arms to be picked up, and his head flopped over showing the cords of his neck all raw and severed, like a slaughtered sheep. She screamed and screamed some more, and mama sang.

She dreamed of the wind, roaring, roaring, and fire. She dreamed of the sea. She dreamed of snow, which came once or twice in the winter. She dreamed the shape of a woman spun of flickering pale light, white and gold and bluey-green. She woke up, because it was not her mother singing to her.

There was a fire and it was night. Nikeh was naked, clean and dry and wrapped in blankets. Her hand was stiff, and her foot, and her throat hurt. She felt all strange and hollow. Someone sat by the fire. Her singing stopped, as if she knew Nikeh was awake, though she had not moved nor made any sound.

“Go back to sleep, child,” the woman said. There was a difference in her way of speaking that was foreign, but not the accent of the Northron traders. “You’re safe here.” She smoothed the hair back from Nikeh’s forehead as her mother or father might have done. “Sleep now, without dreaming. Grow strong and well.”

The next time Nikeh woke it was daylight. There was a horse grazing nearby. She lay and watched how its yellow teeth sheered through grass and dandelions, how its lips and tongue somehow avoided the daisies. It was a big horse, white speckled with brown, not one of the mountain ponies. A horse like the one the emissary of the All-Holy had ridden, tall and solid, a horse of the Nearer Grass, though she did not know it then, nor how the red priests began to build waystations across the Dead Hills along the ancient highway to the east and the pass over the Kara Mountains, nor how they brought back sometimes from their scouting horses and eastern spices and other rare and valued things for the All-Holy’s favourites. She muffled her cry in the blanket, lest the priest she feared see her, but the priest was dead, papa had killed him, and the horse raised its head and gave her a somewhat wondering look out of a big purple-brown eye. And then it took a step, two, three, four, and began to snuffle over her. It started at the top of her head, great nostrils flaring, whiskers tickling over her face, and went down the length of her blanket-cocooned body to the lump of her feet. She had a confused terror it might eat her.

“Let her be, Specky.”

Nikeh sat up then. She had not dreamed the woman, and she did not know her, and the stranger had a foreign horse like the priest. Nikeh was prepared to kick and scream and bite and whatever she must. She raised her arms to defend herself. Her left hand, which had been pierced by the thorn, was wrapped in linen bandages. Her arms felt strange and light, feeble as little sticks and as though they did not properly belong to her at all.

The woman squatted down by her and smiled, so kindly. Nikeh did not hit or kick, or scream. She only lay back and stared. She had never seen such a person before. The woman was not someone from Emrastepse. Nikeh knew enough to know she was not likely to be someone from the tribes of the west at all. Her eyes were narrow and thick-lashed, the darkest brown in colour, and her hair was black, black as a raven’s feather, falling sleek and long about a face more lovely in its shape than any marble relic of the empire preserved in the hall of the princess’s tower. Her nose was small and her cheekbones broad. She was lighter-skinned than most folk of Emrastepse but not so pink and sun-ruddy as a Northron off the ships. In truth, Nikeh thought her a goddess, though how she herself had crossed so many mountains that she had come into the land of a foreign goddess Nikeh could not have said.

The woman wore unfastened a rough, hairy coat, striped dull blue and black, but under it she flashed bright as a butterfly’s wing, all rose and green and crimson.

“What’s your name, child?” she asked.

Nikeh only stared at her. Tears began leaking down her face. She could never, in after years, understand why she could find no answer, only that she hurt so, and could find no way to say it.

“Well, there, it doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “Did you come from the village?”

Nikeh managed a twitch of her head. The woman nodded, patted her unbandaged hand and tucked both back under the blankets again. “You rest a little longer, and then you can sit up and eat some soup.”

Later, Nikeh would learn how Teacher had found her curled dying under the blackberry canes as she followed the ancient miner’s road through the mountain wilderness, coming by a circuitous route to spy upon what the priests did at Emrastepse, where already the surviving folk had made their professions of faith to the priests and been tattooed with the sign of the All-Holy. They were rebuilding the village to a new plan, with a great hall for the priests and a school for the children, and a tower for the new prince, who was not a traitor of their own folk but the son of the new prince of Hannothana, a boy of fourteen named Dimas.

Teacher had been to Emrastepse afoot, following Nikeh’s trail by wizardly means, once she had dealt with the fever and the infection that raged through her blood. Curious where the child had come from, what she might be. She had watched, hidden by more than human hunter’s cunning, from the clifftop, as the bodies were thrown into the sea off the headland where the tide might take them out into a current. She would not, once Nikeh was able to stand, let her go back.

They took the old pack-road. Nikeh was dressed in a long-sleeved smock of some fabric which was not linen, but very like it, and wrapped in Teacher’s striped coat, held before her on the big horse at first, and then, as she grew stronger, clinging behind.

Teacher wore a sword on her back with a tassel of scarlet and sky-blue ribbons trailing from the pommel. Among the few burdens the horse carried was a long coat of armour like nothing Nikeh had ever seen, black, all the glossy plates fastened with cords of sky blue, blue ribbons fluttering from the shoulders. There was a helmet like a demon fox-mask with a crest of more sky-blue ribbon. Teacher put in on to show her, because she was curious, but in those days Nikeh never saw her don it in earnest.

Teacher was a warrior and a wizard. Nikeh had by improbable miracle run and limped and crawled and stumbled her way into the winter’s tale of the heroic avenger she had sought. Now she need only grow big enough and strong enough to wear such armour and wield such a sword herself. Then let the red priests fear her.

Children dream. Dreams carry them on, one foot after another, when despair clings close and smothering.

“Child,” Teacher called her, kindly enough. She never said what Nikeh should call her, so Nikeh thought of her as her teacher, the one she had sought. She would wonder, when she grew older, if that was why she could find no words in those first months—to speak that dream would be to destroy it in an adult’s laughter, whether derisive or only gently mocking.

Teacher talked to her all the time, telling her things about the land, about the weather. Small things. Keeping the world real to her. Teacher was wise in the lore of the wilderness. Nikeh learnt to set snares and to tickle small fish into her hands in the mountain streams, to flip them out and kill them swiftly, to gut them and to cook. She learnt which plants were wholesome to eat, and which were not, and which had other properties useful to know. She learnt to brush as much of Specky as she could reach and clean his great hooves. He was a very gentle, patient horse, an intact stallion but sweet as an old pet tomcat. Once Teacher left her hidden and went away for an entire day and a night, and returned with a tunic and drawers only a little too large, an oily felt cape against rain and cold, sandals. Best of all was a knife for her very own, and a small bow with arrows, fit for a child. She began to learn to hunt. Sometimes Teacher would fall without thinking into other languages, which even Nikeh’s ear could tell were not one and the same, and she began to pick out meanings. Thus she began to learn Nabbani, not as it is spoken on the eastern caravan road but the true Imperial, and also the tongue that belongs to no one folk but is the language of the western road.

It was autumn before she spoke at all herself, one evening, only to whisper, “My name’s Nikeh. Nikeh. Not ‘child,’“ before bursting into tears. She cried for a long, long time. Teacher held her close and did not mind how the child’s anguish beslubbered her silk brocade.

There had always been a hermit on the mountain. Sometimes he came to the village unasked, knowing that some child had fallen ill, some hunter had struggled home with a broken bone or a wounded dog. Dogs, ponies, men, women, the little red cattle—he was physician to them all. He knew the secrets of herbs and of the compounding of drugs. He knew the cleaning and stitching of wounds and the setting of bones. Sometimes he did nothing but lay his hands on them. There was healing in his hands. And when there was nothing else to be done, there was the easing of the unbearable pain; there was a quiet passage to the road to the Old Great Gods.

Sometimes he walked among the trees. At other times he sat in meditation, or perhaps it was in prayer, in the ruins of the old temple above the valley. It had fallen in the great earthquake, in the days of a queen only remembered because it was in her time that the great earthquake came. The fall of the mountainside changed the course of the river, which had no goddess. The royal seat moved to another valley, the farmers followed, and a new temple was built there to honour the god of the mountain. For the hunters who lived under the eaves of the forest, little changed but the distance to the queen’s court and the market of the town.

The hermit had come after that. He was not a priest of the mountain god, but he was a holy man, and he was theirs. Sometimes priests or priestesses came from the king’s town to seek his insight. Sometimes a scholar from the lowlands. He knew the languages of all the folk of the land. His skin was dark brown, his hair was long and black and curling, but his eyes were a brilliant green.

Once, he danced. It was a bad winter, and the snows were deep. The river in its new course—the old had been overgrown with great trees by then—was dammed by ice, and the rising waters threatened the valley. They went up the mountain to the hermit, and he danced, and in his dancing the ice shifted and cracked and stones rolled, and the river flowed, and even in the worst years it did not dam itself there again.

Stories began to come into the mountains, carried by the clans of wandering, godless entertainers who were dedicated to—and perhaps descended from—patron demons of the mountains and the plains, and carried as well by the scholars and the god-dedicated heralds of the city temples, who carried the messages of the kings and queens and were less prone to tell tall tales. The seer-priests in the temples dreamed, and the goddesses cried out at their visions. In the west, far, far in the west, maybe even beyond the rising of the caravan-road, war was coming. Not between folk and folk or land and land.

War against the gods.

And even gods may die.