CHAPTER XXIV

The mountain of the god rose grey, banners of mist trailing west, fading into cloud. The air bit harsh and clean; breath began to smoke like the high winds. No trees, now, only low juniper spilling from cracks in the rocks and snow deep in the shadows, while the first brief flowers, pale yellow, vivid blue, splashed colour over the south and the eastern slopes.

There was a path, if you knew to find it. Holy folk, drawn to the god, might find it. A foal-heavy mare might, driven from the shelter of the lower forest by bear or wolf or leopard. A boy might, seeking that mare, with the warmth of the god burning like a hearthfire to draw him on, and the wind rising. Geese crying high overhead. It had been spring then, too, till the storm fell on him.

The standing stones were cold and dark, when he came to them. It was only that shadow fell on them, but they seemed a warning. Two on the ridge, and two more distant over it, only the tops visible, and the last yet out of sight where the shallow stream crossed the valley that was more a ravine.

There were ravens. They rose from the carcass of a dead musk deer, wandered up out of the forest to die in the winter. It was gone nearly to clean bones now, as a boy and a horse might have been. The ravens circled, croaking. One dropped to his wrist. Snow laid his ears back, shook his mane and stamped. The raven studied Ghu, obsidian eye—one side, the other. Beak like the point of a spear. Cried hoarsely and flew. Ghu rode on between the stones, reined in again, looking down. The valley was cast all in shadow and ice fringed the narrow meltwater stream. There were trees down there, pines that grew more as creeping bushes than great towers, bare, red-barked willow no higher than his head. And stones. Mostly stones. Clumps of wiry grass not yet greening held a little thin soil in place. No flowers yet at all among the stones, and snow at the head of the ravine and in all the shadowed places, feeding the stream, the great peak rising white over them. He dismounted and went afoot, leading Snow down the steep way that was barely a memory of a path, angling towards the second pair of standing stones, then made a sharp turn to the south and crossed the ravine-valley to the brook and the stepping stones. There he dismounted and unsaddled Snow, removed his bridle. Cleaned the horse’s feet and groomed him as if at the end of an ordinary day and his stall waiting, while the shadows thickened colder and darker over them, and in the west the sky turned sullen orange. Grain—mostly with Ahjvar. He poured out a little of what there was, murmuring to the horse of the danger of the unseen cliff, where the brook fell away in a great plume that turned to mist before it ever reached a lower valley, and left him, crossing the stepping stones of the brook and up between the third pair of stones.

Another cliff towered beyond, fissured and broken, spilling scree and snow.

The seventh standing stone, alone, twice the height of the others, a roughly squared pillar, or a broken slab embedded where it had plummeted from above . . . who, now, remembered?

Ghu climbed the rising ground and stood before it. The wind hissed in the creeping pines below. Darkness thickened, the sun behind the clouds falling away into the west, over mountains, deserts. Sun on the hills of Praitan, maybe. Sunlight still sparking on the waves of the Gulf of Taren, the tiled roofs of Gold Harbour. The stones of the ruin on the headland they had called home warm in the sun, and the garden wall, and the garden he had dug and tended gone to weeds and wild things, but the gulls still floating on the wind and crying, and the sea still running away into the sky.

He sat down with his back against the stone, legs crossed, leaned his head back, looking into the west. The light was gone, starless, moonless, black cloud low and thick. The horse Snow was no more to be seen than the snow-heavy heights.

“I’m here,” he said.

Another night, not quite yet a year gone by since then. Summer air, and the damp smell of the mist still, and the swamp called the Orsamoss. Smoke clinging to clothes and hair, the reek of the burning tower. A bank overgrown with junipers sheltered them, spice-scented. Ahjvar had dragged himself that far, could do no more, and had lain down like an exhausted child with his head in Ghu’s lap. He wanted to die. His goddess was silenced and put to undreaming sleep in the earth, but his curse still bound him to her and held him in the world, and the hungry ghost of Hyllau still possessed him, waiting to rise and hunt. He could die, at last. Ghu had promised it. He would not wake again with innocent blood on his hands. And the hag had taken him then, hungry to hunt, and Ghu had taken on himself the grace of the gods who would claim him and broken the binding curse, dragged her struggling from Ahjvar’s soul, and when the savage will of hate that was all she had left of humanity would have burnt the man, again, he destroyed her. A human soul, not released to the road to the Old Great Gods but made nothing, ash and nothing, a piece of the universe unmade.

He had taken the other part of the curse of Ahjvar’s goddess then, put himself in the goddess’s place to anchor it. By doing so, he made himself a necromancer, some might judge. Wizards, priests . . . gods. An enslaver of the dead. And he had asked, come with me to Nabban. Because he was afraid, and lonely, and afraid to be alone. Selfish.

And Ahjvar had said he would try, and had held him for his own comfort when the nights were bad.

If he were no god, he could not hold this curse, and Ahjvar would be dead, as he should be, and go to his road.

If he were no god, he could return to the west.

If he were no god . . . what changed, for Nabban?

The land died soulless, unknown, unloved.

And Ahj died regardless. He could not hold him here.

He could. He would not.

The Mother had not denied Ahjvar, but she had had so little will, so little left of her being. The Father could still take that decision from him. Cast Ahjvar to his road, without a word, a farewell. Do not let him burn again, do not let there be pain and fear, just let him go. He prayed that, if his heart was prayer, beyond words.

He gives himself to you. The Father’s thought, deep, resonating, stone and marrow. How do we deny that?

They had sent him to follow the sun, to find what he needed to become in a world they could not know, and Ahjvar had been what he had needed to find, the sun he had found to follow. Or the rock he had needed in that time, to brace his back against, to be able to find his stillness, to see. A man, who made the silences in which he found how to speak.

He gives himself to you, and not from fear of death. He gives himself to you—to you, through you to us, to the mountain and the river, in service of our children. How should we deny that?

He accepted that. It was forgiveness. It was his, the deed and what must follow. Father Nabban did not take Ahjvar from him.

He would let him go. That awaited, at Swajui. But there would be time for leave-taking, and so Ahjvar could go free and clean and at peace, without pain, between breath and breath, and lie among the roots of the pines with the wind and the sky over him.

You have come back, the Father said, with a devil at your side. You have brought Yeh-Lin Dotemon back to this land.

To say she would have come anyhow was a child’s argument.

“Yes,” he said aloud. “I don’t know; I’m afraid of what I’ve done, allowing her. I don’t know I’ve done right. But I see her, I . . . need her. Will need her. There is something among us that should not be. It was in the Golden City. It . . .” Eyes shut. Darkness to hold him. He shook his head. “It’s a fish, too swift for snatching.”

You would set fire against fire? All may burn.

“Maybe. But maybe not. I would trust her, a little. We are Nabban. All Nabban. For a little—” And was it he or he and he-the-Mother who had been the Wild Sister, and a dragon in the dawn of the world, who spoke those words, held that thought? “—while we are that, while the gods and goddess are growing within us unborn, we may match her. She is not what she was.”

We made you. You are what we are.

You are what we are not.

Angry.

Alive.

Newborn in the world. Do what lies before you.

Find your own road. Ours has failed us.

Find your own road.

Or make it.

They reached to enfold him. Father, Mother, Sisters, Brothers, dragons, tigers, peaks unknown and waters unnamed, forgotten, rebirths awaiting. Snow, stone, deep brown water.

My mother, my father, he told them, voiceless, and let himself fall.