Blackdog (9 page)

Most were making for the rough tracks to the high summer pastures, though the alpine grazing would hardly be greening and snow could linger on the northern slopes for weeks yet. Hardly any continued on towards the eastern end of the lake, the road that climbed down to Serakallash and the Red Desert, or the trail that rose from that road to high Narvabarkash. The people of the mountains were reluctant to leave their own valleys whatever fate of flood or rock or war overtook them.

Some glanced at the girl and went on, too lost in their own terror to spare thought for any other. She was only a wet, dirty, lost child, clinging to a wounded dog that was now merely the size of the big guard-dogs for the herds, noticeable but not remarkable. A young man cursed them when the yaks he drove bellowed and swerved aside. An old woman perched amid bundles on a sway-backed pony shouted, “Hurry, child, before the raiders come,” but she did not rein in or look back once she had passed. The dogs among the fleeing scurried by, tails clamped low.

They were none of them fit to carry the Blackdog, not while Otokas had breath left, and choice.

We have to hide, Oto
, Attalissa said, but the coherent shape of the thought was nearly swamped in the child's terror. She had hardly been off the holy islet since the day he and Old Lady and the sister who had been Spear Lady before Kayugh carried her there, a little, week-old baby.

Go to her birth family, up in a distant tributary village? They had been well paid for the honour they endured, bearing a daughter who was no daughter. They had not seen ‘Lissa since she had been weaned and the proud mother sent back to her family and her six elder children. The woman had died a few years later, Otokas remembered, in an eighth or ninth pregnancy. The father had been poor, the village yakherd, wealthier now with the temple's gift, but still a yakherd. No warrior. A suddenly returned young girl, call her niece or cousin, would hardly go unnoticed even among his flock of children, especially when all his village knew the goddess had chosen him for her fathering.

“Oto?”

He had not answered the girl, found himself lying down across her feet without willing to do so. Even the dog weakened, as the man's soul ebbed.

“Oto! Dog, don't die, you can't die. I won't let you.”

Hush, love. The Blackdog will never leave you. I'll always be with you.

“I want
you
, Otokas!”

A family hurried past the shed, father, heavily pregnant mother, sour-faced old man, four children, all carrying bundles. The father slowed, looked back. “Are you alone, child? Did you get separated from your mama? You'd better come with us. The goddess only knows how long those brutes will stay busy in the town.” He held out a hand.

Attalissa buried her face in the dog's heavy ruff, crying, “No! No!”

He was an unhappy man, a fisherman who loved his children with a worried, remote love that stumbled at showing itself. He felt only weary tolerance of his ever-unsatisfied wife, greater loathing of her venom-tongued father. He planned to go up to his wife's family's summer grazing hut, no further, come back down as soon as the warlord had settled into some firmer control of the town and his bandits. What choice had he? His living was the water and his boat. A weak-souled man, and no fighter, either.

Otokas was cold and weary, and even the dog's body hurt. When it could no longer hold him in life he would die, and it would take what host it could find, any man near, willing or no, and break him to its will if it had to, for Attalissa's sake. But that was not a fate he would wish on even a raider, and a man so taken could prove a poor guardian for a child—for the short time such an unwilling host would survive, before madness ate his mind away and death took him in turn.

The fisherman might be the best Attalissa could hope for, for now.

But the man had already shrugged and hurried on after his family.

Not worthy. None of them had been worthy of Attalissa's trust and love. Not one had stopped with any real will to help the child, no one had cared anything for a lost human girl, and if they could not care for an abandoned child, what right had they to say they loved their goddess?

Then there was no one at all, until a young man clattered past on a dun stallion, a tall, fine-boned beast with a swallow's grace, desert-bred.

“Damn!”

The man cursed and circled back to the girl and the dog. No local man; he was from one of the tribes of the Western Grass, the dry hills west of the deserts, beyond the great river, the Kinsai-av. His beardless, broad-cheekboned face and arms were dark with interlacing tattoos, twisting and knotted cats and birds and serpents, black and blue. Dark-brown hair swung over his shoulders in dozens of fine braids, each knotted with red yarn, and he wore a sabre at his side. The small buckler slung at his back was newly scored and notched, and fresh blood stained his leather jerkin.

The Blackdog snarled, Otokas seeing threat there, thinking
raider
, lurching to his feet. Attalissa stood up too, a hand fisted in his fur.

“Come on, little sister,” the man said. “You can't stay here alone. Give me your hand.” He eyed the Blackdog warily. “Sayan bless the beast, he must have fought well for you, but he's dying. You can't stay here with him.”

Attalissa stared up at him, wide-eyed. He grabbed for her over the dog's back, but Otokas spun fast as a striking snake and seized his arm. And held him, only held him, teeth never breaking the skin. The man froze, and the horse laid back its ears. Attalissa stood on the toes of her bare feet, supporting herself on the dog, and stretched to touch the man's leaning face.

“He's not a raider,” she said.
Let him go, Oto. He doesn't mean to hurt me.

Otokas released him. No, no malice in the man's sudden grab, just practical haste, to carry the child off to some greater safety than a crumbling shed and a dying dog.

He was foreign, a Westgrasslander, a traveller but not, from the look of him, a godless and rootless man. And a warrior. Otokas let the Blackdog's awareness slip into the stranger, intruding deeply on unguarded mind and memory.

The man stayed where he was, swaying slightly in the saddle, his green-flecked hazel eyes gone wide, pupils swallowing them black.

He was Holla-Sayan, of the tribe who farmed among the folded hills of the god Sayan, the Sayanbarkash. He had been a restless youth, midmost in a family of five brothers. The folk of the Western Grass were not nomads like those of the Great Grass in the north, but they did not build towns like the folk of the Desert Road or the Westrons. They linked their lives in extended families and tribes, lived in solitary homesteads rather than villages. They depended mostly on their sheep, but also planted wheat and rye, bred some horses, a few woolly, two-humped camels, and the blue-grey cattle they valued as much as draft animals as for their meat or milk. Their flocks meant more than their fields; they were always a few dry springs away from picking up and moving, still possessed of the nomad's ease with drifting.

Holla-Sayan had left to work as a mercenary, a guard with the caravans that tied the kingdoms of the north to the distant eastern lands. He had come up to Lissavakail the day before, while his caravan halted to rest a few days and water its beasts at Serakallash's oasis. He came looking for a woman, the weaver Timhine, but she was gone, her brother told him, scowling. She had married a man from a village in the higher valleys last autumn and gone, tired of breaking her heart over a homeless swordsman who never came by but a few days in the year. So Holla-Sayan had gone to Lissavakail's one wineshop instead, and settled in to getting drunk on the thin mountain beer. Imported wine was beyond his current means, since he had given all his wages from his last trip to his youngest brother, who wanted to marry.

But then the bronze bells of the temple began to ring.

Holla stood with the defenders until sometime in the darkness of the night, when it was clear the island town was lost. The raiders were no small band, intent on the most gain for the least loss. There was something unnatural in the way they pressed on, ignoring their own fallen. They made him think of the berserkers of Northron tales, or the drug-mad assassins of southern Pirakul's tiger cult: some band of obsessed devotees of a mad god. But they were of no one village or clan and could have no one god. Among them were brown- or olive-skinned, dark-haired folk, mountain men as well as tattooed men and women of the deserts and the Western Grass like himself, but their tattoos, the glimpses he had time to recognize, named them of several score disparate folk. Most were men and women of the Great Grass to the north of the deserts, a few of those with bear-masked helmets, bear's-tooth pendants, or ritual scars on their cheeks imitating the slash of a bear's claws, a new cult that had begun showing up among Grasslander travellers. A good few were tall, pale, prow-nosed Northrons with eyes like the sky, blue and cloud-grey, and a very few were gold-skinned Nabbani.

Whatever had brought them together, they were too many and too unrelenting to be overcome by Lissavakail's fishermen. There had been a handful of Attalissa's sisters among the defenders at first, but they had been singled out and cut down early on. No more had come from the temple, though among the militiamen there had been pleas and prayers cried out to the lake.

While the surviving Lissavakaili scattered to make separate stands or flights in the narrow streets, Holla-Sayan reclaimed his borrowed horse from the bear-masked Grasslander who was trying to steal it from the inn's fowl-yard, rode over the Grasslander's body into the lake, and swam ashore. It was not his town, they were not his people, and nobody was paying him to die for them. The best thing the people of Lissavakail could do would be to come to terms and pay the raiders off. Dying on the terraces of Lissavakail once it was lost did no one any good.

Holla waited out the rest of the night in the shelter of a walnut grove, wet, cold, and shivering. His coat, which had been bundled behind his saddle, was lost, as was his hat. A cut on his right forearm throbbed, wrapped in a cotton headscarf that had been meant as a gift for Timhine.

She was well out of it, at least.

Come the first lightening of the sky, Holla began to follow the winding trail along the steep southern shore of the lake, to work his way around to the east and the long, twisting track down to the foothills and the Red Desert in the north. There was no more direct route. The mountains of the Pillars of the Sky were savage, blade-edged towers, and offered few paths even to those bred to them; none he was fool enough to risk in the dark. There were still fires on the island, and the shouts and whoops of drunken raiders. The sooner he was out of the mountains, the better. He had no desire to find himself pressed into mercenary service for some bandit warlord.

But he could not ride on past the child.

Holla's anger at those who would ignore a crying child by the road was almost as great as that at the raiders, who had ruined a good bout of self-pity and slain honest folk in their own streets and homes and left him feeling half a coward, for leaving them—

—but anger seeped out of him now, and a thick, autumn-lake fog filled his mind, drowned him, turned everything cool and distant. He slid from the stallion and collapsed on the spring-damp earth.

Holla could hear voices, soft, urgent, whispering in his head.

You can't die!
The girl crouched by the dog, which was larger than any sheepdog he had seen, and more wolflike, though the head she wrapped in her arms was broader. Its flanks and muzzle were crossed with newly healed scars, but the stump of what looked like a spear-shaft was lodged under a foreleg, and blood soaked its black fur, puddled where it stood. Unnaturally yellow-green eyes, it had, too, unsettling even in this distant, floating dream.
You can't let Otokas die.

The dog licked the girl's tear-streaked face.

I can't live with this. It's beyond my—the Blackdog's—healing. He'll look after you, this one. I know. The Blackdog always knows. So do you. Trust yourself.

“Dog, dog!” she wailed, her weeping silent no longer. And, “Otokas, no!”

It was not her voice, the girl's voice, in Holla's head, but one older and richer, a woman's voice. And the other…

It's a hard thing to ask of a lowland stranger, unprepared. Will you look after her? Guard her and love her and keep her safe, and bring her home to the lake when the time is right?

The dog's eyes were burning into his own, a yellow-green fire he distantly hoped was some nightmare dreaming.

Holla-Sayan found he could move, the fog in his mind clearing, and he rolled upright, squatted on his heels. Hesitantly, he put a hand on the dog's head.

“I know this story,” he said, his voice unsteady. “I've heard…there is a demon dog guards the incarnate goddess here, and it possesses men.”

The dog…laughed, maybe, hacking, and coughed blood on his boot.

Spirit. Not demon, Grasslander. There's a difference. When did a demon ever deign to serve any but the Old Great Gods themselves? My name's Otokas. The Blackdog.

“She's
the goddess of the lake?
She's
Attalissa?”

The girl, all childish wounded dignity, scowled at him. “I am.”

Please. The Blackdog spirit needs a human host.

Holla-Sayan lurched to his feet, a hand on the stallion's neck to support himself as the world heaved and tipped under him. “What, me? No! I'm not from Lissavakail. I'm not one of Attalissa's folk! I know my own god. I don't belong here.”

She can't stay here. Tamghat—the warlord who leads the raiders—is no ordinary man. You didn't see him, I know. I did. I don't know what he is. Wizard, at least, and more. Nothing I could fight and survive.

“Then what do you expect me to do about him?”

Hide her. Protect her till she comes into her full strength, and can face Tamghat herself.

Run away. Ride away and leave the child to die at the hands of the raiders, or be sold into the Nabbani abomination of slavery, which tore a soul from its god and its place in the world?