For four weeks I journeyed through those mountains, in the shadow of the sacred peak of Abora. At its top, the villagers among the cliffs told me, was the shrine of the great serpent-god, the wisest and craftiest of all the ancient beings that had once built cities in the highest reaches, whose eyes were like rubies and whose feathered wings could blot out the sun. Each morning, sunlight blazed from behind the mountain, and I thought again of climbing it; by the time I had packed up my camp and saddled Bran again, the desire had burned away like fog. I returned to the road north and did not stop again until nightfall.
The sun set a little earlier each evening, and as I followed the pilgrim’s road, the forest turned from deep emerald to the yellow-brown of the kelp that grew in the warm waters of the south. From the highest places of the world to the bottom of the ocean, the turn of the seasons followed me. I had allowed my quest to stretch on for two years, and I was determined not to let another pass without Khalim by my side.
Fate, however, had other plans for me. Perhaps if I had sought the aid of the winged serpent of Mount Abora, my journey would have proceeded differently.
But my road through the mountains carried Bran and me gently. The farmers in the foothills were well-fed and generous with their bounty, and the goat-herders upon the cliffs taught me which of the hardy plants that grew among the rocks were good to eat. In each of them, I saw a little of Khalim: a broad, easy white smile in a brown face, a crown of soft dark curls, hands callused from work and not from fighting.
They were not strangers to violence, as Khalim had been. Men and women carried bows and knives and short spears when they ventured from their villages, to guard against a hostile encounter with another party as well as for hunting, and at each settlement, my weapons were examined by shrewd eyes and practiced hands before I was allowed to pass through. I held out my hands and offered what meat I had caught the day before, and they made me welcome. Thus, I learned their tongues and the lore of their wilderness, and in exchange I offered my story.
Most of them had never heard of Nagara, the village in the river valley to the north where once lived a boy who could heal with the power of the gods. It was a long road through the mountains, and human settlements grew farther and farther apart as I left the coast behind and the air grew thin and cold. The people with whom I spoke had grown old in the same town in which they had been born, or they married into the next one on the road.
I met a woman in a herding village on a vast, flat plateau, where the trees grew low and twisted in the thin soil, their outstretched branches battered by wind. She gave her name as Sarata, and though she had been married to a man of the plateau for five years, she had been born in the low country. A flood, she said, had washed away her home in a single night, and now so little remained of the village that it was as though no one had ever lived there at all. She missed the summer heat, which never quite reached the altitude of her new home, and she missed her dear younger brother, who had drowned that fateful day.
“I had thought this was a gentle land,” I told her. “I understand now that I was mistaken.”
She shook her head, setting the polished wooden ornaments at the ends of her braids rattling. “The gods are both kind and cruel. The rain waters the fields and floods the rivers. You’ll meet them on the road, if you look.”
I asked of Khalim, and she told me of a neighbor afflicted by a disease of the blood. With each passing year, it sapped his strength, until at twenty he was as feeble as an old man. His father carried him on his back up the river to see a healer, passing through three villages on the way—farther than anyone Sarata knew had ever traveled, until her own journey two years later. The young man returned still weak, but walking on his own feet beside his father, and they told a story of a young healer who had driven out the affliction with only a touch.
“Where can I find the place where this healer lived?” I asked, but Sarata only shook her head again. She had never traveled there herself, only heard tell of it, and now she could not even tell me where her village had been, to give me a place from which to start.
I thanked her for her story and for her hospitality, and I spent the evening with Bran in a shelter leaning against Sarata’s house, along with five ill-tempered goats. Perhaps they disliked me because I had eaten one of their fellows in a delicious stew prepared by Sarata’s husband.
Despite their complaints, I slept well enough, and as the sun rose bright white above the plateau, I set off on the winding road down the opposite face.
I did not dream most of the nights I spent on the road, or if I did, I no longer remember it. Bran and I walked from sunrise to sunset, the incline too steep even with its switchbacks for me to ride safely. I crawled into my bed each night too exhausted even to think.
But one evening, when the mountains stood behind me and the forest had become green again, and a soft rain fell onto the makeshift shelter I had stretched between two trees, I dreamt again of the gray beach and the stag with antlers of living wood. It stood as still as if it were carved of stone, and no wind stirred the leaves growing from its head.
“What do you want of me?” I called out, but in the still air my voice was barely more than a whisper.
The stag only continued to stare, its strange, human eyes unblinking. My question’s only answer was the sound of the sea brushing against the cold, silent shore. It stood between me and the bare winter forest, and in the esoteric logic of my dream I understood that I could not enter the wood without its permission. As it did not speak, and neither did it move, I resolved to find a different way forward. I turned from the stag and the forest and the ring of stone spires that surrounded them.
Upon the horizon, black against the strange green sky, lay a ship—a dragon-headed longship, with a single square sail and a bristle of oars held out of the water between the round curves of shields. It was so far out that I could hold out a hand and obscure it from view. Where I expected to see the silhouettes of twenty or more Northern raiders, there was only one figure upon the deck, pacing the length of the ship from bow to stern with an unhurried pace.
I did not recognize the ship. The distance was too great and the sky too dark, and my memory of the voyages of my youth was already starting to fade. If I were to swim out to it, who would I find there? Fearghus, who had appeared in my dreams before? Myself, younger and more foolish or older and wiser? Perhaps I would see my father, who was once a great sailor and explorer of the icy Northern waters, and whose will I had defied for the last time when I left to hunt the sea-serpent.
I refused to let myself hope that I would find Khalim in this vision.
It mattered not; though I believed I could swim out to the ship, it would take many hours that might be better spent searching for another path or negotiating with the silent stag. I had nothing in my possession but the tattered clothing on my back, and I considered finding a weapon.
Before I could come to a decision, however, the sound of calling birds woke me from the dream. The rain had stopped, and a faint mist hovered among the trees.
From that day on, I quickened my pace. The steep decline eased as Bran and I entered the foothills, easing our passage. As we finally crossed into the lowlands, the autumn rains began in earnest, pouring down on our heads from afternoon until morning. My boots soaked through and remained wet, and Bran’s steps slowed, though the rain kept him cool enough that he did not grow as ill as he had in the spring.
I heard the river before I saw it. It sang in a deep, rumbling voice a song of ancient power, of the rise and fall of whole civilizations to which it gave its blessings and upon which it visited its wrath. Here was the god that Sanata had told me I would meet, and it was as benevolent and cruel as Khalim’s god had been. How fitting, then, that this land was where he and Khalim had met.
The first village upon the swollen riverbank offered me a dry place to sleep in exchange for a deer, and the old men in whose house I stayed knew the village of Nagara by name. I had only to travel west for seven more days, they said, and I would find it just over the hill from a roadside shrine.
I asked them if the shrine honored the god of Phyreios, but neither had heard of such a god or a place. The god of the shrine, they said, was the god of the rice fields, and had nothing to do with a faraway city in the desert. His face was worn away by centuries of rain and wind, but I would recognize him for the sheaves of grain in his hands and the snakes beneath his feet.
I found him, just as they had said, on the sixth day. I had expected a towering statue, gazing out over the flooded fields, but the carved figure stood only two feet tall upon a smooth stone pedestal of the same height. All that remained of his face was the ridge of his brow and the hollows of his eyes, and the defeated serpents were but gentle ridges under the shallow domes of his feet. I bowed my head as I passed, but I did not offer a prayer. I had no words for this god in any of the languages I knew, only a voiceless hope that I had at last arrived at my destination.
I climbed the hill as the rains turned my path to mud. Wet and filthy, I reached the top and laid eyes upon the village that Khalim had called home.
A rope bridge lay across the river, joining the road to its mirror on the other side. A short distance away, shrouded in the heavy rain, stood a dozen small houses of clay and stone, water sluicing down their thatched roofs and into shallow channels carved into the earth. Their eaves hung low over their curtained doors like half-lidded eyes, keeping the rain from entering. Dim, flickering lights blinked at me from carved windows.
I sought shelter under a tree until the storm had passed and the villagers emerged from their homes. A man of middle age, his thick black beard carrying a single streak of white, caught sight of me as he approached the bridge to inspect it. I stood and waved to him, and he returned the gesture.
“Hello, traveler,” he said as I coaxed Bran across the bridge. “It isn’t often we see someone brave the rains to come here, of all places. What brings you to Nagara?”
“There was a young man who lived here,” I said, “by the name of Khalim. He had the gift of healing. Did you know him?”
“I did. If you’re looking to be healed, I’m afraid he is no longer here. He left for the north almost three years ago, and we yet await his return.”
I could only shake my head. “I’m looking for his family.”
The man’s friendly face dimmed. “Then it is as we feared,” he said. “Khalim will not be coming home.”
Back to Chapter XXIII: The Port of Charkand
Forward to Chapter XXV: The House of the Weaver-Woman
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