A Wasteland of My God's Own Making Read online

  Soon Djaga, Afua, and five others were ready to take their final test. Rattling circlets were tied around their wrists and ankles. They were granted spears and tall, wickerwork shields. They were stood in a tight circle in the center of the ritual’s arena. And then seven full initiates of Sjado’s temple were arrayed around them with spears and shields of their own.

  The task was simple: draw blood before submitting or being forced to withdraw. Not so easy considering how well the initiates to Sjado’s temple were trained, but something that young aspirants were often able to do on their first or second ritual day. But Afua hadn’t been convinced it would be enough. She’d wanted to impress. So had Djaga. But now all she could think about was the stolen anklet and how it weighed on her.

  “Through war we find peace,” the high priestess was saying.

  “Through war we find peace,” Djaga and the others intoned.

  And then the high priestess swung a whip over her head and sent it to cracking over the aspirant’s heads. Immediately, the initiates closed in. Djaga lowered in her stance, ready to defend herself, but the woman across from her was so swift she got in a strike against Djaga’s shin before Djaga was even set. Djaga winced and backed away, lowering her shield. But when she did that her opponent thrust the spear lightning quick and scored another strike against her leading shoulder.

  Djaga tried to counterattack, but her thrust was met by the orange shield. Her heart pounded in her chest. The sounds around her—the battle cries of the warriors, the shouts of the crowd, the screaming of the children—all became a wash, a numbing rattle akin to the monsoons of the wet season as rain drove hard against the grasses. That was when Djaga first felt it. A presence. Like the one she’d felt as a child when she went out alone to the grasslands at night. It was an indescribable fear, surely the presence of Odokōn, the god of death who came for all. Djaga had run back to the village to her home. She’d buried her face in her mother’s breast and cried, and her mother had consoled her until she’d fallen asleep at last.

  There would be no running now, and Odokōn had already come for her mother. This was a thing undeniable. A demand from Sjado herself for Djaga to fulfill her desires. Battle leads to salvation. War is how we survive. Djaga felt the goddess move within her. Felt her take up her shield, felt her heft her spear. Sjado moved, sinuous as a mamba, spear darting, sinking deep into flesh.

  She heard grunts of pain, heard shouts of surprise. She became the kingfisher, flitting between dull thrusts of weapons held in deadened hands. She became the acacia, stout against the blows brought against her. She became the midnight finch, drinking the blood of her enemies. One fell, a spear cutting her throat. Another dropped holding her stomach where the spear had pierced her through. Others came. Tried to swarm her. But she was the wind. She was the storm. She was the strike of lightning and the bellow of thunder.

  One by one, all that stood against her fell to the ground, until none remained in the arena but the dead. She held her spear to the sky and released the almighty rage that still burned in her veins. She shouted for any to come near. But none would. They’d seen the goddess in her, and they feared.

  She nearly went to them, nearly charged to take more with her spear. Among them, however, she spied a woman, staring at her from just outside the circle, her spear, still to hand, pointing at Djaga as if she feared she would be the next victim. It was Afua.

  The storm winds blew, tossing the horsetails while all else was still.

  You left the arena.

  The wind blew, cool against her burning skin.

  You left, and this was all your idea.

  The wind blew, and the rain began to fall.

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  I’ve found a way!

  The words hung between Afua and Djaga like a mirage. This was trickery, Djaga knew, nothing more. She already knew the way to release, and it was through atonement, through giving Sjado what she wanted. One day the two-faced god would judge her worthy of becoming her own woman once more. Not before. And yet the possibility of release, of Afua knowing some secret Djaga had overlooked, was so tantalizing that Djaga found herself saying, “How?”

  “Do you see the man standing at the end of that pier?”

  Djaga turned to look. On the pier stood a stout Malasani man. His hair was cut straight over his brow, an echo of sorts to his simple black tunic. He had a rough-and-tumble look about him—an ever-hungry wolf, sated for the moment. She’d never met the man but she recognized him immediately. She’d seen him twice, in the killing pits.

  “That’s Hathahn,” Djaga said, already starting to understand what Afua wanted of her.

  “Very good.”

  “You wish me to fight him. In the killing pits.”

  Afua bowed her head, the sly nod of a merchant toward a particularly wealthy patron. “Your final bout flies ever nearer, does it not?”

  “I refuse to kill, Afua. You’ve been here in Sharakhai long enough. You must know that by now.”

  “Yes, I’ve been watching you. I’ve asked around the pits as well. But I know the girl you were.” Afua’s face turned sour. “You hope to appease Sjado by toying with your food and never eating it? You should have known even before your first bout, but surely you know it by now—it will never work, Djaga. Sjado demands her due.”

  “You’ve found your own peace, then?”

  Afua smiled, an expression as sad as a thunderstorm over the grasslands. “I’ve done my killing. But I cannot be free until you are. We are bound. How could it be any other way?”

  It made sense. They had entered the arena together. Afua might have left before it was done, but what would that mean to the two-faced god? Sjado would have punished her as well, and why not bind them together like Sjado was bound to Jonsu?

  “Is that it, then? You wish to find release if I kill Hathahn and appease Sjado?”

  “You are a warrior, Djaga, a thing you deny despite playing at war in the pits. Sjado’s wrath will be quenched only when you kill, not before. When that is done, I will lead us both to Jonsu’s peace.”

  Djaga looked to where the brute, Hathahn, stood at the end of the pier. He was watching them as if he were curious, nothing more, though this had as much to do with him as it did Djaga and Afua. “Just like that? He’ll lie down and let me kill him?”

  “Of course not. He’s long heard of you, and when I told him I might convince you to join him in the killing pits for your final bout, he quickly agreed. To his own god would go the glory.”

  Djaga crossed her arms, turning away from the wind and the biting sand for a moment until it had died down. “I took a vow.”

  Afua’s face screwed up in anger. “Wake up, girl! Who do you think was it that took those lives? Was it you? Me? No, it was Sjado herself. She was angry with us, true, but she was showing us her very nature. I have been haunted by her and Jonsu ever since. Neither of us will find peace until we atone for our sins.”

  “I took a vow.”

  Afua stared at her for a time, but then she huffed like one of the desert’s bone crushers. “You would deny yourself peace?”

  “I haven’t seen you in a dozen years. After all this time, after abandoning me in Kundhun, after leaving me to wonder what had happened to you, you darken my doorway reciting honeyed tales of how I might be freed from the chains of the gods, and you would have me believe that it’s for my benefit?”

  Afua raised her hands to the sky, shook them as if she were calling for rain. “I want to set things right, Djaga! I want to right at least one of the wrongs I’ve committed.” When Djaga continued to stare coldly, a crack formed in Afua’s composed face. “Do I not deserve some peace in this life?”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “You must.”

  “You may not believe that vows have meaning, Afua, but I do.” She began heading back toward Nadín’s ship, the supple sand grasping at the soles of her boots. “Go. Return to Hathahn and tell him you’ll need to find another, for I’ll not fight hi
m, no matter how much you plead.”

  ❖ ❖ ❖

  Nadín stood at the ship’s small stove, stirring a pot of soup. “So she left you there to face the tribunal alone?”

  It was well past sundown, but it had taken a long while to explain it all to Nadín. Djaga had never told her the truth. Not all of it anyway. When she’d learned more, she’d wanted the rest, and Djaga had finally relented. It was the lowest moment of Djaga’s life, a thing she was shamed to even speak of, but it she were going to start a new life with Nadín, she needed to share it or she’d be living a lie.

  “Yes, she left me, though I don’t blame her for it. Not anymore. The tribunal would have ordered her death. I’m sure of it.”

  “Maybe she deserved to die.”

  Djaga shrugged. “I don’t decide who lives and who dies.”

  Nadín frowned at that, but said nothing in return. After ripping two hunks of bread so dark it was nearly black and dropping it into the waiting bowls, she turned and leaned against the hull. Her arms were crossed and she was giving Djaga that stare or hers, the one that said she wouldn’t be satisfied until she knew everything. “Why didn’t they kill you?”

  “They were scared.” Djaga could still remember it, the look of fear in their eyes as they stared at her, blood coating her spear, dead bodies all around. “Every single one of them.”

  “Scared you would fight them?”

  “The goddess was in me, Nadín. They’d seen it, and they were afraid she’d come for everyone else. They didn’t know yet what Afua and I had done, and even after I’d confessed they still wondered at Sjado’s intentions. No one had witnessed her like that in generations. Kill me, and they risked Sjado’s wrath.”

  Nadín ladled soup into bowls, dousing the hunks of day-old bread, then topped it with a sprinkling of chopped parsley. She set one before Djaga, then took the chair across from her at the small galley table. She blew on the soup, then slurped a spoonful noisily.

  This is what I want, Djaga thought. Me and Nadín on a ship, far away from the violence of Osman’s pits.

  In the days ahead, she planned to sail with Nadín and trade with the people of her tribe far to the west of Sharakhai. They’d sail to other tribes and trade with them as well. Then they’d return to Sharakhai and sell the goods and use a portion of the proceeds buy more to fill their hold, enough for another voyage out to the baking sands. It would be a simple life, but a life Djaga would treasure. If only she could enjoy it. Nadín had been after her for months to leave the pits once and for all.

  Djaga had scoffed at first. “I know nothing else,” she’d told Nadín one night as they lay in bed.

  “I’ll teach you,” Nadín had said, leaning in to kiss her.

  “I’m an old lion, with teeth and claws and little else.”

  “Are you saying you can’t learn”—she ran her fingers along the riddle of scars that marked Djaga’s arm—“or that you don’t wish to?”

  Djaga grabbed a fistful of Nadín’s hair, pulled her near, and kissed her soft lips more deeply than Nadín had done a moment ago. “I’m saying I am a beast trapped in a Kundhuni’s skin. I’m saying no amount of hoping will change that.”

  “It will only take time, my sweet.”

  Time, Djaga thought. It sounded so reasonable. More and more, though, as the day of her retirement approached, she worried it was only a foolish wish and nothing more. She hadn’t been able to find the peace she’d hoped would come with the knowledge that she would soon leave the pits. And now she worried that it would never come. Already the itch to fight was on her. Already it was making her want to push Nadín away. Soon it would become a need, and then, if it wasn’t quenched in some way, the goddess would come to occupy her form as she had in Kundhun.

  I must find a way. I will die before I let anything happen to Nadín.

  “You’re looking at me like that again.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re lost.”

  I am lost. In a wasteland of my god’s own making.

  Nadín motioned to Djaga’s bowl. “Eat.”

  Djaga picked up the spoon and used its edge to hack off a spoonful of bread. It was good, the two together, the silky, saffron-laced broth with the earthy bread.

  “You never saw Afua again?” Nadín asked.

  “Not until today.”

  “The way she strutted up to my ship,” Nadín said under her breath, “acting as if she’s some queen from the grasslands.”

  As if her words had summoned it, there came the sound of footsteps on the pier outside their ship. But the tread was heavy, the stride long. “Djaga Akoyo?”

  Djaga didn’t recognize the man’s voice. It was deep, resonant. “Who’s come?”

  The reply came in a thick Malasani accent. “It is Hathahn. I’ve come to speak to you and your woman.”

  Nadín frowned, her eyes flitting between the hatch door and Djaga. What does he want? she mouthed to Djaga.

  Djaga could only shrug. She had no idea. When Djaga raised her eyebrows, asking Nadín for her permission for Hathahn to board her ship, Nadín nodded, though none of her nervousness subsided.

  “Come,” Djaga said.

  In a moment, Hathahn’s ample backside was taking the ladder down into the hold. He wore a striped tunic of white and red. He had thick bracelets of beaten steel on his well-muscled arms and a torc of twisted gold around his neck, a thing that did more to accentuate the corded muscles along his shoulders than the wide neck of his tunic did.

  Nadín’s reaction to Hathahn’s sudden arrival was anything but pleased, but she still stood and motioned to the stove. “Would you like some soup?”

  Hathahn raised his hands, forestalling her. “I cannot stay long, thank you. I’ve only come to speak to Djaga for a moment, and you as well, if you’d care to hear my tale.”

  “Very well,” Nadín said, and before Djaga could say anything against her, she sat and motioned Hathahn to the nearby bench that doubled as their bed when pulled out and laid flat. Djaga wouldn’t have denied her anyway, for she had no doubt this was something Nadín would need a voice in.

  “Where do I begin?” Hathahn said, his legs spread wide, his hands on his knees. Gods, the man was huge. He made the galley look tiny by his mere presence. He waved one of his meaty platters-for-hands toward Djaga. “My Afua came to you today. She told you a tale that would appeal to your sense of, shall we say, self-preservation.”

  “Self-preservation!” Nadín, her soup forgotten, crossed her arms over her chest. “You call fighting a man like you self-preservation?”

  Hathahn nodded. “We preserve ourselves in this life, and we preserve ourselves for the next, yes? We must think not only of our bodies, but our very souls. Unless I’m sadly mistaken”—he fixed his steely gaze on Djaga—“this is a thing that concerns you. Does it not?”

  Djaga was beginning to get annoyed with her life being interrupted. “Get on with it.”

  The smile on Hathahn’s broad face was a knowing one. “We worry about many things. Our health. Our livelihood.” He turned his gaze on Nadín. “Our ability to provide for our loved ones.” He paused then, leaning back, the wooden bench creaking beneath his weight. “You know that I’m a slave, yes?”

  “I know,” Djaga said.

  He shrugged. “Your look shows pity, but in truth I’ve had a fine life. I was raised to fight. I enjoyed it. I grew good at it.” He smiled and leaned forward, eyeing Djaga with a jackal grin. “Very good at it.” He shrugged again. “But the teeth of all dogs grow blunt. Our bite becomes less sharp. You must know.”

  Djaga stared, hating this reminder of all she was.

  “My master hails from Malasan,” Hathahn went on. “I have four wives there. I have twelve children. It’s been two years since I’ve seen them, and I have no illusions that I’ll ever see them alive again in this life. I live to fight. And now that I’ve risen as high as I can, I will fight until I am killed. Why? Because I care only for two things. That my fami
ly will prosper and grow, and that I will stand on the shore of the river, celebrated by our gods as my family crosses over to meet me, one by one. My master will not only provide for them, he will see to their welfare, for in me they have a champion of Malasan. A warrior like Shonokh incarnate.”

  “I grow tired of your tale, Hathahn.”

  “You do?” He laughed, a deep rumble that filled that confined space. “Then you’ll bore yourself to tears when your days in the pits are done. I tell you these things so that you will know my intent. I want this to be—how do they say it in Kundhun?—clear as the spring rains.” He eyed her up and down, a feral look in his dark eyes. “I will not lie down for you, Djaga Akoyo. I will not lie down so that Afua can give you this gift, so that you may be released from your foolishness. I would not lie down if your bitch goddess, Sjado, were she to stand before me now. Be it you or a Blade Maiden or a King of Sharakhai, I will kill the dog who stands against me in the pits or I will die fighting to my last breath. When I depart these shores, I will go to the farther fields with my sword in hand and my head held high.”

  “Why are you telling her this?” Nadín asked, her face aghast.

  Hathahn didn’t look at her. His eyes were only for Djaga. “I tell you this so that you will know. With you and I in the pit? It will be a fight that will summon the eyes of all the gods. Malasan, the Great Shangazi, even the gods of the lazy hills of Kundhun.” He stood, hunkered over in the low space, then poked her in the chest, and tried to do so again until Djaga slapped his hand away and stood herself. “Were you to fight me, your god will listen. And if she doesn’t?” He spat wetly onto the floorboards between them. “Then she never will. That is the promise a fight with me will bring.”

  He swung his gaze to Nadín, then back to Djaga. He looked coiled, ready to spring. Djaga readied herself, but then Hathahn relaxed. He licked his lips and smiled, then turned and strode toward the stairs. “Or fight another sad dog, and see then how your life with your soft tribeswoman turns out.”