"Nameless"

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"This is your only chance."

The words came cold. The pain would come later. Agan kept his hands flat against his thighs and his breath slow, and he did not yet look at the man who had spoken.

The Eagle let the silence do its work. It was the work of all his silences: to be received, and to weigh.

Then he finished it.

"The Mountain does not follow men who cannot ride."

Agan looked at the pine resin. The old blood under it, gone so far into the wood that the wood had become it. He looked at the furs beneath his goat-wool sandals---pelts of things taken in other men's bondings, and he let the chill finish moving through him before he raised his eyes.

He stood where the dais required: three beast-lengths from the throne, close enough to be seen, far enough to be killed. The distance was not an accident.

Agan's summit wrap rose past his jaw, black wool thick enough to swallow his lower face. The thorn-cloak at his shoulders was deep red---second compound colors.

His eyes rose to the dais.

The throne was a controlled explosion of thorn‑wood: branches trained and sharpened across centuries, fountaining black against the summit rock. Where a man sat it had been hollowed and rubbed smooth by the hands and blood of everyone who had sat there before. The inner face still wore its thorns; a man who sat the Nest sat alert, or he bled.

His uncle sat alert.

The Eagle carried his father's bones---the long jaw, the heavy brow---but his eyes were grey, the old‑song grey reserved for the first man who climbed the summit and did not come down. Agan's eyes were amber. That was the problem. Where Agade had been sharpened by wanting, this man had been worn thin by holding---fifty seasons of thorns that measured the cost. A circlet of obsidian thorns sat low on his brow, its points smoothed by years; he did not touch it.

The Eagle had four wives and a keep full of concubines, and no child in any of their beds. Everyone knew. No one spoke of it. The Nest ran through Agade now. Through Agade, to Agan.

He had looked at the thorn-throne once. At the worn hollow where a hundred Eagles had sat and bled. At his uncle's scarred knuckles. The question had arrived then---Could he do it?---and arrived again now, in this room, with no answer because he had no beast and the Nest did not open for Nameless men.

He kept his face still.

The Eagle did not speak again.

Agan met the grey eyes. "I will make the Mountain proud."

The Eagle held his gaze a moment longer. Then he inclined his head, which meant blessing and dismissal.

Agan pressed two fingers to his chest where a scar should have been. He held the gesture a beat too long, then extended his palm toward the throne.

"The Nest honors me."

He stepped back three paces, turned, and walked.

The skulls watched him go---beast-skulls mostly, ribbed into the ceiling and walls, vertebrae carved into benches where the council would sit when the Nest sat in judgment. The furs on the ground took the sound of his sandals and gave nothing back.

He kept walking.

The cold had settled somewhere behind his chest. It would be there for hours yet---the Nest's particular gift, a chill that had nothing to do with altitude and everything to do with being measured by a man who wore thorns like a second spine. Agan had been found wanting before. He had never been found wanting by the Eagle. The difference was a door closing somewhere in his chest, and he did not turn around to watch it shut.

The Nest released him onto the long stair. The cold came with him.

Then heat found him.

The mountain's breath rose through cracked mouths in the rock, the throat-stones that warmed the high halls and the high baths and the high men. Steam drifted across the stair. He passed through it without pausing.

He could still see the compounds stepping down the mountain below him: his family's heavy wool near the summit, dyed dark enough to pass for black. The merchant compounds lighter. The crafters lighter still. The valley folk at the mountain's foot, where the scarves were rough and thin. The whole architecture of privilege, readable by what men wore. He was stepping out of it.

He kept walking. The steam thinned.

His family waited at the Gate of Ancestors, where the carved dead leaned out of the rock to see who was leaving.

Bruma stood a half-pace off their father's shoulder, seventeen and already schooled into the family's stillness, and when Agan's eyes found him he looked back steady and said nothing, which was the whole of what brothers said to each other in this house. Asali hung nearer the carved dead than she was supposed to, not quite in the family's shape and not quite out of it, the way she'd always stood at the edge of any room that asked her to pick a side of it.

His father stood like a piece of the gate. His summit wrap was wound three times around his neck, heavier and darker than Agan's. The thorn‑cloak matched his son's in red and black, but the bronze clasp was older, worn to a mirror by forty‑five seasons of use.

Agade had the family's amber eyes and gave nothing through them; he never had. He had not put a hand on his son in seasons. Touch was a language Agade had never been taught, and he had not gone looking for it. He had others. Agan had spent eighteen seasons learning to read every one.

His mother stepped forward first.

Choge of the Delta, twenty years at altitude and still carrying the river in her skin, that brown-gold sheen the mountain dryness had never managed to take. She took Agan's hand and pressed something into it and folded his fingers over it with both of hers.

It was a bead. An uncut akobi, rough-faced, raw, on a plain cord. The warmth came before she spoke, pulsing against his palm.

"This was mined the day you were born," she said. "I had it set aside."

She lifted her hand to his face and held it there. She said nothing more, and there was nothing he could have given back that the two of them did not already know.

He wanted to open his hand and look at the bead. He didn't. She was still watching.

Agade spoke.

"Come home having ridden. The gate does not open for less."

It sounded like a threat. Agan didn't need to be told he was a problem his father had not yet solved.

Agade nodded once.

Agan bowed.

◇ ◆ ◇

Before he met his travel companions, Agan changed his summit wear for rags. The wagon waited at the foot of the stair. It was a goru, a single covered cart, sun-bleached canvas over a wooden ribcage, drawn by a shaggy ox with its horns filed to stubs. It was also common and forgettable. A cart that carried hides to market and came back empty.

The goru-master was an old woman in undyed wool. Her face was a map of scars, the lines crossing and recrossing until they made a territory of their own. Her hands on the reins did not move. Agan's father had chosen her. There was nothing else Agan needed to know.

He climbed up under the woven cover in the rough wool disguise of a man who owned one set of clothes. The wool was right. His hands were wrong; long, unbroken, a compound heir's hands, soft where a laborer's would be hard, and he kept them in his lap, where the difference would not announce itself on the road.

Deka was already inside.

He sat against the far rib of the cart with his beast curled at his feet. A kavu, gold from nose to tail, a mountain cat built long for stone. One amber eye opened as Agan settled. It moved over him, found nothing in him worth the trouble, and closed.

"Took you long enough," Deka said. His spear lay across his lap. He was already running a whetstone down the blade in short, even strokes that didn't pause.

"I was saying goodbye to my family."

"I said goodbye to mine in the time it took to walk to the gate."

Before the wagon could move, Agan turned to him. "In the camp. Don't use my name. Or my compound. Just Agan of Okot."

Deka looked at him. He looked for a long time, the whetstone still moving in his hand. "They'll know anyway. You walk like a highborn. You talk like a highborn. You're sitting in a grain goru wearing borrowed wool and you still look like you're waiting for someone to bring you folded fur."

"Then let them wonder. Don't give them the answer."

The whetstone stopped. Deka's expression shifted into something Agan couldn't read---amusement, maybe, or a kind of weary contempt.

"You think hiding your name will keep you safe," Deka said. "It won't. The things that want you dead don't care what you call yourself."

He went back to the blade. He said nothing else.

The goru lurched, and the ox carried them west, and Agan watched Okot climb away behind them. He could see the summit, the Nest, the thorn-tree black against the cloud, until the road turned and the mountain took itself out of his sight.

The old woman held the reins and did not speak. Deka honed his spear, the whetstone going down the blade now in longer, even strokes, hour after hour, until the sound was part of the road.

On the second night, they stopped at a water-stop cut into a rock outcropping where the savanna began to thin. The old woman built a fire and sat with her back to the stone. She had not spoken since they left the mountain. She did not start now.

Deka fed his kavu, then himself, then lay down with the giant cat's flank as a pillow. He did not offer Agan anything. He had brought his own food, his own bedroll, his own beast---all the things Agan was still learning he needed. Agan sat against the rock and watched the stars wheel. His hand kept moving toward the bead through his tunic, and kept stopping. His own skin was cold. The bead was not.

Something moved out in the dark---a good distance off, where the scrub thickened before the salt. A shape, low and heavy, crossing between the rocks. The ox shifted in its traces and made a low sound.

The old woman's hand went to her knife. She did not stand. She did not speak. She just waited, still as the rock behind her, until whatever it was moved on and the night settled back into its usual sounds. Then her hand came off the knife, and she fed another stick to the fire. The kavu had not opened its eyes. Deka had not moved.

Agan did not sleep well.

In the morning, Deka kicked dirt over the ashes while Agan moped, staring back at the mountains. He did it without being asked. He did it because it needed doing, and Agan had not done it, and the correction was quiet and required no words at all.

Later that day, they stopped to water the ox at a stream that ran thin and brown through a cut in the savanna grass. The water was low. The dry season had been long. The old woman stood at the bank while the beast drank, her face unreadable.

Deka stripped off his tunic and knelt upstream, splashing water over his head and neck. The scars on his back were old and white---the same marks Agan wore. They had bled on the same stone as boys. That was a long time ago.

Deka finished washing and walked past him without a glance. He pulled dried meat from his pack, tore a strip with his teeth, and began feeding his kavu by hand. The cat took the meat delicately, its amber eyes half-closed. It ate better than Agan had eaten in two days.

"Nothing," Deka said, to the cat.

Agan turned to look at him.

"Two nights on the road and you brought nothing." Deka tore another strip. "No food. No bedroll. No beast. What did you think this was? A progress? A tour of the lowlands with your father's guard?"

"I brought what I was given."

"You brought what your mother gave you. Your mother is not a store-keeper." Deka fed the last of the meat to his kavu and wiped his hands on a rag. He still did not look at Agan. "You didn't pack because you've never had to pack. You thought someone would do it for you. Someone always does."

He walked back to the goru without waiting for an answer.

Agan sat by the stream. The old woman watched the water. The ox had finished drinking.

Agan knew why he was hungry.

His mother had tried to pack him food; his father forbade it. Agade told the store‑keeper to make no provisions and told the old woman to keep her share. He had given Agan the speech and the rags and nothing else.

You want him to starve? his mother had asked, the night before he left.

I want him to learn, his father had said. He's had eight seasons of teachers and council sessions and men bowing to a boy who can't find his own feet. None of it has made him a man. Hunger might.

Agan had overheard it through the door of his father's private hut. He had stood outside with his hand on the stone and listened to his parents argue about whether he would eat on the road to the war camp. He had not announced himself. He had not defended himself. He had gone back to his hut and packed nothing, because his father had told the store-keeper not to help him, and he didn't know how to do it himself.

That was the worst part. His father was right.

On the fourth day, a vibration came up through the cart bed. It was low, nearly nothing, a hum at the edge of his hearing that vanished whenever he turned his head to catch it. He thought it was the road. Then he thought it was the wind.

By the fifth day, when the salt flats opened white and endless to the north, he had stopped thinking about the humming at all. It had become part of the landscape.

He had a word. His father had given it to him at fifteen, the seed-word that was meant to lead him to his beast: stone-that-breathes. He had walked the high passes for moons with it in his mouth. He had said it into caves and down frozen streams. The mountain had handed him back his own echo for three seasons.

Nothing under the stone had ever spoken back.

The First Gate came up out of the dusk; a dark smudge laid on white. Rammed red earth and black stone, built where the savanna died and the salt desert began. Nothing lived north of the wall. Only salt, white to the edge of the world.

The old woman drew the ox to a halt while the walls were still a good way off.

They climbed down. The wind off the salt hit Agan full in the face, raw and dry. Deka dropped beside him, his kavu pouring down after, gold against the white, and the cat's paws touched the salt, and its ears went flat to its skull. It had caught a scent, and it did not like what it had caught.

They started for the gate.

The humming found him again before he was halfway there. It wasn't a sound so much as a pressure---behind his teeth, in the hinge of his jaw, low in his chest---pulling outward through bone.

Agan's chest tightened; the pull had direction, and it was downward.

He knew that pull. At fifteen it had been a tightness under his breastbone---an answer he followed over stone and ice, until the answer stopped and he came home Nameless. He forgot it like a bruise until something pressed and it flared. The mountain was indifferent.

He felt it now. Stronger than the passes had ever given him. Coming up through the ground.

He took his pack first, then his spear. The spear was short, dark-hafted, the blade a machete's width. He had drilled with it for years and never once used it to bleed anything that mattered. He strapped the pack across his shoulder and kept the spear in his hand.

The old woman caught his wrist as he passed the goru.

Her grip was iron. She did not look at him; her eyes stayed on the dark shape of the Gate.

"That bead," she said. "Keep it close. It will warm you."

"What do you---"

She let him go.

Deka laughed once and started without him.

"I go no further," she said. The cart turned, and the ox carried her back the way they had come, and she did not look around.

Agan stood at the winding road. The gate was old salt and stone, clouded and thick, cut into blocks that had been holding back the desert since before the five Lands had their first men. The seams wept something dark in the heat. Overhead, three lines crossed by a single horizontal: the mark of the threshold.

Against this structure, he was nothing. A smudge already being erased by the distance.

It opened without sound. The humming found his teeth again.

Deka was already through.

Agan did not move.

The salt wind was the only sound. It tasted of nothing. It had carried nothing a thousand miles just to find him. He could still run. The goru might not be far. He could stand before his father and say---

He couldn't.

That was the whole problem. He couldn't say anything his father would hear.

His feet moved.