Mammoths at the Gates (The Singing Hills Cycle, #4)

by Nghi Vo

“I would have missed it myself if the road hadn’t widened to a turnaround. This is some desolate country you all have here in the west. Where did you say you were headed again?”

Cleric Pan would say that this is exactly how you get led into the woods and eaten by a wolf, but Cleric Pan also told us that the castle at Keph-Valee can lift from its foundations and fly. It probably can’t, and I probably won’t be eaten by a wolf either. Still, it had been four years since

Are they … did they build sheds on the green? Did a traveling show or a weapons dealer arrive with their covered wagons for some reason?

Mammoth, Chih thought, frozen. Mammoths at the gates.

“Then return,” the woman said shortly. “And take your bird from this place before it says something you both have cause to regret.”

“Come here,” Vi In Yee said, walking forward. “Come

“It would be an honor,” Chih said firmly, and it was the truth. They had met mammoths before in their travels in the north, and they knew very well that the only harm in a well-trained mammoth came at the command of their rider.

She paused. “Still we pushed through, and when we came to Hao Bi’s fortress, we were so pissed we trampled it flat. Eight royal mammoths reduced that place to kindling in a count of sixty.”

the office was sunk in quiet, and the only person present was one of the lay sisters, a woman so old that she just blinked drowsily at Chih from her cot in the back before gesturing at the hooks where the room chits were kept and going back to sleep. Chih found a crate in which to deposit their stack of written documentation and took one of the room chits on their way out, their unease increasing.

I’m going to drop off my things, and then I’m going straight to the aviary. Almost Brilliant will tell me what’s going on.

I really should have a wash before I go to the aviary. Probably have a bite to eat too, but I just need to see Almost Brilliant.

they were home and they were with one of their favorite people in the world. Suddenly, Chih found themself resentful of the mammoths at the gate in a way they hadn’t been before.

The Empress of Wheat and Flood has given us a dispensation to work for four months, provided that we do so under the supervision of the imperial censors. After that, they’re running the water back in.”

They picked it up last year, and it never quite went away. When they went, they went fast, I promise you, and without pain. The infirmary saw to that. Myriad Virtues and I were with them every moment until the end.”

Why do I have a feeling this is somehow alluding to a certain pandemic happening in recent years.

There were many places they had been where that would be reckoned a clean death, a quiet one in bed and attended by people who cared. It was

something people offered as a ...

dead was dead, and the only comfort—one more word, one more t...

Cleric Yu-Ching gave them another hug before stepping back. They were of an age with Cleric Thien, old enough that their tattoos had grown faded and tired, and their stretched and empty earlobes dangled loosely halfway down their neck. “What a good child you have always

So, the clerics are all non-binary? Very interesting!

We really shouldn’t, Chih thought. This is private. We’re meant to be invited, and we haven’t been.

“I’ll ask again, what’s going on?” There was a whir of feathers as Cleverness Himself came to perch on Ru’s shoulder, so puffed up he looked almost twice his usual size. “Go look in the nesting box, the one in the lion’s mouth. Go see for yourself,”

There was the normal spill of straw and scraps from the lion’s jaws, but there were no chicks or eggs inside. Instead it was a female hoopoe, lying with a kind of limpness to her body that made Chih’s breath catch in their throat.

the first neixin they had ever spoken to, Cleric Thien’s companion since before they or Ru were ever born, would not respond.

It’s been done with some care. Someone did it with very sharp shears, and—and they are so even that she must not have struggled at all. How did she sit still for it?

“For sorrow,” she said. “For grief, and for remembrance. Humans don’t understand grief, not like a neixin does.”

“In the Ku Dynasty, our wings were clipped when our clerics died, as a symbol of respect and mourning.”

“And if you think you can stop grief by ordering it, Cleverness Himself, you may as well go defend a flock of chickens in Wen, for all the good you are.”

“Singing Hills has always been ready to defend what’s ours. We’re not going to back down for a pair of mammoths and one foolish advocate.”

“The Divine says people change, remember? No one is as they were five years ago, or two years ago, or a week ago, or a moment ago. If you love someone, you must let them change. And, you know, everyone else wanted to go to Snakehead Lake.”

am called Chiep, descended from the line of Ever Victorious and Always Kind.”

Surrender the body of my grandfather Thien An Lee at once. It is only our right to have our grandfather back, to put him in his proper place by my grandmother’s side.

"His"? Can this be considered deadnaming, misusing pronouns because Thien is a non-binary, right? A they/them.

“As many honors as they earned in their secular life, I promise you that they earned just as many here within these halls.”

“Come on,” she said. “If they want to see that old commendation, we should go dig it out of Cleric Thien’s things.”

Bad habit, they thought. They’re the acting Divine, no matter how much fish they stole for me.

Families, generals in the mammoth corps. She keeps talking about her dead grandmother’s standing as a widow in Northern Bell Pass, as if the woman hasn’t legally been a widow for longer than we’ve been alive.

Things are different out there, and you should usually be very polite to the woman with the mammoths!”

“Our authority and our standing is equal to that of the empress’s own priests.”

Everyone made a mistake. Of course it was a mistake, everyone thought they were dead, but they weren’t.

Cleric Thien told Gentleman Bell how they wished for fish for the people on the river and goats for the people on the mountain. They wished for peaceful dreams for all their family, the living and the dead alike. They wished that the Gentleman’s mouth would always be filled with blood, so that he would never again feel the urge to devour his men.

“And I wish,” they continued in the same voice, “that Novice Chih and Novice Ru know that I can see them.”

But there was a moment, Chih thought, staring so hard at the cracked door between the two rooms, where it wasn’t delight. It was terror at being caught, and now—

change hurt, but it was bearable if you watched it, if you accepted it and knew that it was always coming.

Myriad Virtues needs a seat, she must be allowed to speak, do you understand me?”

A cleric always knows who they answer to, Cleric Thien whispered in their head. They heed the Divine of their order, and after that, they heed their gods.

“No one told us that Grandfather’s bird could tell stories,” she said. “Ought to be good.” To Chih’s relief, Tui In Hao only narrowed her eyes and nodded once.

In that moment, they were and weren’t the cleric Chih had grown up with. This was someone new, and

something in Chih ached, because growing up, growing older, was always a kind of loss, even if what was gained repaid it all and then some.

The things we remember last as long as we do and longer. The thing itself, well, it goes away. It breaks. It sinks to the bottom of the river. It dies or leaves or is lost.”

I would say, it was more suitable for the death of a woman, perhaps an old woman of a venerable clan.

They never knew that they had been tricked, and my grandfather had a word with the young poacher as well, because the things you knew could be as dangerous as the things you didn’t, and the man moved his family south and far away from what he knew. And then my grandfather returned home to his wife and his life, and he lived there peacefully and happily until of course he didn’t.

They could read their stories into the archives later if they wished, or they could hold them close for a while. There was no urgency.