Earthly Crown (55 page)

“But what will we tell the rest of the jaran?” the doctor asked. “I hope I needn’t remind you, Aleksi, that anything you’ve seen in here must be kept a secret.
Must
be.”

“Will his spirit come back?” Aleksi asked.

“It
will,”
said Tess fiercely.

“I don’t know,” said the doctor.

Aleksi rose. He shrugged. “Habakar witchcraft. They’re saying it already.”

The doctor grimaced. “I don’t like it.”

“What choice do we have?” asked Tess bitterly.

“Well.” The doctor rose, brushing her hands together briskly. “There’s no use just sitting here. Aleksi, can you go fetch Ursula? Then meet me at my wagons.”

He nodded and ducked outside. A faint pink glow rose in the east. The wind was dying. Up, bright in the heavens, the morning star shone, luminous against the graying sky. Could it be? That they came from—? Aleksi shook his head. How could it be? How could they ride across the air, along the wind, up into the heavens? And yet. And yet.

His tent flap stirred. Raysia ducked outside, dressed and booted. She saw him and started. “Oh, there you are. Is something wrong?”

“Habakar witchcraft,” he said, knowing that the sooner he let the rumor spread, the more quickly Tess and Dr. Hierakis could hide their own witchcraft. Their own
machines.
“The Habakar priests have put a curse on Bakhtiian.”

“Gods,” said Raysia. “I’d better run back and tell my uncle.” She glanced all around and, seeing that no one yet stirred in the predawn stillness, she kissed him right there in the open. “I’d better go.” She hurried off.

So it begins.
He paused at the outcropping. The land was a sheet of darkness below, black except for a lambent glow flickering and building: Sakhalin had fired the city.

“He, who the sword of heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe”

—
SHAKESPEARE
,

Measure for Measure

D
AVID BEN UNBUTU SAT
and stared at blank white wall. He sat cross-legged, with the demimodeler placed squarely in front of him, its corners paralleling the corners of the plain white room. He shivered because it was cold. The scan unit was on, but all the image showed him was the dimensions of the rectangular room, white, featureless, blank.

A footstep scuffed the ground behind him. “Anything?” Maggie asked.

He shook his head. The beads bound into his name braids made a snackling sound that was audible because of the deep stillness surrounding them. “Our scan can’t penetrate these walls, and neither can we. It’s got to be here. It has to be, but we can’t find the entrance.”

“Or the entrance won’t open for us.” She sank down on her haunches beside him. The heat of her body drifted out to him, and he shifted closer to her, as to a flame.

“Thirty-two days it took me, Mags, to survey this damned place and the grounds. Every way I turn it, the only space I can’t account for is right there.” He did not point. They all knew where it was, behind the far wall whose blankness seemed more and more like a mockery of their efforts. “That’s got to be the control room, the computer banks.”

“The place Tess got the cylinder. This matches the description she gave Charles. So what’s he going to do?”

David blew on his hands to warm them. Maggie laid a hand on his. Just as the white wall emphasized the rich coffee brown of his skin, it lent hers more pallor, so that the contrast seemed heightened, dark and pale. “We’re not Chapalii. Tess didn’t find her way in by herself. She had a Chapalii guide. If Rajiv can’t crack the entrance, then there’s no human who can.”

“Well.” She released his hand and unwound from her crouch, standing up. “You may as well come eat. It’s almost dusk.” She offered him a hand and he took it and rose as well, bending back down to switch off the modeler and tuck it under his arm before he straightened to stand beside her. She grinned down at him. “I hear you’re the current favorite of the spitfire.”

“Damn you.” David laughed. “You’re trying to embarrass me. I think she just wanted to see how far the melanin extends.”

“I hope her curiosity was suitably satisfied.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I did, and it was.” She laughed in her turn. “You’re blushing. You’re such an easy target, David.”

“I would have thought there wouldn’t be any challenge in it, then. You’re a heartless woman, Mags.”

They crossed to the door and slid the panel aside to let themselves out. Immediately, warmth enveloped them although it stayed cooler inside the palace in contrast to the hot summer days passing outside. The ebony floors of this chamber gleamed, and networks of light pulsed in their depths, as if the flooring concealed a delicate web of machinery. Maggie broke away from David and paced out the meter-wide counter that stood in the room. It extended in an unbroken, hollow rectangle within the larger rectangular chamber; she slid up onto it and climbed over to the smaller counter, a half meter wide but also unbroken, that stood within it, and then hopped that one as well to stand in the very center of the room. The two counters separated her from David. She looked at him, and he at her.

“What the hell do these represent?” she asked. “I don’t see anything on here, no storage places, no controls, no patterns, no heat, nothing but the smooth surface.”

David gestured back toward the door they had just come through. On either side of the door stood two tall megaliths. “Rajiv is pretty certain that those are transmitters of some kind. Maybe this is a power source.”

“Damned chameleons,” said Maggie cheerfully. She hopped back over the counters to return to David. They went on.

They no longer exclaimed over the palace. They had been here forty-three days and were as used to it as they ever would be. But still, for sheer size and the elegance and profusion of its detailing, it was magnificent. And it was theirs, the only Chapalii palace where humans had ever run free, unobstructed by protocol officers, by stewards, by the simple presence of any Chapalii at all. That it was thousands of years old did not lessen their victory. For all they knew, and from what little they had been permitted to see in Chapalii precincts now, Chapaliian architecture had scarcely changed at all in the last millennium.

Jo Singh had taken samples from every surface she could get a molecular flake off of, and Maggie had covered the same ground David had in his survey, recording every detail in three media for Earth’s databanks. Charles walked the palace incessantly, as if by becoming intimately familiar with it he could somehow divine the intricacies of the Chapalii mind. After all, why should they have ennobled him? Why should they have rewarded him for his failed rebellion against them rather than simply killing him for the trouble he caused them?

“It’s damned impressive,” said Maggie. David started, feeling that she echoed his thoughts.

“Do you ever think,” he said slowly, “that we might just be better off as subjects in their Empire?”

“They don’t bear grudges, you know, or at least, not that I’ve ever noticed. Not that I’m much among them, of course.”

“Not that any of us are,” David said.

“Sometimes I think they’re better than us. Less prone to emotional decisions. More concerned about peace, and peaceable living. About stability. They must think we’re savages, the way we go on.”

David grinned. “Yes, rather like we look at the natives of Rhui and pride ourselves on being better than them, because we’ve grown out of their primitive state. We live well. All of us, I mean, all humans, not just you and I and the rest of Charles’s retinue.”

Maggie paused as they went through an archway. She lifted a hand to trace a translucent spire of a glasslike substance that bordered the opening, lending its shadow to the pattern of tiles on the floor. At its core, fainter patterns mirrored the walls. “But it’s a moot point, isn’t it? Charles has already decided for all of us.”

“Now, Mags, you know very well that the League Parliament voted full confidence in him. That is to say, that they’d follow wherever he led, knowing that he’s got his eye on freeing us from the Empire somewhere down the line.”

“Look. Here comes an escort.”

Down the dimly lit hall came a white-robed priest—the ancient woman called Mother Avdotya—and a figure now intimately familiar to David. He hesitated and then walked forward beside Maggie, one hand tapping the modeler nervously. It looked like a plain black tablet of polished ebony, and he always carried parchment and quill pen and ink in the pouch at his belt, so that he might be thought to be using such instruments to conduct his survey and the tablet merely as a surface to write on, but it still made him anxious to meet any of the jaran when it was visible. Nadine, especially. Nadine always wanted to see the maps and architectural drawings he made. She had a clear grasp of maps and distances; she had just last night drawn him an astonishingly accurate—for its type—map of the coastline from Jeds up to the inland sea to the port of Abala. She had a fierce, impatient personality, overwhelming and breathlessly attractive to him, and he could not help but think longingly, for an instant, of Tess’s more supple temperament. But Tess was as far out of his reach now as was the Chapalii control room. And Dina was here.

“What have you done for me today?” Nadine asked him, falling into step beside him. She spoke Rhuian precisely and without a trace of accent, as if she had learned the language through Tess’s matrix and not by the laborious process of one word at a time. Even her uncle spoke with an accent, although his command of the language was equally impressive.

“A lintel,” he replied, “from the southwest transept.” He withdrew a rolled-up square of parchment from his belt-pouch and halted to smooth it open on the modeler.

Nadine studied it, frowning. “This pattern, here…isn’t that repeated, but backward, on the northeast transept? And reversed, too.” She stared as if she could puzzle out some vital information from the drawing. “You have a fine hand,” she added.

“No doubt,” said Maggie, with a smirk. David cast her a glare.

Nadine stepped back. Her lips quirked up, but she did not smile. “I want to add to my uncle’s maps on the way back. We’ll probably he riding far into Habakar territory, and eventually, riding south, the land route must come to Jeds. Someday I’d like to map both routes to Jeds, by ship and by horse.”

“Would you, indeed?” said Maggie under her breath in Anglais. “No doubt your uncle would as well.”

“If you will,” said the old priestess, who had waited patiently through this exchange. “The prince and the other priests are waiting only for your presence to begin the meal.”

“Of course.” David rolled up the parchment and stuck it back into his pouch. They had to match their stride to the priestess’s limping walk, so it took some time to wend their way through the maze of the palace and into the back rooms where the jaran priests lived. “How long have the jaran sent priests here?” he asked Nadine as she sat down next to him on a bench in the dining hall.

“Since we found it here. Surely you can see that the gods have touched this place, so we honor it.”

“How long ago was that?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps Mother Avdotya knows. Perhaps my uncle guesses. A long time ago, in any case. But my uncle says that these zayinu from over the sea built this shrine, the zayinu called khepelli. Do you think this as well?”

“Yes, I do. But surely you know that, if you’ve spoken with Tess.”

“There are many things Tess does not speak of,” said Nadine cryptically. “And many things she speaks of without saying much. I will come to your bed tonight, if you wish it.”

David felt heat burn in his cheeks and hoped that Nadine was still unfamiliar enough with his coloring that she could not tell he was blushing. “Yes.” He managed to force out the syllable through a suddenly choked throat. Although the word was barely audible, Nadine smiled and returned her attention to her food.

Later, as they finished eating, Charles signaled to his crew, and they left together to go meet in the tiny room allotted to him. He sat on the edge of the narrow bed. Rajiv sat in the one chair, a hemi-slate resting on his knees, and Maggie on the edge of the wooden table. Jo sank down onto the floor with catlike grace. David remained standing with his back to the door.

Charles regarded them one by one. “What progress today?”

“I’ve got a tentative date on a ceramic sample,” said Jo. “Ten thousand years, minimum. It’s got to be that old. Ten to fifteen, by my best estimate. I incline to the later date.”

“Does that surprise any of you?” Charles asked. He, of course, did not look surprised, but then Charles had become as adept at maintaining a blank expression as his Chapalii counterparts in the high nobility.

“Yes,” said Maggie emphatically. “A thousand years, perhaps. But look at this place. Not here, but the rest of it. How could it have survived in such good condition? What does humanity have left from fifteen thousand years ago? That’s Paleolithic times. Some obsidian blades and a few cave paintings?”

“Margaret,” said Rajiv primly from his chair, “what you are not doing is thinking clearly. I cannot believe we know a thousandth part of the extent and sophistication of Chapalii technology. I will present you with an analogy. Take one of these jaran. Take a curious, intelligent one, such as the woman Nadine Orzhekov. What she knows and imagines of our life and technology is likely closer to the truth than what we know and imagine of Chapalii technology.”

“Furthermore,” said David, shaking a finger in front of his own lips, “it’s the only reasonable window of opportunity for the human migration that was needed to populate this planet. If the Tai-en Mushai moved an entire Homo sapiens population here to work as his—slaves? for his amusement? for who the hell knows what reason?—then that time frame would be reasonable. Hasn’t Tess found some correspondence between Rhuian languages and Earth languages?”

“I don’t know why the Mushai brought humans here,” said Charles quietly, “but I do know from the evidence in that cylinder that he was using this as a base to foment rebellion against the emperor. If that was fifteen thousand years ago…have things really changed that much in the Empire? Have they changed so little?”