His Conquering Sword (53 page)

“It’s nothing,” she said, wiping her eyes.

“Well, then!” exclaimed Katya, leaping up again. “You must come
now!”

“Where is—?” Vasha faltered. He never called Ilya anything, not Uncle, not Ilya, not Bakhtiian and certainly never Father, except to leave a pause where his name went.

Tess waved vaguely in the direction Ilya had gone, not trusting her voice.

“I’ll find him,” said Galina, and jumped up and ran away.

Tess allowed Vasha and Katya to tug her up and drag her toward Sonia’s tent. “But what’s going on?” Tess demanded.

On the other side of Sonia’s tent, out of sight of Tess’s own awning, Josef Raevsky stood with his saber drawn and little Ivan’s hand covering his own on the hilt. Ilya arrived just in time to watch with the others as Josef, with Vania’s hand guiding his, marked Sonia with his saber, drawing the line of marriage down her cheek, parallel to the scar that had marked her first marriage to Mikhal Yakhov.

Tess burst into tears. A moment later she felt Ilya beside her.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, sliding an arm around her back. “I’m sorry, Tess. It isn’t your brother’s fault or even his victory, but my own fault, and Her victory, who has paid me back in my own coin.”

“Oh, you idiot!” she said through her tears. “I just said I had to go there. I didn’t say I wasn’t coming back!” She broke away from him and went forward to hug Sonia.

“Well, you don’t have to cry!” exclaimed Sonia, laughing at her until her tears stopped. “After all, since I must go into seclusion, you’ll have to be in charge of the camp for the next ten days.”

“But I don’t know how to run the camp—”

“If you’d encouraged Aleksi to marry, you’d have more help, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, thank you,” said Tess, laughing. “Where is Aleksi? He was just here.”

“He took one of the guard’s horses,” said Vasha, “and rode out that way.” He pointed, and Tess knew that in that direction lay the Veselov encampment.

“He isn’t going to mark her if I’m not there to see, is he? We’d better go.”

Sonia laid a hand on Tess’s arm, restraining her. “Tess. I think if he’d wanted you there, he would have asked you to come with him. Look how dark it is already. I don’t think Aleksi wants a public marking. There’ll be enough celebration in ten days.”

“Well,” said Tess, not knowing whether to be offended or pleased. Aleksi had been her shadow for three years, a steady, reliable presence but in his own way still insecure about his place in the Orzhekov tribe. It was encouraging to see him act on his own at last, and yet it felt odd as well. “Josef.” She kissed the blind rider on either cheek. Then she went to consult with Galina and Juli Danov about running the camp. Tonight it was not Aleksi, but Ilya, who shadowed her, sticking close by her, saying little but never letting her out of his sight.

Aleksi returned, alone, much later, but he had a smile on his face.

So they stayed outside Birat for ten days. There was a sudden flood of markings, many of them unmarried riders marking widowed women, and a great celebration at the end of that time, observed by the Habakar from their walls and their fields with apprehension and by the jagged western mountains with supreme indifference.

Aleksi astounded Bakhtiian by demanding his share of the treasure gained from the Habakar kingdom for his services to Bakhtiian, and he sent so much gold and jewels to the Veselov camp that when Svetlana was carried out to the fire to meet her new husband, she was almost as heavily laden in riches as was Sonia Orzhekov. Arina Veselov had gifted Svetlana with a good tent, much larger than Aleksi’s, and Svetlana herself gave wedding gifts to all the children and a beautiful carpet to Tess and Ilya that she and her sister had made, as her wedding gift to them.

“I don’t know,” said Cara late that evening, while dancing went on around three bonfires, “if I approve of this business of marking the women.”

“Oho,” said Tess, lifting a hand to touch her own cheek, where she was marked. “Do I detect the superior note of advanced civilizations in your words, Cara?”

“Probably,” said Cara. “I suppose we’ve just found less obviously violent ways to alter our bodies. Tess, do you want to try again for a child?”

“Try again!”

“Charles suggested it, in fact. I think you and Ilya can have a child, with some help from me. A little additional lab work on you, but since you’re coming to Jeds, we can do it there. And you’ll need a communications implant, too, and Rajiv suggests a mini-chip demi-modeler straight into the cranium with a retinal scan trigger. Charles will send a technician down for that.”

“When did Charles suggest that? About me trying again for a child?”

“The morning before he left.”

“Hmm.” Tess broke away from Cara to go forward and greet and kiss Arina Veselov, who was being carried by on a litter, and then came back. “What scheme is Charles hatching now?”

“Tess! Maybe Charles just acted out of pure sentiment.”

Tess considered the possibility. She realized that she had a hard time imagining Charles acting out of anything but expediency. “Well,” she admitted, “maybe I’m not always fair to him.”

Cara snorted. “How often are we ever fair, to others and even to ourselves? Do you want to put a call in to Charles?”

“No. I know he’s safe on Odys. I’ll wait until we can get a safe channel from Jeds. He’s a damned bastard anyway. Ilya is right. Charles accomplished what he wanted—me to leave the jaran and to accept my duties as his heir whether I wanted to or not—”

“Are you leaving the jaran?” Cara asked without a blink.

“Of course not! I mean, only to go to Jeds for as long as I have to, and I’ll have to take jaran with me, a jahar, probably—but I’ll come back to the plains as soon as I can.”

“Then, my dear, I would advise you not to exaggerate the case. Of course you must go to Jeds temporarily, but it’s become equally important that you return to the jaran.”

“Maybe Yuri was right,” said Tess, musing.

“Yuri?”

“My brother Yuri. He said that the gods had brought me to the jaran to find him, to reunite us, who were brother and sister in another life. But maybe the gods had other plans. Maybe Yuri was the jaran, what they were before I came, untouched and—oh, I don’t want to say innocent. Uncorrupted. And so in the end he died, because of what I brought to him and to them.” She shook her head. “He would have hated this.”

“The gods usually do,” replied Cara, looking grave and amused at the same time.

“Do what?”

“Have other plans.”

At first, Tess laughed, but as she stared out at the fires and the musicians and the dancing, the whirl of skirts, the flashing gleam of gold and bronze, the distant torches that rimmed the walls of Birat, she thought of Ilya, who had by his own lights and by the laws of his people already begun the corruption, long before she came. And yet, who was to say if that corruption hadn’t begun while Ilya was in Jeds, a Jeds already deeply influenced by Charles? And yet, who was to say if it hadn’t begun when a fair-haired Singer named Petre Sokolov marked an ambitious woman who didn’t want him, driven by a vision that he was granted from the heavens, of the gods-touched child that he was meant to father?

It took them ten days to cross the mountains over a high pass already coated with snow. Down they rode, into a great forest that stretched endlessly out on all sides. Through this watershed they passed and in fifteen days farther on came to a great river and the fortified city of Parkilnous.

Neither Parkilnous nor its people had any of the grace and light and elegant trappings of Habakar lands. They were a somewhat lighter race in coloring, more akin to the black-haired jaran than to their darker Habakar neighbors to the east. The river streamed by, sluggish and especially filthy downstream from the great walls that rimmed its bank. There were no suburbs spread out in harmonious lines around the inner city. All the houses and markets, palaces and great merchants’ mansions and hordes of poor, lay crammed in together within the confining walls. Hovels sprawled out beyond the gates, out on the dumping grounds for the city’s refuse and into the marshlands that bordered a tributary stream where it fed down from the forest and into the great river itself. Farther out, fields spread, each one ringed by a rough wall of stone.

The governor of Parkilnous had already opened his gates to Zvertkov’s jahar, and he came himself, barefooted and bareheaded like a penitent, to greet Bakhtiian and usher him into the city.

Parkilnous stank. Unlike the Habakar, the Parkilnese evidently had no concept of sanitation, however primitive. Tess could not bring herself to eat much of the feast laid out in her and Bakhtiian’s honor in the great hall of the palace, and the entertainment—dancing girls, jugglers, and a poor emaciated bearlike creature that a burly one-eyed man wrestled—was not much better. Then the merchants came, a representative from each house, many of them elder women, and one by one they piled gifts in front of the great conqueror and the Prince of Jeds. Tess wondered if the old women really headed their families or if the Parkilnese were simply canny enough to have seen the power Mother Sakhalin had in the jaran camp and use it now to their own advantage. Obviously, they planned to buy their way to safety. Give the barbarians enough tribute, and they would leave.

It was a relief to return to the camp at dusk, where the air didn’t reek of refuse and urine and rot, and the tents were airy and the carpets clean.

Ilya sat down with Nadine on pillows in the outer chamber, and they studied her maps.

“You see,” Nadine was saying as Galina brought in komis and tea and Tess paced back and forth along the inner wall of the tent, “David helped me get a fair measurement of the mountain pass and the forest, and I managed to talk to a ship’s captain today and got a sense of how far it is down this river to the sea and thence to Jeds.”

“By sea,” said Ilya. He drew a hand across the vast blank reaches of the parchment, south, to where Nadine judged that Jeds lay. “Jeds has many ships, that can sail up and down the coast. But ships alone or land alone will not make an empire.”

“Send me to scout it, then,” said Nadine, as if daring her uncle.

“When you’ve given me heirs,” he said calmly.

Tess almost laughed, to see Nadine’s expression change so swiftly from smugness to anger. She might as well have had sparks flying off of her. But as quickly, Tess’s amusement turned to pity. Nadine wasn’t suited to be a brood mare. Well, no woman was, to be prized for nothing but the children she could bear. “Perhaps Nadine could be regent, in Jeds, together with Baron Santer,” Tess said into their silence.

“Dina?” Ilya frowned and considered his niece. He sighed. “I wanted to install Anatoly Sakhalin as regent. He is a prince in his own right, and it would have pleased Mother Sakhalin, and I had thought that the Company meant to stay in Jeds—poor boy. Mother Sakhalin said he was heartbroken when he rode away to his uncle. That he couldn’t bear to stay, knowing his wife would leave him soon.” He cast a recriminatory glance toward Tess.

“Ilya! His sort always recovers quickly. Surely he can marry again.”

“I think,” said Ilya slowly, “that women give pretty men like Anatoly Sakhalin too little credit for intelligence and feeling. We shall see.”

“What about Jeds?” demanded Nadine.

“No.” Ilya shook his head. “Nowhere, my girl, until you’ve done your duty to me.” Fuming, Nadine rolled up her parchments and jumped to her feet. “Ah,” said Ilya, raising a finger. “You may leave if you wish, but I’ll keep the maps here for tonight.”

Nadine was too solicitous of her maps to treat them roughly. She set them gently on the table, and then stormed out of the tent.

“I don’t think Feodor is a good husband for her,” said Ilya mildly. “I have it in mind to send Niko and Juli as co-regents, to watch over Jeds with Baron Santer. Niko has always wanted to visit Jeds.”

“Niko Sibirin is a wise choice,” she agreed. She circled back to stand behind him and rested a hand on his shoulder, running her other hand through his hair. “But you could come to Jeds, Ilya. We could establish our reign, and you could strike north from Jeds. And send your armies south from here…”

He rose, went over to the table, and unrolled one of the maps. “Across lands we know nothing of? No. We’re not prepared for that yet. We need a greater army than the one I have now. I must consolidate here and then move forward. There is the Xiriki-khai province still to be won in the south, and the outlying desert cities beyond it. We must not just fight wars but build, a city for Mitya to rule from, armies of Farisa and Habakar soldiers as well as our own. We may not unite the lands between Parkilnous and Jeds while we yet live, Tess, but our heirs—” The sheen of the parchment glowed in the lantern light. He looked young, in the soft light, and all unbeknownst to him he would stay young, perhaps even for long enough to reach Jeds with his army, with all the lands between under his authority. She could not bring herself to regret the decision, what she had begged Cara to do to him, but she wondered if it had been wise. “Still, though,” Ilya continued, so focused on the map that he was oblivious to her stare, “we must send merchants and envoys south from here, and with their intelligence we can trace the route along which we can march our armies.”

“But, Ilya, if it was only for a year, why couldn’t you come with me?”

For the longest time, he stared at the table, as if its swirling grain fascinated him. At first, he spoke to it, not to her. “No. I—Tess—” He took in a deep breath and turned to her. “I have to make my peace with the tribes, with the Elders, with Mother Sakhalin and my own aunt. I have to tell them the truth. I have to stand before them as I wasn’t willing to or brave enough to eleven years ago, or even three years past at the great gathering of tribes at the khayan-sarmiia. I must tell them of the bargain I made with Grandmother Night. They alone can judge me, and choose whether they wish to follow me any farther.”

Ilya always managed to stand so that the light lent him grace and power, as if the light itself existed on this earth in order to illuminate him. He had radiance, which quality can never be learned but only given. It was hard for Tess to imagine that the tribes might repudiate him now, but then, he had broken more than one of their holiest laws.