His Conquering Sword (6 page)

“So it is,” agreed Owen without a trace of arrogance. “He’s acting without knowing he’s doing it, and he’s doing it right, by and large. I’ve been watching him for the whole ride over here. He’s taught himself the art of listening and the art of connecting. Do you know how many competent actors I’ve worked with who took years to get where he is now?”

Diana wondered ungraciously if Owen counted her among their number, but then Yomi came over to chase her back to the tent set up as a dressing room behind the platform.

The performance was a disaster and yet absolutely wonderful. The setting itself could not be improved upon. Coming onstage for her first entrance, Diana felt transported to some ancient scene. They could have been any group of itinerant actors out making their way along the Silk Road, the famous Earth trade route that ran across the mountains and deserts and steppes of Asia, stopping in this medieval oriental city made glorious by its marble colonnades and gentle silk banners. Even the play, in its own way, seemed ironically appropriate: During a revolt in feudal Georgia, Grusha, a servant girl, flees to the mountains with the Governor’s small son, who has been abandoned in the panic by his mother; in the second act, a drunken village clerk named Azdak is made a judge by the rebel soldiers and tries the case to determine which of the women is the child’s true mother.

From the beginning, they attracted a hard-core audience off to the left who stayed in place for the entire play. But other than that group, and the jaran riders who patrolled the square with half an eye on the Habakar natives and half on the play, the audience shifted and grew and shrank according to some tidal schedule that Diana could not interpret. It was frustrating, and yet, it was in part for this experiment that she had come, to see what would play, what could communicate, across such a gulf of space and culture, to touch those who were open to being touched. And, inspired by the setting, by the city, by the bright colored silks or the clear blue of the afternoon sky, the acting fell into place and they worked off each other in that seamless fiction that can never be achieved except by grace, fortune, and sheer, hard repetitious work brought by a fortuitous combination of events to its fruition in transcendent art.

It worked. Diana knew it worked. They all knew it had worked. At the end, sweating and exhausted and for once sated, she took Gwyn’s hand—he had played the soldier and lover Simon—and, with the lifelike doll that represented the child tucked in the crook of her other arm, she, and he, and the others, took a single bow, which was all that they needed to take, or that the audience understood. Straightening, she flashed a grin at Gwyn and he smiled back, wiping sweat from his forehead. She turned to look toward Arina, who had watched it all from a wagon over to one side, and discovered that Vasil had dismounted to stand next to his cousin and was regarding Diana, and the stage, with uncomfortably intent interest.

“You’ve made a conquest, Di,” said Gwyn in an undertone as he turned to go back to the dressing room and strip his makeup off.

“I hope not. Wait for me.” Veselov bothered her. One of the things she so liked about Gwyn was that when he was offstage, he was off; he did not drag the one world into the other. She knew she emoted offstage, at times, but it wasn’t a habit she wanted to foster in herself, and she usually only did it when the person she was with seemed to expect it of her. A professional knew how to separate work and life. But Veselov was always on, always aware, always projecting. The Goddess knew, it ought to be tiring, going on like that all day and presumably all night. She went with Gwyn back to the awning and wiped her face clean. They took down the stage. By the time they got the wagons loaded, the afternoon had mostly passed, and the marketplace lay quiet and almost empty. They started back.

“I liked that story,” said Arina. “It was true, what the judge did, knowing which woman was the true mother. But I can tell it’s a khaja story.”

“How?”

“Well, it isn’t a man’s part to make such a judgment. That is women’s business.”

“But we changed it,” protested Diana, “when we did it at the camp. We made Azdak into an etsana.”

“I didn’t see that.” Arina smiled, looking ahead, and lifted a hand to greet a rider. “Here is Vasil.”

Vasil reined his horse in beside them, on Diana’s side of the wagon. “Why is it I’ve seen none of these songs of yours before?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We’ve—sung—them many times, and we—practice—every night, in our encampment.” She could think of no words for “perform” and “rehearse” in khush.

Veselov did not look at her directly, and yet Diana felt his attention on her as much as if he had been staring soulfully into her eyes like a besotted lover. She shifted on the hard wooden seat. He sat a horse well, and his hands were light and casual and yet masterful on the reins. For an instant, she wondered what he would be like in bed; His lips twitched up into a bare, confiding smile, as if he had read her thoughts and promised as much as she could wish for, and more.

“I would like to see more,” he said, but did he mean more plays or more of her? “You become the woman in the song, yet you remain yourself.”

“Yes,” said Diana, surprised, because Anatoly had yet to grasp the concept of acting.

A rider called to Vasil from farther down the line, and Veselov excused himself and rode away.

Arina coughed into one hand. “Although he is my cousin,” she said, “and I love him dearly, I would recommend to you, Diana, that you be wary of him.”

“I’m married, after all!”

“What has that to do with anything?”

Diana changed the subject, and they discussed other things until they got back to camp at dusk. Where Kirill waited. He came up to them immediately, Lavrenti nestled on his good arm, his other arm hanging free for once. Diana could see the fingers on his withered hand twitching and curling, but without much force or coordination.

“I beg your pardon,” said Diana to Kirill as Arina climbed down, “I must return to our camp and I just wanted to know … is there any word of my husband?”

“He wasn’t with his uncle,” Kirill assured her.

“Oh, then he’s at the besieged city?” Karkand, it was called, the seat of the Habakar kings.

Kirill shook his head. “No. Bakhtiian sent him to capture the Habakar king, who fled on beyond his city.”

“I don’t understand. Anatoly went after him?”

“Yes, with a picked troop of five thousand riders.”

“But where did the king flee to?”

Kirill shrugged. He glanced at his wife, as if for help. “To the lands beyond, I suppose.”

“Out ahead of his uncle’s army?” Diana demanded. “All by himself?”

“Well,” replied Kirill apologetically, “he did promise Bakhtiian to bring back the king’s crown, coat, and head, for the offense the king gave to Bakhtiian’s personal envoys.”

“Thank you.” Diana stuttered over the words and started the oxen up as quickly as she could, to get away. She felt sick. The wagon jolted over the uneven ground toward the Company’s encampment, and all she wanted to do was to throw up. The day’s triumph turned to ashes in her mouth. Anatoly had ridden out into hostile enemy territory in pursuit of a king. Was he mad? Was he suicidal? Had he had the slightest thought for her before driving forward into unknown lands without his uncle and his uncle’s army in order to avenge Bakhtiian’s honor? Already she pictured Hyacinth lying twisted and dead on the ground, slain by arrows or knives, lying alone, left to rot. Now a second image rose unbidden to meld with Hyacinth’s, that of Anatoly tumbled from his horse, lying half-dead with a spear through his left breast, swarmed by rank upon rank of enemy soldiers rabid for jaran blood.

Would she ever see him again? She would have cried, but she had already wept enough tears to bring life to the trampled, parched fields over which she now drove her wagon. She had a horrible, wrenching premonition that she had done crying for him. Like a little shield, the first layer of bricks had gone up, sheltering her. She couldn’t go on, hurting and hurting, never knowing, always wondering: would he come back? when? would he still love her? and when would he leave her again?

The Company encampment loomed before her, sturdy, plain, with its practical square tents and the little canvas cubicle that housed the necessary off to one side. Entrance flaps lay askew, revealing the friendly beacons of lights burning inside the tents. A single fire smoldered into ashes between the tents, but the actors had left it and gone inside to spend their time with the comforts of the technological luxuries they had smuggled along on this barbarian year.

A
FTER YAROSLAV SAKHALIN LEFT
at dawn, to return to his siege of the royal city of Karkand, the council dragged on for the rest of the day. In the morning, they all sat out under the open sky. By noon, with the sun overhead, they moved onto carpets rolled out under a vast awning. Bakhtiian sat on a pillow at one end, and the council fanned out in a rough semicircle in front of him.

Aleksi swallowed a yawn. The talk had been going on since yesterday and, as usual, the discussion had reached that point where the councillors were talking at each other, not to Bakhtiian. Ilya often ran his councils this way: The councillors talked for so long over the greatest and least choice at issue that in the end they reached a consensus without him having to demand obedience.

The longest council Aleksi recalled was the one soon after the assembly on the
khayan-sarmiia,
which had lasted six days and included three days of vicious argument between Yaroslav Sakhalin and Mikhail Suvorin and their respective supporters. In the end, Bakhtiian’s patience had worn them all down. Now that he had what he wanted—the loyalty of the jaran—he no longer had to be so impulsive. Before that long council had begun, Tess had told Aleksi in confidence what Ilya’s hopes were for the council; and so it had fallen out—with a few changes wrought by good advice or prudent compromise—exactly as he wished, and it was the councillors themselves who agreed upon the issue, among themselves and not as a mere passive instrument to Bakhtiian’s voice.

So Bakhtiian sat now, listening more than he spoke.

Tess sat at Bakhtiian’s right hand, and Aleksi sat to Tess’s right and back a bit, close to Josef Raevsky, whose lips moved soundlessly as he memorized the proceedings. The blind man canted his head from one side to the other, to catch a sentence here, a tone there, as the women and men seated in attendance on Bakhtiian spoke in their turn.

Now and again during the exhausting session, Tess rose and walked away—sometimes to relieve herself, sometimes just to stretch her legs, once to sleep for several hours—and returned to sink back down beside her husband. No one minded; she was half gone in pregnancy. The children of the Orzhekov tribe brought drink and food at intervals. Sonia sat in on the council, as her mother’s representative.

Aleksi leaned forward and found an angle at which he could peer between Tess and Ilya and catch a good glimpse of the two parchment maps spread out flat in front of Nadine, who sat on her uncle’s left. Mitya sat next to her, stifling a yawn with a hand. The poor boy had fallen asleep three times now, and Aleksi supposed he would probably be allowed to nap this time. Since the shock of Ilya’s illness had forced everyone to realize that it was remotely possible that Bakhtiian might actually someday die, poor Mitya had been displayed prominently at every gathering and forced into a passive role, listening and learning about the duties and burdens of adulthood. Not that he hadn’t been involved in such things before, but now it seemed he was at Ilya’s side at every council, every assembly, and riding out with him to inspect jahars each morning. Often Galina went with them, since she would most likely become etsana of the Orzhekov tribe in time. Today Sonia had left Galina in charge of making sure that drink and food flowed freely.

“Twenty days ride to the south,” Nadine was saying, shifting the maps, she had so laboriously drawn over the last fifteen days, “according to the merchants and caravan masters Tess and I interviewed, there lies a great trading city called Salkh. From there the road leads to two more great cities, Targana and Khoyan, Targana about fifty days ride southeast and Khoyan about sixty days ride southwest. The caravan masters say that if you go along past Targana in the summer, there is a high narrow pass over the Heaven Mountains beyond which lies Vidiya, although there is another safer route to Vidiya lying much farther to the east. I imagine, Uncle, that Khoyan lies along the road that would eventually lead all the way down through southern lands to Jeds and the cities of the Rhuian peninsula. But I don’t know.”

Bakhtiian’s tent lay pitched on a grassy knoll overlooking the river and the gleaming city beyond, called Hamrat by the Habakar and
sarrod-nikaiia,
Her Voice Is Merciful, by the jaran. Sakhalin had spared the city because it was here that he and his army had been encamped when the first messenger had ridden in with the news that Bakhtiian had woken from his sorcery-induced trance.

“Karkand lies about fifteen days ride to the west, and there is a city ten days ride to the northwest called Belgana which Sakhalin took before he rode on to Karkand. North beyond Belgana on the edge of a great forest stands another city, Niryan, which has already surrendered to us. West of Karkand lie two more cities, neither as great as Karkand, and a range of mountains, a forest, a great lake, and a river, and on that river a city called Margana by the Habakar merchants but
Parkilnous
by the people who live there.”

Aleksi admired Nadine’s maps. She admired them as well; she had worked diligently enough on them since her unexpected arrival about fifteen days ago. She said that one of the Prince of Jeds’s men had taught her a great deal about maps and mapmaking. David ben Unbutu, that was it; the one who had been so hasty with Tess the day the prince and his entourage arrived at the jaran camp in the spring. Aleksi suspected that Nadine had taken him as a lover, but, of course, she never said as much.

Bakhtiian leaned forward and touched the map nearest him reverently. “And beyond this city called both Margana and Parkilnous?”