The Novels of the Jaran (167 page)

Ilya examined the boy as if he hadn’t the least idea what to do with him. He coughed, glanced at Tess, and frowned. “Well. Do you know how to ride, Vasha?”

“Of course I know how to ride! How do you think I got here? Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m sorry. That was ill-mannered of me. Yes, I know how to ride.”

Ilya sighed. He put out a hand as if to pat the boy on the shoulder, withdrew it, and then reached out again and awkwardly touched Vasha on the arm. “You’ll ride out with me today, then. We’ll go find you a mount.”

Satisfied, Tess left them. She stopped to consult with Sonia about the shirt and then went on to Charles’s encampment. She enjoyed the walk; she much preferred walking to riding these days, although she sometimes had to stop when her belly tightened up, all the muscles tensing, practicing for the event scheduled to occur in about seventy days. She was seven months pregnant now, with two months to go, more or less, Earth-time, although the year and month were longer here on Rhui.

Sometimes, especially late at night, she really thought the best thing would be to return to Jeds. But Cara could care for her as well here as at Jeds, really, especially with the new equipment Charles had brought with him, and it was too late by now to get her off-planet. What if she died?

But there was no point in worrying. She couldn’t turn back now. What would come, would come. And she did have Cara, after all. Somehow, with Cara here, she couldn’t imagine anything going wrong.

So what would happen after the baby came? These days it seemed like a veil lay drawn between her here, now, and what lay after the baby’s arrival. What did she want out of life anyway? Mostly she wanted to be finished with the pregnancy, which weighed on her like a kind of mental torpor, as if all the activity in her body, mental or otherwise, had been channeled into her womb. Yet for two days now the thought of the female Chapalii had nagged at her. All this time humanity had read old human patterns onto Chapalii culture: males who possessed all the status and did everything important and females who lived in seclusion, as second-class citizens. Now it appeared that they had been wrong; now it appeared that the Chapalii possessed two cultures. Yet surely the two cultures intertwined somehow. Surely the pattern was readable, if only the right person, with the right skills, could investigate. Tess knew quite well who the right person was.

Yet she did not want to leave Rhui. She did not want to leave the jaran. Charles lived in a world made cold by his obsession; by joining with him, her world, her surroundings, would be cold as well. She would have to leave the warmth of her family behind. Because the jaran were her family, now. Somehow, she had to find a way to work with Charles and yet remain on Rhui.

“Tess!”

“Oh, hello, Aleksi. Where did you come from?”

He ran up to her and settled into a walk. Pink flushed his cheeks. “Sonia told me where you’d gone. I thought—” He broke off.

“You thought what? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” But his expression belied the comment. He hesitated, and then words came out in a rush. “Tess, don’t leave me behind when you go. When you leave. I’ve got no place here, except with you. Whatever there might be, out there, in the heavens, I’ll gladly risk it, as long as I can stay with you.”

“Aleksi!” She stopped. “I’m not leaving. Not yet, anyway.”

“But someday—?”

“Yes.” She said it reluctantly. “Yes, someday I’ll leave the jaran.”

“Then?”

She smiled sadly, thinking of Yuri, who had refused her offer to go with her to Jeds. Gods, it seemed long ago that he had died. “Aleksi, I promise that when I leave, I’ll take you with me if that’s what you truly want.” His flush faded. His expression cleared. “You may as well come with me now. You already know too much as it is.” He assented with a nod and walked beside her the rest of the way to Charles’s tent.

Charles waited outside. He rose when he caught sight of her, and came to greet her. “You’re looking well.”

“Thank you.”

He looked at Aleksi and then back at Tess.

“He knows already, Charles. I don’t see the harm in letting Aleksi sit in on the council.”

“You don’t?”

“Believe me, Aleksi has no standing whatsoever in the tribes except what I’ve given him. He knows it. I know it. We can trust him.” Beside her, Aleksi stood perfectly still, effacing himself in that way he’d learned over the years to avoid notice.

Charles studied the young man, and then Tess; he drew two fingers down the curve of his short beard, stroking it to a point at his chin. “What benefit?” he asked finally.

“Benefit! You would ask that. All right. This one. He has his own tent. When you leave, you can leave a modeler and communicator with him which he can keep in his tent, which I can then use without fear of it being discovered by Ilya or anyone else.”

“This assumes that when I leave, you don’t come with me.”

“I’m not coming with you.”

“Come inside. Everyone else is here.” He turned to go in, turned back. “And you as well, Aleksi.”

Aleksi glanced once, swiftly, at Tess. Tess knew well enough what the invitation meant: Aleksi had just stepped outside the boundaries of his old life and been accepted into a new one. He knew it, too. All of them knew that this was an invitation that would never be extended to Bakhtiian.

They ducked inside the tent. Tess sank gratefully into the chair Cara offered her. She greeted everyone: Marco, David, Maggie, Jo, Rajiv, and Ursula. Aleksi crouched beside her, one hand on the back of her chair. Better that he be here, to mark that although she was part of this world, this council, she also had inseparable links to Rhui. She rested a hand on her abdomen. The fetus moved, rolling under her hand, under the cloth of her tunic, under the skin and the flesh. That link alone marked her forever, mother to a child half of one world, half of another.

“I think,” said Charles into the silence, “that we need to consider the interdiction. We need to consider putting into place a matrix within which the plan of sabotage can develop and from which it can be launched at the appropriate time. Also, I’m running out of time. Now that I’ve proclaimed myself a player in court politics, I can’t be absent for too long without losing—what? face?—without losing position, certainly, and without causing so much suspicion that the emperor might feel called upon to act, to investigate what I’m actually doing here on my interdicted world. Comments?”

“No doubt that you must go back soon,” said Cara.

“I think we should pull everyone off Rhui,” said Rajiv, “except those vital to the matrix.”

“But if we pull everyone off,” said Marco, “then won’t the Chapalii be suspicious? We ought to let it go on as it always has, more or less.”

“Marco, you only say that because you still have continents you want to explore.”

“Selfishness is the root of human success in evolution, don’t you think?”

Cara snorted.

“Quite the contrary,” answered Rajiv, “cooperation has sustained human development.”

“But groups can be selfish as well.”

“Now, now,” said Maggie, “let’s keep to the subject at hand, if you please. For the sake of argument, let’s say we keep the interdiction in place without any obvious changes. Where do we install our base of operations? Where do we channel all the information? Where do we build the matrix? Jeds? Morava? Both at once? Somewhere else?”

“A single fixed base of operations is always dangerous,” said Ursula. “Easy to discover, easy to root out. I’d suggest two or three bases.”

“But when we increase the number,” objected Rajiv, “we increase the necessity for communicating between them, and that poses its own problems and its own dangers.

Maggie shook her head. “Rajiv, communication on Rhui is going to be a problem nevertheless. The interdiction works both for and against us in that way. But you’d know better than I how likely the Chapalii are to be monitoring all planetary communications and how thorough their coverage can be.”

David coughed. “And while Morava might seem best because of its size and its banks, we don’t know if there are other forms of monitoring going on there that we aren’t—can’t be—aware of. Yet we must stay in contact with Morava. It’s vital to the plan, isn’t it?”

Cara nodded. “Jeds provides a good landing point still, and an already established base of power on Rhui. Not to mention a good port, with trade routes spreading out all over the planet.”

“Jo?” Charles asked.

She shrugged. “Nothing to offer yet. I’ve finished my report on the samples I took from. Morava. I’m studying the samples Cara has taken from the jaran population now. We’ll need Jeds in the link just for the laboratory facilities, for one thing. Even Morava doesn’t have facilities we humans can use.”

“Unless we bring Chapalii down onto Rhui.”

“Marco!” David threw up his hands. “That’s absurd. That would be breaking the interdiction all over again.”

“David, they’ve already been at Morava. We’ve established now that Charles has a merchant house allied with him, established on Rhuian terms, I mean. Why shouldn’t they visit Morava?”

“Which still hasn’t answered the question of where to centralize operations,” said Maggie.

“Tess,” said Charles quietly, “you look like you have something to say.”

The answer stared her in the face. It answered both her problems. Neatly. Perfectly. Almost too perfectly. She already knew how to build matrices, and what Charles wanted built here was not that different from any language. She already led a jahar of envoys. A steady stream of visitors, envoys, ambassadors, merchants, and philosophers came and went from the camp of the jaran army. Tess could authorize their movement within the camp; she had the authority to receive them, or to send them away, or to conduct her own missions, to send her own people to Jeds, to Morava, to anywhere she wanted. And the jaran moved, always. They never stayed in one place for long. She had allies within the jaran, and allies outside the jaran.

“Base it with me,” she said softly, surprising everyone but Charles. Tess doubted she could ever surprise Charles. “Base it with the jaran.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

S
ONIA REGARDED THE GOLD
cloth with some misgiving. Certainly Tess had every right to adopt the boy into her tent; indeed, Tess herself had gained a place with the jaran by the same means. But the truth was that this was not a simple adoption. Vassily Kireyevsky
ought
to have stayed with his mother’s relatives. She faulted the Kireyevsky tribe for casting him off, but it wasn’t unheard of that a family would rid itself of an unwanted child by giving it to a family who had need of a servant or even a child to adopt. But a child who had no father could not then be sent to the man who had, perhaps,
sired
him—as if it could ever be proven.

Sonia made a face and rolled the cloth up again. She disliked that Rhuian word, “sired.” Oh, she did not doubt that Vasha was Ilya’s son—by Jedan law—but this was not Jeds. Mother Sakhalin’s warnings seemed apt now. If the jaran took one step too many off the path the gods had given them to ride, then they would no longer be jaran. And why should Tess care what happened to this child, anyway? In Jeds, Sonia had read of noblewomen who murdered their husband’s or father’s bastards. What did Tess expect to come of taking in this child?

She signed and set the cloth aside. Looking up, she saw two riders and their escort halt at the edge of camp. A strange sense—not quite of foreboding but of dislocation—swept her, seeing her cousin and the boy together. There was something very alike about them. She got to her feet and went to greet them.

“Hello, Ilya. Vasha.”

The boy stammered a greeting. He looked deeply embarrassed at having the luxury of handing over his reins to another man, who would tend to the horse for him; indeed, he looked embarrassed at having ridden such a handsome horse at all, since they had, of course, gone out on two of the khuhaylan Arabians.

“Go on, then,” said Sonia, taking pity on him, “Katya is waiting for you. They’re over there—” She waved toward her left, where Katya and Galina and a handful of other girls were practicing archery on the empty stretch of ground lying between the Orzhekov tents and the next tribe.

Vasha looked up at—Sonia could not quite bring herself to think,
his father
—Ilya, and Ilya gave the slightest lift of his chin, which the boy took for permission. He ran off.

“Well,” said Sonia.

“It was not my choice!” Ilya exclaimed.

Sonia chuckled, resting a hand on his sleeve. “Ilyakoria, I would never tax you with something that so obviously has Tess’s mark about it.”

“I will never understand her,” muttered Ilya, sounding vastly irritated.

“You do hate that,” she agreed mildly. “And you would never have married her if you did understand her. Come. You look thirsty.”

He also looked as if he wanted to talk. He walked with her and sat down under the awning of her tent. She brought komis for them both, and while they drank they watched the girls shoot.

“Vera Veselov wants every girl to ride for at least one season with the archers in the army,” said Sonia. “I think she thinks of it as some kind of
birbas,
hunting the khaja as we hunt animals. Good training. But I and Mother Sakhalin and several other etsanas have argued against it. The experience will do some girls no good; others will prefer to ride for two years before it’s time for them to marry. And there are women who have lost their husbands who have asked to join as well, but others who wish only to return to the plains. Right now we have enough volunteers, and we haven’t even begun to draw young women from the tribes still out on the plains.”

“Right now,” said Ilya. “But eventually the novelty will wear off, and then it will no longer be enough to have volunteers and a casual place alongside the rest of the army.” His eyes narrowed. “Look.”

Galina had given Vasha her bow. He obviously had handled a bow before, although he did not have the skill of the girls.

“Will you stop him?” Sonia asked quietly.

Ilya glanced at her. “How can I?”