The Novels of the Jaran (192 page)

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.

“Your father was right, you know, about his vision,” she said. “About you.” She crossed to him and laid her hands on his chest. “When I come back, we’ll have a child.”

“Two,” he said instantly, and then embraced her and just held her. He was warm and so close that they might almost as well have been one person. “Tess,” he whispered, “haven’t two new moons passed since you were delivered of the baby?”

“Yes. Why?” But she laughed even as she asked the question, knowing what he meant by it. “Yes, Ilya,” she said, and kissed him.

Two days later, they boarded the ship: Tess and Aleksi and his new family; the Bharentous Repertory Company; and what was left of Charles’s party: Cara and Jo and Maggie and Rajiv. Hal Bharentous and Gwyn Jones carried between them the litter on which Vasil Veselov lay, his face drawn with pain and his beauty forever mutilated by an ugly scar. Until he got to space, of course, where it could easily enough be repaired.

Poor Karolla walked behind her husband, her face set. She was hugely pregnant. A great argument had ensued over whether Karolla could bring her tent. In the end, Tess had told Owen she would herself pay for any extra weight charges and that Karolla might bring anything she damned well pleased. The gods alone knew how difficult life was going to be for her, torn away from the tribes, without stripping her of all her worldly goods that might anchor her in the strange new world she was going to. Tess wondered if Karolla had had a choice whether to go; a real choice, that is, not just Vasil convincing her that, of course, she would go with him. But Tess was glad Vasil was leaving, for Ilya’s sake. For her own peace of mind. Diana Brooke-Holt came after, holding the hands of the two children. Diana looked pallid and fragile. Tess noted how solicitous many of the other members of the Company were toward her.

On the other shallow river ship, Niko and Juli and two of their grandchildren and various of their train and one hundred riders boarded. The horses, disliking it, were led below. On the shore, David huddled over a map with Nadine. Maggie hailed him, and he started and glanced up. There was an awkward moment, one could tell by the way he stared at Nadine, and then they said good-bye without touching and he hurried up the ramp, hands clenched. He came and stood beside Tess on the deck.

On the shore, Ilya waited, he with his jahar arrayed gloriously behind him and his gold banner whipping in the breeze that skirled in off the river, rising with the dawn. What words did they need here? They had said what was in their hearts many times.

She watched him. He watched her. The captain of the ship bellowed orders. The ramps scraped up over rails. Ropes were cast free, and with poles they thrust themselves away from the dock, and then the stroke for the oars called out, a steady, pleasing pattern.