The Novels of the Jaran (20 page)

“Who’s combining? Isn’t Doroskayev’s group behind us? Yuri says you still don’t know which dyan those men call loyalty to, the ones who tried to kill you in Sakhalin’s tribe. And how can you read all that from these rocks?”

“Why are women always so damnably curious?” asked Bakhtiian. He smiled.

“Because men keep everything from them, of course.”

He laughed. “Very well. I relent. I’ll show you.” He glanced around before dismounting to explain the intricacies of this language of stone and stick and earth. When they were riding again, he said, “The jaran have no language that is set down, unlike Rhuian. Our poetry and songs live in all our memories. Only the stone mounds have meaning.”

“No written language at all?”

“Some priests carve in stone, but few know the secret of that tongue.”

“Do you?”

“I cannot say.”

“Then you do.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

“Why are men always so damnably evasive?” asked Tess. She smiled.

“Because of women,” said Bakhtiian.

For some reason, this produced a silence. A bird called loudly overhead. Tess gazed up at the sky. It had a slate color, a tinge of gray, as if one storm cloud had been ripped to pieces and mixed in with the blue. In Jeds it had the blue of turquoise, but in Jeds the other colors had not seemed so bright. A torn wisp of cloud clung to the horizon.

“Why did your brother send you overseas?” he asked.

She turned, astonished and irritated, to stare directly at him. “You don’t trust me.”

His lips tightened, and he reined his horse away from her so abruptly that it shied under the hard rein. He turned it downslope and let it have its head, Tess trailing behind.

She retreated immediately to the company of the young men that evening, and sat at the fire watching Mikhal and Fedya across from her as they sang a riddle song to an appreciative audience.

“Yuri, I’m hungry,” she said peevishly, still annoyed and troubled by her afternoon’s conversation. “Why can’t we eat?”

Yuri sat with his arms curled around his one upright knee, staring morosely into the fire. “Didn’t Ilya tell you? Tomorrow we come to
zhapolaya,
the sacred hill. We have many laws that we must follow at a holy place.”

“Including starving? Have the khepelli been out of their tents at all since you set up camp?”

“How should I know? Do you think I care?”

“Well at least you’re hungry, too.” Yuri made a face at her, but it was a half-hearted attempt. “What is this zhapolaya?”

“The stone that crowns the sacred hill. Something the gods left us.”

“How nice of Bakhtiian to tell me,” Tess muttered.

“What?”

“Is this one of the sacred places the khepelli want to see?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Wait. Are you saying that they knew it was here?”

“But everyone who knows this land knows of it. Why shouldn’t they?”

Of course they would have asked Bakhtiian to direct them to holy sites. Something the gods had left. Could it be the relic of some star-faring civilization? But this planet had been discovered by the League Exploratory Survey, annexed at the same time the League had been annexed by the Chapalii Empire, and then deeded to her brother when the emperor had honored him with the dukedom. Perhaps some ancient Rhuian empire had laid tracks across this trackless plain and then vanished. Perhaps. It was the easiest explanation.

Tess followed the shifting red of flame up and across and found that her gaze had drawn and met Fedya’s where he sat next to Mikhal. He smiled in return and looked away, the smile lingering on his face as if he had forgotten it. Tess ran her knuckles over her lips thoughtfully, focusing on the darkness beyond so that her knuckles separated into two exact duplicates, one solid, one shadow. She rose, bidding Yuri good night, and wandered out toward the Chapalii tents.

But what if Yuri had meant his comment literally—what if the Chapalii had known exactly where they wanted to go and had chosen this way, riding cross-country, to get there as unobtrusively as possible?

The four tents stood isolated beyond the fire and the casual clutter of the jahar. Three stood dark against the night sky. In the second, the tent of Hon Garii and his companion, Hon Rakii Makokan, another son of a merchant house, a low gleam of steady light filtered from the tent. But shouldn’t a light inside canvas reveal silhouettes? This one did not. She shook her head, impatient with herself. What could she do, alone on this journey, except keep an eye on them for Charles? Spy on them. She ought to at least use the correct word. Someone coughed nearby. She turned to see a figure standing about twenty paces from her, a tall, slender form traced dimly against the spread of stars. She knew that it was Bakhtiian. Watching her. Watching her spy.

“Damn him.” She stalked off to bed.

In the morning, she felt nauseated with hunger. Bakhtiian’s pace as they scouted only emphasized the hollow jolting, and now and then, when he wasn’t looking, she would put her hand over her mouth. To her unspeakable relief, they reached the sacred hill in the early afternoon.

The hills they had seen on the horizon the day before now rose abruptly out of the plain as if the earth had frozen in the act of bubbling. The grass here, more brown than gold, grew sparsely enough that soil showed through in patches. The zhapolaya was distinguishable from its companions only by the standing stone at its peak, a dark rectangle whose angularity and solid mass looked unnatural against the fluid hills. A standing stone—some kind of marker, perhaps, like the milestones the Romans had used.

“There is a hollow for a camp,” said Bakhtiian, and they found it out of sight of the sacred hill. These were weak-soiled, low hills, crumbled in spots from the winter rains. Several dry watercourses ran through the hollow, but there were no clouds, no danger of a washout.

“No storms. Not yet.” Bakhtiian laughed. Some tone in his laugh caught at her, made her shiver all the way down her spine, made her warm. The jahar rode in and she watched them, acutely aware of the lines of their bodies, their movements as they dismounted and walked and stretched and glanced—one or two—at her, quickly and then away. She turned away to hide her blush, and she knew: the long drought had caught up with her at last. Some tone in his laugh: remembered pleasure, or anticipation. She dismounted, glad to unsaddle the horse.

She took as long as she could caring for Myshla, checked her hooves twice over, brushed her until her coat gleamed, talked to her. The Chapalii retired early to their tents. The jaran men settled down around the fire, their tents a close wall behind them. Tess walked over reluctantly and sat down beside Yuri, aware of their glances, their bodies, their presence. Niko scattered herbs over the flames, and a sweet, strangely harsh scent drifted out to them.

“What is that?” Tess asked, not sure that she liked the powerful tang.

“Ulyan,”
whispered Yuri. “All the men carry some.” He shifted so that she could see a tiny pouch snuggled up against the hilt of his saber, looped to his belt.

“Why?”

“To greet the gods. A man who dies in battle, or a woman in childbirth, is welcomed to the gods’ lands, and we burn ulyan with him on his pyre, so the gods’ messengers will come to carry away his spirit. Jahar riders and pregnant women always keep a pouch of ulyan with them.”

“I can’t stand the scent. It’s so strong. I’m going to take a walk.”

Yuri patted her hand. “It also covers the smell.”

Tess left, walking aimlessly out into the gathering darkness, the hollow lost behind her, the sacred hill hidden behind the hill to her right. She touched her belt in four places, a little ritual: saber, knife, mirror, and Chapalii knife. Covered the smell, he had said.
Of burning flesh? With any luck at all, I’ll never find out.

The moon, large and bright and not yet half full, rose like a cautious animal over the horizon and began its leisurely circuit of the sky. Stars appeared here and there.

Beneath her feet the ground sloped upward. Tess followed it, letting other forces dictate her movements. She came upon him unexpectedly, sitting on a rock embedded in an overhanging lip of hill. The view was of nothing, except the formless shape of hills. He was, perhaps, watching the moon.

“Hello, Fedya.”

“He is happy tonight,” he answered, by way of greeting. He did not look at her.

“Do you mean the moon?” She sat beside him, cross-legged, her hands on her knees.

“Of course.” He looked at her fleetingly.

“Do you call the moon a man, a male, in the jaran?”

“What a strange question. Yes.”

“In my land, we call her a maiden or, sometimes, an old woman.”

“But the moon is not nearly as bright as the sun.” Fedya considered the moon, tilting his head to one side. He had a soft profile, blurred by his mustache and thick lashes, and by the clean, round line of his jaw.

“Then what is the sun?”

“A woman.” He looked at her, puzzled. “Of course.”

She looked down. It smelled of soil here rather than grass, a heavy scent unstirred by wind. “There is so much that is different.”

“Between a man and a woman, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

Fedya shook his head. “There is nothing different.”

“You haven’t been in my land.”

“What is a land but people? Your ways may be different, but people are the same.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe you.”

“How can you not believe me?” he asked, fixing her with a stare so intimate that she felt her face warm with a flush.

“Fedya, will you—do you want to—” She almost laughed, but it came out a half-strangled, tiny sound. “I don’t know what to say, how to ask.”

“You already have.” He put his hand on her shoulder and drew it down, slow and caressing, down along her sleeve to her wrist. She had to hold her breath to stop from sighing, and she was suddenly aware of every inch of skin, tingling, aching. “Tess.” His voice was gentle. “I must tell you this first. I can only think of my wife, or of what comfort there is in lying with a woman.”

“But it’s only—comfort I want. I can’t—not men who want more—” Her hand lifted to touch her own lips, lowered. “—than I can give them. Than I have. I’m not explaining myself.”

“But you are.” His hand lay steady on hers. He looked up at the moon. “The soul is cold and alone when darkness comes. It needs comfort. But the other things, possession, passion, love—ah, they bring hurt.”

“Betrayal. Betraying the confidence you give, between a man and a woman.”

“Betrayal,” Fedya echoed. Her hand warmed now where his touched it. “Perhaps I felt she betrayed me when she died, like the sun, always deserting the moon to the darkness.” The light of the moon shadowed his eyes.

“No confidences,” said Tess. “Only comfort.”

He lifted one hand to cup her face. “Below this rock it is dry.”

He was gentle, and quiet, and he knew how to laugh when it was appropriate. He fell asleep afterward, half in her arms, and Tess saw that when he slept he looked much younger, almost as if he were a child again. The roughness of his cloak tickled her skin, but pleasantly, softly, as if it meant to remind her that contentment was all very well, but there was work still to be done. They lay in darkness, the moon far gone on his nightly path.

Something that had been kicking in her had calmed; another alarm now took its place. Work to be done. She slipped on her clothing and wrapped him in his cloak, carefully tucking the cloth around his feet. He did not wake. It was chilly. She reached the crest of the hill, yawning.

A light lit the sacred hill opposite. Shadowy forms, thin and awkward in their movements, clustered around the standing stone, limned by the glow. Tess dropped to her knees and waited and watched.

For a long time they simply stood there, as if they were examining the megalith. She surveyed the ground all around, but she could detect no other watchers. Just as she decided to make a careful circuit, to be sure that no one, especially not Bakhtiian, was also observing this scene, the light cut off.

She scuttled down the hill, keeping low, and at the base of the zhapolaya crouched and stared up. A rectangle of oblivion, drowning out the stars, marked the standing stone. She knew her eyes had adjusted, but she could see no one, no forms, no shapes, nothing but the stone, above her. The Chapalii could not have moved so fast and disappeared so utterly. On the dark face of the stone, a red light winked and vanished. She ducked, expecting laser fire, but none came. The light winked and vanished again, and she waited, and it winked and vanished yet again. A signal.

She crept up the hill. No one shouted. Nothing moved. The light blinked on and off, on and off, beckoning her.

A beacon. The thought struck her forcibly as she reached the top and cautiously stood next to the stone. The megalith dwarfed her, standing three times her width and twice her height. Just above her eye level, embedded within the stone, gleamed the blood-red point. She placed her hand on the stone, next to it, and felt the roughened texture of rock on her skin. But the rock was warm, and the barest pulse throbbed through it, blending with the beat of her heart. She slid her hand across its surface until she covered over the tiny depression within which the point of light lay winking.

The stone gave off an exhalation, like an old woman’s tired sigh. Warm air brushed her face. She felt dizzy, disoriented, until she realized that the rock face was pulling away from her, opening. The ground moved, and she stared down into the earth, down a flight of stairs that led—

That led wherever the Chapalii had gone. A ghostly blue light emanated up from the depths.

Tess put a foot on the first step. A hand closed on her shoulder from behind, and she froze. A thin, hard hand, preternaturally strong, and with it, the scent of cinnamon, distinctive and strong. She knew it was a Chapalii before she even attempted to turn.

From below, drifting on the warm draft that rode up the stairs, she heard the low double chime of “signal received,” Chapalii standard, and then a voice.

“Progress received. Continue observation of Soerensen. Proceed with caution. Do not act rashly.”