The Novels of the Jaran (218 page)

“I’m not making a fool of myself!”

“You are, too. You stare at her like a stupid grazel.”

“And you don’t stare at the princess? Now I suppose you think that Bakhtiian will want you to marry her, so that he has a claim to the Mircassian throne.”

“Why shouldn’t he?” For the first time, Vasha felt abruptly hopeful. “It would be easier to conquer Mircassia with an alliance than with soldiers.”

“I have to piss,” said Stefan, and detoured into the underbrush. Vasha waited, brooding, knowing Stefan well enough to hear in his silence the words Stefan would not say but that other people would say: Why should a bastard receive any blessing, any favor, from the man who could not truly be his father, not by jaran laws. Only by khaja ones.

“Anyway,” said Vasha toward the bushes, “why shouldn’t he marry me to a khaja princess? Do you think the jaran would ever follow me, truly? They’ll follow Aunt Nadine’s children, or Aunt Sonia’s. But not me. So why shouldn’t he provide for me by granting me a kingdom, as he did for Mitya.”

Stefan swatted branches aside and came out, buckling his belt. “Mitya has a better claim to be Bakhtiian’s heir than you do.”

“I
know
that! But why shouldn’t he, anyway?”

“Is that what you want? Truly?”

Standing knee-deep in thick grass, Vasha heard Father Wind’s thick voice talking in the deep-leafed trees. Through a gap in the trees, Vasha saw a few torches and lanterns still burning, marking the merchants’ camp. Behind them, three fires burned down toward coals, orange flames shooting up from banks of glowing red. Occasional noises sounded on the night air, a voice, a twig snapping, farther off the startled lowing of a cow in a nearby village or the uff-uff of one of the bad-tempered little guard beasts that the khaja loved.

“Yes,” said Vasha finally. “Not that one thing, only of itself, but to be at the center of something, like Father and Tess are, and to build a web of alliances as strong as a weaving, that can never be ripped apart.”

“But then why did you steal the horses?”

“I don’t know. Why did you come with me?”

“I don’t know.” Stefan grinned. “We did manage it, though, even if it did make Yaroslav Sakhalin furious. I’ll bet he never stole horses when he was a boy.”

“I’ll bet he did.”

“Bet he didn’t.”

“Who’s going to ask him?”

Stefan laughed. “Come on. We’re supposed to report to Riasonovsky.”

They walked on, sidestepping riders sleeping curled in blankets on the ground.

“Do you really think Yaroslav Sakhalin never tried to steal horses or even grazel when he was a boy?” Vasha asked finally as they came up to Riasonovsky’s tent. They heard voices inside, two men talking together. By the light of the lantern hung within the tent, they saw two shadowy outlines, men standing by the tent flap.

“None of those Sakhalins stole horses. They didn’t have to.”

“What about my cousin Galina’s husband? They say he was pretty wild when he was young.”

A hand snaked out abruptly from the tent and yanked aside the tent flap, revealing Riasonovsky and a fair jaran man dressed in Sakhalin colors. “Who says that?” asked the second man. He grinned. “Well met, Vassily Kireyevsky. I heard you were riding this way. As it happens, I’m returning to Sarai as well. I’ve just told Riasonovsky that I and fifty of my men will be riding north with you. Galina is expecting our second child, as you know.”

Vasha’s first thought was that Riasonovsky could not have looked more expressionless had he been a Habakar holy man in the grip of a God-induced trance: He had seen one himself, and would have sworn that the holy man was dead, except he was sitting upright and unsupported, and had miraculously come back to life two days later.

His second thought was that no one could possibly have as bad luck as he had.

“Well met,” he stammered. “I didn’t know you were riding through these lands.”

Andrei Sakhalin smiled. As the feckless youngest son in a string of good-looking and hard-fighting boys (the eldest being his famous brother Yaroslav), he had profited by the others’ loyalty and service to Bakhtiian: When Galina Orzhekov, eldest granddaughter to Mother Orzhekov, came of age to be married, it had been agreed by the etsanas and the dyans of the Orzhekov and Sakhalin tribes that a Sakhalin prince ought to be granted the alliance. That prince had originally been meant to be Mother Sakhalin’s grandson, Anatoly, but he had been poisoned with love for a khaja Singer and had disappeared into khaja lands. That left Andrei, who was suspected of being light-minded; he was also thirteen years older than the girl, but he was unmarried. Galina had done her duty, not that she had any choice in marriage in any case.

“I hear you stole horses from the khaja,” added Andrei.

Vasha flinched and barely nodded.

Andrei chuckled. “Good for you. I stole horses from the khaja once, when I was a boy. They were filthy creatures—the horses, that is. Thank the gods I never got close enough to the khaja to tell what they were, although why do we even need to? Their stone tents reek from a morning’s ride away. I would have tried stealing grazel from the other tribes, which would have been more interesting, but even by then Yaroslav had pledged to aid Bakhtiian in uniting the tribes, so we were forbidden from trying anything that might have started a feud.” He sighed, looking wistful. “Ah, well.” He turned back to Riasonovsky. “I’ll bring my men over in the morning. I need fodder for the horses.”

Without further ado, he swept out of the tent, winked at Vasha, and walked out into the darkness.

There was silence.

“What is he doing here?” Vasha asked finally.

Riasonovsky grunted. “Going back to Sarai,” he said in a voice that made it obvious that he had nothing more to say on the matter. “Your report?”

They gave it, succinctly, and he dismissed them, leaving them to stand awkwardly out in the darkness. They looked at each other.

“What will happen to us when we get back to the tribes?” Stefan asked softly, the question Vasha most dreaded to hear. Suddenly his throat was choked with fear.

“Grandfather Niko will make sure that you get sent out to a good jahar, maybe Kirill Zverfkov’s or Tasha Lensky’s. Somewhere you could make a name for yourself.”

“I wouldn’t go. You’d never manage without me.”

“You might not have any choice,” Vasha said hoarsely. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. Oh, gods, Stefan…” Then, because it was cowardly not to say it, he forced himself to, though his voice was the merest whisper, almost lost on the breeze. “What if my father casts me out? What if the tribe disowns me?”

“Tess wouldn’t disown you.”

Vasha just shook his head. Tess was khaja, after all, not jaran. In the end, it was the jaran council that would speak.

“Well,” repeated Stefan stubbornly, “I won’t go anyway, no matter what happens.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ardhanarishvara

I
LYANA WOKE EARLY ON
Frejday, feeling a pleasant sense of anticipation. The dust-eater purred at her feet. When she shifted to get up, it slid away under the bed (a real bed, which Diana’s Aunt Millie had built for her). She swung her feet down and kneaded the soft pile of rug with her toes.

“Up! Valentin, it’s morning time—” She broke off. Valentin’s sleeping pillows lay empty, his blankets still folded neatly in their center. Ilyana dressed quickly and ducked outside. Anton sat by the fire, drinking milk. “Where is Valentin?”

“I dunno.” Anton slanted a glance up at her, gauging her mood. “Doing something you don’t want him to, probably.”

“Anton!” Infuriating beast. Ilyana could see trouble building with Anton; he was getting more and more bored with his life and the restrictions set on him, and he had long since learned to be underhanded in his dealings. “Have you seen him?”

“No.”

Gritting her teeth, she went to her mother’s tent. Karolla was still asleep, and Vasil, with the baby snuggled in a sling against his chest, was playing a counting game with Evdokia. Ilyana slunk out quietly. Evdokia got so little attention from their father that she didn’t want to disturb her now. She went back to the pantry, drank some milk, and went out to the hallway.

No Valentin at the bottom of the steps, where he liked to sit and brood. She sighed and stared up the twisting flights, wooden banisters polished to a dark sheen. From the next level she heard, faintly, Hal and Diana and Anatoly singing a song together, and Portia giggling. Their door was cracked open, and Ilyana smelled frying bacon, so strong and tantalizing that she had to swallow. But Valentin wouldn’t be there, not if Anatoly Sakhalin was there, too. Higher, at the top, she knew that Hyacinth would not yet be awake and Yevgeni would already have left for the shop where he worked. She cursed under her breath and went out back to the garden.

The garden consisted of a bed of flowers and a vegetable patch, with a five-meter-square lawn in the back. Hal took the younger kids out there on afternoons he was free (and the weather was good) and taught them baseball. One dwarf Myriad grew by the back gate, an arthritic old tree developed in the heady days of hybridization; the pear and apple limbs still bore fruit, but the peach and apricot only leafed out and then faded. Valentin liked to sit in its shade, but he wasn’t sitting there now.

Back by the house the cellar doors lay shut, but the bolt was retracted. Mired to the earth by a sudden sense of dread, Ilyana forced herself forward, heaved up one door, and took the steps down into the darkness. It remained cool and dank down here, even with the filter running. Various kits, chests, cupboards, and power nodes cluttered the cellar. None of the residents of the house really bothered to straighten it up except at the winter reset. Beyond this storage the bulk of the cellar simply drifted into a melange of beams and plascrete reinforcements and darkness.

In the farthest back corner, she found Valentin shivering. He was all over gooseflesh. His fingers twitched spasmodically under gel tips and his left foot, curled awkwardly under his rear, was tangled in a wire. He had old-fashioned goggles on, although he could not have seen her in any case. The tray of nesh-drives sat on the ground just out of his reach. Either he had slid away from it, or he had stationed himself out of reach on purpose.

Ilyana bit down so hard on her lower lip that she swallowed blood before she realized that she had broken her skin. She wanted to scream. She really wanted to panic. Had he been here
all
night? But she blanked out her emotions and knelt down to begin the sequence of drive deceleration. It wouldn’t do any good to run the
return
sequence that would alert the person in nesh that it was time to get out. She had to compel him into a narrowing sequence of paths, like jaran hunters on a birbas driving game into a shrinking center, and thus push him into the “air-lock” that would return him to
here.

She picked up the monocle that allowed an outside observer a fail-safe to peer into the nesh environment and squinted into it. A bewildering array of images rushed by her. The sun rose over a golden, infinite plain and shivered, transforming as a wave like heat passed over the scene so that a paler sun gleamed coldly down at midday on an army retreating in disarray through a frozen wasteland of snow and trees. Tower Bridge slid by in twilight. A vast spaceship loomed and faded. Infinity Jilt blasted through a space lock and crossed the threshold into a council chamber whose walls were a hundred swaying slender tree trunks that shot up into a sky filled with the lights of the aurora borealis, shifting, weaving, a spider dropped silken strands down and the delicate threads caught and bound a crippled bird that dragged its shattered wing along the ground and it fought against the binding and Valentin began to retch, dry heaves.

Ilyana dropped the monocle and pulled the goggles off his eyes. He was doubled over, wires knotting, and she ripped them off his fingers. He was shaking hard and gagging and vomiting, but nothing came out, only a little spittle. His shakes turned into shivers. The cellar light snapped on and Ilyana started back, gripping Valentin’s hands protectively. His fingers were blue with cold. He was back, in this world, but he wasn’t yet aware.

“What is this?” asked Anatoly Sakhalin.

Trust him never to let any covert action go undetected, not in this house.

“Oh, gods,” said Ilyana under her breath. Still holding Valentin’s hands, rubbing them, she looked back over her shoulder.

Sakhalin regarded her and Valentin in silence. Like all the Sakhalin princes, he was a good-looking man, and Ilyana found him imposing, even though he always treated her politely. She adored Diana. Anatoly made her feel—well, anyway, a man like him never noticed girls like her. She flushed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I am also sorry,” he replied in khush, walking forward now, “that there are not Singers here trained to guide a boy’s journeys. He is sorely in need of help.”

Hope flared. “He needs to see a
dokhtor
,” she said hurriedly, before Valentin regained his wits. His retching had subsided into hoarse coughs. He sounded like he was coughing his lungs out. Ilyana flinched at each convulsion. He began to blink frantically as he reoriented.

“Then the etsana must order it done,” he said, and hope died. Karolla Arkhanov was “etsana” of the jaran exiles, and she would never admit anything was wrong with her eldest son. Anatoly crouched on the other side of Valentin, examining the boy with a frown on his face. “But if the dokhtors here are also Singers, I have not heard of it, and it is the Singers who must sing to the spirit of the wounded, to grant it healing.”

“Wounded?” Ilyana stuttered.

Valentin’s hands tightened on hers and his gaze focused on her face. “Yana?” he whispered. He swallowed, hard. “Damn it. Why did you do that? I was just going good.” The harsh cellar light made his skin look stretched and white.

“Do not speak to your sister with such disrespect,” said Anatoly mildly, still in khush. Valentin began coughing again. “These khaja machines are poison to you,” added Anatoly, in the same deceptively bland voice.