The Novels of the Jaran (221 page)

Anatoly contemplated the ruins of their argument with grim satisfaction. After a moment he realized that his hands were shaking, and he clenched them.

Aunt Millie stepped out onto the patio and surveyed him. He lifted his chin and faced her stubbornly. “Routed the enemy, I see,” she said conversationally.

“I didn’t—!”

“Now, Anatoly, come inside and help me wash the vegetables for the salad.” Once he would have protested that men did not cook, but that excuse was not tolerated at Holt Farm. He followed Aunt Millie inside meekly and took up a station beside her at the double sink. Most of the rest of the family—and there were a lot of them—had adjourned to the west lawn to watch the cricket game. Through the west window he saw Portia sitting on her grandfather’s lap, golden head resting on Granfa’s arm and two fingers stuck in her mouth. She was tired.

“You’re discontented,” observed Aunt Millie.

“It isn’t right that Diana should want me to stay behind,” he said promptly, taking the dispute to where it should have been essayed in the first place. “This could be a chance for me to use my skills, the only chance I’ve truly had so far.”

“It could be,” she agreed mildly. She was a big-boned woman, quite unlike her niece, appealingly strong, with powerful hands and arms from decades of carpentry work. “But I can’t say that you further your cause by driving Diana to tears.”

“She fights just as well as I do.”

“Certainly she can be just as cruel and cutting when she wishes to be, but she doesn’t have your years of tactical and strategic training, so, I would give the advantage in that department to you, I’m afraid.”

He had the grace to look ashamed.

“I know from my own experience that it’s sometimes impossible to forgo a chance to make a person whom you’re angry with cry just because it feels like recompense for your anger. But that isn’t the way to build a marriage. If I say that Diana has had to struggle these last years, I don’t say it to belittle what you’ve gone through, Anatoly. But you have to accept that she has had to make as many adjustments as you have.” She paused and looked at him with what he knew was a keen eye. “Do you disagree?”

Anatoly was not in the habit of disagreeing with aunts and etsanas, and in any case, he had discovered over the years that Aunt Millie did not give advice often, or lightly. Nor was it wise to ignore her. He tried to sort out his feelings, but they were far too chaotic. He settled for the direct approach. “I’m very angry. I want to go.”

She nodded, and he was relieved to see that this confession contented her. “Then that is what you must tell Diana.”

They washed and cut broccoli in silence for a while and finally, driven by the quiet, he blurted out, “No one seems to understand. If I were still with the jaran, I would be a dyan, a commander, of my own army. These are the years that a soldier does his best fighting, and I’m wasting them away.”

“So you’re frustrated. I understand that. But, Anatoly, you know that you’ve received treatments that will allow you to live far longer than you could have expected to on Rhui.”

“My body has received these treatments, and my mind benefits from them, but my mind still lives on Rhui. That is, I mean—” He flushed, angry at himself for repeating the worst of Diana’s accusations against him, when that wasn’t what he had meant.

“I know what you mean: Intellectually you understand that you’ll live longer, but in your own mind, emotionally, you still age each year the way you always expected you would. Or at least, is that what you mean?” She smiled.

Relaxing, Anatoly smiled back. “Close enough. I can’t help but think that I ought to be doing something, but I’m not.”

“That is up to you.”

Diana sat at the other end of the long, long table at dinner, with Portia next to her, and Anatoly had no chance to get her alone until evening. He ran her to ground when she came downstairs and went out onto the front lawn after putting Portia to bed.

“Diana,” he said softly, coming up behind her. He did not touch her.

She shrugged without answering, without turning to face him.

“I beg your pardon for the things I said. I was angry because I want to go with the Company.”

Now she turned, looking startled. In any light, she was beautiful. Dusk softened her expression, and for an instant he could believe that she had forgiven him everything.

“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate you offering an apology and explaining yourself.”

He flinched as if slapped, but he kept Aunt Millie uppermost in his mind and he forced himself to stay calm. “Diana. I had hoped we could—”

“Kiss and make love and wake up in the morning as if nothing, no argument, had happened, like we always do? I’m tired of running that same cycle over and over and over, because we aren’t getting anywhere new.”

She paused. It was so quiet that he felt as if he could hear the exhalation of the sky, the music of the stars, and the slow drag of the moon on the distant tides.

A gleam of bitter humor surfaced in her face. “But I am willing to enter negotiations,” she added, “if it’s worth it to you, to build something we can live with.”

“Of course it is worth it to me! How could you think otherwise? I left everything for you, Diana!”

“How could I ever forget it?” she whispered, ducking her head down, as if to avoid a blow.

“My heart,” he murmured, and caught her shoulders and pulled her into him. It was the only sure way he knew to show her that he loved her. For a moment she resisted. Then she muttered something uninterpretable under her breath and abruptly wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. They stood that way, under the stars, for a long time. No one disturbed them.

CHAPTER TEN

Sarai

T
HE ORZHEKOV TRIBE CROSSED
the great sea of grass in an untidy line, a thread pulled across a golden tapestry. Out on the plains, it was easy to love the passage from one pasture to the next for its own sake, to feel at one with the migration of the wind, to believe that the journey itself was endless, that no destination, once reached, was ever final.

Tess urged Zhashi along the line. In the back of one wagon, Yuri slept soundly despite the constant movement, his head cushioned on an arm, his body swaying to the rhythm of the wagon’s ride. She lifted a hand to greet Niko as she passed him as well. He could no longer ride long distances and had to drive wagons now. But he smiled at her. The duty seemed not to bother him.

“Dammit,” she said, coming up beside her husband in the vanguard, “it hurts me more to watch him get old than it does him to get old.”

Ilya glanced at her, then went back to surveying the ebb and flow of grass along the low hills, rippled by the wind while the clouds sailed with majestic disinterest above. “So do we all grow old and die,” he said finally. “He has lived a long life, and has seen a child born to his granddaughter. No doubt, having lived lawfully and well, the gods will allow him to be born into his next life as a woman.”

Tess laughed. “No doubt that will be his reward.”

“You don’t think so?” Ilya asked, looking truly puzzled. It was at moments like this that Tess remembered how different they were. Abruptly distracted, he reined Kriye aside and headed out away from the tribe, motioning her to follow.

Mystified, she did. They came to the crest of a rise and there, below, lay Sarai, distant enough that the line of trees along the river looked narrow and low. Ilya dismounted.

“Here is the spot where you marked me, and I you,” he said. He looked not as much joyful as smugly satisfied.

“How can you possibly tell?”

Looking down on him, she saw how the sun lit his hair and shone, for an instant, on his face before the clouds muffled its light. “How can you
not
tell? You khaja have been crippled by your maps and your timepieces and your walls.”

“Our maps have been very useful to you!”

“That is true. But nevertheless, you are like the prisoners in the cave, your legs and necks shackled by your maps and your walls so that all you can see is the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave. You think they are the truth, but they are only a shadow of the truth, which lies—” He gestured to the sky and the plain and the distant spiral curl that was the growing city of Sarai. “—out here, under the gaze of the sun and the moon and the stars.”

“Well!” Tess laughed again. “That is why you have so often been accused of loving khaja learning too much! I thought you didn’t like Plato.”

“I don’t.” Ilya grinned and swung back up on Kriye, who sidestepped away and was in general feeling lively. “But I must use the weapons I am given or else lose all.” As soon as Ilya was on Kriye’s back, the stallion broke away and ran along the crest until Ilya finally reined him in and turned back. Zhashi snorted and lowered her head to graze, disgusted by this masculine idiocy.

But Tess enjoyed watching it. Ilya and Kriye together made a beautiful picture. And they liked being admired. “Vain creatures,” she said to Zhashi, who found the subject too uninteresting to reply to.

She inspected Sarai, which from this height and distance bore more resemblance to the ruins of a whorled seashell than to a city. She blinked her implant on. If she had been alone, she would have used voice triggers to bring up the program she wanted; instead, she had to sort backward through the entrance architecture by focusing her eyes on and blinking at each subfile she wanted, as if she was descending a long staircase. It took longer, but it was silent.

They had laid out the pattern first, a great spiral at whose center rested an oval plaza, the heart of the city. Through her implant, the image overlaid on Sarai-as-she-was-now, Tess saw that pattern marked on the ground as she and David ben Unburn had envisioned it, a city blending both worlds, jaran and khaja. At last, she focused past the pattern and examined the actual city.

On one side of this plaza spread the khaja city, on the other, the haphazard strings of jaran camps. Swathes of parkland cut through the khaja city. Following David’s plans, the surveyors had marked out areas where khaja settlers—mostly artisans and laborers and merchants brought in from conquered territories—could build their own houses. Within those districts an untidy array of houses and hovels and villas rose in clumps, warrening together by clans or religions or some other designation Tess hadn’t yet figured out. These districts grew in fractured rings out from the innermost city, where the first of the public buildings now rose beside the plaza.

“It looks like the marketplace is finished,” said Ilya.

The image of the marketplace took form and commingled with the actual marketplace, a vast space of arches roofed with stone and wood open on the sides. Tess smiled to herself and a new image asserted itself, that of David’s third tier design, a fanciful combination of arches and fluttering cloth and elegant thin spires all bringing more loft and air to the market. But they could not build such a thing now. Not yet.

She let her eyes roam, spiraling out and seeing the image of the city that was meant to be: a glorious shell open to the sky, with the broad oval paved in white stone and a great fountain at its center, with a forum and a second marketplace and a palace for the bureaucracy (since it was certainly not anything Ilya would agree to live in) and an audience hall and a granary and guild halls and a library (her addition) and a stadium and a theater modeled after the one at Ephesus, and at this point she and David had spent more time laughing over what Utopian absurdities they could think up than actually planning anything useful.

“What do you see?” asked Ilya casually.

Tess started, blinking down hard on the third tier construct and reining Zhashi—who had caught her sudden shift of mood—in with a touch of her knees. Her eyes caught an unfamiliar gleam of pale tile, and she gasped.

“The bathhouse roof is on! It must be finished!”

Her enthusiasm surprised a laugh out of Ilya. “Very well. Perhaps we’d better go down and investigate.”

Tess slanted a sidewise glance at him, but mottling his face and form she saw instead David’s five-hundred-year projections for the growth and spread of the city, an ugly sprawl that reminded her bitterly of what the jaran had already lost, and what they had yet to lose. She blinked the implant off and, frowning now, followed Ilya down the slope.

They rode into Sarai along a paved thoroughfare that began abruptly in the middle of grass and ran straight into the city. Fifty riders from Ilya’s jahar fell in around them and escorted them to the park on the jaran side of the oval in which the great tent of the Orzhekov tribe stood, the permanent symbol of Orzhekov authority. To the right, half-hidden by stands of young trees, sat the Sakhalin tent topped by a red pennant edged with gold, and to the left, farther back behind a young planted wilderness that would in time hide them from view, rose the tents of whichever of the other Elder Tribes were in residence at any given time. Right now, Tess counted three flags: the golden sword of Veselov, the blue horse of Raevsky, and, of course, the green tent striped with gold that marked the Grekov tribe.

Tess dismounted and unsaddled Zhashi and rubbed her down while Ilya went to greet his cousin Kira and her daughter Galina, who had stayed in Sarai. Then, handing the mare over to a boy who would lead her out to pasture, Tess followed Ilya inside the great tent.

It was vast, more like a great round hall than a nomad’s tent. It also boasted a slatted wooden floor and huge beams rising above, on which the felt roof rested and from which tapestries hung, decorating the long inner hall and closing off a series of smaller private rooms along the sides, although any one of those private chambers was the size of many an etsana’s tent.

Ilya laughed, and she saw him at the opposite side, kneeling beside Galina’s firstborn, a chubby three-year-old.

“Gods,” said Tess as she greeted her eldest adopted sister, Kira, “it’s hard to believe that little Galina is old enough to be having her second child.”

“Even if she did have to marry that worthless Sakhalin prince?” asked Kira tartly.