The Novels of the Jaran (248 page)

They hit the front rank of the jaran riders, and at once there came the ringing of sword and saber, lance and shield, and arrows rained down on the khaja lines from the archers posted behind the front ranks. There he had fought, coming once within striking range of the Xiriki princeling: He thought he could see the golden plume of his own helmet, won by right of arms and by right of his Sakhalin name, bobbing in the center of the thickest knot of fighting.

The noise itself was deafening, but Sosha stood her ground, solid, afraid of nothing. More jaran riders poured over the bridge and swept out to push the khaja flanks back, and back, and although the engagement here would go on for half the morning already he saw the Xiriki camp where
t
he khaja had foolishly trapped themselves within the tight circle of their own wagons, like animals in a corral. Already he saw Zvertkov’s army coming up from the south and the two armies
—
his and Zvertkov’s
—
combining to surround the encampment, dust and arrows and the constant clatter of battle hanging in the air round them.

And the panic, the rout, while the Lion Prince fled and his brother alone with his picked troops tried to hold off the pursuit, but it was already too late, because the khaja were already defeated in their hearts and maddened by fear. The jaran riders had slaughtered the fleeing soldiers with less trouble than it took to kill the most placid grazel, leaving bodies strewn for a day’s ride westward like the broken trail marking their defeat….

The swirl of the battle faded, and the actors became insubstantial ghosts and, at last, faded into the white tile grid.

“Hey, cool! Can we do it again?”

Anatoly stared at the blank landscape. He didn’t want to do it again. It was boring. It wasn’t real, it was worse, it was just something that had already happened, that didn’t mean anything now. “It’s like being dead,” he whispered. “This isn’t right. We must leave here. This is not the place where the Singers go; it is the land where the demons live.”

“No, no.” Valentin tugged on Sosha’s bridle, looking worried. “We can’t go now. I’m trying to build a bridge to the other land.”

“What other land?”

“The deepest one. It’s hard to get to. But I’m almost there. I really am—just let me—”

“No.”

“Just let me—”

“No, Valentin! When you ride with the jahar, you obey the dyan instantly.”

“But I know how to get to the map!” Valentin sounded desperate, and Anatoly almost gave in, but he had no idea how much time had passed in the real world. Suddenly he wondered what lay beneath this grid. Another world? A deeper world?

“We must go back. But we will come here again, to the place where you say there is a map.”

Valentin let go of the bridle and stepped back, and Anatoly braced himself in the saddle, expecting the boy to flee. But instead a plain stone arch coalesced on the grid and Valentin retreated through it and was—gone. Quickly, Anatoly rode after him.

And opened his eyes.

The latticework wavered and then steadied into a white web, solid under his fingers, and he let go. Valentin was coughing and gulping, but he managed a weak smile.

“Did I do all right?” he asked.

Anatoly frowned. “What is wrong?” But even as he said it, the boy’s color got better and he wiped his mouth and stood up, looking fit enough.

“Next time we can go straight to the map. It’s like a big thing, like a model I guess Yana would call it.” The boy paused suddenly. His lips twitched. “Is it true that my mother gave you flowers so you’d think Yana gave them to you?”

Anatoly flushed. “I would never presume to criticize a woman, but that was ill-done of her. Do you understand why?”

“Yana is in love with you,” added Valentin with all the wicked glee of a younger brother revealing dark secrets.

Anatoly flushed even more, and was grateful that it was dark. “Do you understand why?”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s supposed to be the girl’s choice. That’s not how they do it on Earth, though.”

“How khaja do it is not my concern.” He cocked his head to one side. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah. I heard it before. They’re all back. I wonder how that barge floats. David says it isn’t mag-lev.”

Anatoly jumped back from the latticework just as the first figures came through the archway that led into the courtyard. There was no celebration tonight, but a more combative feeling, as if the actors wrestled with what they had wrought this night and what they might hope to achieve in the future.

“Valentin! Hello. Anatoly.” David paused beside them, peering at them curiously. In the luminescent glow from the gazebo, his expression looked quizzical. “Shouldn’t you be in bed, Valentin?”

Valentin hesitated, glanced at Anatoly, then mumbled a good night and left.

David waited until the boy was gone and the actors had faded into their rooms or settled down in the far corner of the courtyard to talk. “I hope you didn’t find him here.”

“I used him as a guide.”

“You
what
?”

“If I cannot get through the dome, and if, as you suggest, only certain portions of the palace are even habitable by us, then I must scout inside, by using the nesh.”

David considered. “Fair enough. But don’t take the boy. Please don’t.”

“Why not? It is time he had something to do, that he began to learn to be a man.”

David pulled a hand through his hair. “It isn’t that easy. Neshing makes him ill. He’s too young to nesh except on a supervised and extremely constrained basis. He’s gone far too far already, and it could actually kill him.”

“Truly?”

“I don’t know. I only wormed this information out of his sister a few days ago. I don’t know how bad it is, and Yana claims that their parents are incapable of safeguarding him. So I guess that leaves… me.”

Anatoly bowed his head. He thought about the hungry look on Valentin’s face. “Perhaps you and I can find a way to guide him out of his need for the nesh. What we saw in there wasn’t real.”

David shook his head, not quite grinning. “It depends on what you’re looking for. Frankly, I think it might be possible to use this nesh port to scout the palace. We’ll have to arrange something. But not tonight. I’m tired.”

“The play went well?”

“How to know? It went. Good night.”

Diana, laughing, came in through the arch with the lighting designer, waving at him, and went out again. Out beyond the arch music started up, a guitar and hand-drums, a chant.

But Anatoly didn’t really see her, although he lifted a hand in greeting and left it half raised, then curled it into a fist. The sharp satisfaction of purpose flooded him: Valentin said there was a map somewhere below the surface world. David said it might be possible, within the nesh lattice, to truly scout the palace.

He intended to do so, even if he had to do it alone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Altar

F
OR THE LENGTH OF
a drawn-out breath, Vasha saw everything as if it had stilled and frozen: The ranks of khaja infantry, drawn up with shields and spears around their position. His father and Konstans, oddly calm in the center of the maelstrom. The ranks of riders, trying desperately to form up in the too-small space. Stefan holding on to a panicked, wounded horse. Rusudani peering out from underneath the shelter of the carpet.

Katerina, magnificent, like a child of the gods caught forever in the act of aiming her bow. She fired.

The world dissolved into action. Arrows showered in, and again, and again, striking freely into the mob of remounts. The horses went mad with terror. Within moments, the jaran riders fought as much to maintain a line against the frenzied horses as against the khaja soldiers. Horses screamed. Pelted by arrows, Stefan ran out to the carpet and dragged it backward toward the wall, shouting at the two women to come with him. It was the only haven.

“Drive them!” Konstans was shouting. “Drive them against the shields.”

But already men went down under the endless rain of arrows. Already arrows stuck out at every angle from Ilya’s armor, from every man’s armor. Horses bucked and bolted. Any man who fell was doomed to be trampled, and even when one knot of riders forced a wild group of stampeding horses into the khaja infantry, they could not press their advantage when a gap opened; by the time a second group of riders fought through to aid them, the gap had closed up again.

Katerina fired steadily, but without any real effect, until a shower of arrows pelted down around her. Her horse reared, screaming, and she was thrown.

Vasha scrambled down at once. A stumbling horse struck him on the shoulder and he staggered, then grabbed Katya and dragged her up, yelling at her. “Come on! Get back up! You’ll be trampled.” He was furious, because he was terrified that she might be dead.

They turned, but both their horses had gone. “Back to the wall!” Vasha yelled. He had to yell, the noise was deafening. A horn blew. He heard an advance called, although he could see nothing but a wall of horses, mobbing, milling, staggering and collapsing.

It was utter chaos. Only Ilya and Konstans remained in his sight, battered but still upright. Vasha came up against the wall and heard a woman saying something but just then, to his horror, Kriye pitched forward and Ilya vanished, tossed over his head. A flurry of riders, those who could press through, converged on the stallion.

Princess Rusudani was crying out something. “She says we must go inside the monastery walls!” shouted Jaelle. “We will be granted sanctuary there.”

“I won’t leave the riders,” said Katya grimly. She surveyed the wreckage of the field, looking for a new mount. True to her training she gathered up arrows from the ground.

Vasha watched as the khaja soldiers moved down the distant rise. Already he could see their front rank in patches, through gaps in the jaran riders where men and horses had fallen. A bay struggled to his feet and dropped again. Farther, on the edge of the carnage, a man in the red and gold surcoat of Ilya’s guard crawled, dragging his legs, found a saber, and hoisted it. Infantry men reached him, and there was a flurry and then, nothing. The khaja pressed forward.

With the khaja moving in, the arrow fire lessened and the fighting drew out in knots of wild melee, spears and swords clashing, shouts and cries.

“We must go within the walls,” repeated Jaelle, looking frantic. “If we can reach the church, God will grant us sanctuary!”

Stefan tugged on Vasha’s arm. “We’d better go!”

“I won’t leave without my father!”

He saw Konstans’ white plume, caught in an eddy of men retreating step by slow step from the advance. Clots of riders threw themselves into the fray ahead of this eddy, as if to cut it off from the khaja, and by that, Vasha knew that Konstans must be protecting Ilya.

Vasha ran forward as Stefan pulled Rusudani and Jaelle up and dashed for the stone gateway that led into the monastery grounds. An arrow jammed into his armor, pricking his ribs, and another skittered off a boot and spent itself on the ground. Katya was right behind him. She found a stray horse, wild-eyed but unhurt, and she yanked its head down and mounted. It sheered away from her, and she fought it back and began firing into the soldiers nearest the final knot of jaran riders.

Vasha reached the guardsmen and at once one of the men, seeing him, shouted something about the gate and the wall, but Vasha, almost as frenzied as the wounded and dying horses now, fought through the press of animals and found—

oh, gods

—his father slumped over a saddle as if he were dead.

But he wasn’t. His eyes were closed and he breathed, hands convulsing on the reins. Vasha grabbed the reins and tugged the horse toward the wall. He could feel the battle like another man’s breath on his back, it was so close behind him, fought more quietly now, with fierce concentration on the part of those riders still left, those few.

Konstans shadowed him. There was a shout, a rush, and Vasha got pushed all over the place as he strove to reach the wall. Ilya shoved himself up, raising his saber, and Vasha wasn’t sure what he saw first: the infantryman or the spear that took Ilya in the side.

Vasha dropped the reins and struck the soldier, first with the flat, not meaning to, but it only staggered the man and then Vasha hacked and hacked at him.

“Enough!” Konstans’s voice was so eerily calm that it was frightening. “Get him out of here, Vassily.”

Vasha stared over the dead khaja soldier, who lay crumpled at his feet. There were maybe fifty riders left, and far away to the right a knot of twenty slowly being overwhelmed, fighting furiously, fighting like madmen.

“Go!”

He saw the gateway. Stefan peered out at him and grabbed the reins out of his hands. Vasha looked down and realized that there was blood all over his hands. Ilya slipped. Vasha shoved him back up onto the saddle, cursing, praying under his breath.

“This way!” said Jaelle. “Princess Rusudani has gone ahead to make sure the doors of the church are open.”

Vasha followed her into the maze of stone tents, bewildered and terrified. Stefan led the horse. Vasha held his father onto the saddle. He could not even tell if Ilya still breathed.

Behind them, the last of the riders poured through the gate and turned to make a final stand. Konstans pulled back with about half of those left, following Vasha. Arrows rained down into the monastery grounds.

A cowled man stared at them from a doorway and shrank back inside. Smoke curled up from a roof, but it wasn’t fire.
Hearth
, thought Vasha, his mind wandering. “It’s from the hearth,” he said. “They cook inside their houses over open fires.”

No one answered him. Perhaps they hadn’t heard. Stefan was limping. The whole world, this tiny patch of ground that he set each foot on, was hazed. A cobblestone. An arrow embedded in the dirt. The hem of Jaelle’s skirts trailing on the stones, muddied. A cluster of grass growing up between huts. A bird taking flight from a green sward. The struggle at the gate, distant behind them, unrelenting, a constant surge like the ocean, swelling over him in waves.