The Novels of the Jaran (27 page)

The sun beat warmly on her face. At the top, she surveyed the plains around her. There, in the distance, riding northeast, was the enemy jahar. Out on the flat beyond she saw no sign at all of Bakhtiian’s jahar. She seated herself on an outcropping of rock and waited, watching, until the enemy jahar vanished entirely from her sight. Then she walked down again.

Halfway down, she spied movement. Bakhtiian appeared, leading out the two horses. He saddled Myshla, and she reached him as he finished the last cinch and turned to saddle his own horse.

He looked up as she approached, pausing with one hand on the saddle. “By the gods, that was Dmitri Mikhailov’s jahar.”

“You should be furious,” said Tess, trying to sound contrite when she really felt like grinning. “I took a great chance.”

“There are no chances.” He favored her again with that unreadable look. “You succeed or you fail. Battles are not won by men who refuse to take risks.” It was quiet. Only the rustle of an animal in the undergrowth disturbed the sighing of the wind through the leaves. He returned to cinching up the saddle, the tarpan patient under his hands.

“Do you know, Bakhtiian, they were all good men.”

He glanced at her. “How do you mean?”

“They were all modest.” Now she grinned. She simply could not resist the urge.

His head tilted to one side and one eye narrowed, giving him a quizzical look. “Do you mean you—” He straightened, putting his hands on his hips. “The cloak, the clothes, a female alone. You did it all on purpose. You meant all along to embarrass them.” He burst out laughing, full laughter, without restraint and yet not uncontrolled. Tess suddenly felt extremely flattered. He stopped laughing and favored her with a smile. “Gods, you’re a dangerous woman. Using our own customs against us.”

“No more dangerous than you, Bakhtiian.”

“Perhaps.” He finished with his horse while she packed up her saddlebags and tied her belongings on to Myshla. “So they’re going back to the temple.”

“How did you know?”

“I deduced it.” He grinned. “Penance, indeed. I was also close enough to hear.”

“I never saw you!”

He blinked, guileless. “You weren’t supposed to. Do I really speak Rhuian like a native?”

“You have an accent,” she admitted, “but you speak Rhuian very, very well.”

“Thank you,” he said, and she thought the comment sincere. “We should go.” But he paused with one hand on the saddle. “Vasil left something for you.”

“Do you know them
all?
All the men who are riding against you?”

“Not all of them. Just the important ones, the ones whose grudge against me is so deep that they will not give it up unless they are dead.” He waited.

She took off the necklace and handed it to him. He looked almost discomposed as he took it from her.

“This is precious.” He turned the stones over in his hands, slipped them through his fingers as if their touch communicated some message to him. “Very rare. The stone comes from a princedom south of Jeds, and it is crafted by a master jewel-smith in the Tradesmen’s Quarter.”

“In Jeds? How would a jahar rider get a necklace from Jeds?”

But Bakhtiian’s face had shuttered, and he gave her back the necklace without a word and mounted his horse. “We must go.” He rode off without waiting for her, and she hastened to follow. They paused at the crest to gaze north and south, but there was no sign of men or horses, only the smooth, golden flow of grass spreading out on all sides. Tess gazed, watching ripples of wind stir the blanketing gold, and she felt—happy. Somehow, somewhere, she had developed an affection for this peculiarly same yet diverse land. Some movement of Bakhtiian’s made her glance at him. He was watching her. When she met his gaze, he did not look away, but stranger still, he seemed, for an instant, shy.

“Will you call me Ilya?” His hands lay still on his horse’s neck. His voice sounded as studied and calm as ever. She might have hallucinated that glimpse of shyness.

“If you will call me Tess.”

“Perhaps—” He hesitated again, slowly put out a hand. “Clasp friends?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“It is a mark of friendship. I give my honor into your hands, and you may call on it if you are in need. And your honor into my hands, the same. But it is not a gift to be lightly given or lightly used.”

“No,” she breathed, staring at him. Here, now, he was asking her to be not only his friend but his equal. “Of course.” Her voice shook slightly. “Of course I will clasp friends with you. Ilya.” She took his hand in hers.

“I am honored. Tess.”

By evening, when they caught up with the others, she felt so pleased with herself that she engaged Cha Ishii in the meaningless, polite, but deviously complex formalities of Chapalii dinner conversation just to test her adroitness. When she tired of that, she collected her blankets and sat out alone, just breathing in the cool air and watching the moon. Behind she could hear the riders laughing, pausing, and laughing again as Bakhtiian told the story of her encounter, no doubt embellishing it with a great deal of exaggeration. After a bit they quieted, and she guessed that a serious council was taking place.

Sometime later Fedya found her. “Tess.” He chuckled. “You’re a marvel.” She could see only the pale oval of his face in the moonlight as he settled down to sit beside her. The night bled all color from his shirt. “To fool Mikhailov. That is the marvel.”

“Fedya, how well does Bakhtiian know these men?”

He shrugged. “Mikhailov has been riding against Ilya for years.”

“What will they do next?”

He shrugged again, but it was a fatalistic gesture this time. “They’ll find out you sent them wrong. We have to prepare.”

An insect ran up her hand. She started, shuddering, and shook it off. “Prepare for what?” But even as she said it, she knew what he would reply. If Bakhtiian respected Mikhailov so much, then any battle against him would not fall out as easily as that night skirmish against Doroskayev and his men had. People died in real battles.

“They outnumber us, but we know where they are. We’ll choose the ground and ambush them.” Perhaps Fedya felt her shiver, though they were not touching. He put his hand on hers, a comforting gesture, but his skin felt cold. “Don’t worry,” he said softly.
“You’ll
be safe. I promise it.”

“Safe,” she murmured, and she kissed him, wanting more comfort than that.

Chapter Thirteen

“Courage minimizes difficulties.”

—
DEMOCRITUS OF ABDERA

T
HEY RODE FOR SIX DAYS
, until they came to a range of rugged hills that severed the flat monotony of the plains like a knife. Here they halted, setting up the jahar’s tents at the mouth of a canyon and the Chapalii tents what Tess judged to be about a kilometer away in a sheltered hollow. For two nights the riders slept in their tents. On the third, they slept in the scrub. Late on the afternoon of the fourth day, Fedya asked Tess if she would like to go hunting, and Tess, feeling nervous and jumpy, and knowing full well that she had seen no game in these hills, understood the invitation to be a smoke screen for his real intentions. She strapped on her quiver and rode out with him.

Their trail soon led to a rocky overhang close by, but well-hidden from, the Chapalii camp. Bushes and vines screened off the entrance from the casual eye. He pushed them aside and, ducking under the overhanging lip, she went in. Light filtered through the leaves, dappling the bed of moss and grass he had laid for them on the earth. The gesture was so touching and so intimate that she felt embarrassed suddenly, afraid that her feelings for him—tenderness and liking crossed with simple desire—might prove inadequate for his toward her. What if he loved her? She halted on her knees beside the little bed, hands buried in soft moss, knowing that she could never really
love
him, not as more than a friend and bedmate, not with her entire being. She was not sure anymore if she could love anyone in that way, the way she had thought she had loved Jacques.

Fedya stood just behind her. He laid a hand tenderly on her shoulder. “I made you a song, Anya,” he said softly, and then he chuckled, because he had just called her by his wife’s name. “Forgive me, Tess. I have not made a song since she died.”

Tess caught her breath, relieved and touched at the same time. “I am honored, Fedya,” she said, equally softly, and she felt a sudden warmth toward him, unrelated to their friendship, to their lovemaking, because that inadvertent slip made the truth so evident that she could not believe she had not seen it until now: she had never loved Jacques, just as he had never loved her. She had been infatuated with him, certainly, but love—Fedya had
loved
his wife. She did not feel diminished because he loved Anya still, though his Anya was dead and he stood here with a different woman. “I hope you will sing it for me.”

“For what other reason would I make it, if not to sing it for you?” He knelt across from her, head slightly bowed by the slope of the overhang, and he sang. It was a song about the legendary dyan Yuri Sakhalin who, wounded unto death, had come to beg healing from the daughter of the sun.

Tess stretched out and leaned on her elbows, cushioned by the moss and his blanket, and watched him, transfixed. Singing, he was entirely with her and yet entirely away from her, so that she could really look at him, at his face, his shock of pale hair and the curve of his mouth, the elaborate design of birds embroidered into the sleeves and collar of his shirt, the fine spiraling patterns worked into his leather belt, his saber, lying parallel to his legs where he sat. In a more luxurious land he would have tended to plumpness, but this land had made him lean and tough, hardened with the riding. Yet his voice was sweet, as fragile as a budding flower. And when he finished, silence lay on him as naturally as song had.

“It’s beautiful, Fedya,” she said, a little in awe. “Thank you.” She kissed him.

“Remember it. Remember this place.”

Tess let her face slide in against his neck. His hair brushed her eyes. “He’s chosen this place for the ambush,” she said, because for four days no one, not even Yuri, had spoken a word to her about fighting.

He slipped his hand down to her back, holding her against him. “The plains are wide, but when men travel on a set path, they are very small, indeed.” His fingers found her waist and explored it to the clasp of her belt.

“Too small to run?” His hair smelled of grass. “Too small to avoid—your pursuer?”

“Tess,” he said. “There are better things to think of, this night, than war and death.”

She woke with a start. Someone in her dream had been calling her name insistently, unable to reach her.

“Tess. Tess.” The voice was wrong. That voice and her name did not belong together in waking life. Therefore, she was still asleep. But as she opened her eyes, she knew the voice for Bakhtiian’s. She reached out her hand—

Fedya was gone.

“Tess.”

Light infiltrated their bower. It had been dark when she had fallen asleep. Her clothes lay in a heap at her feet, so tangled that she had to pull them apart and set them in a neat row before she could put them on. Her hands shook. She tried to tuck in her shirt with one hand and comb her hair with the other, gave it up, and tucked her trousers into her boots instead. Crawling on her hands and knees to the entrance, pushing through leaves, untangling a vine from her hair, she stood up just outside. His back was to her.

“Ilya?” Morning sun shone brightly in her eyes. She had to squint, and still she could not make him out clearly. He turned. She saw, with a shock, the streak of blood down his face, and then, like a rush of sick trembling, she realized that it was not his blood at all but someone else’s. “The blood,” she gasped.

His hand lifted and explored his cheek. He looked surprised, as if he had not noticed it before. “I must have been too close when I killed him,” he said conversationally. His body was tense with controlled energy: nervousness or perhaps exhilaration. She shuddered. What had he said?

“Killed who?” Her hand rose to touch, on her own face, the area the blood covered on his.

“I don’t know,” he said cheerfully. “He was about to gut Niko. By the gods, woman, I couldn’t let a man do that to my oldest friend.” He sat down abruptly and his expression changed so completely that it frightened her. “Listen, Tess. I have to tell you something.”

The world was silent, waiting on his words. They were too far from the jahar camp, even from the Chapalii camp, to hear—anything—and there was not even wind to rustle the grass. The sun simply shone, painfully bright as it crested the hills. “What happened? Damn it. Tell me.”

“No one told—He didn’t—Oh, gods.” He ripped up a handful of grass and wiped the blood from his cheek. Pale streaks remained, striping his skin.

Tess knew what had happened. She hadn’t even said good night to Yuri yesterday afternoon; she’d been in such a hurry to go off with Fedya—She couldn’t even picture where she’d left him, last seen him. She sank down onto her knees.

“Who was killed?” she whispered. She almost reached out to touch him.

He looked away, troubled.

“Ilya,” she said, his name strange on her lips.

“Fedya.”

Tess merely stared at him, caught between relief and disbelief. She had been with Fedya only a few hours past; he was simply gone away for a bit. But Yuri—All her breath sighed out of her and she slumped forward, catching herself on her hands.

“Yuri is alive? Where is he? I want to see him.” Fright made her childish. She was horrified that she had slept while blood was shed.

“You can’t see him.”

“Why not? Why not! He’s dead. Just tell me he’s dead!”

“Don’t go hysterical on me.” His voice shook and he leaned toward her, one hand jerking out as if to steady her.

She drew back. “I never faint. Where is Yuri?”

“I sent him with Niko to help the khepelli break their camp and move out. We must travel as far from here as possible today.”

“Let me go to him.”

“Yes. But after you come with me.”