The Novels of the Jaran (278 page)

“What does it say?”

“It would depend on whether the killing occurred in time of war or time of peace. Whether it was a jaran man or a khaja man who was killed.”

“Then a jaran man, in time of war.”

Vasha set the cup down on the table, carefully steadying it so that it would not tip and spill on the documents. He had copied enough of them, under Tess’s supervision, and knew how laborious a process it was to write one out. “Prince Janos, it does not matter what the Code of Law says. This matter lies outside the Yarsos. Bakhtiian’s death will be avenged by the jaran army.”

“Even if that army was controlled by a man who was willing to count himself my ally? War is a hard business, Prince Vasil’ii, and if we avenged every death brought about by war, we should have no more men left to fight.” Vasha considered the khaja prince for awhile in silence. Janos, seeing that he was lost in thought, went back to studying the two documents. How would he feel about Prince Janos if Janos truly had killed Bakhtiian? How would he feel about the man who had murdered his father? But Janos had not killed him. Janos had fallen for the ruse. So what use was it to speculate on what had not happened, except to uselessly tangle his ability to think clearly? Because Janos was offering him something, and Vasha needed to know what it was, and now, of all times, not to make any stupid mistakes.

“War will come to you nevertheless, Prince Janos. Andrei Sakhalin cannot protect you from that, nor will he ever control the jaran army, and if he gave you such assurances, then he lied to you.”

Janos shrugged. “White Tower withstood two sieges in my grandfather’s time, and its defenses are stronger now than they were then. Dushan itself is at peace with the jaran, in return for peace. I possess two valuable hostages. I hold an alliance with a jaran prince from the greatest of the jaran tribes, by your own admission, even if you say his position is not as strong as he claims it is.” He tapped the right hand document. “My wife is the granddaughter of the Mircassian king.”

“This is all true, but why tell me? I am only your prisoner.”

“I have here letters brought by two envoys. These two envoys are here in this camp, waiting to address me. One is from Prince Basil of Filis, sent to my father, the king of Dushan. My men intercepted him on his way north.”

“That is a dangerous game, Prince Janos.”

Janos fingered one corner of the right hand document. “But I have information my father does not possess. This letter comes from King Barsauma of Mircassia. His envoy has traveled many leagues, first to Tarsina-Kars, then to the convent of the Holy Knife, in the Kolosvari Hills, and thence, by other routes, here to me. King Barsauma is old, his health failing. It is never wise for a king to die without designating his heir, or else the church and the lords will tear the kingdom asunder in order to grab more for themselves. His wife bore him six children, four boys and two girls. With the unexpected death last spring of his eldest son, all of them are now dead, just as poor Rusudani’s three brothers have now all died, before their time, during the ten years she was shut away in the convent. She has two younger brothers and a younger sister, of course, but they are by her father’s second wife, the one he took after her mother died. So that means, of all the claimants for the Mircassian throne, only two have any solid claim. One is an invalid, a boy not more than twelve years old, the youngest child of the king’s deceased brother by a vicious woman whom all say the king cannot abide. The other is King Barsauma’s last living grandchild, who is now my wife.”

Janos lifted a hand, and the servant poured more wine into his cup. Vasha self-consciously took a sip of his own wine, which was cold and flat; the spice had lost its flavor with the heat. Another man brought a new lantern in and replaced one whose wick was sputtering.

“King Barsauma seeks Princess Rusudani. He wants her to travel to Mircassia to be invested as his heir and to make a proper marriage. He does not, of course, know that I have already married her. Prince Basil of Filis has thrown his support behind the invalid child. He writes of this to my father, whom he supposes may aid him.”

Suddenly, Janos drained his cup in one gulp and set it down, hard, on the table. He looked troubled. As well he might.

“Why tell me this?” Vasha repeated.

“You owe allegiance to neither side. Therefore, your counsel on this matter might be unimpeded by the prospect of personal gain.”

“But that isn’t true. I am part of the jaran army.”

“What did you learn from your father? Enough to judge the strength of a position, if you had a good look at it?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then judge the strength of my position, Prince Vasil’ii.”

Vasha revised his estimate of Janos’s condition. The prince
was
drunk, not sloppily, not overbearingly, but touched enough by the drink to confide in a man whom he knew to be his enemy, if only because he did not truly know if he could trust his allies. What worth an enemy’s counsel? What was it worth risking to attempt to convince an enemy to become an ally?

“Yet you still lack something. You want something from me, Prince Janos.”

Janos smiled, somewhat ironically, and Vasha knew he had spoken the truth. “I want an alliance with the Prince of Jeds.”

“She will never give you one,” said Vasha instantly, knowing full well how
Tess
would feel about the man who had supposedly killed her husband. Except he hadn’t. Tess was pragmatic. If Vasha could make sure that Ilya was restored to her, if he could convince her that Janos would make a strong ally, because he
would
make a valuable ally. Vasha felt that he understood Janos, casting here for a way to further his ambitions, as any prince would, given the opportunity. As Vasha was, seeking to improve his own place… and not just, perhaps, with his captor.

It would make sense for the jaran to ally with Janos.

At that moment, watching Janos’s sharp, intelligent face in the bright glare of the lanterns and the slow stir of the tent wall behind him in the rising wind, Vasha knew that
Ilya
would never forgive Janos. That Ilya himself would remain the greatest obstacle to an alliance with Janos. And it was a good alliance. It was a brilliant alliance. No need for the jaran army to expend itself on Mircassia if it was a friendly kingdom. With the proper treaties, the army could pass through the fringe of the kingdom and drive straight into Filis while the Jedan army, led jointly by the young Baron Santer and his sister’s husband Georgi Raevsky, hit the Filistian princedom from the rear. Crushed by these pincers, virtually the whole of the north from Jeds to the northern plains would be under the control of the jaran.

The thought of an empire of such immense size took Vasha’s breath away. He could see it in his mind, the map they all learned so well from the great copy nailed to a wooden board propped up by steadying legs, under the awning that served as the school for the children of the Orzhekov tribe. It was the empire of his father’s vision, so vast that even a messenger riding at breakneck speed, not that any man could endure such a pace for more than ten days, would take sixty days to traverse it.

And accomplished, here at the end, without the threat of the powerful Mircassian kingdom, against which the jaran army might, conceivably, break its strength. Even an army as mighty as the jaran could stretch itself too thin. As the empire grew, the wisest course was the one that Ilya himself was slowly cobbling together: client kingdoms and marriage alliances balanced against outright conquest. He had married into such an alliance himself, even if he might try to deny, now and again, the reasons behind his marriage. However madly in love his father might have been with Tess, twelve years past, he would never have married her if she hadn’t been the sister of the Prince of Jeds.

Then, with a chill, Vasha recalled his father pacing round the tower chamber, muttering under his breath. Perhaps he would have. Perhaps Ilya was not quite as pragmatic as Vasha always assumed he was.

Ilya would never make an alliance with the man who had taken him captive and killed half his guard. Never. Not even if it meant sparing his army a brutal campaign against a powerful adversary.
He would not do it.

So it was up to his son to do it in his place.

Because Vasha knew, with that same instinct that told him when he had placed a pebble correctly on the khot grid, that this was the right choice to make.

“The jaran would rather greet Mircassia as our friend than as our enemy, Prince Janos,” he said, and by so doing, made the first move in a new and more complicated game.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The Lake of Mirrors

T
HEY SAT DOCKED AT
Crossover Station, taking in their last consignment of human-made goods and foods, as well as five casks of Bass Ale, enough for the long haul to Chapal and back. Beyond Crossover Station lay the mysterious reaches of Chapalii space.

“And while it’s true,” Branwen was explaining over a supper of what Benjamin, the quartermaster, called “stir-fry,” “that all known space is Chapalii space, or at least controlled by their empire, still we mark the boundaries of League space because it’s familiar space, it’s our space, human space.”

Just as, Anatoly thought, the plains would always be the true home of the jaran no matter how far their empire extended.

“Past Crossover,” she added, “as the old joke goes, you’re skating on pretty thin ice.” Anatoly shook his head, not understanding the analogy. “I guess that wouldn’t make any sense to you,” she said with a smile, thoughtfully, without the self-satisfied air of superiority so many people in the League used when explaining things to Anatoly. “We League humans have been sunk in the same cultural milieu for such a long time now, over a century, that we forget what it’s like to have people come in who don’t have the same markers. In the old days, even the tribe just over the hill might be wholly alien. Maybe we’ve lost a little of our ability to adapt to that.”

“But surely you must adapt to the alien, if there are so many zayinu—so many
aliens
—in the universe.”

“Not as many as you might expect.”

“Or more than you’d expect,” interposed Summer Hennessy, the big pilot. “If you take into account the probability of a solar system forming around a star, and a planet falling into an orbit that is within the zone of life, and life itself arising, and intelligent life—”

“Define intelligence,” snapped Rachelle, the other pilot, the testy one.

“—and all of that coincidentally happening within the same time frame as human life developed,” finished Summer, ignoring Rachelle’s comment. “It’s more likely civilizations, alien, intelligent, or otherwise, would be separated by gulfs of time as well as space.”

“Begging your pardon,” said Anatoly politely, not wanting to seem as if he was interrupting the other woman, “Captain, but then do I understand you to mean that within League space you have a variety of routes on which you can travel, but once beyond this station, you must follow the old trade routes laid out by the Chapalii?”

“Exactly. I don’t know how much you know about how we actually travel in space, and how we navigate…?” Branwen kindly trailed off to leave room for him to stop her.

He just shook his head. He had traveled with the
Gray Raven
and its crew for seven days now, and he had quickly felt comfortable with being ignorant. Especially after the third day, when they had had a free-for-all fencing match in the passageways and he had not only won handily but been feted with great good nature afterward by the others. He had actually gotten rather drunk. The crew of the
Gray Raven
were good people to get drunk with, like his old comrades back in the army; he had never felt comfortable getting drunk with the actors.

“Stop me if I start lecturing,” said Branwen with a grin.

“Yes, do please stop her,” said Rachelle, but she always said things like that, and Anatoly was learning not to take her comments seriously.

“But I’ll try to make this short. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to you, Anatoly, but I’ve always preferred to, ah, scout out my ground in advance, so to speak.” She half turned in her seat to face the one wall in the galley that was not wood-paneled. “Screen, pull out a hologram. Display standard singularity simulation. If you take a stream of photons, the particles which make up light, they’ll move through space at the speed of light and continue in the same direction unless some force causes them to change direction. Before we met the Chapalii, we traveled in ships that could approach but never attain the speed of light, so obviously travel time between the stars was glacial and feasible only in the time frame of years and generations. But the Chapalli gave us relay stations.”

In the three-dimensional image that seemed to extend from the wall, a stream of particles which Anatoly supposed represented a stream of photons struck a round object and shot away at a different angle.

“These relay stations create ‘windows’ which are singularities in the time-space continuum. The navigator—that’s me—in concert with coordinates given out by the relay station, describes a velocity and an angle at which the ship enters the singularity. That’s our vector; that’s why it’s called a vector drive. It’s like entering a gravity well, which throws us to a second singularity, which has been determined by the vector at which we entered the first one. So you could enter the first window and come out in two different places depending on your vector.”

“Or you could enter a window with an innocent vector and end up never coming out,” added Rachelle cheerfully.

“So you must scout out these routes…” Anatoly hesitated. “How can you scout them, if you must know beforehand where you are going? It isn’t like trying a path up into the mountains and turning back if it ends in the heights, or riding out into a desert until half your water flasks are empty, and then returning to the last oasis to try a new route.”

“The truth is, we’re dependent on the Chapalii for that. Or at least outside of League space. Inside League space we believe we have recorded most of the routes through space, and there do seem to be a limited number, not an infinite one. Obviously, if you have a finite number of relay stations, and not all link each to the other, there would be a finite number of routes between them. But in Chapalii space proper, we have to accept the route that is chosen for us by whatever passes for their navigational staff. For instance, the run to Paladia Minor and Major and thus to Chapal: We call it the Mirror Road because on the second jump we pass through a system where there’s a mirror array in orbit, reflecting the binary star. Of course we don’t know what it’s for, but it’s a brilliant landmark. Only this ship and two others have ever been allowed to run all the way in to the Paladias, and that is the only route we’re allowed to take. We know there must be other ways to get there, since we have records from Sojourner King Bakundi and her husband, who are on the Keinaba merchant flagship, but she’s got no access to navigation. She can only look out the viewports, and there aren’t many of those on Chapalii ships apparently. There are a few other humans apprenticed on Keinaba ships, but only the flagship seems to go in to the Paladias.”