The Novels of the Jaran (287 page)

“I could have done something about it,” David was saying. “Goddess, I knew, and I didn’t
do
anything.”

“No wonder you’re angry at everyone else,” replied Hyacinth.

“Oh, hell, it’s true. I’m just so furious at myself.”

“You couldn’t have known this would happen.”

“That’s what we always say, isn’t it?”

“I can see you’re in a self-defeating mood. I won’t trot out the rest of the cliches, then. We’re not going to be here much longer, though. I know Owen is angling for us to tour farther into Chapalii space. What’s going to happen then?”

“Maybe the best thing for those kids would be to stay on Earth and be fostered to someone else, with Veselov a good long way away from them.”

“Veselov won’t be touring with the company again.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t know? You can’t see it? He’s lost it. He doesn’t know how to act anymore, only how to pose. Owen is thoroughly disgusted with him, but he’s contracted to the end of
this
run.”

“Well, whatever it takes, we need to keep him away from those kids.”

“Do you blame him more than her, then?”

“Yes, I do. What a self-centered egotistical bastard he is. Karolla is just so self-negating as to be a cipher.”

“Oh, I would say that she’s as inflexible. No, I’d say she’s more inflexible. Don’t forget I’ve lived upstairs from them for seven years now, I like to be generous and spread blame around. Listen, David, have you ever visited their flat? No? Let me just say that they made their bed and now they’re lying in it.”

“That didn’t happen to Yevgeni.”

“Only because in the end we got up-enough courage to admit that we couldn’t do it on our own.”

“But Sakhalin never got counseling that I know of, nor did Diana ever go to the constabulary and ask for an advocate.”

“That’s true. Anatoly Sakhalin may be an arrogant bastard, but if you prod him enough, you can at least get him to think. But there’s going to be hell to pay between him and Di when he gets back. I think she’s going to file for a dissolution.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. David, I hope you’re not blind enough to have missed that she’s taken up with Yassir. The lighting designer. So Anatoly will end up paying the price one way or the other.”

“And what about Ilyana?” David asked.

Ilyana pushed through the curtain and went into the room, not wanting to hear whatever Hyacinth might say about her. “I’m ready,” she said. “I’m ready to go for Valentin.”

She walks the web of light and drops down into the hall of memory. David is not with her. She remembers seeing him place his hands on the nesh sponge, remembers a finger placed against hers, the comforting warmth of his body next to her, remembers Hyacinth holding one of Valentin’s hands against the sponge, just in case, but now she is here, alone, falling into the cavern of time, where Shiva danced the anandatandava in the hall of consciousness within the heart of woman, within the heart of man.

“I’m looking for my brother,” she says desperately, for Genji is there, her robes rustling with a thousand small voices as she moves from a lit corridor out into the grand hall. “He got lost in here.”

“It is careless to lose a brother,” says Genji. “They are difficult to replace.”

Ilyana wants to ask her if she has lost brothers, but she is afraid to, because here in nesh even more than out in the surface world she is aware of the passage of time, of the incremental slippage that drags Valentin farther and farther away from her, falling into the deepest wilderness, unmapped, much of it as yet unmade, formless….

“I know where he’s gone,” she says aloud as she realizes where he must be. Without thinking, or with thinking but without forethought, she builds the gate to the memory palace out of the seamless black floor and walks through to find David standing in the courtyard. “We have to go to the desert,” she says. “That’s where he went. He went to the desert.”

So David takes them through the shortcut he built, the vine lattice which passes through the stultifying humidity of the jungle and then into the sere heat of the endless, empty plain. Here it is flat, packed sand in a parched monotone extending to the horizon. Nothing stirs. She sees no sign of life.

“I don’t see him,” says David needlessly. “There’s nothing out here.”

But there is the smell of baking heat, and the sour taste of grit, and the biting sand that gets into her ears and rubs in the collar of her blouse and blisters the soles of her feet. And there, half hidden in a tiny drift of sand, dried camel droppings. This is still Valentin’s land. His soul still exists here.

“Not here,” she says, remembering. “He’s trying to get through to somewhere else.” Through the storm.

She stretches out her hands, her fingertips. She reaches for the sand, feels its grain, its silicate structure. In true nesh, she could not alter the constructs of another person’s habitat, but this is not true nesh, this is another type of nesh entirely, formless matter inhabited by a trace of Valentin’s soul.

She draws the sand up into the air and calls the wind from the north, blowing down upon her, she draws it through her until she is scoured clean inside and herself becomes a gateway. She pushes forward into the storm which is also herself. She forms in her memory the image of that place that Valentin struggled toward, the golden sea—not, as she had thought, that bronze gold undulation of endless sand which is the desert, but a moving sea rippled by currents of wind.

She battles forward, but the way is made easier because someone has already forged this path, she is only rediscovering it for herself, Valentin has already come before her, she can see the signs of his passing like an echo of his being. The golden light glares brighter and brighter until she has to shut her eyes against the blinding glare which is both of her and outside of her. The wind howls, screaming against her, the sand tearing her to ribbons. Then she feels the hot breath of a summer wind and she throws herself through, heedless of David struggling behind her.

And she is out on a golden plain flying above it like a bird. She
is
a bird. She is a fledgling eagle, soaring above a sea of grass. Sharp-sighted, she can see three days’ ride away, and there, beyond the swell and ebb of the ground and the endless motion of the wind through the grass, she sees a tribe moving.

Swifter than horses, she wings toward them, spying them out. As with any tribe, there are women and carts and children and the men of the jahar, dressed in the pale and bright surcoats of Bakhtiian’s army. There is her uncle, Anton Veselov, just as she remembers him, and beside him, a far mistier memory, is her grandfather, Dmitri Mikhailov, Karolla’s father and the man who led the final, failed rebellion against Ilyakoria Bakhtiian in the tribes. And there, riding beside the men with her bow strapped across her back, is Valye Usova. A herd of horses and a bigger herd of glariss, bleating and trotting in the familiar unruly mob, trails the line of wagons. An old woman drives the lead wagons; Ilyana takes a moment to recognize her. It is Mother Sakhalin, ancient, surely dead by now… but of course the others here are dead, too. She swoops down and as a child in the second cart points up into the heavens, marking her descent, she sees the driver of the second string of wagons: Her aunt, Arina Veselov. And riding beside her, an old but hale man, the healer Nikolai Sibirin whom she vaguely remembers.

Ilyana feels a terrible fear. She feels as if the heavens are contracting around her, but the sky remains cold and piercingly blue, as infinite as the grass. She lands, fluttering, on the second wagon, perched on the rim of the wagon beside Arina Veselov, who looks at her with grave eyes.

“Where is Valentin?” Ilyana asks, but it only comes out as a shriek, an eagle’s call, fierce and challenging.

“A spirit is visiting us from the heavens,” says Niko Sibirin.

Despairing, Ilyana flings herself skyward and flies, anywhere, away, not wanting to watch the tribe as it rides on across the golden sea of grass. Was this what Valentin wanted?
I want to go home
, he had said. The tribe continues on its way, receding into the distance behind her.

But there, a tiny speck in the grass, comes a rider. She wings closer, dives, heart fluttering in her chest with excitement.

It is! It is Valentin, riding a young bay mare.

“Valentin!” she cries in her eagle’s voice. “Valentin!”

He does not heed her. She swoops down, but he is intent on riding. He marks her only as a great bird, a spirit, watching from the heavens. His face is alight. Like a stone in her stomach, Ilyana realizes that he is happy.

“Valentin! It’s me. It’s Ilyana. Come back. Come back.”

But he keeps on riding, and though she tries, she cannot transform herself here. She is an eagle, a spirit, come from another land. She flies along with him until the wind picks up, driving her backward. Battling against it, she loses ground, he recedes from her, and she is torn away, sucked back through, and the plain is swallowed up in a howling storm of sand and grit battering against her and she feels a firm hand pull her back into the smothering haven of the jungle and she walks two steps, weeping, down the marble foyer that passes through the gate of the memory palace.

Weeping, Ilyana let go of the sponge. “He can’t hear me! He couldn’t hear me, he just kept on riding!”

“Where did you go?” David asked in a hoarse voice. “I couldn’t follow you.”

“Goddess,” swore Hyacinth, fainter. “You’ve been gone for hours. Take some water.”

“He’s trying to go home,” said Ilyana, and then she was sobbing so hard that she could no longer talk.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

A Taste of Betrayal

G
UARDS TOOK VASHA TO
the battlements and there he found Prince Janos surveying the army that, three days after the first alert, now surrounded the town and castle of White Tower. Staring at Janos’s back, Vasha tried to imagine the khaja man forcing Katya, but he could not. Another khaja man, perhaps, but not Janos. Anyway, Katya would never let such a thing happen to her. Janos swung around, and Vasha was abruptly reminded of the bruises Janos had received before the hunting trip, as if he had fallen down… or gotten in a fight.

Seeing Vasha, Janos beckoned him to the wall. “How can you advise me, Prince Vasil’ii?”

Rather than speak to him, Vasha stared down at the army laying siege below: tents set up outside of catapult range, the sheer number of horses, and farther back, at the limit of his vision, the sudden onset of industry where the engineers would be directing the building of siege engines, towers, and the other paraphernalia of war. As a strike force setting out to join Yaroslav Sakhalin’s army, this group had no such weapons with them, but they knew how to build them, how to draft the local peasants to do the work under the supervision of soldiers. He knew this force, of course, knew the banners and recognized the colors: there, the red and gold of his father’s personal guard, the half that had stayed with the army and thus not perished in the ambush; there, various tribal colors. But most startling, flying among the banners, was the eagle rising, wings elevated and displayed, the heraldic device of the Prince of Jeds. Tess had come for revenge.

“I can give you no advice,” he said finally, miserably. “Those are my own people.” He wanted to ask about Katya, but he dared not.

“I don’t want to fight them. My defenses are strong, but as you can see they outnumber me. Is that banner not the banner of the Prince of Jeds? I would choose to negotiate. You know that is true. I can offer them an advantageous alliance. What can I send them as surety for my good will?”

Vasha almost said, ‘the priest,’ but discarded that idea. It was dangerous now to bring too much attention to Ilya. In any case, the army below would not be in a mood to negotiate. “Send an envoy. That is all you can do. They will not grant you terms.”

“You seem certain of that. I would send you, of course, but I must hold you in reserve. I hope you take no offense of it.”

“I take none. But there is one thing…” He met Janos’s gaze. “Free Princess Katerina. That would show you mean well.”

There it was, the knowledge in his eyes, that easy to see once you knew to look for it. Janos turned away from Vasha, hiding his expression, and Vasha was swamped with something like grief, a taste of betrayal. So it was true. Janos, decent to him, had raped Katerina. How could one man contain two such faces? And what of Katya, who was, Vasha supposed, never more to be spoken of between them? Janos looked out over the jaran army, the abandoned fields, and the clouds approaching from the east. Vasha felt the first spray of rain, a mist, dampening the stones.

“I will go down now,” said Janos to his guards. “Prince Vasil’ii, you will attend me, I hope.”

It was not a request. Clearly, Janos did not intend to give up any of his hostages. Nor, Vasha reflected wryly, would he have done any differently in the same situation. Except he would never, ever, force a woman to lie with him. Worst of all, following Janos down the narrow, slick steps, Vasha realized that he could not bring himself to hate the man, only the deed. And by thinking that, he might as well himself have betrayed Katya.

Tess sat under her awning and watched the khaja envoy approach her through the rain. She had sited her tent so that she could see the castle and the hastily-completed defensive works thrown up around the town. The rain gave them a blurred appearance, deceptively soft and welcoming. Because it was growing dark, and the lanterns threw light no farther than the square of her carpets, she did not realize until the envoy ducked under the awning that the man wore the badge of the Mircassian king.

“Why does a Dushan prince send a Mircassian envoy?” she asked, too impatient to waste time on the niceties.