The Novels of the Jaran (30 page)

“Pandora.”

“Pandora. That’s prettier than the woman’s name in our story: Vlatagrebi.”

“Poor thing, saddled with a bad reputation and a name like that.”

“Then you’d rather be called Pandora than Vlatagrebi?”

“By whom?”

Bakhtiian leaned back against the rock face. A spray of dirt skidded down the face to settle behind his boots. He folded his arms over his chest. “By me. It’s only fitting.”

“We have a saying in our land: ‘the pot calling the kettle black.’”

“The pot calls—Shameless woman. If I were a brave man I’d—” He checked himself.

“You’d what?”

“I take it back. I wouldn’t.”

“Who are they, Ilya?”

It took him a moment to answer because the smile that crept onto his face was the kind that arrives slowly and leaves reluctantly. “I surrender.” He put his hands against the rock by his shoulders, palms up and open.
“Arenabekh.
The black riders.”

“I saw nothing.”

“You weren’t looking. You were staring at the mountains.”

“How could you tell they were these—arenabekh?”

“All in black.”

“Is this a particular tribe?”

The wind rolled a single wilted leaf past his boot. “They have no tribe.”

“No tribe? And they’re riding, so they must all be men.”

“They have renounced tribe, kin, women, any ties to order or custom or family.”

“I thought my abstainers were severe.”

“They don’t necessarily abstain.”

“They take lovers amongst themselves?”

He colored slightly. “This is not a fit subject for a man and a woman to discuss.”

“But I’m khaja. And fully as curious as you are.”

He smiled. “So you are. Well, then, some do. Not all. Some believe that our life now is not the life the gods gave us to live, so they live as it is said jaran lived in the early days.”

“Without women? How could there be jaran now if that was so?”

“Exactly. And how are we to know how the jaran lived in the early days, having only old stories to tell us, which may have been changed in the telling? Do you see them now? Don’t shift forward. They’re sharp-eyed, these demons.”

The screen of bushes and hedge concealed them, but eventually she got a view of the approaching riders through a gap in the shrubbery. Bakhtiian hummed something under his breath, fingering the hilt of his saber. She felt his excitement, and it made her nervous; she had seen that same excitement in him before—for battle.

She wished now that she was not sitting because it made her feel vulnerable, unable to move quickly, but she could not stand up now. The black riders rode straight for the spur of rock.

“God,” whispered Tess as they neared. “They look grimmer than you ever did.” Because she had not meant to say it aloud, she looked up. He glanced down, a glint of amusement in his eyes, and put two fingers to his lips.

They pulled up a stone’s toss away, suspicious and watchful. The dull coats of their horses, the dourness of their expressions and, most of all, the unvarying black of their dress made them cheerless and forbidding. No embroidery decorated their shirts. None wore jewelry.

“A quick night’s camp,” said one in a strong dialect.

If Tess had thought the jaran men of her acquaintance hard, she had no word for these. One had no right arm, only a loose, empty sleeve that stirred restlessly in the breeze. Next to him a younger man, beardless and rosy-cheeked, examined the rock with one clear eye; his other eye was scarred shut, puckered and white. These men hunted, they had their quarry trapped, and they knew it. She bit her lip to stop herself breathing through her mouth, as if even that faint sound might alert them to her presence.

“The fox has gone to the hill,” said a bearded fellow with a haughty forehead and cruel eyes. His blond hair fell in a long braid to his waist.

“Patience, Sergi,” said the one with the dialect, a black-haired man who had possibly been given a frown at birth and had been unable to remove it. A tic, almost hidden in his rough beard, disturbed his right cheek. “You three check around the rock.”

The three brought back the two horses. Tess saw how all the riders stared at the stallion and the mare, two creatures so obviously superior in line and breeding to their own animals that it was rather like standing a man of the jaran dressed in all his finery next to an ape dressed in skins. Bakhtiian stood utterly still, his eyes narrowed, his expression more anticipatory than apprehensive. How easily he could blend into the group of men below. Then, startling her with the suddenness of his movement, he stepped out from behind the screen of bushes to stand in full view of the jahar below, but he glanced once swiftly back at her as he did so.

“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” he asked. He froze, almost as if he were posing for the benefit of his audience, with one hand on his saber hilt and the other resting on the hilt of his dagger. He looked dangerous.

“By the gods, Bakhtiian!” said the bearded Sergi. “Come here, you ill-favored son of the cold winds, and I’ll show you the special trick I’ve learned with the saber just for you.”

“You flatter me.” Bakhtiian did not move. Leaves brushed at his boots.

“And bring your treasure down, too, the one you’re hiding. Is it some handsome lad you’re afraid we’ll spirit off?”

Bakhtiian caught Tess’s eye and lifted his chin. She stood up and came two steps forward. Even as she halted next to Ilya, about ten men turned their horses away and rode off to one side, backs to her, heads lowered. More than half of those left averted their faces, so as not to look at her, but the rest examined her with cold, inquisitorial interest.

“Gods!” cried Sergi. “It’s a damned woman! Who would ever have thought it!”

“Shut up, Sergi,” said the one with the pronounced dialect.

“Shall I come down?” asked Bakhtiian with all the familiar pleasantry of a venomous snake.

“Please do,” said Sergi. “But keep the woman up on the ledge. Some of our men haven’t seen a woman in five years, and I can’t answer for them if they catch her scent.”

Tess straightened her shoulders, met his eye, and held it. “They wouldn’t dare touch me.” She laid one hand on her saber hilt, though she had no illusions about her ability to use it against any of these men.

Sergi let out a whoop. “A khaja with spirit, and listen how she talks. They won’t touch you. Certainly not if you’re Bakhtiian’s.”

Bakhtiian, descending with composed dignity, stopped dead. One of his feet slipped on the incline and pebbles skittered out and rattled down to the base of the rock.

Tess drew her dagger, tossed it up into the air, and caught it. “You’ve got it half right, Sergi. They won’t touch me. I don’t know what Bakhtiian has to do with it.”

Bakhtiian, regaining his balance, resumed his descent as if nothing had happened.

“Sergi, shut up,” said another man. His face bore a broad, ugly white scar that stretched from forehead to chin, puckering one side of his face into a permanent leer. “You can only keep your mouth shut for as long as it takes a horse to shit.”

On the pretext of sheathing her knife, Tess looked away. The jaran men she knew never swore in that way—or at least, not in front of her.

“So, you are Ilyakoria Bakhtiian,” said the man with the dialect, and suddenly all attention focused on him, though he had made no obvious effort to attract it. “I am Keregin. You seem a little short for a man with such a tall reputation.”

“That depends on where you’re standing,” said Bakhtiian, looking as though his greatest concern was the fit of his clothing.

“Choose your man,” said Keregin. “I want to see if you deserve your reputation. Bakhtiian.” He savored the flow of the syllables. “What kind of luck got you a name of your own?”

“Luck is only my lover, not my wife,” replied Bakhtiian easily. He drew his saber. “If ever I wed, it will be skill and intelligence.”

“Tedious bedfellows,” said Sergi.

“Shut up,” said the scarred man.

“Choose,” said Keregin.

Bakhtiian looked over the arenabekh one by one, his gaze measuring and keen but never quite insulting. Watching him, Tess realized she had clenched her hands into fists without realizing it. This was to be a real fight, a real duel. What if Keregin meant it to be to the death?

“He has too heavy a hand,” said Bakhtiian, “and that one, no instinct.”

“Got you there, Vlacov,” said Sergi.

But Bakhtiian appeared not to hear the comment and the low mutter of laughter it produced. He examined a man far to the side whose light eyes were shadowed by dark circles beneath and whose nose was broken. “He’s too angry. There, too unsteady a hand, and that one, he drinks too much khaja wine.” He paused, then pointed with his saber at a particularly unprepossessing man of middle years, a remarkably unkempt fellow whose only conspicuous features were a long nose and brilliant blue eyes. “That man.”

Keregin laughed. “We’ll concede your eye for flesh. Tobay, fight him.”

“What will we do with the woman after Tobay kills him?” asked Sergi. “None of us has any use for such a thing.”

“Sergi, if you can’t keep your mouth shut while they fight, we’ll bury your head in the ground and stuff your saber up—”

“Silence!” shouted Keregin. “Move back. Now, Bakhtiian. Make us remember you.” The lanky Tobay dismounted and came forward, holding his saber as if he did not know he had it in his hand. “Left-handed,” added Keregin. “Or I might get bored.”

With no change of expression, Bakhtiian switched hands and circled left, measuring his opponent. Tobay stared dumbly at him as if he had not a wit in the world. Bakhtiian had moved about a quarter of a circle when Tobay suddenly stepped left and cut in with a broad sweep toward Bakhtiian’s right shoulder. Bakhtiian parried, stepping in to the blow, and there was a moment of suspension, metal pressed against metal, and then both men fell back unmarked.

“A greeting in passing,” said Sergi.

Bakhtiian edged back toward the rock. He lunged forward suddenly to Tobay’s right, cutting low. There was a quick exchange: low, low, and high; then low, and Bakhtiian came out to the open space with Tobay backed against the cliff.

“An exchange of kisses,” said Sergi. “How passionate.”

Tobay’s face and demeanor changed utterly, as if, Tess thought with sudden fear, a light had been turned on inside him. He moved back until less than a meter separated him from the rough wall of rock. With his right hand he reached back to brush the rock with his fingers, and the angle of his saber changed ever so slightly. Bakhtiian circled in, trying to push Tobay completely against the rock, feinting high but striking low again. But Tobay’s saber swept the cut aside and went on sweeping for Bakhtiian’s head.

Tess gasped, breath suspended. Bakhtiian fell to his knees, saber barely catching the blow. For an instant the tableau held and then Bakhtiian twisted Tobay’s saber around, cut free from a flurry of blows, and leapt backward, regaining his feet.

“A conversation,” said Sergi. “About the weather.”

But Bakhtiian was wounded. Tess stared. Blood welled and, welling to fullness, bled off a cut on Bakhtiian’s wrist. She breathed again. Not deep enough to be fatal, or even perhaps, debilitating. And yet, what if Tobay was only playing with him?

They moved away from the rock. Their exchanges grew more complex. Tess saw only a mix of high and low, wide and close, movements begun in one place that ended in another until she could not recognize where one began and the other left off. And all the time, the slow drip of blood from Bakhtiian’s wrist tracked his movements over the ground. She could not move. They both feinted, and feinted again, their sabers never touching. Every second she expected to see Tobay kill Bakhtiian. Every second Bakhtiian escaped.

Tobay fenced him against a slab of rock and went for his face, angled the slice into an arc that would open his stomach. Somehow Bakhtiian twisted the blade and was still whole and moving. He parried and pressed, made a bid for open ground, and gained it. They backed off, eyeing each other, breathing fast and hard. Bakhtiian’s face shone with intensity.
My God,
she thought, watching him as he circled slowly, so concentrated that it seemed his entire being had caught fire:
if he ever looks at me like that, I’ll last about as long as tinder under a glass.

And she suffered an instant of stark fear, wondering what such a blaze would do to her.

“Right hands,” said Keregin.

Tess watched the rest of the fight in a haze. Somehow, now that they were right-handed, they seemed more evenly matched, but still she knew that she ought to fear more for Bakhtiian than for Tobay. Until, in a furious exchange, Tobay wrenched himself free and slapped his left hand over his right arm. Blood leaked out between his fingers. He grinned.

“Enough!” yelled Keregin, dismounting.

“The woman didn’t bolt,” said Sergi. “I’m more impressed with her than with Bakhtiian.”

Keregin strode over to Bakhtiian, who stood breathing deeply to regain his wind.

“By the gods,” Keregin squinted down at him. “Maybe there’s something to your reputation after all. Tobay, put up and go.” Tobay sheathed his saber, looking again half-witted and lifeless. Many of the men, who had looked up to watch the fight, turned their heads away again. “Tobay’s got no interest in life but saber. He prefers fighting two or three men, since one is too easy. He wasn’t going for the kill.”

“I know.” Blood still dripped from Bakhtiian’s wrist.

Keregin laughed. “And not too proud to admit it.” His expression changed. “You’ve got foreigners with you.”

Bakhtiian shrugged. Tess crouched, balancing herself with a touch of one hand on the pebbles that littered the ledge.

“I know the ruins up in these mountains. A place to inspire the gods in you if nothing else might, but I warn you, Bakhtiian, to reach them you’ve got to ride through khaja lands. There have been jahar raids into khaja towns, and your name linked to them. I won’t lift a hand against you, but there’s been mischief done. Is it yours?”

“No.”

Keregin lifted his right hand to flick a piece of grass off his beard. His little finger was missing. “I believe you. But remember, the khaja know your name now. They blame you. They are like us in one way, Bakhtiian, if not in any other: They seek revenge.”