The Novels of the Jaran (39 page)

He was hunched so far over Myshla’s neck that his hood had not been blown back. “Yes.” The word vanished on the wind.

She mounted Kriye. He sidestepped, taking her into a bush. Branches scraped her leg. She jerked him back onto the trail, driving him ahead. Myshla came forward, and the tarpans, nervous, hesitated and then followed the drag of their lead-lines. The wind swelled. Rain broke over them, hard as pellets, sounding like thunder on the rocks around them. Her head was soaked in an instant. Water blurred her vision.

Finally, finally, they reached the valley floor. She slowed to negotiate a litter of rocks. Water streamed away in little runnels between them. A leaf blew into her face, attaching itself like a damp tentacle. She flinched back, jerked the reins. Kriye shied. For an instant she had all that she could do to control him. A thick gust of rain drove into her from the side. A large branch tore loose from a tree behind them and crashed down onto the path. Myshla bolted.

The mare stumbled on the rough ground and fell, flipping over sideways. She pushed back up to her feet and then, unaccountably, she calmed.

“Ilya!” Tess scrambled down off Kriye, throwing the reins over the black’s head. Rain drowned the landscape in gray. Bakhtiian lay half in a ditch at the side of the trail. Water eddied over his boots. She grabbed him under his arms and tugged him up onto the trail, and knelt by him, pulling him up into her arms. “Ilya!”

His eyelids wavered, opened. He had a cut below one eye, thin and jagged. The brown tunic was ripped. Blood welled up from a scrape on his palm. He mouthed something. She had to lean down. Rain drenched her neck, slipping under her cloak to run down the curve of her spine. She shuddered.

“Go on.” He shut his eyes.

She eased him down on the trail. With both hands she smoothed his hood back away from his face. Then she took off one of her gloves and slapped him as hard as she could. He sat up. Rain and blood painted a broad red line down his cut cheek. He lifted a hand to his face. Blood dripped from his palm.

“Stand up, damn you!” She got behind him and lifted. He got his good leg under him and came up with such strength that she had to take a step backward to balance. He pushed her away with one arm and hobbled over to Myshla. Blood leaked from a gouge midway down Myshla’s left foreleg.

“Oh, hell.” Tears burned her eyes. “Ilya, you’ll have to ride Kriye.” He did not reply, but with a movement half extraordinary and half ungainly, he got himself on the stallion. Tess mounted her remount bareback, tying Myshla to Kriye’s saddle. They went on.

Partway up the far slope, with wind and rain pouring against them, she had to dismount. Bakhtiian lay bent, almost hugging Kriye’s neck. She tied her mount on behind, put her head down, and led them forward. Water gushed down the path in fresh trails. The hard surface had dissolved into mud. The rain soaked through her gloves, through her trousers. Rivulets trailed down her calves to pool in the toes of her boots.

The pile of stone marking the approach to the cave was half obliterated. Beyond it, rock fell in slick ledges down toward the bottom of the canyon that lay, dim and obscure, far below. Rain pelted at the low bushes, stripping them of their last leaves. Tess got a tighter hold on Kriye, up at his mouth, and started across.

That Kriye was surefooted was the best of her luck. In this direction, the wind whipped her cloak open. Rain drenched the front of her shirt. Convulsive shivers shook her every few steps. She picked her way across the pathless slope of loose rock, slipping once, knee jarring on stone, one hand plunged to above the wrist in a sink of icy water. Kriye held steady. Tess pushed herself up, slipping again, clutching the reins. A steep slope, its carpet of lichen torn into strips by the storm, a rubble-strewn ledge, and at last the broad entry and narrow doorway of the cave.

“The gates of paradise.” Bakhtiian’s voice, faint and far off behind her. Kriye nosed against her, recognizing shelter, and suddenly the rain no longer pounded furiously on her head.

Chapter Eighteen

“We have come into this roofed cavern.”

—
EMPEDOCLES OF AGRAGAS

S
OMEHOW BAKHTIIAN GOT HIMSELF
off Kriye. With cold-numbed fingers, Tess fumbled with the harness. Myshla’s saddle slipped from her hands to land on her feet. Pain lanced up her leg. She led the horses into the rock corral and rubbed them down with the hunter’s undershirt. The gouge on Myshla’s leg did not look too deep. She put salve on it and wrapped it, and left the horses to their forage. There was still enough light to see. She thanked someone for this; whom, she was not sure. From inside, the high whistle of the wind and the rain’s monotonous staccato sounded almost subdued.

Dizziness engulfed her. She sat down. She felt hot and cold together, and her head felt as if it was about to float to the ceiling. A low voice cursed in an undertone to her left. A spark caught, and then flame: Bakhtiian had started a fire. He rubbed at his eyes, pausing in the action to rest his forehead on a palm.

Tess stood, unsteadily, and gathered together the blankets—few enough with this bitter cold. “I’ll make a bed for you,” she said, and carried them over to the couch of branches she had laid earlier in the day.

He glared bleakly at her. “You’ll have a fever by morning. Dry your clothes first.”

She knelt by the fire. The heat steamed off her. A draft carried the smoke up and out, and the fuel burned merrily, snapping and crackling. Then she realized that he was taking his clothes off. She averted her gaze and stared at the horses.

“I
said
dry your clothes.”

“I am.” She peeled the cold, wet cloth of her red shirt away from her skin, but it reattached itself an instant later, and she flinched.

There was a silence. She did not look to see what his expression was. His red shirt lay on the ground next to the fire. A moment later, his right boot joined it, and then his trousers, laid out to absorb the heat.

“Soerensen.” His voice was hoarse with pain or anger. “This is not a request. Take them off.” A flutter in the air, and a blanket struck her on the side of her face. Forced to turn, she could not help but look at him. He was entirely covered, wrapped quite primly in a blanket, only his feet showing, where they were thrust out close to the flames. His face was white with exhaustion, but he also looked annoyed. Seeing her turn, he pulled an edge of the blanket deliberately across his face, so that he could not see her.

“Oh, God,” sighed Tess. She stripped and wrapped the blanket around herself. It was damp but offered warmth despite that. After a time she actually felt her toes and fingers. The darkness deepened as night came on and the storm continued to rage outside. Inside, fire illuminated them. The gray rock walls of the cave curved up into darkness, their surface rippled and rough as though some ancient chill had frozen them in the midst of movement. The air seemed close and harsh against her throat. Smoke settled in her lungs. The part of her farthest from the fire felt perpetually chilled, so she shifted frequently. She yawned.

“At least they’ll never follow us in this storm,” she mumbled. She glanced up. Bakhtiian lay slumped over his knees.

She got on her trousers and shirt through a combination of habit and fear and circled the fire to kneel beside him. The blanket had fallen down, revealing the strong curve of his shoulders, and as she tugged it up with sudden prudishness, his eyes fluttered and opened. He stared at her, confused. His hands closed on her waist. The blanket slipped to reveal his naked torso. Tess jerked back.

He clutched the blanket and pulled it tight around his chest. “I passed out,” he said.

“Your clothes are dry.” She turned and walked across the cave to converse with the horses. Over the next several minutes he swore three times in a very low voice. The fire flared briefly. She heard him moving, but she did not look. Then it was quiet. Myshla nosed at her ear. She shivered. Rain drummed softly outside. Inside, it was freezing.

“Soerensen.” His tone was sharp.

She turned. The fire was still bright enough that she could see Bakhtiian. He had taken the blankets and cloaks and the hunter’s clothing and layered them on the couch of branches she had laid, and dragged himself on top of them.

He met her eyes. He was flushed, and his mouth was drawn in a severe line. “Come here.”

She did not move. “If you give me the two cloaks, I’ll be warm enough.”

Bakhtiian swallowed. He looked as if his greatest desire at that moment was to pass out again. “I beg pardon for my immodesty, but in a storm like this, in our condition, we need the warmth.”

Tess shivered and rubbed her hands along her arms. It was hard to speak, her lips were so cold. “You’re right, of course. We don’t have any other choice.”

“I would never have said it otherwise,” he replied with considerable reserve.

She kicked the coals of the fire into a smaller circle and stared at them. Finally she walked over to Ilya. “Well,” she said.

He was already lying on his side, left leg resting on the uninjured one. “Share the blankets.” He rested his head on a pillow of dry grass and shut his eyes. Gingerly, she settled down next to him. “No,” he mumbled, “on your side. Back to me. There, so if I shift, my leg won’t move.”

She rolled up on her side, angling her legs so that they supported his. Yawning, blinking back sleep, she tucked the blankets around their legs.

“Lie against me,” he whispered. “I’ll get the last blankets. Gods, woman, you’re shaking with the cold.”

He had folded his arms tight between his chest and her back, but otherwise she lay against him. This couch of branches was not the most comfortable bed she had ever slept on, but
he
was warm. She heard, like a counterpoint to the furious storm, a distant slide of loose rock, the thin crack of breaking branches and, to her left, the slow drip of water pooling somewhere under the overhang. Heat crept into her shoulders and knees and hips. She slept.

Odys had no colors but brown and gray and the faded green of its reeds. It had no heights and no valleys, except in the archipelagoes where no one had any reason to live. It was a drowned world, the sea and the massif almost one, the mud flats interminable, stretching out in all directions from the only slab of ground that stood above the waves, the Oanao Plateau.

But the palace and the port and the city of Odys Central itself had heights and valleys in profusion. Perhaps the architecture here was deliberate, to provide contrast with the terrain; perhaps all Chapalii architecture was this way, on all imperial planets. No human survey had been allowed to ascertain which was true.

And there was color as well. Color especially in the vast greenhouse, acres broad, that jutted off the fourth spoke of the ducal palace. Charles stood among the irises, chatting amiably with his head gardener about economic theory in preindustrial Earth cultures as contrasted to the development of communal theory on pre-space Ophiuchi-Sei-ah-nai.

“Ah, there he is, Jamsetji,” said Charles. “I must go. Come to dinner tonight, and we’ll finish arguing this out.”

Jamsetji tipped his cap back and glanced toward the gazebo half hidden by the wisteria and trailing roses. “That the merchant who speaks Anglais? Cursed trouble, if you ask me.”

“Is this one of your hunches?”

“Might say it was. But that’s not saying you don’t want to get involved with it either.”

“Or that I have any choice,” added Charles. “Listen in.” He strolled off down a winding turf path and came by a circular route to the little gazebo. Hon Echido sat on a wrought iron bench in the gazebo, directing two stewards in the placement of cups and saucers and a kettle and a pitcher on the little round table before him. He saw Charles and stood up, bowing to the precise degree.

Charles acknowledged him and entered, sitting down on the bench opposite. He dabbed sweat from his forehead and accepted a cool drink from one of the stewards. The stewards retreated out of earshot. “Please, Hon Echido, sit down.”

Echido sat. Pink flushed his skin but quickly faded. “You do me a great honor, to meet me here, Tai-en,” he said in Anglais.

“It is a beautiful spot.” Charles gazed for a moment at the far lines of vegetation: the clustering flowers nearby, the vegetable flats, the grain fields, the tasseled rows of corn, the orchards farther off, and the distant line of trees, demarking the park and exercise ground for those humans serving voluntary exile on Odys with Soerensen. Scent hung here like something one could touch, overpowering, yet at the same time reassuring. “Although it’s hot.”

Swathed in robes, Echido looked comfortable. He sipped from his cup, steaming liquid that smelled of cloves and aniseed and tar. “The layout is from a human plan, I see. There is a certain disorder, artful, indeed, but disorder all the same that precludes these grounds being of Chapalii design.”

“You speak Anglais remarkably well, Hon Echido.”

“Your praise is generous, Tai-en.”

“As well as being perfectly true. I have enjoyed our discussions of the various trade and mineral rights available for exploitation in my fief. Yet I feel that for the Keinaba family, whose wealth and acumen is known and admired throughout the Empire, to instruct one of their own to learn Anglais, one as high-ranking, as valuable, and as perceptive as yourself, Hon Echido, means that there is a more delicate matter you wish to broach.”

Echido arranged his hands in Merchant’s Humility. “The Tai-en honors us with his attention to such an insignificant family as our own.”

Since the Keinaba merchant house was one of the wealthiest merchant houses in an empire where wealth counted as a marker of rank, Charles simply waited. In the distance, he could hear Jamsetji singing an afternoon raga in a reedy voice.

The merchant’s skin shaded to violet, the color of mortification, and his fingers altered slightly to add the emphasis of Shame to the arrangement of Humility. “I beg of you, Tai-en, to allow me to explain before you cast me out of your presence, as any lord would feel every right, every compulsion, to do. For time uncounted, for years beyond years, Keinaba has served the
Yaotai
Kobara princely house and the Tai Kaonobi dukes. We served well and faithfully, as any merchant house ought.”