Kate Eliott

The Sword of Heaven 2

His Conquering Sword

CHAPTER ONE

Aleksi could no longer look at the sky without wondering. On clear nights the vast expanse of Mother Sun's encampment could be seen, countless campfires and torches and lanterns lit against the broad black flank of Brother Sky. Uncle Moon rose and set, following his herds, and Aunt Cloud and Cousin Rain came and went on their own erratic schedule.

But what if these were only stories? What if Tess's home, Erthe, lay not across the seas but up there, in the heavens? How could land lie there at all? Who held it up? Yet who held up the very land he stood on now? It was not a question that had ever bothered him before.

He prowled the perimeter of the Orzhekov camp in the darkness of a clear, mild night. Beyond this perimeter, the jaran army existed as might any great creature, awake and unquiet when it ought to have been resting; but the army celebrated another victory over yet another khaja city. And in truth, the camp still rejoiced over the return of Bakhtiian from a terrible and dangerous journey. The journey had changed him from the dyan whom they all followed in their great war against the khaja into a gods-touched Singer through whom Mother Sun and Father Wind themselves spoke.

And yet, if it was true that Tess and Dr. Hierakis and Tess's brother the prince and all his party came from a place beyond the wind and the clouds, beyond the moon and the sun, then to what land had Bakhtiian traveled? To whom had he spoken? By whom was he touched? And how could a land as large as the plains lie up there in the sky, and Aleksi not be able to see it?

The stars winked at him, mute. They offered no answers, just as Tess had offered no answers before he had discovered that there was a question to be asked.

From here he could see the hulking shadow of Tess's tent at the very center of the camp—not just at the center of the Orzhekov tribe but at the heart of the entire army. Another, smaller shadow moved and he paused and waited for Sonia to catch up to him.

She rested a hand on his sleeve and he could tell at once—although he could not see her face clearly—

that she was worried. "Aleksi," she said, whispering although they were already private. "Have you seen Veselov?" She hesitated, and he heard more than saw her wince away from continuing. But she went on.

"Vasil Veselov. He came through camp earlier. He said he came to ask Niko about one of his rider's injuries, but I don't believe—" She faltered.

Aleksi was shocked at her irresolution. "No one has seen him leave," Sonia continued. "And Ilya just came back. ..." She trailed off and flashed a look around to make sure no one was close enough to hear, despite the fact that they both knew that they were well out of earshot, and that no one walked this way in any case. This part of camp, unlike the rest of the huge sprawl of tents extending far out into the darkness, was quiet and subdued. "The guards didn't see him, but you never miss anything, Aleksi." She waited.

A discreet distance beyond the awning of Tess's tent stood the ever-present guards, these a trio who had ridden in with Ilya, Aleksi had seen him arrive with a larger train and then dismiss most of them.

Bakhtiian had gone into his tent alone.

"Oh, I saw Veselov leave camp," Aleksi lied in a casual voice. It wasn't true, of course. But Aleksi knew when to trust his instincts. Better that no one else realize where Veselov actually was.

"Thank the gods," murmured Sonia on a heartfelt sigh, and she gave Aleksi a sisterly kiss on the cheek and returned, presumably lighter in spirit, to her own tent.

It made Aleksi feel sick at heart, to lie to her like that, but he had learned long ago that orphans, outcasts, and all outsiders could not always live by the truth, though they might wish to. He trusted Tess to know what she was doing, just as she trusted him to protect her. No greater bond existed than love sealed by trust.

Aleksi touched his saber hilt and glanced up at the stars again. He wondered if Tess had not become like a weaver whose threads grow tangled: If the damage is not straightened and repaired soon enough, the cloth is ruined. Wind brushed him, sighing through camp. Songs drifted to him on the breeze, a distant campfire flared and, closer, a horse neighed, calling out a challenge. Above, in the night sky, the campfires of Mother Sun's tribe burned on, too numerous to count, too distant to smell even the faintest aroma of smoke or flame from their burning.

"We come from a world like this world," Dr. Hierakis had said, "except its sun is one of those stars."

Could there possibly be another Mother Sun out there, giving her light to an altogether different tribe of children? He shook his head impatiently. How could it be true? How could it not be true? And what, by the gods, did Tess think she was doing, anyway? Did she truly understand what trouble there would be if it was discovered that Bakhtiian and Veselov had met together, secretly, even with her serving as an intermediary?

He cast one last glance at the silent tent and then began to walk the edge of camp again.

CHAPTER TWO

Ilya lay in elegant disarray beside her, breathing deeply, even in sleep marked by a harmonious attitude that drew the eye to him. A soft gloom suffused the lent. The lantern burned steadily, but its light did little more than blur the edges of every object in the chamber.

Vasil was one such object: the light burnished his hair and accentuated the planes of his handsome face. He lay on his side with his eyes shut, but Tess knew he was only pretending to be asleep.

Somehow, not surprisingly, she had ended up between the two men. She traced her fingers up his bare arm to his shoulder.

"Vasil," she whispered, so as not to wake Ilya, "you have to leave."

He did not open his eyes. "If you were a jaran woman," he said, no louder than her, "you would have repudiated him, and never ever done such a thing as this. What is it like in the land where you come from?"

"In the land where I come from, there are marriages like this."

His eyes snapped open. He looked at her suspiciously. "Two men and a woman?"

"Yes, and sometimes two women and a man, sometimes two of each. It's not common, but it exists."

"Gods," said Vasil. He smiled. "Ilya must conquer this country."

"No," said Tess, musing. "It's a long way away."

"I never heard of such a thing in Jeds," said Ilya.

"I thought you were asleep! It isn't Jeds, anyway. It's Erthe."

"Ah," said Ilya. He shifted. She turned to look over her shoulder at him, but he was only moving to pull the blankets up over his chest. "Tess is right. You have to go, Vasil."

Lying between them, Tess was too warm to need blankets. Vasil reached out to draw a hand over her belly, casual with her now that they had been intimate.

"Not much here. You must be early still, like Karolla."

Tess chuckled. "Dr. Hierakis says I'm not quite halfway through. She says with my build that I carry well."

"Dokhtor Hierhakis? Ah, the healer. She came from Jeds."

"From Erthe, originally, but she lives in Jeds now."

"How can she know, Tess?" asked Ilya suddenly.

For once, there was a simple, expedient answer, and she didn't have to lie to him. "Because you got me pregnant after you came back from the coast with Charles. I know I wasn't pregnant before that. Ilya, if you think back, you know as well as I when it happened."

"I'm sorry I—" began Vasil, and then stopped. He withdrew his hand from her abdomen and sat up abruptly.

"You're sorry about what?" Tess asked.

"Nothing." He shook his head. Tess watched, curious. She had never seen Vasil at a loss for words before.

"You're sorry you weren't there," said Ilya in a low voice, "and you're sorry to think that I might have a life with my own wife that doesn't include you."

Vasil did not reply. He rose and dressed without saying anything at all. Tess could tell that he was troubled. She watched him dress, unable not to admire his body and the way he moved and stood with full awareness that someone—in this case she—was watching him. She could feel that Ilya watched him, too, but she knew it was prudent not to turn to look. Vasil did not look at either of them. He pulled on his boots and bent to kiss her. Then he stood and skirted the pillows, only to pause on the other side, beside Ilya. Tess rolled over.

The light shone full on Vasil's face. "Are you sorry I came here tonight?" he asked, his attention so wholly on Ilya that Tess wondered if Vasil had forgotten she was there.

Ilya regarded him steadily. "No." His gaze flicked toward Tess and away. His voice dropped to a whisper." No, I'm not sorry." Vasil knelt abruptly and leaned forward and kissed him. Lingered, kissing him, because Ilya made no move, neither encouraging him nor rejecting him, just accepted it.

Simple, ugly jealousy stabbed through Tess. And like salt in the wound, the brush of arousal.

Ilya shifted and suddenly he changed. All this night he had been astonishingly passive, going along with the choice Tess and Vasil had made as if he followed some long-set pattern, pursued acquiescing to his pursuer. As if that was how it had been before, between him and Vasil. Now he placed a hand on Vasil's chest and gently, with finality, pushed him away. "But it can't happen again," he said quietly.

"You know that."

Startled, Vasil glared at him. "Why not? She said there were marriages like this, in that khaja land."

He reached out to Ilya's face and splayed his fingers along the line of Ilya's jaw. With his thumb, he traced the diagonal scar up Ilya's cheek. "You are the only man marked for marriage in all the tribes."

"Oh, God," said Tess, recalling that moment vividly now. "And I was wearing your clothes and using your saber when I did it."

"So it is true," said Vasil triumphantly. "Can you deny it?"

Ilya closed a hand over Vasil's wrist and drew Vasil's hand away from his face, then released it. "It is also true that not twelve days ago a rider named Yevgeni Usova was banished from the army for lying with another man, with one of the actors. Shall I judge myself less severely than he was judged?"

"I was sorry to hear about Yevgeni," said Vasil carelessly. "But he was stupid enough to get caught."

"So we are to be allowed to continue as long as we are not caught? I think not, Vasil. I must be more holy than the riders I command, not less. Nothing else is just."

Vasil looked annoyed, as if he had not expected this turn of events. "So that is why after your family was killed, after the tribes agreed to follow you, you threw me out? That is why you stopped getting drunk? I remember after you came back from Jeds, how many women used to ask you to their beds and how very often you went. It is true, what I heard later, that you rarely lay with women afterward? After your family was killed? After I was banished? Were you punishing yourself? Is there a single piece of gold in this tent from any of the khaja cities your army has conquered? Once you questioned everything, you demanded to know why the jaran had to live as our grandmothers and grandfathers and their grandparents had lived, as the First Tribes had lived. Now you are the most conservative of all. Do you know who you remind me of? You remind me of the man who killed your mother and sister. You remind me of Khara Roskhel."

For an instant Ilya's anger blazed off him so strongly that he seemed to add light to the room. Then, as suddenly, he jerked his head to one side, to stare at the curtained wall that separated the inner from the outer chamber. "He was pure," he said in a low voice.

"And you are not? Because of me?" Vasil's tone was scathing.

Ilya hesitated. Tess had a sudden instinct that Ilya wanted to say "Yes, because of you," but that because he did not believe it himself, he could not bring himself to lie.

"Roskhel always supported you, Ilya," said Vasil, his voice dropping. "When we got to the great gathering of tribes, that summer eleven years ago, when we rode in to the encampment, he supported you. And then, the day you stood up in front of the elders of the tribes to tell them of your vision, he was gone. What happened there to turn him against you? Did he and your mother quarrel?"

The silence following this question became so profound that Tess heard, from outside, the bleating of startled goats. Tess realized that she was cold, and she wrapped a blanket around her torso. Vasil did not move, staring at Ilya.

"Yes," said Ilya in a clipped tone. He would not look at either of them. "Go, Vasil. You must go."

"Ilya." Vasil extended a hand toward Ilya, tentatively, like a supplicant. The gesture seemed odd in him, and yet, seeing it, Tess felt heartened. "You have always had such great visions, ever since you were a boy. What I want seems so small beside it."

"Yet what you want is impossible."

"It is because I'm dyan? I'll give it back to Anton. I never wanted it except to get close to you."

"You know that's not the reason."

"But I have children, and a wife. You have a wife, and soon you'll have children as well. What is to stop us continuing on like this?"

"You will never understand, Vasil. Only what I granted to the gods and to the jaran, that I lead us to the ends of the earth if need be, if that is our destiny. You aren't part of that vision. You can't be, by our own laws. I banished you once. I've already made that choice. Don't force me to do it again. Because I will."

"Damn you." Vasil rose abruptly, anger hot in his face. "I would have made a different choice."

Ilya's weight of authority lent him dignity and a sheer magnitude of presence that so eclipsed Vasil's beauty and charisma that Tess suddenly understood the desperate quality in Vasil's love for Ilya. "You are not me. The gods have touched me. Through my father and my mother, the gods chose to bring me here, so that I might act as their instrument. My first duty will always be to their calling."

"What about her?" Vasil asked bitterly, gesturing with a jerk of his head toward Tess.

"Tess knows the worth of my love for her."

"Yes," said Tess in a quiet voice, seeing how Ilya's shoulders trembled with emotion, and fatigue. "I do know the worth of his love for me. Vasil, you know what the answer is. You must have always known it. Why couldn't you have taken this night as a gift and let it go?"

She could not tell if Vasil heard her. But then, whenever Ilya was near him, the greatest part of his attention had always been reserved for Bakhtiian, no matter how much he might seem to be playing to others. "Let it be my curse to you, then," said Vasil, "that you always know that I have always and will always love you more than anything." He spun on his heel and strode out, thrusting the curtain aside so roughly that it tumbled back into place behind him.

"Oh, gods," said Ilya, not moving. He watched the curtain sway.

"You don't think he'll try to get caught on purpose—?"

"No. He knows I'll have to kill him. Whatever he may say, he loves his own life more than he loves me."

"Ilya." She reached for him. He flinched away from her. She stopped dead, and then pulled back her hand. He had never rejected her before, not like this. God, what if he really did love Vasil more than he loved her? What if she had misinterpreted the brief scene played out between them? But watching him as he sat there strung as tight as a bow, edged as sharp as any saber, she knew beyond anything else that he hurt. His pain distressed her more than the knowledge—which could no longer be denied— that he did in fact love Vasil and had for many years. Ilya was not rejecting her; he was rejecting himself, and thus anything that loved him and might yet scorn him for what he had revealed himself to be.

"I'm a damned hypocrite," he said in Rhuian. The curtain had ceased swaying, but he still stared at it.

Tess made a brief laugh in her throat. "Ah, Bakhtiian returns to the lands of the mortals. How unique you are. I'm sure you're the only person afflicted with hypocrisy."

He twisted around to glare at her. "You don't understand what that means!"

"What? That you're not perfect? But I've known that for a long time." She could see by his expression that she was offending him, so she continued gleefully. "Of course! Why didn't I ever see it before? Yuri always said so, that you thought you had to be the best. Kirill said it, too: that you always had to win. I didn't see then that it also meant that you had to be the purest one, the one with no flaws, no stain on your spirit, the one who never committed the slightest offense or the least impolite exchange. Do you know how boring that kind of person is? Why, I'm relieved to see that you're flawed like the rest of us.

Even if it's only with so common a sin as hypocrisy."

"How dare you laugh at me!" He looked livid with anger.

"Because you won't laugh at yourself. Someone must. Since I'm your wife, I've been granted that dubious honor."

"The gods do not grant their gifts lightly, Tess," he said stiffly, "and with that gift comes a burden."

"Yes, a burden greater than that any other person has to bear. I'm well aware of it. I'm aware of it constantly, and it's beginning to weary me. It may even be true, but that still doesn't mean that you're any different than the rest of us. That you're any better."

"No," he said softly, still not looking at her, "I am worse."

"Oh, Ilya." This time when she leaned across to touch him, he sat motionless under her hands, neither responding to her nor retreating from her. As he had with Vasil. "You must know that I don't think it's wrong for you to love him. Only that I—" She hesitated. Their bed was a wild landscape of rumpled blankets, stripes and patterns muted in the lantern light, of furs thrown into topographical relief, mountains and valleys and long ridges and the far mound of her toes, of pillows, one shoved up against the far wall, two flung together at the head of the bed, more scattered beyond Ilya, and of his clothing, littering the carpet beyond. One boot listed against a stray pillow. His belt curled around the other boot, snaring it.

He said nothing, but his silence was expectant, and courageous, too; how easily he might think it would be natural for her to repudiate him, based on the morals of his culture, faced with what she now knew of him.

"He's just so damned beautiful," she said at last, afraid to say it, "that I can't help but think that—that anyone would love him more than ... me...." She faltered.

"Tess!" He spun back to her, upsetting her balance. She tumbled over and landed on her back, half laughing, half shocked, in the middle of the bed. "You're jealous of him!"

"Why shouldn't I be?" she demanded, rolling up onto her side. He rested on his elbows a handbreadth from her, staring astonished at her. "You've known him a long time, much longer than you've known me.

It's obvious you still love him. All that keeps you apart is that the jaran don't recognize, don't accept, that kind of love."

"That is not all that keeps us apart, my heart," he replied gravely, but humor glinted in his eyes as well. "I loved him with a boy's awkward, headlong passion. But you," his gaze had the intensity of fire on a bitter cold night. "You I love like...." He shook his head, impatient with words. When he spoke again, he spoke in his autocratic tone, one that brooked no disagreement. "You, I love." As if daring her to take issue with the statement or the nakedly clear emotion that burned off of him.

Tess was wise enough simply to warm herself in the blaze, and vain enough to be gratified by it. She had heard what she had hoped to hear, and she knew him well enough by now to know he spoke the truth. Vasil was certainly more beautiful than she was, or could hope to be, but he was also the most self-centered person she had ever met. And she suspected that Vasil's attraction to Ilya was likely not so much to Ilya as a person, as Ilya, but to Ilya as the gods-touched child, to Bakhtiian, the man with fire in his heart and a vision at the heart of his spirit.

"Still," she asked suddenly, "if it was possible, would that tempt you? A triad marriage?"

He rolled his eyes and sat up, sighing with exasperation. "All you women ever think about is lying with men." He surveyed the remains of the bed with disgust and rose and set to work straightening out the blankets and placing the pillows back in their appointed spots.

"But would it?"

His lips twitched. "I don't know," he said at last, flinging the last stray pillow at her, which she caught.

He picked up his boots and his belt and folded his clothes in exactly die same order and with the same precise corners that he always folded them. She admired him from this angle, the clean lines of his body, the length of thigh, his flat belly and what lay below, the curve of his shoulders, his lips, the dark shadow of his luxuriant hair, tipped with sweat. He was a little thin yet, from the sickness, but that would pass. He sank down beside her, cross-legged, and considered her with a frown. "Does it tempt you?"

She sat up as well and shrugged. "Not really. I wonder if there's anything there, in him, past his undoubted beauty. Tell me about him."

He considered her. After a moment he slid in under the blankets and covered them both up. She lay on her right side, angling one leg up over his legs. But her belly, not yet large enough to need a pillow for support, still needed something. She shifted and grimaced; he turned by degrees until she found a comfortable position. She sighed and slid her shoulder in under his arm and rested her head on his warm shoulder. He lay on his back, with one hand tucked under his head and the other curled up around her back, fingers delicate on her skin.

"I was a singularly unattractive boy," he said at last, musing. "I was awkward. I was a dreamer, and I had strange ideas and stranger curiosities. I was also afflicted with—" He sighed. She had one hand tucked down under her belly, knuckles brushing his hip; her other hand rested on his chest, so she felt the force of the sigh under her fingers. "—very sudden and very strong desires, that winter, and no girl in any tribe we met that season had the least interest in me. Why should they? I was odd, and ugly. Then Vasil arrived. We were both passionate in our youthful desires."

"What was yours? Or was it only—"

He chuckled. "No, no, it was both. The physical craving was strong enough, but never as strong as the other I wanted to know everything."

"Then what was Vasil's?"

"I suppose I was. Vasil was radiant. He was beautiful. Girls followed him. They asked him everything they never asked me. They paid him as much attention as they paid the young men who had made a name for themselves riding with the jahar. I don't know why he chose me."

"Perhaps he saw what you would become."

Silence shuttered them. Tess felt as if she could hear the sound of the blankets settling in around them, caving in with excruciating slowness to fill the empty space left by the curves and angles of their intertwined bodies.

"He believed in me when no one else did," said Ilya, almost wonderingly, as if that moment of revelation, of the adolescent boy revealing with reckless daring his wild vision only to find that his listener did not scorn or laugh but rather embraced him, had set its mark so fast and deep upon his spirit that it had branded him forever.

"Not even your father?"

"My father rode out a lot in those days. He was a Singer. The gods called him at strange times, on strange journeys."

"Your sister?"

"Natalia's first husband had just been killed in a feud with the Boradin tribe, while she was still pregnant with her first child."

"Was that Nadine?"

"Yes. Oh, Natalia was fond enough of me, and kind to me, considering what an embarrassment I must have been to her, but she was busy and preoccupied. Riders were already beginning to come round, to see what they could see of her, to ask if she was ready to marry again."

"But, Ilya, women have no choice in marriage."

He tilted his head to look directly at her. His lips quirked up. "Nor should they," he said, and grinned.

Then he yelped, because she pinched him.

"That for you, and don't think I'll ever forgive you for taking me down the avenue without me knowing what it meant, either."

"Perhaps it was rash—"

"Perhaps!"

"But, by the gods, I'd do it again. Tess." He pressed her against him, as close as he might, and kissed her long and searchingly.

There came a cough. There stood Vasil, framed in the entrance by curtain and striped wall. "If you will talk about me, then I wish you'd do so in a language I can understand. And, Ilya, my love, I don't know how you can expect me to leave here unseen if you post guards at the entrance to your tent."

Ilya swore.

"Wait," said Tess in khush. "Ilya, it's true he can't get out by the front entrance without being seen.

They all saw you come in here. You'll have to go out front and distract them with something, and he can sneak out the back."

"You have a back entrance?" Vasil asked, looking interested.

"Go on," said Tess, forestalling what Ilya was about to say, which she guessed would be ill-considered and rude. Vasil stared at him as he dressed, but he dressed quickly and pushed past the other man without the slightest sign of the affection he had shown earlier. A moment later, Tess heard voices outside, engaged in some kind of lively conversation. "Here," she said, standing up with a blanket pulled around her. She went to the back wall of the tent and twitched the woven inner wall aside to reveal the felt outer wall. Here, low along the ground, the felt wall overlapped itself and, drawing the extra layer aside, Tess revealed a gap in the fabric just large enough to crawl through. She knelt and peered out.

Vasil laid a hand on her bare shoulder. His fingers caressed the line of her neck. "Here, I'll look. I've done this before."

Tess made a noise in her throat and stood up, and away. "I have no doubt of it."

He hesitated, and bent to kiss her. Then he knelt and swayed forward. Paused, surveying his ground.

A moment later he slid outside. Tess knelt and looked out after him, but he had already vanished into the gloom. She twitched the fabric back, let the inner wall fall into place, and called for Ilya. After a little bit, he came back in, swearing under his breath.

"Well, you can hardly blame him," she began.

"I can do what I like," he said peevishly. "He's so damned charming that it's easy to forget how much trouble he causes."

"I think I'd better sew that back entrance shut."

He cocked his head at her. "Probably." He stripped and snuggled in beside her. And sighed. "It was a stupid thing to do."

"What? Letting him get out of here unseen?"

"No." By the constraint in his voice, she could tell he was embarrassed. "What—we did—tonight."

"No, it was the right thing to do. It never does any good to run away from what you're afraid of. I should know. I've done it often enough."

"What was I afraid of?"

"I don't know. But I don't think you're afraid of Vasil anymore."

His face rested against her hair. He stroked her along the line of her torso and down along her hips, and up again, and down, while he considered. "No," he replied, sounding surprised, "I don't think I am."

"So. Is there anything else you haven't told me?"

His hand stopped. "I've kept no more hidden from you," he said indignantly, "than you've kept hidden from me."

Shame overwhelmed Tess. Gods, he didn't know the tenth of it. Yet what could she say? There was nothing she could say.

"It wasn't Natalia they were asking, anyway," said Ilya, "it was my mother and my aunt. It's decent to observe a period of mourning before marrying again"

It took Tess a moment to recall where they had left off their other conversation: with his sister, Natalia. "But she did marry again?"

"Yes." Although she wasn't looking at him, she felt him tense. "That's when I left for Jeds. I hated him."

"Why?"

Ilya let go of a shuddering breath, and he clutched her tighter to him. "He mocked me. He scorned me.

Gods, he tried to rape me once. He knew about Vasil; he caught us together, one time, and he held the knowledge of it over me like a saber. He used to fence with the boys, those of us who aspired to be riders, and he'd torment me. He'd cut me up, fine cuts all along my arms and my chest."

"But, Ilya, how could your sister ever have married someone like that?"

"Oh, no one else knew. He made sure of that. He was charming to everyone else, a good rider, a fine fighter, good with horses and the herds. No one believed me. They all thought I was just jealous. They said I was too attached to Natalia. They said—" He broke off. "Anyway, I left."

"And you went to Jeds. It's strange, now that I think of it, how much I know about your journey to Jeds, and how little I knew of the reasons you left the tribes to go there. But, Ilya." She laughed a little, into his shoulder. "Does that mean that the courtesan Mayana was the first woman you ever slept with?"

"Yes." He didn't sound amused; defensive, perhaps.

"She's so famous, though. I remember that she used to come have tea with Cara once a week. She must have been young, even though she seemed old to me. I was only—what?—ten. She'd just recently bought her freedom from the brothel she was indentured to, so it couldn't have been long after you left Jeds that I arrived there from Erthe. So it wasn't only a university education you got at Jeds."

"Are you complaining about the education I got at Jeds?"

She canted her head back to grin at him. "Not at all. Then you came back to the tribes. Was Vasil still with your tribe?"

"No. He appeared about two winters later. He'd heard that I had returned. My mother had already made me dyan, so no one wondered at first when I took him into my jahar. Josef left his tribe at about the same time, to ride with me. The Roskhel tribe traveled alongside of us many seasons during that time."

"Why did Khara Roskhel turn against you? Gods, what brought him to murder your whole family?"

But the question evoked only silence. His left hand ran a pattern, up and down, along her lower back.

She felt as if the gesture, repeated obsessively, was itself the answer, but in a language she did not speak.

"Ilya?"

"No." He lay the index and middle fingers of his right hand on her lips, gently. "No more, Tess.

There's been enough today, and tonight. I'm exhausted."

As well he might be. She sighed, knowing that if he would not confide in her now, as vulnerable as he was because of all that he had laid bare this night, he probably never would confess the truth of the troubling mystery of Roskhel's defection and subsequent horrible revenge.

She shifted until she was comfortable. His breathing slowed and gentled, and he slept. From outside, she heard the night guards conversing, the murmur of their words but not their meaning. Or perhaps it was just one of them, reciting an old story to keep them company on a dark night.

CHAPTER THREE

Boredom afflicted Jiroannes. He had nothing better to do than to interest himself in the goings-on in his guard-men's encampment. At dawn each day, he sent Syrannus to request an audience with Bakhtiian. Each day Syrannus returned with a polite refusal. In the mornings Jiroannes inspected the camp, ostensibly to make sure the women and children were being treated well by their keepers but in fact because the simple human contact with people other than Syrannus and the two slave-boys was as salve to him, who was otherwise alone.

There was something pathetic about how gratefully the women greeted him, eyes cast down, knowing as they did that it was on his sufferance they were allowed to be there. Sleeping with men of another race, soon to be pregnant with their children; and yet, most of them would otherwise have starved to death, or met a worse fate. They knew they were the lucky ones. The little children sucked on their fingers and stared at him. The older ones attempted to help out around the guards" camp. A few bold children even assisted Lal and Samae and the other slave-boy—whose name was Jat—in hauling water and beating carpets and collecting fuel for the benefit of Jiroannes himself. The guardsmen's camp tripled in size in ten short days. By the time Bakhtiian made his triumphal entry into camp, Jiroannes felt that he was master of an entire little tribe of his own.

When the citadel fell, his men went out searching for refugees. This time they brought back a princess. Waiting women and peasant women had been sheltering her, but the delicacy of her complexion and hands and the fine gold-braided shift she wore underneath the filthy gown her protectors had given her to camouflage herself in betrayed her high station. The captain brought her directly to Jiroannes as dusk lowered around them. Trembling, the woman knelt before him, hands crossed on her chest, head bent so that it almost touched the carpet, and begged him for mercy.

He took her to his bed. She was a virgin, which proved how great a prize she was. She wept a little afterward, silently; he was annoyed to discover that her grief made him uncomfortable. She was a handsome woman, insofar as any of the Habakar women could be called handsome, and she had a pleasingly full figure and soft, yielding flesh. A few drops of blood stained her inner thighs, but he had been gentle—as gentle as he could be, considering how long it had been since he had lain with a woman.

But now that he had satisfied his craving, he wondered if the jaran women, if Mother Sakhalin, would consider this night's work as any different from a rape. Still, the woman had begged him for mercy, and she had given herself into his hands of her own free will. This was war, after all, and in war, the conquered must expect to become servants. Yet his captain had remarked that he had yet to see jaran riders carrying off any khaja women.

Jiroannes tried to talk with her, but they spoke no language in common and she seemed either stupid or so frightened as to be stupid, so he soon grew bored with die effort. She called herself Javani, but whether that was her name, or a title, or a word describing her feelings he could not tell. He called Lal to him and had the boy lead her away to the women's tent, which now she would share with Samae.

In the morning, a rider came by to say that all ambassadors were required to attend court at midday.

"Eminence," said Syrannus as he and Lal helped Jiroannes dress in his most formal sash and blouse and turban, "what would you have me do with the woman?"

"She will remain in seclusion, as befits her station," said Jiroannes. "I will send for her again tonight.

Make sure she is comfortable, Lal, and see that she is allowed to wash."

Lal accepted these orders with his usual gratitude.

Jiroannes wondered if the boy was ambitious. After all, since Lal was a eunuch, he might aspire to the honor of tending to Jiroannes" wives and the other women in the women's quarter. Not that Jiroannes had wives yet, but in time he intended to marry often and well.

"Lal, treat her as you would any woman of high station in your care, and see what you can discover about who and what she is. I would be—most—grateful for such information."

Lal dropped to his knees and touched his forehead to the carpet. "Your eminence, you honor me with this responsibility." Then he jumped to his feet and hurried off to his tasks.

Definitely ambitious. With Syrannus and four guardsmen attending him, Jiroannes walked through camp. As usual, the guardsmen stayed behind at the first circle of jaran guards while jaran men escorted Jiroannes to the flat triangle of ground where Bakhtiian sat invested in all his authority on a carpeted and silk-hung dais. His chief wife and a blinded man sat on pillows to his right. To his left sat Mother Sakhalin, an older man dressed as a rider whom Jiroannes did not recognize, and, surprisingly, Mitya.

Jiroannes was brought forward. He made his bows; he was recognized. As he backed up, he caught Mitya staring at him. The boy flushed and averted his gaze, looking ashamed and uncomfortable. His aunt Sonia came forward from her station to one side and spoke to the boy for a few moments in a low voice. Mitya straightened his shoulders and drew himself up. What was he doing up there? Was it possible that Mitya was one of Bakhtiian's heirs? Was Bakhtiian showing him off, or showing him preference? Jiroannes realized that he had not the slightest idea of who might or might not succeed Bakhtiian if Bakhtiian died, and this irritated him. But at least Bakhtiian looked hale, if a little pale about the lips. If Bakhtiian had indeed been ill, he looked no worse for the experience. Other ambassadors came forward in their turn and were recognized and dismissed to the audience.

The afternoon dragged on as one embassy after the next appeared to entreat Bakhtiian for clemency: Habakar city-elders and Habakar governors and one furtive-looking Habakar prince with two wives and nine children surrendered one by one, begging nothing more than that they and what they offered into Bakhtiian's hands be spared the destruction being visited on Habakar lands by Bakhtiian's ruthless general Yaroslav Sakhalin. They pledged undying loyalty to his person; the Habakar prince offered him his eldest daughter—who looked all of twelve years old—to wife.

The offer prompted a long exchange between Bakhtiian and his chief wife which Jiroannes was too far away to follow. Partway through it, Mitya's head jerked up as if his name had been mentioned, and the boy wrung his hands in his lap and gazed sidelong at the Habakar girl and then away.

It was hot and dusty. The sun burned through the silk of Jiroannes's emerald green blouse and baked his back. Syrannus fanned him, but the tiny breeze gave no relief. Sweat trickled down in rivulets and streams on Habakar faces, on other foreign faces, dampening backs and arms, staining the rich fabric of their clothing. Awnings shielded all of the jaran sitting or standing in attendance, except for the guards.

Of the foreigners, only the four interpreters stood under cover.

The Habakar prince knelt in the dirt with his wives and children huddled behind him and the girl in question standing on display to one side with her gaze cast down. They did not veil their women here, so her face was plain for all to see. Her clothes were breathtakingly rich, and she was laden with jewelry that Jiroannes would have been proud to see his own wife wear. How had her father managed to get his family through the lines with his wealth intact? The girl kept glancing to one side, not at her father, but at the boy who knelt at his father's right hand, the eldest of the brood, who looked to be about Mitya's age.

Mother Sakhalin had joined in the discussion up on the dais, and some agreement was reached.

"To seal our promise," said Bakhtiian, addressing the Habakar prince, "we will agree to take both the girl and the eldest boy."

The prince went white, as well he might: to have one's heir and beloved eldest son wrenched from you ... even Jiroannes, who had no legitimate children yet, knew how hurtful a blow that must be. But what could he do? The man had other sons, that much was evident. The girl maintained her composure; the boy took it bravely enough, rising to stand protectively next to his sister.

"May I beg of you," said the prince in a low voice, "that you treat them well?"

Bakhtiian regarded him with bemusement. "We are honoring you by this alliance. You are the cousin of the Habakar king, are you not, by your inheritance laws? Thus will your children marry into the noble families of the jaran and be exalted for this reason. For this reason as well, you will remain in our heart."

Clearly, it was a promise. The prince's face cleared and he looked thoughtful more than anything, now.

"You may return to your lands, which will be spared," finished Bakhtiian.

The dismissal allowed for no reply. The prince bowed deeply and led his entourage away. One of his wives wept copiously. The other looked slyly pleased. Mitya's Aunt Sonia came forward and herded the two Habakar children away into the jaran camp. Jiroannes felt a sudden and surprising sympathy for the brother and sister, abandoned among the barbarians, hardly knowing whether they might ever see their family or any familiar Habakar faces again. He had glimpsed the ruins of the Habakar cities on the march, and although certainly they did not compare in size or evident scope with Vidiyan cities, still, he could see that these Habakar were civilized people, unlike the jaran.

Another embassy came forward, elders begging clemency for their city, which Sakhalin had invested with some small part of his army before riding on. The afternoon wore on. Jiroannes began to feel faint from heat and sun and thirst. His eyes drooped. Syrannus prodded him awake. After a time, his eyes drooped again. His chin nodded down, and down.

Bells shook him awake. He started up, heart racing. He recognized the sound, the one made by jaran messengers as they raced on their way down the line. A rider appeared at the inner ring of guards. The messenger dismounted, throwing the reins of his blown horse to a guard, and strode forward, bells chiming. Except it wasn't a man.

Bakhtiian stood up out of sheer surprise. "Nadine!" He got right down off the dais to go and greet her.

He embraced her, kissed her on each cheek, and then pushed her back to stare at her. A recent scar disfigured her left cheek. He brushed the line of the scar with his right hand. His eyebrows arched up.

"What is this?"

She had a fulminant look about her. "I am married, Uncle. He told me you were dying, and that it was my duty."

"Is that so? I suppose it was Feodor Grekov. Are you sorry?" He regarded her with a pained expression that might have been amusement or distress.

Her eyes burned. She looked furious and yet well aware that she was the focus of everyone's attention.

Jiroannes enjoyed watching her helpless rage. "That you're not dead?" Her voice rasped with anger. "If I had to sacrifice myself, then I think you might have been polite enough to die and make it worth my while." To Jiroannes's amazement, she flung her arms around her uncle and hugged him tightly.

She let go of him and stalked past him to the dais. She greeted his wife warmly, the blind man warmly, Mitya warmly, and the old crone with distinct reserve. Mother Sakhalin looked smug. Bakhtiian followed her back, not at all offended by her rudeness. Jiroannes was not sure whether to disdain her for her ill-mannered greeting or admire her for having the courage to speak so disrespectfully to her uncle.

"What news from Morava?" Bakhtiian asked of her in a perfectly friendly voice. Then he glanced up, as if recalling that the entire court watched the proceedings eagerly. He gestured. The audience ended.

Soldiers herded the ambassadors away with their usual ruthless efficiency. Jiroannes was glad to retreat to the cool shelter of his awning, to have Jat bathe his feet in lukewarm water and Syrannus recite poetry to him. Lal had done wonders making dinner with the provisions available to him, but then he always did. Just as the boy served him dinner on the three traditional silver trays, Syrannus rose and signaled to the slave to pause. Jiroannes turned.

Mitya had halted at the edge of the Vidiyan encampment, looking uncertain as to what his reception might be if he tried to venture any farther in.

"Go and ask him to share dinner with me," said Jiroannes sharply, afraid the boy would leave.

Syrannus hurried out and returned with Mitya. The boy glanced around the camp and relaxed when he saw no sign of Samae.

Jiroannes stood up. "I am honored by your presence," he said, and realized that he was smiling with pleasure. "I have missed your company." There, it was said. Let the boy scorn him if he chose.

"I'm sorry," said Mitya hesitantly. "My aunt said—" Samae came out from inside the women's tent, saw Mitya, and ducked back inside. The boy went crimson.

"I beg your pardon for whatever insult I may have unwittingly offered you," said Jiroannes hastily.

"Please, sit and eat with me. Syrannus, the other chair."

Syrannus brought the otfier chair. Mitya sat. Lal retreated, only to return quickly with a full set of dishes for two diners and the food cunningly set out for both men. They ate in polite silence.

Lal cleared the dishes away and brought hot tea, spiced to perfection. Mitya sipped cautiously at the aromatic liquid. "Are you married?" he asked suddenly.

"Not yet, but I hope to marry once I return to my country."

"Whom will you marry?"

Jiroannes shrugged. "There are several women I have in mind. They must all be of good birth, of course. The Great King's fourth cousin has a daughter, and with my uncle's influence to favor my suit, I may be able to marry her."

"But she is a Vidiyan woman. Of your own kind."

Jiroannes thought now that he knew why Mitya had come to him, this evening. "Yes. But if an advantageous match with a woman of high birth from another kingdom presented itself, I would certainly accept it."

"Even if it meant you couldn't have the—the fourth cousin's daughter?"

"Why should it prevent me from marrying her as well?"

They stared at each other in mutual incomprehension. Light dawned on Mitya's face. "You mean it's true, what Tess says, that you marry more than one woman? At the same time? Gods!"

"So did the Everlasting God ordain, that each man may marry as many women as he can support.

Thus also may he guarantee that he has heirs to carry on after he dies."

"Gods," echoed Mitya. Then he flushed and stared down at his hands.

"You're young to think of marrying."

Mitya's hands moved restlessly in his lap, twisting and wringing and lacing his fingers together and then pulling them apart. "Ilya wants me to marry the Habakar princess. Not now, of course, but when I'm old enough. In four winters it will be the Year of the Wolf, and I'll be twenty years old and of age to ride in jahar. But then he wants me to become the dyan, the governor, of these lands, Habakar lands, with her as my—my etsana, I suppose."

"Ah," said Jiroannes, seeing that Bakhtiian had more than simple plunder on his mind. "Well, you must know, Mitya, that the Great King of Vidiya has a wife who is the daughter of the Elenti king, so it's common enough for nobles to marry women of other races."

Mitya looked skeptical. "Galina said she won't marry the boy no matter what, even if they all agree to it."

"The boy?"

"The prince. He'll have to marry an etsana, of course, or an etsana's daughter. They mean him to stay with the camp. They're going to send both the sister and the brother out to the plains for a few years and then decide. Do you think I should marry her?"

"I'm flattered that you desire my opinion, Mitya," said Jiroannes, thrilled that the boy had come to him in such a confiding mood.

"But you're not jaran. You must think about these things differently than we do."

"A prince rarely marries to suit himself. Is that not also so with the jaran?"

"My cousin married to suit himself," muttered Mitya.

"Your cousin? Oh, you mean Bakhtiian. But he married the sister of the Prince of Jeds. That was surely a wise match for him to make."

Mitya laughed. "You don't know Ilya at all. That isn't why he married her."

Well, Mitya was still young, and Jiroannes too delighted by his presence here to want to ruin the mood by disabusing the boy of his fantastical notions about Bakhtiian. Of course a king like Bakhtiian married where he found the most benefit for himself and his ambitions. Certainly for this upstart barbarian to marry the sister of the Prince of Jeds was a tactical victory of the highest order.

"Do you want to marry the girl?" Jiroannes asked instead.

Mitya shrugged, "I don't know. I want to please Ilya. I want to do my duty to the jaran. He told me that until Nadine has a child, I'm his heir." He made a face of comical relief. "Gods, I'm happy Dina got married. I don't think I want to inherit, or at least, not everything."

"You don't want to be Bakhtiian in your turn?" Jiroannes was astonished.

"Of course I will do what Ilya asks of me." Lal came by and refilled their cups with steaming hot tea, fresh-brewed and piquant. "But because my mother will become etsana in time, I never thought as a boy to dream about becoming dyan."

"Now you must think again."

"Yes," replied Mitya, seeming as struck by Jiroannes's simple comment as if it were the most profound revelation. He lapsed into a silence which Jiroannes nourished with a companionable silence of his own.

"You have many khaja women in your camp now," said Mitya finally.

"Yes. My guardsmen have—married them."

"Mitya considered this statement. "Do they have wives at home as well, then?"

"Well. Yes. Some of them do. Not all."

"Ah." Mitya lapsed into silence again. Lal brought more tea. It was dark by now. A cool breeze sprang up, rustling through the dagged fringe of the awning. The moon was up and near full, and its light spread a soft glow over the endless sprawl of tents. The boy looked up at Jiroannes and down again as swiftly.

"What does it mean," he asked softly, "when they say Samae is a slave?" He pronounced the Rhuian word awkwardly.

Jiroannes flushed, glad of the covering darkness. "I don't know your language well enough to explain it. Perhaps Bakhtiian's khaja wife can."

"She did. Is what she said true?"

Jiroannes wondered if he had been cursed in a former life. "Perhaps. Probably."

"But that's barbaric," said Mitya. "Only savages would hold to such a custom."

"There are strict laws—" Jiroannes began.

"But if a woman or man of the jaran violates the gods" laws, then they are put to death. That is just."

"Don't you have other laws as well? That a man or woman might break?"

"Yes." Mitya frowned. "It's true that Vera Veselov betrayed the sanctity of her tribe and was cast down from her high position to act as a servant to the Telyegin family, for so long as she may live.

Although now she's riding with the army, and is a good commander, they say. But still—"

"A slave is a servant," said Jiroannes, grasping at this explanation. He so desperately did not want Mitya to leave with a disgust of him. "Many people in my country become slaves because they have violated our laws."

Mitya appeared mollified. "That's not so different." He rose and handed the delicate cup carefully back to Lal. "I must go. Perhaps—I may visit another time?"

Jiroannes leapt to his feet and escorted Mitya out to the edge of the encampment. "Assuredly. I would welcome it." And followed with other effusions, until the boy took his leave and walked out into the night, away into the jaran camp. Jiroannes returned to his chair and sank down into it with a sigh of contentment. Perhaps there was hope for this friendship after all.

"Eminence." Lal touched his head to the carpet and waited for Jiroannes to notice him.

"You may speak."

"Eminence, I beg your pardon for this indecent request, but the girl insisted I bring it to your attention."

"The girl?" He thought for an instant the Habakar captive had importuned Lal. "Did you discover anything more about her?"

Lal was quick. "About the Javani? Nothing, eminence, except that it is a title, not her name. It is Samae who demanded I ask of you if you wish her to go to the young prince tonight."

The young prince. Jiroannes could not for an instant imagine what Samae meant by this puzzling request. Then, of course, he knew exactly what she meant. The damned whore wanted to go to Mitya. In the four years he had owned her, she had never once come to him without being commanded to. Never.

And now she begged for permission—no, for an order—to go to a damned barbarian. He felt a red rage building in him. How dare she make her first request of him now, she who had refused her freedom in order to stay his slave, and make it this? She mocked him. She preferred a half-grown boy to him, who had proven his manhood many times over, with her, with all his concubines, with the quickness of his intellect in the palace school, with his prowess on the hunt and even, once, in battle.

"Tell Samae that the women who run this camp have decreed that she may do what she wishes," he snarled. He got to his feet in one sharp movement and stalked over to the entrance to his tent. "Send the Javani to me."

Lal bowed with his hands crossed over his chest and scurried away. Jiroannes thrust the curtained entrance aside and strode into the seclusion of his tent. There he paced up and down, up and down, along the thick carpets that cushioned the interior. When the Javani came at last, she was still afraid of him, but her fear only whetted his appetite.

CHAPTER FOUR

Depression hung over the Company's camp like a miasmal fog. Each day they traveled with the wagon train farther on through the devastated Habakar lands. Each evening Owen drove them through rehearsals, rearranging parts to cover for Hyacinth's absence, doubling lines, changing bits of stage direction, but there was no spark. Each day took them that much farther from the place where Hyacinth had left them and that much farther from any hope of seeing Hyacinth alive again.

Gwyn flung a tangle of ropes and stakes down onto the ground in disgust. "Who packed these?" he demanded of Diana as she unrolled the Company tent.

She glanced incuriously at the shapeless mass. "Phillippe."

Gwyn shook his head, frowning. "At least he remains a professional with his music."

"Oh, he'd never be that sloppy with music, Gwyn. You know that. There is a point beyond which one can't go, as an artist." She managed to draw a smile from him, which was astonishing, considering the mood everyone had been in since Hyacinth had fled over twenty days ago.

"Anahita is sick again." He crouched and began the laborious task of unraveling the tangled skein.

"She spent all day throwing up over the side of the wagon. Yomi took her to see Dr. Hierakis. Diana."

Hearing an odd note in his voice, she looked up at him. His gaze measured her. "You ought to ask Owen if you can take over the leading roles."

"But—"

"Don't protest that you don't want them."

"Of course I want them! But—"

"But—?"

"I'm too young. I'm not experienced enough."

"You're still young to the craft, it's true, but you're good enough, and you have more than enough room to grow. You have to make the leap. Otherwise you'll never be anything but a supporting player. Is that what you want?"

She dropped her eyes away from his gaze, unwilling to let him see the extent of the sheer driven ambition in them. "No. You know it isn't."

"That's why you must take advantage when the opportunity presents itself."

"But it just seems—unethical, somehow."

"This isn't politics, Diana, it's art."

"Does that mean that simple standards of human decency don't count for us, because we're artists?

That we're beyond ethical considerations because art is a higher form of discourse? I don't think so.

Quite the reverse, I'd say."

He laughed. "That's not what I meant. I meant that in politics there may be times when it's expedient to leave someone in power who's become incompetent, because in a web like that, there are ways to circumvent the damage that person might do. But not on stage. Her work is suffering."

It was true. Anahita's work was suffering. Diana felt it impolite, as a junior member, to agree with Gwyn.

Gwyn added, "And that impacts on all of our work."

"But to be fair, Gwyn, it's not just her. We're all suffering. I never imagined what a catastrophe it would be to lose an actor like this. Not to mention what a catastrophe it must be for Hyacinth, if he's even still alive."

"I can't imagine anyone less suited to wilderness survival than Hyacinth. But he made the choice.

Here, I've got this all in order now."

While they raised the tent, Owen came by. "Diana." He blinked owlishly at her as she struggled to lift the canvas up over the pole. "You'll be taking over the leading roles starting tonight. We'll have our first performance with you in that capacity as soon as the army halts for longer than a single night."

If Diana had not been so well-trained, she would have let the entire edifice, balanced precariously between her and Gwyn, collapse on top of her. "Of course, Owen," she said, her voice muffled by fabric.

She wanted to ask about Anahita, but felt it impolite to do so. It might seem too much like crowing.

"How is Anahita?" Gwyn asked.

"Doctor says she has an ulcer, and some other unspecified complaints. She's agreed to take supporting roles until her health is better."

"She agreed to it?" Gwyn asked.

Owen wore his vague look. "She understands professional necessity. Rehearsal in thirty minutes, then, and I'll need extra time with you afterward, Diana." He left.

"I wish I'd been able to eavesdrop on that conversation," said Gwyn. "I wonder what he threatened her with? Hyacinth's fate?"

"Owen wouldn't threaten anyone—" Diana trailed off, seeing that Gwyn was laughing at her.

"Di, the man is as ruthless as Bakhtiian when it comes to his domain. You're being sentimental."

"Goddess," she swore. "The leading roles." She fell silent. He honored her silence, and they finished setting up the tent without another word.

That evening, at their rehearsal on the flat square of ground in between the company tents—there not being time enough to set up the platform and screens—they walked through King Lear, which necessitated few changes except those Ginny wrote in as they worked. Ginny had already recast the play so that Seshat played Lear as an etsana, rather than Dejhuti playing him as the old king. Ginny had as well conflated the parts of the half brothers Edgar and Edmund with those of Goneril's and Regan's husbands. Diana played both Cordelia and the Fool. For whatever reason, rehearsal went well; Owen was pleased. For the first time since Hyacinth's disappearance, the mood in camp felt optimistic.

Thirty days after Hyacinth's disappearance, which was also twenty days after Bakhtiian's return to the army, they came to a great river that wound through the land. There, like a vision on the other side of the river, Diana saw a city with gleaming white walls and silver towers and goats grazing peaceably outside the walls amid the sprawl of huts and hovels where, presumably, the poorest people lived. The city astonished her, all marble and colored tile, a romantic's dream. Beyond the city, grain ripened in the sun, and farther still, orchards blanketed the gentle slopes of surrounding hills. This was a beautiful countryside, rich, fertile, and handsome. And yet, on this side of the river, the army arranged its camp on fields long since trampled and withered by the summer's heat. She felt a sudden, sharp sympathy for the Habakar people and for their lands. What a horrible thing it was, to destroy such beauty. How had this piece survived? Had the jaran army been unable to cross the river?

But even as she thought it, she saw a troop of red-shirted, armored horsemen riding out from around the city: jaran riders. What if one of them was Anatoly? She had an hour before her call for rehearsal, so she ran to the Veselov camp, hoping to get news from Anna.

The Veselov camp was settling in for what Diana could now recognize was a long stay—at least two days. Girls beat carpets and laid them out to air in the sun. Three boys dug out a huge fire pit in the center of the camp, in front of Anna's great tent. Mira, running around with a pack of children, caught sight of Diana and ran over to greet her with a kiss. Diana hoisted her up and went in search of her mother. She found Anna at the other edge of camp, saying good-bye to her husband. Kirill rode off with a handful of other men, including the gorgeous cousin Vasil, and Arina turned and saw Diana.

"I'm so pleased to see you." Arina kissed her on each cheek and regarded her with pleasure. They exchanged more commonplaces as they walked back into camp.

"Will the camp be staying here for long?" Diana asked.

"Yes. There's forage and supplies to be had here. Yaroslav Sakhalin has returned."

"With his whole army?"

"Oh, no. Evidently they've laid in a siege at the king's royal city, but Sakhalin returned to see if it was true that Bakhtiian did not die. Then he'll return. Kirill went to attend Bakhtiian." She said it proudly.

Diana thought it sweet how proud Arina was of her husband, who had done so well despite his debilitating injury. "He can use his hand again, although it's very weak."

"He can? How did that happen?"

"The gods graced him, I suppose. I think he's suffered enough." Arina paused to survey her domain and to direct some girls in the placement of an awning, two tents, and a bronze stove. "Do you think,"

Arina added in a lower voice, "that I'm selfish to hope that, even if his arm does heal, Kirill won't be able to ride with the army again?"

Which, like all of these men, was probably his greatest desire. "No," said Diana softly, touching Anna's hand, "I don't think so. Is there any news of Anatoly? Did he come back with his uncle?" A surge of hope shook through her.

"I don't know. But Kirill will know, surely, when he returns."

Diana lingered there until it was time for rehearsal, but Kirill did not return. That night, Anatoly did not come to her tent. In the morning Owen appeared in high good humor, having managed a coup of sorts. He had convinced Bakhtiian to let the troupe ride with a jaran escort into the Habakar city and there put on a performance. He chose The Caucasian Chalk Circle in its untranslated, unexpurgated form, since these Habakar people could not understand them anyway and would presumably have no problem accepting a male as judge. Diana already played the leading role, and Owen and Ginny, as understudies, could cover Hyacinth's parts.

They rode out in the wagons about noon. Members of the Veselov jahar had been assigned as their escort. Arina agreed to come along, and the excursion along a winding road past a bend in the river and to the long pontoon bridge laid out over the waters proved marvelous. It was hot, but not too hot. Trees lined the riverside, shading the road. Rushes carpeted the shore. Out on the water, with the huge inflated skins and wooden road rocking beneath them, a breeze sprang up and curled in Diana's hair and cooled her cheeks. The muddy water flowed on, oblivious to their passing. If only Anatoly were here, this day would be perfect, but Arina had not seen Kirill since he went to council with Bakhtiian. Vasil had come back to lead the little expedition, but he had no news. However, Anna had heard from Mother Sakhalin that Anatoly was not with his uncle and that, indeed, Yaroslav Sakhalin had already ridden out at dawn, to go back to his army.

On the other side of the river, Diana felt like she had come to some fairy country. Farmers stared at them from fields turning gold in the stark, clean light of the summer sun. The people looked cautious and frightened, but their clothes were sturdy and their faces hale. Grain trembled in the wind, flowing in waves across lush acreage, bordered by dry ditches out of which green shoots and scarlet lilies poked ragged heads. The city loomed before them. With their escort around them, the company passed through the open gates without the least trouble and trundled into a city for the first time in what seemed years.

Diana stared, enchanted by the scene. Gardens flowered between orderly groups of stone and mudbrick houses. Trees overhung the streets. A marble fountain graced a courtyard, glimpsed through a latticework doorway. A white citadel rose in the center of the city; off to one side soared the delicate minarets of what she presumed was either a palace or a temple. Down side streets she saw Habakar natives dressed in bright clothing, hurrying about their business. This main thoroughfare along which they rode sat deserted, as if the populace had been warned to stay out of their way. Pale brick paved the avenue, so smooth and cunningly fitted together that the wagons did not jolt at all as they made their way in to the central marketplace. Would it, too, be deserted?

But the market colonnade bustled with activity, even when they reached it with their escort of dread jaran riders. Streamers of variegated silk hung from the sexpartite vaults that made up the colonnade, which were otherwise open to the air on all sides. Diana could see that it was gloomy underneath the vaulted colonnades, but all around on the outskirts old women in embroidered black shawls sold fruit and vegetables from the backs of painted carts and men with frogged, knee-length brocaded jackets and dyed leather shoes hawked bolts of silk and utensils of bronze and iron. The intense bustle of the marketplace slowed to a halt as Habakar merchants and buyers froze and stared. Many melted away.

Others, more brazen or perhaps simply resigned, returned to their business. Veselov fanned his riders out, and they sat with their horses on a tight rein and watched this activity with perplexed expressions.

Owen herded the actors out of the wagons and, in record time, they set up the platform and placed the screens for their makeshift stage.

They drew an odd sort of audience while they set up. People stared but did not linger, as if they did not want to draw attention to themselves. Children edged close to watch and were dragged away by their elders.

Owen strode up to Diana as she adjusted a screen to Joseph's precise specifications: a 38-degree angle exactly, no more, no less. "Diana. Who is that?" He gestured. She turned.

He was looking straight at Vasil Veselov, who sat astride his horse not fifty paces from them, watching the stage assembly with interest. With that absolute instinct for an audience that he possessed, Vasil shifted his gaze to look toward Owen and Diana.

"That's Vasil Veselov. He's Anna Veselov's cousin, and he's also dyan—warleader—of their tribe."

"Perfect." Owen examined Veselov. "Look at the angle of the shoulders, and the tilt of the chin. He's canted just off center, too, in his seat on the horse, which draws attention without seeming to and without imperiling his stability in the saddle. And that face. Goddess, if I'd had that face, I would have stayed an actor."

"A good thing you didn't have it, then," retorted Diana, stung by his praise. It wasn't as if Veselov was acting; he was just being himself. She had never heard Owen praise anyone so extravagantly, not even Gwyn. "Everyone says your genius is for directing."

"So it is," agreed Owen without a trace of arrogance. "He's acting without knowing he's doing it, and he's doing it right, by and large. I've been watching him for the whole ride over here. He's taught himself the art of listening and the art of connecting. Do you know how many competent actors I've worked with who took years to get where he is now?"

Diana wondered ungraciously if Owen counted her among their number, but then Yomi came over to chase her back to the tent set up as a dressing room behind the platform.

The performance was a disaster and yet absolutely wonderful. The setting itself could not be improved upon. Coming onstage for her first entrance, Diana felt transported to some ancient scene.

They could have been any group of itinerant actors out making their way along the Silk Road, the famous Earth trade route that ran across the mountains and deserts and steppes of Asia, stopping in this medieval oriental city made glorious by its marble colonnades and gentle silk banners. Even the play, in its own way, seemed ironically appropriate: During a revolt in feudal Georgia, Grusha, a servant girl, flees to the mountains with the Governor's small son, who has been abandoned in the panic by his mother; in the second act, a drunken village clerk named Azdak is made a judge by the rebel soldiers and tries the case to determine which of the women is the child's true mother.

From the beginning, they attracted a hard-core audience off to the left who stayed in place for the entire play. But other than that group, and the jaran riders who patrolled the square with half an eye on the Habakar natives and half on the play, the audience shifted and grew and shrank according to some tidal schedule that Diana could not interpret. It was frustrating, and yet, it was in part for this experiment that she had come, to see what would play, what could communicate, across such a gulf of space and culture, to touch those who were open to being touched. And, inspired by the setting, by the city, by the bright colored silks or the clear blue of the afternoon sky, the acting fell into place and they worked off each other in that seamless fiction that can never be achieved except by grace, fortune, and sheer, hard repetitious work brought by a fortuitous combination of events to its fruition in transcendent art.

It worked. Diana knew it worked. They all knew it had worked. At the end, sweating and exhausted and for once sated, she took Gwyn's hand—he had played the soldier and lover Simon—and, with the lifelike doll that represented the child tucked in the crook of her other arm, she, and he, and the others, took a single bow, which was all that they needed to take, or that the audience understood. Straightening, she flashed a grin at Gwyn and he smiled back, wiping sweat from his forehead. She turned to look toward Arina, who had watched it all from a wagon over to one side, and discovered that Vasil had dismounted to stand next to his cousin and was regarding Diana, and the stage, with uncomfortably intent interest.

"You've made a conquest, Di," said Gwyn in an undertone as he turned to go back to the dressing room and strip his makeup off.

"I hope not. Wait for me." Veselov bothered her. One of the things she so liked about Gwyn was that when he was offstage, he was off; he did not drag the one world into the other. She knew she emoted offstage, at times, but it wasn't a habit she wanted to foster in herself, and she usually only did it when the person she was with seemed to expect it of her. A professional knew how to separate work and life.

But Veselov was always on, always aware, always projecting. The Goddess knew, it ought to be tiring, going on like that all day and presumably all night. She went with Gwyn back to the awning and wiped her face clean. They took down the stage. By the time they got the wagons loaded, the afternoon had mostly passed, and the marketplace lay quiet and almost empty. They started back.

"I liked that story," said Arina. "It was true, what the judge did, knowing which woman was the true mother. But I can tell it's a khaja story."

"How?"

"Well, it isn't a man's part to make such a judgment. That is women's business."

"But we changed it," protested Diana, "when we did it at the camp. We made Azdak into an etsana."

"I didn't see that." Arina smiled, looking ahead, and lifted a hand to greet a rider. "Here is Vasil."

Vasil reined his horse in beside them, on Diana's side of the wagon. "Why is it I've seen none of these songs of yours before?" he asked.

"I don't know. We've—sung—them many times, and we—practice—every night, in our encampment." She could think of no words for "perform" and "rehearse" in khush.

Veselov did not look at her directly, and yet Diana felt his attention on her as much as if he had been staring soulfully into her eyes like a besotted lover. She shifted on the hard wooden seat. He sat a horse well, and his hands were light and casual and yet masterful on the reins. For an instant, she wondered what he would be like in bed. His lips twitched up into a bare, confiding smile, as if he had read her thoughts and promised as much as she could wish for, and more.

"I would like to see more," he said, but did he mean more plays or more of her? "You become the woman in the song, yet you remain yourself."

"Yes," said Diana, surprised, because Anatoly had yet to grasp the concept of acting.

A rider called to Vasil from farther down the line, and Veselov excused himself and rode away.

Arina coughed into one hand. "Although he is my cousin," she said, "and I love him dearly, I would recommend to you, Diana, that you be wary of him."

"I'm married, after all!"

"What has that to do with anything?"

Diana changed the subject, and they discussed other things until they got back to camp at dusk. Where Kirill waited. He came up to them immediately, Lavrenti nestled on his good arm, his other arm hanging free for once. Diana could see the fingers on his withered hand twitching and curling, but without much force or coordination.

"I beg your pardon," said Diana to Kirill as Arina climbed down, "I must return to our camp and I just wanted to know ... is there any word of my husband?"

"He wasn't with his uncle," Kirill assured her.

"Oh, then he's at the besieged city?" Karkand, it was called, the seat of the Habakar kings.

Kirill shook his head. "No. Bakhtiian sent him to capture the Habakar king, who fled on beyond his city."

"I don't understand. Anatoly went after him?"

"Yes, with a picked troop of five thousand riders."

"But where did the king flee to?"

Kirill shrugged. He glanced at his wife, as if for help. "To the lands beyond, I suppose."

"Out ahead of his uncle's army?" Diana demanded. "All by himself?"

"Well," replied Kirill apologetically, "he did promise Bakhtiian to bring back the king's crown, coat, and head, for the offense the king gave to Bakhtiian's personal envoys."

"Thank you." Diana stuttered over the words and started the oxen up as quickly as she could, to get away. She felt sick. The wagon jolted over the uneven ground toward the Company's encampment, and all she wanted to do was to throw up. The day's triumph turned to ashes in her mouth. Anatoly had ridden out into hostile enemy territory in pursuit of a king. Was he mad? Was he suicidal? Had he had the slightest thought for her before driving forward into unknown lands without his uncle and his uncle's army in order to avenge Bakhtiian's honor? Already she pictured Hyacinth lying twisted and dead on the ground, slain by arrows or knives, lying alone, left to rot. Now a second image rose unbidden to meld with Hyacinth's, that of Anatoly tumbled from his horse, lying half-dead with a spear through his left breast, swarmed by rank upon rank of enemy soldiers rabid for jaran blood.

Would she ever see him again? She would have cried, but she had already wept enough tears to bring life to the trampled, parched fields over which she now drove her wagon. She had a horrible, wrenching premonition that she had done crying for him. Like a little shield, the first layer of bricks had gone up, sheltering her. She couldn't go on, hurting and hurting, never knowing, always wondering: would he come back? when? would he still love her? and when would he leave her again?

The Company encampment loomed before her, sturdy, plain, with its practical square tents and the little canvas cubicle that housed the necessary off to one side. Entrance flaps lay askew, revealing the friendly beacons of lights burning inside the tents. A single fire smoldered into ashes between the tents, but the actors had left it and gone inside to spend their time with the comforts of the technological luxuries they had smuggled along on this barbarian year.

CHAPTER FIVE

After Yaroslav Sakhalin left at dawn, to return to his siege of the royal city of Karkand, the council dragged on for the rest of the day. In the morning, they all sat out under the open sky. By noon, with the sun overhead, they moved onto carpets rolled out under a vast awning. Bakhtiian sat on a pillow at one end, and the council fanned out in a rough semicircle in front of him.

Aleksi swallowed a yawn. The talk had been going on since yesterday and, as usual, the discussion had reached that point where the councellors were talking at each other, not to Bakhtiian. Ilya often ran his councils this way: The councillors talked for so long over the greatest and least choice at issue that in the end they reached a consensus without him having to demand obedience.

The longest council Aleksi recalled was the one soon after the assembly on the khayan-sarmiia, which had lasted six days and included three days of vicious argument between Yaroslav Sakhalin and Mikhail Suvorin and their respective supporters. In the end, Bakhtiian's patience had worn them all down. Now that he had what he wanted—the loyalty of the jaran—he no longer had to be so impulsive. Before that long council had begun, Tess had told Aleksi in confidence what Ilya's hopes were for the council; and so it had fallen out—with a few changes wrought by good advice or prudent compromise—exactly as he wished, and it was the councillors themselves who agreed upon the issue, among themselves and not as a mere passive instrument to Bakhtiian's voice.

So Bakhtiian sat now, listening more than he spoke.

Tess sat at Bakhtiian's right hand, and Aleksi sat to Tess's right and back a bit, close to Josef Raevsky, whose lips moved soundlessly as he memorized the proceedings. The blind man canted his head from one side to the other, to catch a sentence here, a tone there, as the women and men seated in attendance on Bakhtiian spoke in their turn.

Now and again during the exhausting session, Tess rose and walked away—sometimes to relieve herself, sometimes just to stretch her legs, once to sleep for several hours—and returned to sink back down beside her husband. No one minded; she was half gone in pregnancy. The children of the Orzhekov tribe brought drink and food at intervals. Sonia sat in on the council, as her mother's representative.

Aleksi leaned forward and found an angle at which he could peer between Tess and Ilya and catch a good glimpse of the two parchment maps spread out flat in front of Nadine, who sat on her uncle's left.

Mitya sat next to her, stifling a yawn with a hand. The poor boy had fallen asleep three times now, and Aleksi supposed he would probably be allowed to nap this time. Since the shock of Ilya's illness had forced everyone to realize that it was remotely possible that Bakhtiian might actually someday die, poor Mitya had been displayed prominently at every gathering and forced into a passive role, listening and learning about the duties and burdens of adulthood. Not that he hadn't been involved in such things before, but now it seemed he was at Ilya's side at every council, every assembly, and riding out with him to inspect jahars each morning. Often Galina went with them, since she would most likely become etsana of the Orzhekov tribe in time. Today Sonia had left Galina in charge of making sure that drink and food flowed freely.

"Twenty days ride to the south," Nadine was saying, shifting the maps she had so laboriously drawn over the last fifteen days, "according to the merchants and caravan masters Tess and I interviewed, there lies a great trading city called Salkh. From there the road leads to two more great cities, Targana and Khoyan, Targana about fifty days ride southeast and Khoyan about sixty days ride southwest. The caravan masters say that if you go along past Targana in the summer, there is a high narrow pass over the Heaven Mountains beyond which lies Vidiya, although there is another safer route to Vidiya lying much farther to the east. I imagine, Uncle, that Khoyan lies along the road that would eventually lead all the way down through southern lands to Jeds and the cities of the Rhuian peninsula. But I don't know."

Bakhtiian's tent lay pitched on a grassy knoll overlooking the river and the gleaming city beyond, called Hamrat by the Habakar and sarrod-nikaiia, Her Voice Is Merciful, by the jaran. Sakhalin had spared the city because it was here that he and his army had been encamped when the first messenger had ridden in with the news that Bakhtiian had woken from his sorcery-induced trance.

"Karkand lies about fifteen days ride to the west, and there is a city ten days ride to the northwest called Belgana which Sakhalin took before he rode on to Karkand. North beyond Belgana on the edge of a great forest stands another city, Niryan, which has already surrendered to us. West of Karkand lie two more cities, neither as great as Karkand, and a range of mountains, a forest, a great lake, and a river, and on that river a city called Margana by the Habakar merchants but Parkilnous by the people who live there."

Aleksi admired Nadine's maps. She admired them as well; she had worked diligently enough on them since her unexpected arrival about fifteen days ago. She said that one of the Prince of Jeds's men had taught her a great deal about maps and mapmaking. David ben Unbutu, that was it; the one who had been so hasty with Tess the day the prince and his entourage arrived at the jaran camp in the spring.

Aleksi suspected that Nadine had taken him as a lover, but, of course, she never said as much.

Bakhtiian leaned forward and touched the map nearest him reverently. "And beyond this city called both Margana and Parkilnous?"

"They don't know. That's as far as they trade. At Parkilnous, other merchants take the goods and travel on with them, and trade goods from the south in return."

"So." Bakhtiian removed his hand from the map.

The discussion erupted again. Send the entire army to Karkand. No, that's stupid; the broader the net, the more game could be drawn in. Send ten thousand men to each city, then. That's doubly idiotic; if you only knew a tenth again as much as Yarosiav Sakhalin about strategy; many small forces are weak against a single large army, and it isn't impossible that the Habakar king might be drawing together an army for a final strike. The Habakar king is running like any damned coward into the west, with Anatoly Sakhalin at his heels—no longer a threat. How can the honored dyan possibly know that? Why, because only a beaten coward would abandon his own tent and family, of course. How else explain that he had deserted his own royal city? All this talk of fighting is all very well, but what about the camp? What are the water sources between here and the southern cities? How much forage? How bad are the winters here, and farther south? When do the caravans stop running? Can a large detachment winter off forage from the countryside, in the south? Will there be food enough for the wagon train? And so on.

Nadine had made many cunning little marks on her maps, each indicating information about water sources and forage and towns—insofar as the caravan masters and merchants knew or were willing to part with such information, insofar as any of it could be trusted. Of course, it was all hearsay. Still, Aleksi did not doubt that in the short time Nadine had been back with them, she and Tess between them had tripled jaran intelligence of the lay of the land. Aleksi wondered about Tess's sources of information, too, because now and again, during the interminable translation sessions between Tess and the interpreters and the Habakar merchants, Tess would make a sudden correction to something Nadine mapped in. Had Tess had access to maps in Jeds that were more accurate than the merchants"

recollections? But why would they have such maps in Jeds? Jedan merchants never came here, as far as Aleksi knew.

Or perhaps, perhaps if that had not been Bakhtiian's actual spirit that Aleksi had seen hovering in the air, the night Bakhtiian had been witched away to the gods" lands—or to the heavens from which Dr.

Hierakis claimed she and Tess had come—if it really had been an image of his spirit, of his body, then perhaps Tess knew how to make an image of the land that was equally accurate. Everyone knew that the land remained constant, that seen once, and remembered, you could ride that way again twelve years later and find your way. That was how the jaran navigated the endless plains. That, and by the stars and the winds. Along the Golden Road that ran east to the riches of Empire of Yarial there was said to be a country where the land did shift, where no traveler might walk without becoming lost, where mountains moved at night and rivers changed their course between the seasons. But Aleksi knew that such a place could only exist because every khaja in it, child, woman, and man, was a sorcerer born and bred, or else because the gods had put a curse on it.

The afternoon wore on. Fifty disagreements dwindled to ten, and ten to two. "But if we are agreed,"

said Venedikt Grekov, dyan of the Grekov tribe, "that Bakhtiian must direct the siege of Karkand personally, because of the insult given him by the king, then wouldn't it be wisest to send Sakhalin south to Saikh? If that city is so valuable?"

Heads nodded all around. Fifteen days ago, Venedikt Grekov would never had been so bold as to speak with this much authority this late in the council. Now, however, his nephew was going to be the father of Bakhtiian's heirs. The Grekov tribe, important as one of the Ten Elder Tribes, had just taken a sudden and impressive leap in status—though with Mother Sakhalin's blessing, of course. Nadine had a frown on her face. She did not look up at the speaker, which was impolite. Everyone knew she wasn't happy about the marriage.

"Surely," added Kirill Zvertkov, "we should secure the two cities west of Karkand, so no Habakar army can march from their protection on Karkand."

"Will it take so long for Karkand to surrender to us?" asked another dyan.

Mother Sakhalin cleared her throat. All fell silent. "My nephew assures me," she said, "that the stone tents of Karkand are built in such a fashion that simple force, even using the archers, cannot overcome the walls."

"Had we been forced to storm the walls of Qurat," said Kirill, "we would have suffered severe losses.

Sakhalin said that Karkand is better placed."

"Then, as Zvertkov says," replied Grekov, "we had better ride a ring around Karkand and cut it off from the rest of the country. Then the khaja can starve or surrender."

Everyone nodded.

"If we take prisoners," said Vershinin, "then when we do attack, we can drive them before us as we did at Tashmar—you weren't there, Bakhtiian—up to the walls as the first wave."

"There are other ways," said Nadine suddenly, "to break a siege. The Prince of Jeds has an engineer with him who knows many tricks. I expect the prince's woman soldier Ursula el Kawakami does as well."

"What kind of tricks?" asked Bakhtiian.

"Well, if we can make the walls collapse, then they can't protect the khaja army, can they?"

"I will think on this," said Ilya. "Meanwhile," he glanced up to survey the council, "as you say, Sakhalin ought to ride south to Salkh, once I arrive at Karkand, and Grekov, Vershinin, you will double your jahars in numbers and ride on west, to the cities beyond Karkand. Nadine." He tapped a finger on her maps, but northward, now, at the edge where the Farisa city lay, the one the Habakar general had himself burned, at the northeastern boundary of Habakar lands where they bordered the plains. "You will return to Morava, to escort the Prince of Jeds back to me."

"Uncle!" Ah, but she looked angry.

"That would be best," said Mother Sakhalin smoothly, "since her husband is there." Everyone knew what she meant: that it was long past time for Nadine to start having babies.

Nadine rarely sat still. She did so now, but it was a stillness brought on by fury, not by peace. "Uncle, what if the prince has already left Morava?"

"You rode the same route, there and back, both you and Feodor Grekov. You will go." He set his hands, palms down and open, on his knees, and surveyed the council. "So will it be."

Rather than reply, Nadine made a great business of rolling up her maps. She was angry, but what could she do? Bakhtiian had spoken. She rose, excused herself, and left. Bakhtiian rose to follow her.

The council, dismissed, broke up into a dozen disparate groups to gossip and stretch their legs. Kirill came by to speak for a few moments in a low voice to Tess; then he strode away into the lowering twilight.

Tess leaned back. "Aleksi, Cara wanted to see you."

"To see me?"

"About—don't you remember?" She dropped her voice to a whisper. "As you watched her do with me.

She wants to look into your body with her machines. To—to map it."

Aleksi remembered. He wasn't sure whether to feel honored or nervous, but Tess wished him to do this, so he would. "I'll go," he said, not one to hesitate once he had made a decision. He kissed her on the cheek, bade farewell to Josef Raevsky, and went on his way. Passing between his tent and Tess's on his way to the hospital encampment, he heard Bakhtiian and Nadine arguing in Rhuian just out of sight behind Tess's great tent. He paused to listen.

"What right has she to interfere?" Nadine demanded, sounding quite intemperate. "I know she convinced Feodor to mark me. He would never have done it otherwise. He would never have had the nerve."

"Yes, and faced with the prospect of being married to you in this temper, Dina, can you blame him? In any case, you know very well what right she has to interfere. She is Mother of all the tribes."

"Yes, but we've been to Jeds. We're not bound by useless jaran customs. You and I should know better

—"

"Listen to me, young woman. I know better, and I know that for all that I learned in Jeds, for all the knowledge that lies in these khaja universities, we jaran are stronger because of what we are and because of how we live. The khaja can't stand against us. They will never be able to. So the gods have gifted us.

Would you like to have married in Jeds, instead?"

A fulminating silence. "You know very well how they treat women in khaja lands."

"Yes, I do."

"I don't want to marry at all. I want to ride."

"Then ride. You are already married, Dina. The nine days have passed."

"I wasn't in seclusion."

"That's true. If you wish to go through the ceremony—"

"I don't!"

"Then accept what you must. And you must have children. You know it as well as I do." There was another silence, but this one had more of a despairing edge to it. "Dina, ! have already been advised to remove you from command of your jahar."

"Who—!"

"None of your business. Listen to me, damn you. You're worse than I was at your age." That brought a reluctant chuckle from her. "I won't do it. You're a good commander, and even if you weren't my niece, you would deserve such a command. You will remain a dyan. But there will be times when you can't ride."

"When I'm pregnant."

"Yes. Don't you see, Dina? The gods never give out unmixed blessings. They gifted women with the knowledge that is also a mystery, that of bringing children into the world, but knowledge is also a burden."

"A heavy one, in this case."

"If you only had a sister to bear children while you rode, then that would be well. But you have none."

"I want to explore, like the prince's man, Marco Burckhardt, does." Said stubbornly.

Bakhtiian sighed. "You have no choice, my niece. You will have children. I order you to. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"During such time as you can't leave camp, you will work with Tess. Her work is every bit as important as Yaroslav Sakhalin's." His voice dropped into a coaxing tone. "Those maps you made together are very fine."

"Thank you." Was there a slightly warmer edge to her voice? Was she melting. "Praise from Bakhtiian is as a blessing from the gods themselves—"

"Stop that! Don't mock me!"

"Uncle.... I didn't mean.... I only meant...." She faltered. Aleksi was amazed to hear her sound chastened.

"Never show such disrespect for the gods. You should know better, you who only by the gods" grace are alive today, when everyone else in our family died."

"My father didn't die. You didn't die."

"Go," said Bakhtiian.

Aleksi heard Nadine take in a breath to say something. Instead, she said nothing, and a moment later he saw her emerge from behind the tent and stride away out into camp, which he thought showed great wisdom on her part.

"Aleksi," said Bakhtiian, sounding no less curt. Aleksi started, and then walked around the corner to face Bakhtiian. Ilya turned from looking out after his niece to glare at Aleksi, and Aleksi wondered abruptly how many times he had been saved from a lecture—or worse—from Bakhtiian because of Tess's implicit protection. "I don't like it," Ilya said, and Aleksi knew that he meant Aleksi's habit of listening in. "Do it to others if you will. Don't do -it to me."

"I beg your pardon," said Aleksi. "An incurable habit from my youth. It saved my life more than once."

"No doubt," replied Bakhtiian. Aleksi could not tell whether he meant the comment to express sympathy or censure. "Nevertheless, not to me."

"I understand and obey, Bakhtiian." He bowed, as they did in Jeds; Tess had taught him how to do it.

"Go," said Bakhtiian, but the word wasn't as terse as it had been when he had ordered Nadine to leave.

He might even have been amused.

Aleksi escaped and, whistling under his breath, he considered the world while he made his way to the doctor's tent. He decided that the world was a strange place, stranger than any one person ever might suspect, knowing only what she knew from the narrow path she rode through it. Aleksi felt sometimes that he himself rode more than one path, that there were two, or three or four of him, each scouting a different path, each in constant communication, as though belled messengers raced between the routes carrying intelligence from one to the next. And once you saw the world from three, or five, different roads, the view was never the same. The map changed and altered, and its details became more accurate.

The landmarks receded or grew, depending on the angle from which you observed them, and at once, there might be an escarpment from which the astonished traveler would rendezvous with her selves and could suddenly comprehend the land as it truly was.

"Ah, Aleksi." Dr. Hierakis emerged from her tent, wiping her hands on a rag. "Come in. Come in." He followed her back inside. She had sewn tiny bells all along the entrance flap, and they tinkled as the flap fell down behind them. Aleksi understood the bells, now; just as the messengers wore bells to alert the next garrison or tribe to their coming, the doctor positioned bells around her tent so that no person might enter unannounced and surprise her at her machines. A lantern sat placed in the center of a table, but Aleksi knew this trick. Tentatively, he put out a hand toward it, touched it, and his finger passed right through it. It was only an image of a lantern, not a lantern at all, although it looked so true that he would never have known if Tess had not told him.

"Sit down." The doctor indicated first a chair and then a pillow, so that he might choose whatever was most comfortable. "Will you have some tea?"

Aleksi didn't like tea, but he was far too polite to refuse any drink offered him in a woman's tent. He sank down onto the pillow and received the hot tea from Dr. Hierakis. He sipped at the spicy drink cautiously and regarded the doctor from under lowered lids. She reached under the table with one hand and did something there with her fingers. The lantern grew a little brighter; otherwise he saw no change.

"Recording," she said into the air. Then to him: "Do you have a second name, Aleksi?"

"Soerensen," he said promptly.

"I meant, a jaran name, or a tribal name."

"Not one I remember."

"How old are you?" She stared at him with that gaze he recognized as impartial, measuring him against some pattern only she knew, not for any personal reason.

"I don't know."

"I mean, in which year were you born? Eagle? Rat? Lion? Horse, perhaps?"

"I don't know."

"But everyone knows that, here."

"I beg your pardon. I don't know. My tribe was massacred by khaja raiders when I was very young."

"Tess mentioned that. How did you escape?"

Aleksi shut his eyes and struggled to recall anything from that time. He shrugged. "All I remember is the dew on the grass, and lying half sunk in water in a little hollow of swamp. I lay there so still for so long that a frog crawled right up onto my right hand. It was a blessing, you see. The gods took pity on me, because the khaja had taken my family, so they sent the frog to gift me with speed for fighting."

"Why a frog?"

"Haven't you ever seen how fast a frog jumps? He sits perfectly still, and then he's gone."

She chuckled. "Yes, I suppose that's a fair analogy. But Aleksi, were they all killed?"

"Yes," he repeated patiently, "all but myself and—" Here he faltered. Always he faltered. "—my sister Anastasia." Her name came out hoarsely.

"No, I meant, is it possible that it was a slave raid? Or was everyone killed?"

Her question, like a blessing, allowed him to recover. His memories of the rest of his tribe were so dim that they had long since ceased to trouble him. "What is a slave raid? Oh, that they would take the people away to sell in other lands, to serve a khaja master. I don't know. I don't remember seeing any bodies except that of my father."

"Oh, Goddess. I'm sorry, Aleksi."

Aleksi found her sympathy interesting. He never told jaran as much as this; any respectable jaran listener would have been appalled that a child could lose his entire tribe and still go on living. The gods had cursed people for less. "It was a long time ago," he said, to reassure her.

"Then what happened?"

This was harder. He managed it by breaking each word off from the next. "Then Anastasia took us away from there. She took care of me for as long as she could. Three or four years, I think."

"What happened to her?"

Aleksi set the cup down and bowed his head. This one memory, he could not bear to look upon, but it flooded over him nevertheless. Anastasia had grown steadily weaker over that third—or was it fourth?—

winter and then, with spring, she became feverish and unable to eat. The gods had spoken strange words through her mouth, and she had seen visions of creatures terrible to behold and creatures as sweet as flowers, and she had wept for fear of leaving him when he was still too young to take care of himself.

Not that she had been so much older than he was, but her first course of woman's blood had come on her mat past autumn, so she was no longer a girl, although of course she had never received any of the rites investing her with her womanhood.

The doctor waited patiently. Aleksi's throat was thick with emotion, too choked to speak. Hands shaking, he lifted the cup to his lips and sipped at the tea. The gesture soothed him enough that he could force out a sentence. "The gods took her on a spirit journey, but she never came back."

"Ah," said the doctor. She poured more hot tea into his cup, and by that gesture Aleksi knew he had her friendship. "You love Tess very much, don't you?"

He glanced up at her, astonished. She smiled warmly at him; he did not need to reply, because she already knew the answer and the reason for it. With her, he was safe. How strange to know that. How strange to be safe at all. He felt dizzy.

"Goddess," she said, "you must have been—what?— eight or ten years old? Well, what did you do then?"

"I wandered. I got by. Eventually I came to the Mirsky tribe late one summer. Old Vyacheslav Mirsky's wife was very ill, but they had no children or grandchildren to help them. It was a terrible disgrace, how the tribe treated him. Everyone knew what a great rider he was, but they thought Stalia Mirksy ought to know that her time was through and simply remain behind on the grass so that she wouldn't slow the tribe down. Stalia kept telling Vyacheslav she ought to, but she was all he had, and he wouldn't let her do it. So I saw—well—I saw that if a small orphan boy helped bring in fuel and water and beat carpets and built fires and gathered food and went to get their share of the meat at slaughtering time, they might let that boy sleep on the ground next to their tent without driving him away."

"And did they?"

But while the memory of Anastasia always filled him with a horrible dread, a painful, dizzying fear that his heart had been torn out and dropped into a black abyss from which he could never retrieve it, the memory of Vyacheslav and Stalia always brought tears to his eyes. "No, they took me into their tent and treated me as their own grandchild. Stalia got better. They said I was their luck. Eight years I lived with them. Vyacheslav trained me in the saber. You've heard of him, of course." By her expression, he saw that she hadn't heard of Vyacheslav Mirsky. "You haven't! Well, everyone knows he had the finest hand for the saber in all the tribes, before he grew too old to ride in jahar. The Mirskys still brag about him, though they treated him badly once they had no more use for him."

"And then?"

"Then one winter they both died of lung fever. They were ancient by then. Stalia told me they both would have died far sooner if it wasn't for me. Perhaps it's true. But as soon as they died the Mirskys drove me out."

"Isn't there something about horse-stealing in here?"

Aleksi considered his cup. It was metal, but the heat of the tea did not burn his hands where he cupped the round surface between his palms. An etching of fronds edged the rim and the base. Steam rose from the tea, caressing his face. But he had already trusted her with so much, and Tess, with everything.

"Stalia and Vyacheslav had given me things: his saber, a beautiful blanket she had woven, the tent that belonged to her only daughter, who had long since died, their komis cups and flask, some other things. I overheard the etsana—their own cousin's daughter!— speaking to her sons and daughters, saying that if they didn't throw me out of camp immediately I'd try to steal everything in the tent and run off with it. So that night I took what I could carry, and stole a horse, and rode away. Oh," here he glanced up at her, "I knew it was wrong. The penalty for stealing a horse is death, of course. But I couldn't bear to lose every little thing they'd given me, because everyone else in the Mirsky tribe was so petty and small-minded."

"Where did you ride to, then?"

"There was one jahar that would take men who didn't belong anywhere else. The arenabekh."

"The arenabekh. They were outlaws, weren't they?"

"Men who had left their tribes for one reason or another—for some crime, because they loved men more than women, because they no longer wanted to live with the tribes."

"Did you like it there?"

"Not at all. How can any person love a tribe where there are no children?"

"Wouldn't someone like that boy who was exiled— with the actor—wouldn't he seek out the arenabekh?"

"He would, if he could find them. Keregin, their last dyan, led the arenabekh into a hopeless battle in order to save Bakhtiian's life. But Tess would know about that. She was there."

"Was she, now? I haven't heard this story yet."

"Well, but with the arenabekh gone, Yevgeni Usova has nowhere to go, if he's even still alive."

"So there you were with the arenabekh."

"I stayed with them for almost two years, because there was nowhere else to go. Keregin was hard but fair, and he never treated me any differently from the others because I was an orphan—or a horse stealer. Then I heard about these training schools, where young men might go to train for jahar, and I thought I'd go and see if Kerchaniia Bakhalo, the man who ran one, would accept orphans. He did.

When he discovered that Vyacheslav

Mirsky himself had trained me—well—he never said as much, but I knew I was his favorite pupil.

But then, I was a better fighter than the rest. It was the frog, you know. And after that, Bakhalo brought us to the great camp that was growing up around Bakhtiian."

"Where you met Tess."

At the mention of Tess's name, he could not help but smile. "Yes. She trained with us. Although she was Bakhtiian's wife, she never treated those of us who were orphans any different from the rest. Of course, she is khaja, which accounts for it."

"How did she come to adopt you as her brother?"

"Every woman needs a brother, and hers had died— that was Yuri Orzhekov, Sonia's younger brother.

She and I always got along well, and we liked each other right away. We felt—" He thought about it, two outsiders working and training together, both with quick minds and ready laughter, detached and yet involved in the jaran camp. "—linked, somehow. But then the Mirskys rode into camp. They were well within their rights to kill me, of course. In fact, they were in the process of doing just that—"

"How, in the Lady's Name, were they doing that?"

"Well, there were five of them, and they caught me in the dark coming out of a woman's tent, and then they beat me with sticks. But Tess happened to walk by and she stopped them."

"You're casual about it."

Aleksi laughed, recalling what Bakhtiian had said to his niece. "The gods never give out unmixed blessings. So who am I to complain about bruises and a broken arm and collarbone when it brought me Tess as a sister?"

One of the things Aleksi liked about Dr. Hierakis was that she could laugh compassionately. "Who, indeed?"

"You see, they demanded to know what right she had to stop them meting out the justice I did, after all, deserve, for stealing one of their horses, and she said, "the right of a sister." And so she adopted me."

"Did she consult Bakhtiian?"

"Why would she consult Bakhtiian? She brought me back to her tent and nursed me back to health and I became her brother and have been ever since, and always will be. Bakhtiian did take me into his jahar, then, but he might well have done so anyway—although, if Tess hadn't adopted me the Mirskys would have killed me sooner or later, so I suppose I'll never know if Bakhtiian took me into his jahar to give me his protection or because he admired my fighting."

"Perhaps both."

"Perhaps."

"Well, you've led a harrowing life, Aleksi."

He sipped at his tea. "I'm content." And he was.

"End recording," said the doctor to the air. "Will you come with me?" she asked. She passed through into the inner chamber. Respectfully, he followed after her.

In this miraculous den, many strange and wondrous machines cluttered the long narrow table and crowded into each other on the carpets. An image shimmered in the air. Aleksi recognized it immediately: the shrine of Morava, with its great shining dome and its twin towers framing the curved expanse of roof.

"That's where the prince is," he said in surprise.

Cara glanced at the shrine. The image was so lifelike that Aleksi could not believe that he himself was not standing some distance from the actual shrine, seeing it with his own eyes. Had she witched it and brought it here, making it small enough to fit in her tent? But no, Tess said that the machines called modelers made images of things, not the things themselves.

"Lie down there." The doctor patted a low couch with one hand. On this couch, Bakhtiian had slept through his coma. "I'm going to scan you. You saw when I did the same thing to Tess. Take off your saber first, and any gold or metal—yes, your belt buckle."

Aleksi did as he was told and gingerly lay down on the pallet. Tess had lain here without the slightest sign of nervousness. Now, the doctor spoke a few Anglais words he did not recognize and he felt the air hum around him. Then she took a little box, lit with jewels of light, into her right hand and, starting at his head, passed it down over his body. The humming air moved as well, like an invisible ring of pressure, down along his torso and his hips,

down his legs, dissipating at last by his feet. It took a long time. Torn between awe and fear and curiosity, he watched his spirit drawn into the air at the foot of the couch. His spirit shone as brightly as Bakhtiian's and Tess's did, which surprised him a little, and yet, hadn't the gods gifted him with many blessings?

"Lady in Heaven. This is astonishing. You're a perfect specimen, Aleksi. No wonder you survived your hell of a childhood. I think you may well be one of the keys I need to crack the code. I think whatever tinkering those damned chameleons did to the humans they transplanted here bred true in you.

Have you ever been sick, a day in your life?

Aleksi thought about this, since it was the only thing in her entire speech that he understood. "No, not that I remember."

"And your reflexes—I must find a way to test them. I'll just bet that they're part of the package.

Aleksi, have you ever thought about having children?"

There were definitely times when Aleksi thought the doctor was a little mad. "Every man thinks of it at some time. But if I marry, I'll have to leave Tess, and I don't want to do that."

"Of course. The jaran are matrifocal. Still, I'd love to try a little selective breeding—" She broke off and coughed into one hand. "In any case, this is a needle. I'm going to take blood. You saw me do that to Tess as well."

"Yes." He watched with interest as she pricked his skin with the tiny blade. The viscous scarlet of his blood filled a tiny chamber of glass, a red as rich as the red of his silk shirt. She removed me needle and gave him a piece of fluff to press onto his skin, though the point of entry scarcely qualified as an injury.

At the long table, she busied herself with some of the machines, but he could not see what she was doing because her back covered his view of the table. Instead, he regarded his spirit, turning in the air before him.

"Oh, you can sit up now," she said over her shoulder.

He sat up. His spirit still turned. He rose and walked closer to examine it. It seemed to emanate from the very base of the couch, like a rainbow emerging from the ground and arching up into the heavens to scatter its color across the rain-drenched sky. But it was him, clearly so. He reached to touch it, but just as his fingers met its surface, it sparked and vanished into a thousand flickering lights and then to nothing. He jumped back. The image appeared again: there, his narrow chin and thin face, in gold and white and blue; the curve of his throat a glittering, soft green; the relaxed slope of his shoulders in green and blue, with a hint of violet; his chest and hips, his legs, his feet fading into a cloud of deepest violet at their base, the exact curve of his kneecap, the knob in his left little finger, gold with a tracery of red, where it had never healed straight when it was broken many many years ago. He was crowned by a bright silver formless light, just as Bakhtiian's spirit had been, just as Tess's had been.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" asked the doctor from her table. He felt her move, without seeing her. He caught a movement in his peripheral vision; an instant later he shot his left hand up and caught a little ball she'd thrown at him. "Good reflexes," she said. "Squeeze that as hard as you can." He complied, then transferred it to his other hand and squeezed it again. The ball was made of some strange substance he did not recognize: not wood or metal, not ceramic or cloth. Little bumps nobbled its surface, and when he squeezed hard enough it gave slightly beneath his hand, and he felt warmth from inside of it.

The doctor came over to him and squinted at his eyes. She held up a black stick with a tight nestled in its tip. "Look at me. Straight at me. Don't mind this. They say the actor Gwyn Jones is a martial artist."

"What is that? Martial artist?"

"Someone who has studied the art of fighting, not just the craft of it. I'd like to see the two of you spar together. He won a number of tournaments, of—well—contests, say when you race a horse. Surely you fence together and see who comes out the winner?"

"I always did," Aleksi admitted humbly. "Come out the winner. That's what Vyacheslav often said to me, that most men are blind to the saber, that they only use it to cut with and kill with, but that the saber is like a Singer's lute, that it could itself sing. He said I was a Singer, that I had made a long journey, but that my instrument wasn't tales and song but the saber itself, just as the saber had been his instrument in his time. So he taught me."

"You are a Singer? A shaman?"

He shrugged. "I never went to the gods" lands, if that is what you mean. But I learned from him as much as there was time to learn, about the—art—of saber." He grinned. "I like this word, martial artist.

You khaja are always surprising me. I thought you weren't civilized."

Dr. Hierakis laughed and withdrew her light from his face. "That's all. What news from the council?"

Aleksi also liked her brusqueness and the way she came straight to the point and never hemmed and hawed about the least detail. "The main army, with Bakhtiian, rides to Karkand. Sakhalin rides south.

Grekov and Vershinin ride west past Karkand. Nadine will ride north to escort the prince back here."

"Oh," said the doctor.

"Will he know this before she arrives?" Aleksi asked.

Dr. Hierakis laughed. "Yes. We have a way of talking that can send a message faster than the fastest horseman can ride. You see the image of Morava, there?" He nodded. "That isn't an image modeled out of the memory, but a real image, sent to us by Marco Burckhardt from half a kilometer away from the palace. He sent it this morning."

Aleksi regarded the image of Morava. The view looked down the long avenue that led to the front of the shrine. He could just make out the sweep of white stairs framed by thin black pillars that led to the huge doors embroidered with tracery and fine patterns. "But, Doctor," he said, "if you can send messages so quickly, why not show Bakhtiian how to do this thing as well? If his generals could speak together like this, then imagine what they could do."

"Oh, I can imagine it," said the doctor. "But we've done too much already. Casualties are high, of course, but deaths are low. We're saving and healing a much higher percentage of the wounded than would have survived without my training. And yet, and yet, I can't just stand by and watch them die, knowing that with a little knowledge they could be saved. What of the khaja living in the army's path?

But I can't reach them. I can't reach everyone. Not yet."

The doctor often talked to herself like this, to him and yet to herself and to some unnamed audience which Aleksi supposed was both her conscience and the absent prince, with whom she shared more than simple friendship and loyalty. He knew some vital issue troubled her, but he had not yet puzzled out what it was. And if she and the prince did not want to share this swift messenger they hoarded between them, after all, why should they? They owed Bakhtiian nothing. Aleksi did not think they were Bakhtiian's enemies, but neither did he think they were Bakhtiian's friends. Allies, perhaps, because of Tess, but it was an uneasy truce. They were only here because Tess was here. Even Bakhtiian knew mat.

They needed no alliance with Bakhtiian, and certainly with such machines, they had nothing to fear from him, however powerful and vast his army might be. Jeds was a long ride away, according to both Tess and Nadine, according to Bakhtiian himself.

But if Tess left, if the prince and Dr. Hierakis convinced her to go, Aleksi had long since promised himself that by one means or another, whatever he must do, he would go with her.

CHAPTER SIX

At first the color gray, like a fog, sank in around them. Fog lifted to become mist, and through the mist towers appeared, rising up toward the sky in such profusion that they might have been the uplifted lances of the jaran army, one hundred thousand strong.

But to call them towers did them no justice. Not one tower looked like any other tower. Each possessed such striking individuality that even from this distance—from this relative distance, seated on the floor and staring into the three-dimensional field of Hon Echido's Jke's representation of the palace of the Chapalii Emperor—David could distinguish some characteristic in each tower his eye had time to light on that set it apart from the others. Why had they chosen to do that? So many and yet each unique?

David thought of the Chapalii as so bound by the hierarchy of their social order that he would never have guessed that they valued diversity.

"The Yaochalii reigns forever."

Was that Echido talking, or a voice encoded through the image building in front of them? David couldn't tell. The image itself wore such depth and reality that he could easily imagine himself actually transported there, staring at the city from high above. He recalled the emperor's visit to Charles and Tai Naroshi—or their visit to the emperor. Maybe he was there. The thought made him giddy.

"For time uncounted, years beyond years, has the Yaochalii reigned, and so will he reign, for time uncounted, years beyond years."

It was hard for David to judge distance because of the scale and the slowly turning field of the image, but in any case, the city was huge. Of course, it wasn't actually a city; it was the palace of the emperor, a megalopolis by human standards and yet devoted entirely to the emperor and his business. Had it once been a real city? As the Chapalii Empire had expanded out into space, had it been abandoned bit by bit, or had the emperor decreed it so and forced the evacuation? The Chapalii home world of Chapal was the emperor's world alone now. Or at least, so the Protocol Office said. No other cities existed there, although this one was itself the size of a small continent.

"The Yaochalii holds his gentle hand over vast territories. The docks of Paladia Minor flow with ships. Merchants spin the heavens with their web of commerce. Lords preside with wisdom over their houses. Dukes administer justly. The princes are at peace. Each lord, each duke, each prince, sends a woman of his house to build a tower for the Yaochalii's pleasure, so that the emperor may rise in the evening and see a thousand thousand lights set upon his earth to rival the thousand thousand lights that are the markers of his domain in the heavens."

Beside him, Maggie covered her mouth with a hand and muffled a cough. Night descended on the field. The towers burned in brilliance, each one a star, reflecting the stars above. Great tiers of darkness blanketed the interstices between the blazing towers, and as the field lightened into day again, David recognized these as concourses and avenues and colonnades and gardens and labyrinths and ornamental terraces and every kind of engineering marvel, laid out in breathtaking extravagance and detail, more than he had modeled or imitated or— perhaps, just perhaps—dreamt of in his extensive studies.

"In these days comes the Tai-en Mushai to Sorrowing Tower. Thus does he choose to walk on his own feet into Reckless Tower, and so by his actions does he bring himself to Shame Tower. Thus does his name pass through the rite of extinction, and his house is obliterated forever."

"Under which emperor did this happen?" asked Charles out of the darkness on the other side of the brightening field.