CHAPTER NINE

Recompense

"Are you sure," Diana asked for the fifth time, "that you want to come with the Company? I don't know how long we'll be on this tour, or even exactly where we're going, if it's true that we actually get to go to Duke Naroshi's palace. You know you and Portia are welcome to stay here with my family.

You know they'll be glad to have you."

"Gods!" Anatoly Sakhalin jumped to his feet and stalked to the edge of the brick patio. Beyond lay the bright patchwork of the flower garden, exhaling in the sun, and beyond that the fields of rye and barley and the stark frame of the great greenhouse. The wooded hill that had given the farm its name loomed above the greenhouse. Behind him, through the open patio doors, he could hear the cheerful rumble of Diana's family as they chatted and worked and prepared family dinner inside the house. He smelled bread baking, and a souffle. Portia shrieked with laughter. A bee droned lazily through the flowers, and from the lawn to the west of the house he heard the crack of a cricket bat and one of the cousins yelling.

"You don't want me to go with you," he said.

"Well, what will you do? We'll probably be confined in a small area, we'll be rehearsing and performing all the time, everyone else there will be part of the Company."

He turned to look at her. She wore the face he liked least: She was going to be reasonable, to appeal to practicality, to rationality, whatever that meant. Anatoly was damned tired of being reasonable. He had been reasonable for five years now, after the fiasco with the Couture Festival, and the only thing it had gotten him was a daughter, although Portia was certainly worth every otherwise monotonous year that had passed.

"How can I be any more confined than I am now?" he demanded. "At least I will get to see something of the lands away from Earth."

"If you would bestir yourself to get some kind of occupation, then you wouldn't be so confined!"

"I have an occupation! One I trained for for many years. I am a soldier, and I offered my services to Charles Soerensen when I left Rhui."

"Not this again! You are so inflexible and stubborn, Anatoly! This isn't Rhui. This isn't the jaran.

You're as bad as Karolla, living in the past."

"I beg your pardon!"

"Oh, I know, I know. You get along very well here. You take your classes and ride at the stables and fence and teach at the Academy. You've learned how to get around and I swear you know how to use all the obscure bits of technology better than I do—!" That made her chuckle, and he saw her soften; she always did, eventually, when they fought. This time he was not inclined to forgive her. "No one can ever accuse you of not being single-minded. Or of not being smart enough to do what you want."

"Thank you," he replied sarcastically.

She stood up, defensively crossing her arms on her chest. "Then why can't you admit that you aren't a jaran soldier anymore? You've got to make a new life for yourself. It's been seven years since you left Rhui!"

"I am a jaran soldier."

"Ah, Goddess, you're impossible!"

They lapsed into an angry silence, glaring at each other. Diana's Aunt Millie, laughing at something someone had said behind her, stepped out through the patio doors, halted, frowned, and went back inside, leaving them alone on the patio again.

Diana sighed, finally, running a hand over her eyes. He could see that she was close to tears. "Oh, Anatoly, why do we have to argue all the time?"

She was in a mood to soothe him, but he wasn't in a mood to be soothed. "You have done nothing to help me. Why did you ask me to leave Rhui when you never intended that I become a part of your tribe?"

She bit down hard on her lower lip and did not reply, but he saw tears brimming in her eyes and he pressed his advantage.

"You only had the baby to placate me."

"That's unfair! I love Portia!"

"But you wouldn't have agreed to have her, would you, if it hadn't served to distract me from the discovery that all those enterprises I had gotten involved in, that all of them were just using me as a pet, as a ... what do you call it? . . . a sideshow freak? If you truly cared for me, you wouldn't ask me to stay behind, as if I were a servant. A man does not stay behind when a jahar goes riding; he rides.

It's insulting, Diana. As if you think I can't take care of myself. You could think about me for once, instead of only thinking of yourself."

"Only thinking of myself!" she gasped. "How dare you? If you think I haven't struggled all these years ... how dare you say that! I've had to make sacrifices, too."

"That is all I am to you now, an obstacle. You would rather leave me behind with your family who will smother me with their kindness and conceal your shameful infatuation within the walls of the tent.

So I won't embarrass you again, because I know you were mortified after I showed those whimpering festival producers what a battle is really like. No one patronizes a Sakhalin!"

"I stood up for you!"

"Only because you had no choice! Not because you truly meant it!"

She burst into tears. "You can't even see that it's been hard for me, too," she choked out, and she broke past him and ran out along the graveled path that led toward the greenhouse.

Anatoly contemplated the ruins of their argument with grim satisfaction. After a moment he realized that his hands were shaking, and he clenched them.

Aunt Millie stepped out onto the patio and surveyed him. He lifted his chin and faced her stubbornly. "Routed the enemy, I see," she said conversationally.

"I didn't—!"

"Now, Anatoly, come inside and help me wash the vegetables for the salad." Once he would have protested that men did not cook, but that excuse was not tolerated at Holt Farm. He followed Aunt Millie inside meekly and took up a station beside her at the double sink. Most of the rest of the family—and there were a lot of them—had adjourned to the west lawn to watch the cricket game.

Through the west window he saw Portia sitting on her grandfather's lap, golden head resting on Granfa's arm and two fingers stuck in her mouth. She was tired.

"You're discontented," observed Aunt Millie.

"It isn't right that Diana should want me to stay behind," he said promptly, taking the dispute to where it should have been essayed in the first place. "This could be a chance for me to use my skills, the only chance I've truly had so far."

"It could be," she agreed mildly. She was a big-boned woman, quite unlike her niece, appealingly strong, with powerful hands and arms from decades of carpentry work. "But I can't say that you further your cause by driving Diana to tears."

"She fights just as well as I do."

"Certainly she can be just as cruel and cutting when she wishes to be, but she doesn't have your years of tactical and strategic training, so, I would give the advantage in that department to you, I'm afraid."

He had the grace to look ashamed.

"I know from my own experience that it's sometimes impossible to forgo a chance to make a person whom you're angry with cry just because it feels like recompense for your anger. But that isn't the way to build a marriage. If I say that Diana has had to struggle these last years, I don't say it to belittle what you've gone through, Anatoly. But you have to accept that she has had to make as many adjustments as you have." She paused and looked at him with what he knew was a keen eye. "Do you disagree?"

Anatoly was not in the habit of disagreeing with aunts and etsanas, and in any case, he had discovered over the years that Aunt Millie did not give advice often, or lightly. Nor was it wise to ignore her. He tried to sort out his feelings, but they were far too chaotic. He settled for the direct approach. "I'm very angry. I want to go."

She nodded, and he was relieved to see that this confession contented her. "Then that is what you must tell Diana."

They washed and cut broccoli in silence for a while and finally, driven by the quiet, he blurted out,

"No one seems to understand. If I were still with the jaran, I would be a dyan, a commander, of my own army. These are the years that a soldier does his best fighting, and I'm wasting them away."

"So you're frustrated. I understand that. But, Anatoly, you know that you've received treatments that will allow you to live far longer than you could have expected to on Rhui."

"My body has received these treatments, and my mind benefits from them, but my mind still lives on Rhui. That is, I mean—" He flushed, angry at himself for repeating the worst of Diana's accusations against him, when that wasn't what he had meant.

"I know what you mean: Intellectually you understand that you'll live longer, but in your own mind, emotionally, you still age each year the way you always expected you would. Or at least, is that what you mean?" She smiled.

Relaxing, Anatoly smiled back. "Close enough. I can't help but think that I ought to be doing something, but I'm not."

"That is up to you."

Diana sat at the other end of the long, long table at dinner, with Portia next to her, and Anatoly had no chance to get her alone until evening. He ran her to ground when she came downstairs and went out onto the front lawn after putting Portia to bed.

"Diana," he said softly, coming up behind her. He did not touch her.

She shrugged without answering, without turning to face him.

"I beg your pardon for the things I said. I was angry because I want to go with the Company."

Now she turned, looking startled. In any light, she was beautiful. Dusk softened her expression, and for an instant he could believe that she had forgiven him everything.

"Thank you," she said. "I appreciate you offering an apology and explaining yourself."

He flinched as if slapped, but he kept Aunt Millie uppermost in his mind and he forced himself to stay calm. "Diana. I had hoped we could—"

"Kiss and make love and wake up in the morning as if nothing, no argument, had happened, like we always do? I'm tired of running that same cycle over and over and over, because we aren't getting anywhere new."

She paused. It was so quiet that he felt as if he could hear the exhalation of the sky, the music of the stars, and the slow drag of the moon on the distant tides.

A gleam of bitter humor surfaced in her face. "But I am willing to enter negotiations," she added, "if it's worth it to you, to build something we can live with."

"Of course it is worth it to me! How could you think otherwise? I left everything for you, Diana!"

"How could I ever forget it?" she whispered, ducking her head down, as if to avoid a blow.

"My heart," he murmured, and caught her shoulders and pulled her into him. It was the only sure way he knew to show her that he loved her. For a moment she resisted. Then she muttered something uninterpretable under her breath and abruptly wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. They stood that way, under the stars, for a long time. No one disturbed them.