by Kate Elliott
Chapter Three
“If God had not created yellow honey, they would say that figs were far sweeter.”
—XENOPHANES OF COLOPHON
FAR ABOVE, A BIRD dove toward the earth, a bundle thrown from some high spot to be dashed to pieces against the ground. Abruptly it broke its plummet and jerked upward, wings spread. Tess’s hand was on her throat.
Bakhtiian walked toward her, slowly, each step measured and even. A saber swayed at his hip.
Tess forced herself to lower her hand and, knowing that it is always best to face your fears directly, she stood up—slowly, so as not to startle him—and looked him straight in the eye. He looked away; that fast, like a wild creature bolting; then, deliberately, he returned her gaze. His hesitancy gave her courage, and she found that her heart was no longer beating so erratically.
“I suppose you think us savage,” he said in a low voice.
He spoke such faultless Rhuian, enhanced rather than marred by a melodious accent, that it took her some full, drawn-out moments to even wonder why it ought to matter to him. “My God.” It was the only response that came to hand.
“Sonia says you come from Jeds.” She simply stared at him; when she did not reply, he went on. “I studied there myself, at the university, some fifteen years ago. I was very young.” He paused. “But even then I thought the architecture of the university, set out around such a fine square, was particularly remarkable.” The wind stirred the scarlet silk of his shirt. It reminded her of blood.
“Savage is too kind,” she said hoarsely. Then, realizing that she had just insulted a man who could kill her as easily as he had his previous victim, she cast round desperately for a safer haven. “Anyone who’s been in Jeds knows that the university is unique because its buildings are set in the round.”
His expression, unrevealing, did not change. “I’ve seen men killed in more brutal ways in Jeds. And for less compelling reasons. You’re pale. You shouldn’t be alone.”
“Go away.” She deliberately turned her back on him. Five breaths later, she realized what she had done, and she whirled back. But he was gone.
“Tess.”
She bolted right into Yuri.
“Tess. Don’t be scared of me.”
She could not help herself. She gripped his shirt in her fists and sobbed onto his shoulder. He stood very still. After a bit she stopped crying and stepped a half pace away. She dried her eyes on her hand, feeling like a fool, and looked at him. “Your shirt is all wet.”
“I don’t mind.” He stared at her so earnestly that she looked away. “You are sad.”
“Oh, Yuri, that was awful.”
“It’s true that he got a more merciful death than he deserved. My mother and the other—elders—will be angry with Ilya now, I can tell you that.”
“Good Lord,” she murmured, utterly bewildered. “How could that be called merciful? How was he supposed to die? No, don’t tell me that.” She lapsed into silence.
“Tess, he had to die. He had broken the gods’ law. Otherwise his—crime, is that the word?—would have made the whole tribe suffer.”
“What did he do?”
Yuri looked shamed, and he hesitated, as if he was afraid to confess the magnitude of the man’s wrongdoing. “He shot a whistler.”
“A whistler?”
“It’s a bird.” Wrung from him, the admission seemed both anguished and, to Tess, utterly incongruous.
“A bird.” What kind of people had she fallen in with?
“He shouldn’t have been out hunting with women’s weapons anyway, and he was three times a fool to shoot into a thicket. He should have flushed out the game.” Yuri shrugged. “But it’s done now. The gods must have guided his hand. It was a just execution.”
He spoke so matter-of-factly that Tess was appalled, and not a little frightened. “Yuri. You’ll tell me, won’t you, if I’m about to do something that would offend, that would break your gods’ law?”
Now he looked shocked. “You don’t think we punish children? Or those who act in ignorance? We’re not savages!”
“No, no, of course not. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” But Yuri could not maintain outrage for longer than a moment. He grinned at her consternation. “Well,” said Tess, “I appreciate you coming to find me. Did Bakhtiian send you?”
“Ilya? Why would he send me? No, Sonia did.” Abruptly he blushed. “She thought, if you were upset, that you might want—a man’s comfort.” The constrained tone of his voice left no question as to what Sonia meant by a man’s comfort.
For an instant, unable to look at Yuri, Tess was too embarrassed to speak. But then, glancing up at him, she realized that Yuri was far more embarrassed than she was. Their gazes met. Yuri covered his mouth with his hand, and they both laughed.
When Tess tentatively laid a hand on his arm, they sobered. “I don’t—I don’t need a lover, Yuri. Not right now. But a brother…” Had Charles received her computer slate already? Only to send a message to Jeds and find that she had never arrived? “I could use a brother, right now.”
He smiled, looking both relieved and honestly pleased, and grasped her hand with his. “Then I will be your brother, Tess. I would far rather be your brother, because a woman’s lovers come and go, but her brother she keeps always.” He studied her a moment, serious. “But you’d better wash your face. I’ll take you to the stream.”
They walked back through camp. Yuri led them wide around his family’s cluster of tents, where Tess could see a little gathering: Bakhtiian, standing as if he was on trial in front of a half circle of older women and men. On the far side of camp, they followed a stream past a low rise. The stream slipped down a smooth ladder of rocks and broadened into a pool. Yuri left her at the top of the rise, and Tess picked her way down the slope alone. Sonia, standing with a group of young women, saw her and waved.
“Tess.” She came to greet her. “Perhaps my brother does not interest you.” About twenty young women gathered around. They were not shy at all; they pointed to Tess’s clothing and even touched her brown hair, exclaiming over its color—theirs was either blonde or black, with no shade in between.
Under their scrutiny, Tess was amazed she could keep her composure. “No. No, I like him very much. But I am not looking for a lover.”
“Ah.” Sonia shooed the other women away and immediately began to undress. “Your heart has been broken. I can see it in your face.” She stripped down to a thin white shift. Around them, the other young women, naked now, plunged gasping and laughing into the pool. “A man has treated you badly. Here, let me help you take those off.”
Tess was not entirely sure she wanted to strip naked in what was after all no more than an early spring day, however fine, and swim in a stream that looked bitterly cold, but after the execution, she did not want to refuse. “Yes,” she agreed, to both statements.
“What fine undergarments you wear.” Sonia examined Tess’s underclothes without the least sign of self-consciousness. “Perhaps you can show us how to fashion some. Here, Elena, Marya—” Several of them splashed right out of the pool to exclaim over this new discovery, and when they had tired of that, they bullied Tess into stripping completely and coming back into the water with them.
It was like ice. But the company, and the energy with which they all splashed about, soon made her forget her goose bumps. Only Sonia spoke Rhuian; the others addressed her cheerfully in their own language and she quickly learned names and a few words. About half the women had scars on their left cheeks.
“So you are not married?” Sonia asked. “No? How old are you? Twenty-three? A widow, perhaps?”
“No. I…I was to be married, but…”
“Ah. This is the man who has broken your heart. Well.” Sonia dismissed the betrayer with a blithe wave of one hand, and a retaliatory splash in the direction of the gray-eyed, blonde girl she called Elena. “In Jeds the customs are different. I did not like them. We have many young men here who are polite as well as han
dsome.”
Tess could not help but laugh. “When I’m ready for a lover, I’ll ask your help in picking one out.”
“I sent you my brother. But perhaps—” She laughed. Her laugh gave color to the air and sparked her eyes and wrinkled up her nose. “When I know you better, Tess, then I can help you choose. But I think it is time you got a husband, for I see that you have no—what is it to say in Rhuian?—none of the Mother’s threads on your belly. As old as you are. I am twenty-four, and I have three children. You must not wait too long. Everyone knows the story of Agrafena’s aunt.”
The story of Agrafena’s aunt was not, it transpired, about anyone living in the tribe, but an old tale. Giggling and shivering, everyone hurried out of the pool, dried off, and dressed. They sat farther up on the slope, the pool dappled by shadows below, an untidy collection of bodies sprawled in the sun with Sonia and Tess at their center. By turns two or three of the young women took clothing to a stretch of flat stones below the pool and beat them clean in the water. As Sonia told the story, it took a fair while to tell, alternately in Rhuian and in khush. It was about a woman who waited so long to have children that when at last she married and wanted them, she was barren—having offended the spirits of earth and water by her stubbornness—and so had to send her niece on a long journey in order to find the holy woman who could restore her to favor.
Poor Agrafena had not yet found the holy woman when a little girl raced down from the direction of the camp and delivered a message to the group. Sonia rose and reached down to help Tess up. “The men are coming.”
Slinging the damp clothes over their shoulders, the women walked in a straggling group back to camp. A path had been beaten down through the coarse grass, winding around the base of the hills, and they followed this. Elena, at the head of the line, whistled suddenly. The whole group quieted. A young man, then another, and another, came around a rise—the men going to the pool. All the girls straightened their shoulders, swaying their hips as the men did when they were wearing their sabers, and when the first of them passed the first young man, the entire group broke into song. The men, all young, stared silently at the ground; many were grinning. One had flushed a desperate, flaming red; another hid his eyes with his hands. Toward the end of the line, a young man with reddish-blond hair looked up as he passed Sonia and Tess, and winked. He had piercingly blue eyes. Sonia gasped, laughing, and looked back at Tess.
“Did you see that? Did you? Trust Kirill!” The last of the men passed them. All the women were laughing now, breaking off their song. “Did you see?” Sonia addressed the whole group. “I want you all to know—” first in khush, then in Rhuian “—I want you all to know. He winked.”
“Who?” called Elena from the front.
“Who do you think?”
A chorus, up and down the line, answered her. “Kirill!”
“You see.” Sonia turned back to Tess again. “He’s terribly forward. He has no shame at all.”
“I’m not sure I understand what happened.”
Sonia swung her wet burden out in front of her and, with a quick turn of the wrist, made it snap in the air. Faint drops of water sprayed. “We sang a man’s song at them, which reminds them of the order of things. If a woman sings a man’s song, it makes fun of men, you see.”
Tess did not see, but she was saved from having to answer by their arrival in camp. Whatever other consequences the execution might have had, it had no effect on the daily round of life: at dawn, the camp had been empty. Now it bustled with activity. A fair-haired young woman, weaving at a loom fastened at one end around her waist and at the other to an awning corner pole, paused in her work and smiled at Tess. At another tent, an elderly woman simply stopped scouring out a pot and stared at Tess. She called a question to Sonia, which the younger woman answered with a few words. The two toddlers at her skirts stared, wide-eyed but unafraid. Three men, standing next to hides pegged out over the ground, glanced up quickly at her and away before she could meet their eyes. Farther out, beyond the tents, children raced in from the fringes of the herds to stare at Tess and were chased back to shepherd again.
Sonia’s tent was not actually Sonia’s tent, but the one belonging to her mother. The smaller tents that Mother Orzhekov had gifted each of her four daughters with lay pitched around the large tent. Tess helped Sonia hang the wet clothes up along the tent-lines to dry and then was given a board and a knife and a slab of meat to cut into strips for stew. Yuri strolled up with a baby on his hip and with a look of relief deposited the child on Sonia’s lap and turned to sit down beside Tess. He looked around rather furtively and, seeing no other young men in sight, drew his knife and helped her cut up the meat. Sonia took the baby away, and Tess and Yuri sat for some time in companionable silence. Occasionally young men passed by, and Yuri would hide his knife under his leg and lean back as if he were relaxing.
“I do appreciate it, Yuri, but you don’t have to help me,” said Tess after the third time he had hidden the knife. “I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. Now that I’m a rider it’s supposed to be beneath my dignity to do anything but practice saber and whatever work Uncle Yakhov needs done with the herds.”
“But you helped Sonia with the baby.”
“Everyone cares for the children. And, of course, a man does what his family asks of him.”
“But I see men working at many things besides those who are out with the herds. Don’t those men fight?”
“Every man can fight, Tess, but not every man rides in jahar. We’re almost done anyway.” Three men appeared suddenly from around the back of the tent, but after one startled glance, Yuri simply returned to slicing meat. One was Bakhtiian. Beside him walked an older, silver-haired man, and two steps behind followed a fair, pretty young man who wore a profusion of necklaces in a multitude of colors that clashed with the garish embroidery decorating the sleeves and yoke of his scarlet shirt. Tassels of gold and silver braid hung from his boot tops. Tess could not help but stare. Except for a brief, piercing glance, Bakhtiian ignored them. The young man copied Bakhtiian. But the older man met Tess’s eyes and inclined his head with a friendly smile before accompanying Bakhtiian on into camp.
“Who was that?” Tess asked.
“Who? Niko? Nikolai Sibirin. He’s the eldest rider in jahar. You’ll like him.”
“Who was the other one?”
“The other one? Oh.” Yuri shrugged dismissively. “Vladimir. He isn’t anybody. He’s an orphan that Ilya took in, because he had a good hand for the saber.”
“He dresses—” She faltered.
“He’d like to be noticed. I suppose women might find him attractive.” By his tone, Tess could tell that if women did, their taste was inexplicable to Yuri. “Sonia said that I should teach you khush, if you’d like.”
“Yes, I would,” Tess replied, realizing that Vladimir was a subject completely uninteresting to Yuri.
“Well, then, let’s start with naming things. Damn.” He hid the knife.
Tess looked up. A young man sauntered toward them, saber swaying at his hips. He had blond hair, shot through with the red-gold of flames, and a light mustache above full lips. For an instant their gazes met. His head tilted to one side and, with the barest grin, he winked at her before looking as quickly away in a move both shy and flirtatious. Tess flushed.
“Trust Kirill,” said Yuri under his breath. He stood up. “What do you want?”
“Really, Yurinya.” Kirill halted before them, not at all abashed by Yuri’s tone. “Don’t you know Mikhal’s waiting for you to relieve him?” With another sidewise glance at Tess, he spun and almost too casually strolled away.
Yuri squinted at the sun. “Not yet, he isn’t,” he muttered. He grinned suddenly, looking down at Tess. “He did that just to get a close look at you.”
“I guess I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Kirill has no shame at all. If any other man were so forward, he would be run ou
t of camp. I don’t know how Kirill gets away with it.”
Tess bit down on her grin, hiding it. “He’s not unhandsome.”
“I suppose not,” Yuri agreed glumly. “And he knows it.” Then his expression lightened. “But Maryeshka Kolenin showed him, though, when he tried to marry her.”
Before Tess could ask for details of this intriguing event, Sonia came around the corner with the baby on one hip and a little girl holding on to her opposite hand. “Yuri! Are you still here? Misha must be waiting for you to relieve him.”
“Not yet,” exclaimed Yuri, completely exasperated now.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Tess asked.
The casual question brought much more of a reaction than she expected. Yuri blushed. “No. You can’t—”
“Yuri.” Sonia set the baby down on the rug and let go of the girl.
Yuri said nothing.
“I can’t what?” Tess asked.
“Ilya said not to tell her—”
“Yuri,” said Sonia. She let out a sigh and dumped the cut meat into a gleaming copper pot. “You might as well say. I never thought it was right not to tell Tess, and you’ve said too much as it is.” She exchanged a glance with Tess and set a woven bag filled with wet tubers down next to the rug, taking the board from Tess. Then she and her daughter turned their backs on Tess and Yuri and with a fresh knife cut up the vegetables, although the little girl peeked back frequently.
“What is it you weren’t supposed to tell me?”
Yuri hesitated, glancing to the right, to the left, at Sonia, and finally back at Tess. “About the khepelli.”
“The khepelli?” Tess felt like all the heat had flooded out of her body into the ground and the air. The late afternoon breeze was chill and damp, presaging rain.
“They say you were on the same ship with them,” Yuri continued, apparently oblivious to her expression. “When Ilya told them you were following us, they were very surprised. They said you must have followed them from the coast. They said that you were a—a spy—is that the right word?”