by Kate Elliott
Her touch jostled his head, and it rolled, back, staring at her, one eye strangely shut. One eye scarred shut. It was not Fedya at all, but Doroskayev. She jerked her hands back. The Chapalii clustered around her.
Ishii stood above her, seeming almost to touch the sky. “How fortunate that it is not one of Bakhtiian’s men. For a moment I feared that my man’s rashness would be irreparable, but now I see he may have done Bakhtiian a service.” Tess stood up slowly, still shaking. “Excuse my impertinence in speaking without your leave, Lady Terese, but I saw that this situation needed a male’s firmness. Please allow me to assure you again that we have never wished to do you any harm. You have only to say the word, and the suspicions that have grown between us shall be laid to rest.” He clasped his hands in that arrangement known as Lord’s Supplication.
Tess stared at him. She shook. She did not dare look down at the body. She had not the slightest idea what to do with her hands. Ishii could have let his men kill her, could have buried her, and who would have known? Standing alone among them, their only witness the moon and the stars, she could not imagine any human set against her in such a delicate dance showing such forbearance. She outranked him; she was heir to a Chapalii dukedom; she was sacrosanct. Ishii gazed back at her. The moon washed his face so pale it seemed almost translucent. Like the plains beyond, the Chapalii mind had many aspects that seemed unchanging to an alien. Lost in that careful game of diplomacy and treachery that Charles and the Chapalii played with each other; lost on these uncharted plains of Rhui; the two circumstances of her life seemed very similar right now.
“Truce,” she said.
“You honor us, Lady Terese.” He bowed, and the others echoed the bow as befitted their stations. Straightening, he turned to his men. “Cut away the sod carefully. We must inter him so that there is no trace. Perhaps, Lady Terese, you will indulge us by identifying this man. He was, I think, one of Bakhtiian’s enemies?”
“Yes.”
Emboldened by her passivity, Ishii went on. “Perhaps you will permit me to allow Hon Garii to escort you back to camp? You need not stay for the interment. I understand very well that females have heightened sensibilities.”
They moved away from her, preparing a grave. Trapped beneath the earth. Had Doroskayev deserved such a fate? She walked past them, stumbling slightly in the darkness. Garii followed her, unasked. At the base of the hill, she stopped. He stopped behind her. Without turning around she put her hand on her knife.
“How do I use this?” she whispered.
He did not reply immediately. When she tilted her hand to see him, she saw that he had glanced back to where dark figures worked just beyond the crest of the rise.
“If I may be permitted to speak, I have attuned it to human use, Lady Terese,” he said at last. “The heat of your thumb, pressed over the third and second lights, causes the beam to activate. Forgive me. A thousand thousand pardons be granted me that I did not realize you needed instruction in this gift.”
“You are pardoned,” she said automatically.
“I am yours, Tai-endi,” he said, the formal response, and he bowed, as liegeman to his liege.
“Go,” she said hastily, abruptly afraid that she had acknowledged something far deeper than she realized. “Ishii will be watching.”
“As you command.” He retreated back up the hill.
I am yours. Lord, Tess, you’ve gotten yourself into it now. The wording had been precise and formal: the bond of servant to master, not any slight thing bound by a wage or a common goal, but true fealty. Surely Garii was already bonded to Ishii’s family, and such bonds lasted until death, and beyond death into the next generations.
Light flashed, a brief, searing pulse, and she started and hurried away toward the copse and the spring. Bodies on grass. They should leave him to rot. She would have been left out there, months ago, walking on the plains. A body could lie a hundred years in such space—
By the spring, someone waited for her, sitting on a low rock. She broke into a jog, remembering how she thought they had killed him.
“Fedya,” she said. Stopped. It was Bakhtiian. A blanket and his cloak lay, folded neatly, on the rock beside him.
“Did you catch a glimpse of our mysterious escort?” he said with a slight smile, but his tone was serious and his eyes met hers. One of his hands rested casually on his blanket. “But if he eluded Josef, he could elude anyone.”
For a long moment she could not speak. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I just had to be alone. I’m modest.”
“All good women are.”
“And good men?”
“Even more so,” he answered, not a trace of humor in his voice. There was a pause. “We’re extending our sentry ring tonight,” he said at last. “If you feel crowded in your tent, it would be safe, tonight, for you to sleep outside of camp.”
“I know.”
Blanket and cloak tucked under one arm, he stood up so that they faced one another on a level. “I understand that you have sustained a shock.”
“Oh, hell,” said Tess under her breath, putting one hand to her face to stop the sudden flow of tears. Bakhtiian took one step toward her. Footsteps rustled in the grass.
“Tess?” He came up beside her, bedroll in one hand, cloak slung over his shoulders. “Ilya!” Now he was startled.
There was a very long silence.
“Excuse me,” said Bakhtiian abruptly, and he left.
“Tess.” Fedya reached up and gently drew her hand down from her face. “In the morning, it will not seem so terrible.”
And in the morning, it did not.
In the morning, Niko rode out with her and Bakhtiian. They circled back but found nothing, from which both men concluded that the trailing scout had veered off. Around noon, coming back to the copse and spring they had left that morning, they spotted the jahar away to their left where, Tess thought, they surely should not be. The range of hills dwindled away in front to the familiar flatness of plain. The three of them dismounted and crouched on the height, the horses downslope behind them.
Tess saw their jahar out on the plain. But the riders still in the hills—another jahar. Closing quickly, too quickly, with their position.
“Niko,” said Bakhtiian crisply. “Get our jahar to cover. I’ll delay them. We’re not ready for a battle, not yet.” But Niko did not answer, was already on his horse and riding.
“How long until they reach the spring?” Tess asked.
“Not long enough, although they may stop to water the horses. That can’t be Doroskayev. They can’t know we’re so close, or they’d not be pacing themselves…Why are you still here?” He stared at her as if he had just seen her. “Follow Niko.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Decoy them back the way they’ve come.”
“But once they see you, they’ll know your jahar is near. How many will bother to follow a lone man?”
“If that man is Ilyakoria Bakhtiian, quite a few.”
She glanced to where his remount stood, a stocky tarpan. “They’ll catch you.”
“I’ll ride Myshla. They won’t catch us. Now, woman. Go.”
Tess jumped up and ran back to the horses, grabbed the tarpan’s reins, and mounted Myshla, kicking the mare even before her seat was stable.
“Damn it,” Bakhtiian yelled, rising. “Get back here!”
“I suggest you get down in that copse and hide. And hurry.”
He took two stiff steps toward her. “Damn you, Soerensen. This doesn’t concern you. I said—”
“You’re wrong. I need to get to Jeds, urgently. If you stay there, they’ll run you down.” She reined Myshla farther away. “You’d better go. We haven’t got much time. Trust me.”
She turned Myshla and cantered down the slope to the copse, the remounts trailing behind. How to throw them off the scent, how? She tethered the two horses securely to a tree and pulled off the distinctive jahar saddles, obscuring them with the saddlebags. She ripp
ed open her saddlebags, cursing under her breath; everything was jaran, everything. Why hadn’t she even brought a change of clothing from the ship?
“Oh, God, Tess, you’re in for it now.” What was it she had once said about maenads and madness? Sometimes you had to choose all or nothing. And sometimes your weakness became your strength. All at once she knew what to do.
She strewed all her belongings about, piling them into disarray so that their provenance might be concealed. She took her blanket and ran back into the nearest screen of trees and awkwardly—for who knew where Bakhtiian was now—took off her tunic and trousers and wrapped herself in her cloak. It was difficult enough to go out there clad in her underclothes, underneath the cloak, but she had to trust what she knew of jaran culture. The white blouse Nadezhda Martov had given her was generic enough, seen from a distance, so she drenched it in the spring and dampened her Earth-made tunic and trousers and retreated to the edge of the trees, hanging the clothing over bushes to dry. She unlaced her boots and left them by the clothes, but not before stuffing her bracelets inside them; hid the saber and knife under the saddles, but kept the Chapalii knife with her, and finally rolled out her bedroll at the edge of the screen of trees and sat down on it. Nervously she fingered her necklace, the pewter ankh from Sojourner.
The branches of one lopsided tree scraped incessantly against the trunk of another. On the other side of the water hole, the low rock Bakhtiian had sat on last night lay naked and dark in the midday sun. There was no sign of him. She prayed that he had taken refuge deep in the farthest screen of trees. She touched the hilt of the knife and withdrew her hand. Her palms were slick with sweat.
Then came the sound of hooves, pounding along the earth.
There were at least forty of them, scarlet shirts with low collars and banded cuffs, black trousers cut fuller than those of Bakhtiian’s men but clearly jaran. They pulled up, undeniably amazed. She leapt to her feet with a cry of surprise, managing to almost let her cloak fall without actually revealing anything.
By the looks on their faces when the cloak slipped, she knew she would succeed.
Chapter Twelve
“Of pleasures, those that come most rarely give the greatest enjoyment.”
—DEMOCRITUS OF ABDERA
“WHY HAVE YOU COME back?” she cried in Rhuian. She clutched her cloak with both hands, pinning it closed at her chest. “You said you were going to the great temple of the goddess. You cannot have gotten there and back so soon.”
A good three dozen or more men stared at her, and she suddenly doubted herself. She was utterly vulnerable to them except for the Chapalii knife belted over her underclothes, a weapon she had never used and was not certain she could use. How could she be sure Garii was the least bit trustworthy? Wind pulled up one corner of her cloak, revealing a glimpse of knee. As if it were a signal, the men’s gazes flicked away one by one, and most of them colored as they looked at anything but her. Her hands gripped the cloth more tightly and she forced herself to breathe slowly. It had to work, it could still work, and yet it all rested on this: manners, custom.
A hurried consultation began among the leading rank of riders. She used its cover to look them over as surreptitiously as possible: like all jaran, most of these riders were light-haired and fair-complexioned with a sprinkling of darker ones throughout, but she recognized none of them, only the characteristic scarlet shirts boasting embroidered sleeves and collars and black trousers and boots that proclaimed these to be jahar riders.
Finally three of the men dismounted and walked slowly toward her. They kept their eyes averted. The grass made a low whispering sound as they passed through it. The first, a man of Bakhtiian’s age, tall and very fair and unusually handsome even for a man of the jaran, glanced at her frequently but did not meet her gaze. The other two men were older. The man on the right had a sullen, angry expression, and he regarded her with the most direct gaze, suspicious of her. He looked like the kind of man who is suspicious of all people. The third man, in the middle, was the oldest, his fair hair silvering, his shoulders bowed, his expression that of a man harassed beyond all bearing. When the other two halted a decent two body-lengths from her, he came forward another three steps and stopped.
“Do you speak khush?” he asked.
Tess shrank back a step, feigning confusion.
“What is a woman doing out here on her own?” said the sullen man. “Do you think she’s from that khaja town? She may recognize us.”
The middle-aged man hunched his shoulders even more, frowning. “She may recognize you, Leotich. My men had nothing to do with that idiotic raid. Could you understand what she said, Vasil?” This to the blond.
An auspicious time to break in. “Who are you?” Tess asked in Rhuian. “You are not the men I talked to before.”
Vasil tilted his head, thinking hard. “Something about men. But she speaks too quickly.”
“But it is this—Rhu-an?”
“I think so.”
Tess shrank further into her cloak and spoke very slowly and with precise enunciation. “Can you understand me?”
Vasil smiled suddenly. It lit his face like fire, and Tess caught herself staring at him even as he looked right at her, and he flushed and shifted his gaze. His eyes were a vivid, fiery blue. “I speak,” he said hesitantly. “Little.”
“Only a little?” She emphasized the disappointment in her tone, and then wondered if she was overdoing it. “The other man spoke Rhuian very well.”
“Man?” Unconsciously, Vasil leaned toward her. Necklaces swung forward from his chest. “Other man? He speak?”
“Yes. He spoke like a native but he wore much the same clothes as you do. Is he one of you? Is he here with you?”
“I’m sure of it, Dmitri.” Vasil looked triumphant. “A man who spoke with her in Rhuian. It has to be Bakhtiian.” Leotich glared at her obliquely, lips tight.
“What else did she say?”
“I don’t know.”
Tess lowered her eyes, not wanting to seem too interested in a conversation she ought not to understand. She resisted the urge to glance at her belongings, at the copse behind, wondering if it all concealed her true purpose as well as she hoped. Wondering if it concealed Bakhtiian.
“I’ll try again,” said Vasil to Dmitri. He coughed, hesitated again. “Man,” he said. “Other man.” He sighed, frowned, concentrated, and then when she glanced up at him, he gave up and pointed to his scarlet shirt. “Is?”
“Yes, yes.” Tess let her hold on her cloak slacken slightly. “Such clothes, red shirt, black trousers.” She let one arm emerge to point at their clothing and then did risk a half turn to look behind her, where her traveling clothes—obviously foreign—lay drying on the bushes. The white-barked trees beyond stood stark, barely clothed with scant green in the sunlight. When she looked back, all three men were looking not at her, or her clothes, but at each other.
“It has to have been Ilya,” said Vasil in a fierce undertone, almost exultant. “It has to.”
“Don’t get too excited,” said Leotich to Vasil.
Vasil’s head jerked back, one hand brushing his knife hilt. “Don’t tempt me,” he muttered.
“Vasil!” Standing between them, Dmitri lifted his chin, and that gesture alone convinced Tess that he was the man to be reckoned with. “Find out which direction.”
Vasil returned his attention to the ground on Tess’ left. “Other men. Where?”
“Other men! Yes, there were many others, and they were going, like me, to the great temple, but they would not take me with them.”
“Many? Temple? Temple!” He grasped Dmitri by one arm. “Many of them, going to the old temple near the town.”
“But Doroskayev said they were behind us.” Leotich’s frown made his eyes pinch together with suspicion. “How could they have gotten ahead of us? Why would they turn back?”
“Gods, man,” said Dmitri. “Who knows why Bakhtiian does what he does? He may have gone past the temple
and then gone back. He’s a far more religious man than you are.”
Leotich snorted in disgust.
“And since I obviously must remind you, he is escorting a party of khaja pilgrims. There is a reason to return to the temple. Perhaps he was forced to avoid it in the first place because of Doroskayev’s idiocy.”
Leotich’s pale eyes focused on the other man, and he kicked at the grass, tearing a thin scar in the ground. “Doroskayev is the only one with any kind of plan. Whatever you may think of his raids, he always leaves Bakhtiian’s name. Even if Bakhtiian eludes us, someday he’ll come too close to khaja lands and they’ll kill him for us, for revenge.”
“Doroskayev is a fool.” Dmitri’s voice, sharp as the winter wind, froze them all. “He has played into Bakhtiian’s hands, and I, by the gods, intend to tell him so when we meet up with his jahar. Bakhtiian says the khaja are a threat. Doroskayev will stir up a war and then they will be a threat. Don’t you see? Now Bakhtiian can justify his work. Fool and idiot twice over.”
Leotich’s frown had turned into a scowl. “Doroskayev said Bakhtiian had a woman with him. How do we know she isn’t some trick of Bakhtiian’s, left here to throw us off the scent?”
Vasil flushed with anger. “You’re no better than a khaja pig, Leotich. Bakhtiian would never put a woman in such danger.”
“You’d know, wouldn’t you,” snarled Leotich.
Vasil put his hand on his saber. Leotich grinned, almost feral.
“Stop quarreling!” Dmitri’s voice cracked over them. Tess huddled backward, cringing away from their angry voices, not entirely pretending fear. “Doroskayev!” His disgust for his ally was all too evident in his tone. “Since when do we believe everything Doroskayev says? None of his men saw a woman. Whatever else you may think, Leotich, I’ve studied Bakhtiian for years. I know him as I know my own brother, as only one enemy can know another. Bakhtiian would never devise such a ploy as this. Gods, Vasil, see if you can make the woman understand we mean her no harm.”