by Kate Elliott
Except for Fedya. But for Fedya, it had proved fatal. With a sigh, Tess sat up. She braided her hair, pinned the braid atop her head, and went swimming. The water felt cool and soft against her skin. The sun warmed her face. She did not go back to camp until evening.
In the morning she rode out with Bakhtiian. Ahead, dark stained the land, and she asked him what it was.
“Don-usbekh. The dark wood. Days of it, east and west, and south to the mountains. The khaja say it is haunted.” He smiled, looking at her to see what her reaction would be.
“Haunted by what?” she asked, not quite laughing.
He shrugged. “The khaja fear many things, not least their own nightmares. I do not know.”
“Do you think it is haunted?”
“I think that no khaja will live there. But there’s an old road that runs through it, so once people must not have feared it as they do now.”
An old road. “Will we follow this old road?”
“It’s the only track through. See there—that broken pillar. We’ll follow the road from there.”
But despite her fears—or hopes—the old road proved to be just that—an old road. Ancient, stone paved, half grown over in spots, it looked exactly like what she guessed it must be: some relic from an old empire, thrown across the vast land.
“Perhaps the people who built this also built the great temple on the plains,” she said to Bakhtiian as they waited in the first outlying tendril of the forest for the jahar to catch up with them.
“Perhaps they did.”
She spotted the first ranks of the jahar in the distance, tiny figures moving closer. “Bakhtiian, if Mikhailov’s men could find you on the plain, aren’t you worried that they might find you more easily on a road like this? We’ll be trapped on it, on a single road surrounded by trees.”
“Mikhailov, whatever else he may be, is not fool enough to follow us into khaja lands. For that is what lies beyond the don-usbekh.”
“Then why are we going?”
Bakhtiian’s stallion shifted beneath him. Bakhtiian stroked the black’s neck with affection. “For more of these horses, I would risk much more than this.”
And one hundred more of these horses he would have, should they reach the end of this journey. “Well,” said Tess, but nothing more. The jahar arrived then. Bakhtiian sent Josef and Tasha and Niko back to cover their rear, and he rode ahead with Tess, leaving the main group to ride at their leisure in between.
Soon enough the close ranks of trees began to seem oppressive to her even while she told herself that this forest was far more open than many. A dank, rotting scent hung in the air. So much vegetation, falling in and covering itself, and no wind to sweep the air clear. Even the colors turned somber and dense. Now and then an animal that had ventured too close to the road would flee into the forest, a trail of sound marking its path. It was never entirely still. Noise scattered out from the undergrowth, and rodents chittered and birds called from the branches above. The light bled down in patches and stripes so that day never came completely and night came without even the grace of stars.
That night a storm blew down from the mountains. The constant drumming of rain and the patter of falling leaves and twigs disturbed her sleep as she tried to make herself comfortable inside her tent. It was a relief to ride the next morning, although the trees dripped on them all that day and the day after. By the third morning, the forest had leached itself dry in the warm summer air, though the undergrowth looked greener for the drenching. They rode on, having to cut away growth in some places to clear the road, and Tess began to wonder if the forest would ever end.
“I’ve never seen Ilya so cheerful,” said Yuri one evening as he helped Tess set up her tent. Because the trees grew up to the very edge of the road, indeed overgrew the road in many areas, the jahar set up camp on the road itself at night. “He must smile once a day now, and he never smiled but once a month before. What do you two do while you’re riding?”
“We talk, Yuri.”
He chuckled and sat down next to her tent, fishing in his saddlebags for his spare shirt and his embroidery needles and thread. “Do you want to try again?”
“And ruin your shirt? No, thank you.”
“Well, it’s true women have little hand for embroidery. But you’ve taken to saber well enough.” He threaded a needle with a thick golden thread and began to embroider golden spirals through the thick black pattern that textured his sleeves. “I thought you might take to this if you tried it again.”
“Yuri, I’m sore from my saber lesson tonight. May I just lie here for a while and watch you?”
“If you think this stone is a comfortable bed, then please, lie there as long as you wish.”
She laughed. It was not quite dark yet, and a fire built within a ring of stones some ten paces away gave light as well. Here, in this deserted place, game was plentiful and easy to kill, and deadwood for smoking the meat was in vast supply. Bakhtiian had decided to halt for a few days, to hunt, to graze the horses in nearby meadows, to rest. “I’m teaching him some of the songs I know,” Tess said at last.
“Who? Oh, Ilya.”
“And he’s teaching me jaran songs. Only decent ones, of course.”
“My dear sister,” said Yuri primly, “Bakhtiian would never think to teach a woman any songs but those that it is decent for her to know.”
“Unlike some I know.”
Instead of replying, he squinted at his work in the inadequate light. Kirill and Mikhal and a few of the other young men were gambling. Farther on, the conical tents of the Chapalii thrust up among the trees, like pale ghosts lost in the leaves.
“And Newton,” she said.
“Newton? Who is Newton?”
“Oh, a philosopher. Not just him, but Casiara and Narronias and—and the work of many others.”
“Gods. Sometimes I’m amazed that Ilya ever came back from Jeds. How he loves khaja learning.”
“You’re right,” she said, realizing that it was true. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” It had not occurred to her before that there might be some link between his relentless ambitions and the constant, restless inquisitiveness of his mind. Just as she could not resist a new language, he could not resist a new philosopher. If she mentioned a name he did not know, he demanded that she recite every scrap of writing she could remember, a feat she usually accomplished by broad paraphrasing since she had not his training in wholesale memorization. He loved to quibble over the smallest point and discuss the large ones to the finest detail. The scope of her knowledge, fostered by a decade in the schools of a stellar empire, was balanced by his experience, his impressive memory, his capacity to assimilate new information, and his astuteness; she always had to be careful of what she said. “I guess I always thought,” she said, discovering that Yuri was watching her curiously, as if wondering where she had gone, “that a man with ambitions of conquest would be too single-minded to aspire to be a philosopher as well.”
“Oh, I don’t think Ilya wants to be a philosopher,” said Yuri lightly. He yawned, laying down his shirt, and let a hand rest on Tess’s back. “He just doesn’t like other people knowing something he doesn’t.”
Tess laughed. “That’s unkind, Yuri.”
“Do you think so? I don’t. Ilya has no one to answer to. That means he must know everything. It would be enough to drive me mad. I think it’s the reason Ilya is so harsh.”
“Harsh? Maybe at first, but not lately—” She grinned. “With Kirill, yes.”
“Well, Kirill deserves it.”
“No, he doesn’t!” She laughed again. “Maybe. But I like him. He’s—he’s Kirill. And you must admit that he’s the only one of you who has the courage to make fun of Ilya at all.”
“He’s the only one stupid enough to do it in front of him.”
“He’s the only one who doesn’t take Ilya as seriously as Ilya takes himself.”
Yuri picked up his embroidery. “I resent that. You never saw Ilya at hi
s worst. When the mood was on him, he would come into camp and, like that, everyone walked everywhere on their toes to avoid his notice.”
Tess giggled.
“He hasn’t been bad at all this trip. I think he likes you.”
“Likes me?” She found a perceptible crack in the stone fitting and traced it out as far as her hand could reach.
Yuri rubbed the light shadow of beard on his chin. “Did I leave my razor with you?” he asked, and then he went on, not waiting for her reply. “He likes Niko. I think he likes Vladimir, or at least is fond of him, and I know he likes Josef and Tasha and my mother, and Sonia, although he would never admit he likes Sonia. But you can never be sure who else he likes. I don’t even know if he likes me, but I think he likes you.”
“Oh.” Tess brushed dirt out of the crack with her middle finger. “I like him. He’s easy to talk to.”
Now Yuri laughed. “If I’d heard anyone say that a year ago, I would have thought they were as mad as Yevich the Weaver.”
“Who is Yevich the Weaver?”
“You don’t know the story of Yevich the Weaver? By the gods, that will have to be settled.”
The story of Yevich the Weaver took four evenings to tell as told by Josef, the best tale-teller in the jahar now that they no longer had Fedya to sing tales for them. By the time Yevich had gone mad twice and finally settled his score with the wind-maiden and her four brothers, they had ample provisions. They rode on and passed out of the tangled dark wood and into the feet of the mountains.
They traveled for a day up a series of terraces of scrubby grass linked by ridges of rock. The road had vanished entirely, and the ridges proved so devoid of paths that the riders were forced to dismount and lead their horses up each one. Now and again a drying riverbed offered easier passage and even water as they climbed from level to level through the ridges, until the last terrace spread out like a sea before them, a broad plateau brought up short by the mountains.
Tess stared. The air was so clear that it seemed only a thin sheet of glass between her and the mountains, which were surely close enough for her to touch, and yet so distant, lacking any detail, that their size alone awed her.
“Those are the children,” said Bakhtiian, watching her. “The grandparents are farther in. It’s said they are so high that one cannot see their tops.”
“That would depend on where you were standing.” She grinned. “Rather like a man’s reputation, don’t you think?”
“So awesome from a distance, so meager up close?”
“I thought it was the other way around. Small and insignificant from far off, but massive at its base.”
“Weighed down by its own importance.”
“A heavy burden,” said Tess.
“Only to the man who has had it forced on him,” said Bakhtiian, suddenly serious. “Fame is a light and welcome burden to the man who picks it up of his own will.”
“I don’t agree. Fame becomes a heavy burden either way.”
Bakhtiian raised one hand, like a teacher making a point. “But by choosing to carry it—Dismount!” She dismounted almost as quickly as he did. “Damn,” he said to himself, and then to Tess, “Follow.” A spur of rock jutted up, a solitary sentinel of the ridges that fell away behind it. Bushes and clinging grass patched the dark surface. They halted at its base. “Stir up the ground.”
He took the horses around the rock while Tess trampled grass and scuffed dirt. “Good enough,” he said, returning without the horses. He studied the spur for a moment and, choosing a path, began to climb.
Tess scrambled after him, her feet slipping on loose pebbles, her hands grabbing bare knobs of stone and long, sinuous roots. He halted at a small ledge, screened by bushes, and pulled Tess up after him, leaving his hand on her arm when she stood beside him. She could feel every point of pressure, however light, where his fingers touched her skin.
“You may as well sit, if you wish,” he said. “They may not have seen us, but I know they saw the horses. This rock is the only cover, unless we wanted to risk breaking our necks by running down into the rough. Two against—I’d guess forty-two. We should go to ground.”
She took the hint and sat. His hand released her, leaving a lingering tingle on her arm where he had held her. He remained standing.
“Who?” Tess asked. “Another jahar? I didn’t see them.”
“Another jahar, yes—” He hesitated, absently staring at his hand. “And no.”
“If you thought these men really wanted to kill you, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Bakhtiian transferred his attention from his hand to the plateau. Grass and mountains, nothing else. “I just want to look at them before we exchange pleasantries.”
“The weather is fine today, and my what a lovely horse that is?”
He looked down at her and smiled, a smile that lit the corners of his eyes. “The jaran have a tale of a woman who brought misfortune to her tribe because she was too curious.”
She tilted her head. “Is that so? We have a story something like that.”
“If two old moral tales won’t teach you, I’ll never be able to. What was the woman’s name?”
“Pandora.”
“Pandora. That’s prettier than the woman’s name in our story: Vlatagrebi.”
“Poor thing, saddled with a bad reputation and a name like that.”
“Then you’d rather be called Pandora than Vlatagrebi?”
“By whom?”
Bakhtiian leaned back against the rock face. A spray of dirt skidded down the face to settle behind his boots. He folded his arms over his chest. “By me. It’s only fitting.”
“We have a saying in our land: ‘the pot calling the kettle black.’”
“The pot calls—Shameless woman. If I were a brave man I’d—” He checked himself.
“You’d what?”
“I take it back. I wouldn’t.”
“Who are they, Ilya?”
It took him a moment to answer because the smile that crept onto his face was the kind that arrives slowly and leaves reluctantly. “I surrender.” He put his hands against the rock by his shoulders, palms up and open. “Arenabekh. The black riders.”
“I saw nothing.”
“You weren’t looking. You were staring at the mountains.”
“How could you tell they were these—arenabekh?”
“All in black.”
“Is this a particular tribe?”
The wind rolled a single wilted leaf past his boot. “They have no tribe.”
“No tribe? And they’re riding, so they must all be men.”
“They have renounced tribe, kin, women, any ties to order or custom or family.”
“I thought my abstainers were severe.”
“They don’t necessarily abstain.”
“They take lovers amongst themselves?”
He colored slightly. “This is not a fit subject for a man and a woman to discuss.”
“But I’m khaja. And fully as curious as you are.”
He smiled. “So you are. Well, then, some do. Not all. Some believe that our life now is not the life the gods gave us to live, so they live as it is said jaran lived in the early days.”
“Without women? How could there be jaran now if that was so?”
“Exactly. And how are we to know how the jaran lived in the early days, having only old stories to tell us, which may have been changed in the telling? Do you see them now? Don’t shift forward. They’re sharp-eyed, these demons.”
The screen of bushes and hedge concealed them, but eventually she got a view of the approaching riders through a gap in the shrubbery. Bakhtiian hummed something under his breath, fingering the hilt of his saber. She felt his excitement, and it made her nervous; she had seen that same excitement in him before—for battle.
She wished now that she was not sitting because it made her feel vulnerable, unable to move quickly, but she could not stand up now. The black riders rode straight for the spur of rock.<
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“God,” whispered Tess as they neared. “They look grimmer than you ever did.” Because she had not meant to say it aloud, she looked up. He glanced down, a glint of amusement in his eyes, and put two fingers to his lips.
They pulled up a stone’s toss away, suspicious and watchful. The dull coats of their horses, the dourness of their expressions and, most of all, the unvarying black of their dress made them cheerless and forbidding. No embroidery decorated their shirts. None wore jewelry.
“A quick night’s camp,” said one in a strong dialect.
If Tess had thought the jaran men of her acquaintance hard, she had no word for these. One had no right arm, only a loose, empty sleeve that stirred restlessly in the breeze. Next to him a younger man, beardless and rosy-cheeked, examined the rock with one clear eye; his other eye was scarred shut, puckered and white. These men hunted, they had their quarry trapped, and they knew it. She bit her lip to stop herself breathing through her mouth, as if even that faint sound might alert them to her presence.
“The fox has gone to the hill,” said a bearded fellow with a haughty forehead and cruel eyes. His blond hair fell in a long braid to his waist.
“Patience, Sergi,” said the one with the dialect, a black-haired man who had possibly been given a frown at birth and had been unable to remove it. A tic, almost hidden in his rough beard, disturbed his right cheek. “You three check around the rock.”
The three brought back the two horses. Tess saw how all the riders stared at the stallion and the mare, two creatures so obviously superior in line and breeding to their own animals that it was rather like standing a man of the jaran dressed in all his finery next to an ape dressed in skins. Bakhtiian stood utterly still, his eyes narrowed, his expression more anticipatory than apprehensive. How easily he could blend into the group of men below. Then, startling her with the suddenness of his movement, he stepped out from behind the screen of bushes to stand in full view of the jahar below, but he glanced once swiftly back at her as he did so.