by Kate Elliott
“Go on.” He shut his eyes.
She eased him down on the trail. With both hands she smoothed his hood back away from his face. Then she took off one of her gloves and slapped him as hard as she could. He sat up. Rain and blood painted a broad red line down his cut cheek. He lifted a hand to his face. Blood dripped from his palm.
“Stand up, damn you!” She got behind him and lifted. He got his good leg under him and came up with such strength that she had to take a step backward to balance. He pushed her away with one arm and hobbled over to Myshla. Blood leaked from a gouge midway down Myshla’s left foreleg.
“Oh, hell.” Tears burned her eyes. “Ilya, you’ll have to ride Kriye.” He did not reply, but with a movement half extraordinary and half ungainly, he got himself on the stallion. Tess mounted her remount bareback, tying Myshla to Kriye’s saddle. They went on.
Partway up the far slope, with wind and rain pouring against them, she had to dismount. Bakhtiian lay bent, almost hugging Kriye’s neck. She tied her mount on behind, put her head down, and led them forward. Water gushed down the path in fresh trails. The hard surface had dissolved into mud. The rain soaked through her gloves, through her trousers. Rivulets trailed down her calves to pool in the toes of her boots.
The pile of stone marking the approach to the cave was half obliterated. Beyond it, rock fell in slick ledges down toward the bottom of the canyon that lay, dim and obscure, far below. Rain pelted at the low bushes, stripping them of their last leaves. Tess got a tighter hold on Kriye, up at his mouth, and started across.
That Kriye was surefooted was the best of her luck. In this direction, the wind whipped her cloak open. Rain drenched the front of her shirt. Convulsive shivers shook her every few steps. She picked her way across the pathless slope of loose rock, slipping once, knee jarring on stone, one hand plunged to above the wrist in a sink of icy water. Kriye held steady. Tess pushed herself up, slipping again, clutching the reins. A steep slope, its carpet of lichen torn into strips by the storm, a rubble-strewn ledge, and at last the broad entry and narrow doorway of the cave.
“The gates of paradise.” Bakhtiian’s voice, faint and far off behind her. Kriye nosed against her, recognizing shelter, and suddenly the rain no longer pounded furiously on her head.
Chapter Eighteen
“We have come into this roofed cavern.”
—EMPEDOCLES OF AGRAGAS
SOMEHOW BAKHTIIAN GOT HIMSELF off Kriye. With cold-numbed fingers, Tess fumbled with the harness. Myshla’s saddle slipped from her hands to land on her feet. Pain lanced up her leg. She led the horses into the rock corral and rubbed them down with the hunter’s undershirt. The gouge on Myshla’s leg did not look too deep. She put salve on it and wrapped it, and left the horses to their forage. There was still enough light to see. She thanked someone for this; whom, she was not sure. From inside, the high whistle of the wind and the rain’s monotonous staccato sounded almost subdued.
Dizziness engulfed her. She sat down. She felt hot and cold together, and her head felt as if it was about to float to the ceiling. A low voice cursed in an undertone to her left. A spark caught, and then flame: Bakhtiian had started a fire. He rubbed at his eyes, pausing in the action to rest his forehead on a palm.
Tess stood, unsteadily, and gathered together the blankets—few enough with this bitter cold. “I’ll make a bed for you,” she said, and carried them over to the couch of branches she had laid earlier in the day.
He glared bleakly at her. “You’ll have a fever by morning. Dry your clothes first.”
She knelt by the fire. The heat steamed off her. A draft carried the smoke up and out, and the fuel burned merrily, snapping and crackling. Then she realized that he was taking his clothes off. She averted her gaze and stared at the horses.
“I said dry your clothes.”
“I am.” She peeled the cold, wet cloth of her red shirt away from her skin, but it reattached itself an instant later, and she flinched.
There was a silence. She did not look to see what his expression was. His red shirt lay on the ground next to the fire. A moment later, his right boot joined it, and then his trousers, laid out to absorb the heat.
“Soerensen.” His voice was hoarse with pain or anger. “This is not a request. Take them off.” A flutter in the air, and a blanket struck her on the side of her face. Forced to turn, she could not help but look at him. He was entirely covered, wrapped quite primly in a blanket, only his feet showing, where they were thrust out close to the flames. His face was white with exhaustion, but he also looked annoyed. Seeing her turn, he pulled an edge of the blanket deliberately across his face, so that he could not see her.
“Oh, God,” sighed Tess. She stripped and wrapped the blanket around herself. It was damp but offered warmth despite that. After a time she actually felt her toes and fingers. The darkness deepened as night came on and the storm continued to rage outside. Inside, fire illuminated them. The gray rock walls of the cave curved up into darkness, their surface rippled and rough as though some ancient chill had frozen them in the midst of movement. The air seemed close and harsh against her throat. Smoke settled in her lungs. The part of her farthest from the fire felt perpetually chilled, so she shifted frequently. She yawned.
“At least they’ll never follow us in this storm,” she mumbled. She glanced up. Bakhtiian lay slumped over his knees.
She got on her trousers and shirt through a combination of habit and fear and circled the fire to kneel beside him. The blanket had fallen down, revealing the strong curve of his shoulders, and as she tugged it up with sudden prudishness, his eyes fluttered and opened. He stared at her, confused. His hands closed on her waist. The blanket slipped to reveal his naked torso. Tess jerked back.
He clutched the blanket and pulled it tight around his chest. “I passed out,” he said.
“Your clothes are dry.” She turned and walked across the cave to converse with the horses. Over the next several minutes he swore three times in a very low voice. The fire flared briefly. She heard him moving, but she did not look. Then it was quiet. Myshla nosed at her ear. She shivered. Rain drummed softly outside. Inside, it was freezing.
“Soerensen.” His tone was sharp.
She turned. The fire was still bright enough that she could see Bakhtiian. He had taken the blankets and cloaks and the hunter’s clothing and layered them on the couch of branches she had laid, and dragged himself on top of them.
He met her eyes. He was flushed, and his mouth was drawn in a severe line. “Come here.”
She did not move. “If you give me the two cloaks, I’ll be warm enough.”
Bakhtiian swallowed. He looked as if his greatest desire at that moment was to pass out again. “I beg pardon for my immodesty, but in a storm like this, in our condition, we need the warmth.”
Tess shivered and rubbed her hands along her arms. It was hard to speak, her lips were so cold. “You’re right, of course. We don’t have any other choice.”
“I would never have said it otherwise,” he replied with considerable reserve.
She kicked the coals of the fire into a smaller circle and stared at them. Finally she walked over to Ilya. “Well,” she said.
He was already lying on his side, left leg resting on the uninjured one. “Share the blankets.” He rested his head on a pillow of dry grass and shut his eyes. Gingerly, she settled down next to him. “No,” he mumbled, “on your side. Back to me. There, so if I shift, my leg won’t move.”
She rolled up on her side, angling her legs so that they supported his. Yawning, blinking back sleep, she tucked the blankets around their legs.
“Lie against me,” he whispered. “I’ll get the last blankets. Gods, woman, you’re shaking with the cold.”
He had folded his arms tight between his chest and her back, but otherwise she lay against him. This couch of branches was not the most comfortable bed she had ever slept on, but he was warm. She heard, like a counterpoint to the furious storm, a distant slide of loo
se rock, the thin crack of breaking branches and, to her left, the slow drip of water pooling somewhere under the overhang. Heat crept into her shoulders and knees and hips. She slept.
Odys had no colors but brown and gray and the faded green of its reeds. It had no heights and no valleys, except in the archipelagoes where no one had any reason to live. It was a drowned world, the sea and the massif almost one, the mud flats interminable, stretching out in all directions from the only slab of ground that stood above the waves, the Oanao Plateau.
But the palace and the port and the city of Odys Central itself had heights and valleys in profusion. Perhaps the architecture here was deliberate, to provide contrast with the terrain; perhaps all Chapalii architecture was this way, on all imperial planets. No human survey had been allowed to ascertain which was true.
And there was color as well. Color especially in the vast greenhouse, acres broad, that jutted off the fourth spoke of the ducal palace. Charles stood among the irises, chatting amiably with his head gardener about economic theory in preindustrial Earth cultures as contrasted to the development of communal theory on pre-space Ophiuchi-Sei-ah-nai.
“Ah, there he is, Jamsetji,” said Charles. “I must go. Come to dinner tonight, and we’ll finish arguing this out.”
Jamsetji tipped his cap back and glanced toward the gazebo half hidden by the wisteria and trailing roses. “That the merchant who speaks Anglais? Cursed trouble, if you ask me.”
“Is this one of your hunches?”
“Might say it was. But that’s not saying you don’t want to get involved with it either.”
“Or that I have any choice,” added Charles. “Listen in.” He strolled off down a winding turf path and came by a circular route to the little gazebo. Hon Echido sat on a wrought iron bench in the gazebo, directing two stewards in the placement of cups and saucers and a kettle and a pitcher on the little round table before him. He saw Charles and stood up, bowing to the precise degree.
Charles acknowledged him and entered, sitting down on the bench opposite. He dabbed sweat from his forehead and accepted a cool drink from one of the stewards. The stewards retreated out of earshot. “Please, Hon Echido, sit down.”
Echido sat. Pink flushed his skin but quickly faded. “You do me a great honor, to meet me here, Tai-en,” he said in Anglais.
“It is a beautiful spot.” Charles gazed for a moment at the far lines of vegetation: the clustering flowers nearby, the vegetable flats, the grain fields, the tasseled rows of corn, the orchards farther off, and the distant line of trees, demarking the park and exercise ground for those humans serving voluntary exile on Odys with Soerensen. Scent hung here like something one could touch, overpowering, yet at the same time reassuring. “Although it’s hot.”
Swathed in robes, Echido looked comfortable. He sipped from his cup, steaming liquid that smelled of cloves and aniseed and tar. “The layout is from a human plan, I see. There is a certain disorder, artful, indeed, but disorder all the same that precludes these grounds being of Chapalii design.”
“You speak Anglais remarkably well, Hon Echido.”
“Your praise is generous, Tai-en.”
“As well as being perfectly true. I have enjoyed our discussions of the various trade and mineral rights available for exploitation in my fief. Yet I feel that for the Keinaba family, whose wealth and acumen is known and admired throughout the Empire, to instruct one of their own to learn Anglais, one as high-ranking, as valuable, and as perceptive as yourself, Hon Echido, means that there is a more delicate matter you wish to broach.”
Echido arranged his hands in Merchant’s Humility. “The Tai-en honors us with his attention to such an insignificant family as our own.”
Since the Keinaba merchant house was one of the wealthiest merchant houses in an empire where wealth counted as a marker of rank, Charles simply waited. In the distance, he could hear Jamsetji singing an afternoon raga in a reedy voice.
The merchant’s skin shaded to violet, the color of mortification, and his fingers altered slightly to add the emphasis of Shame to the arrangement of Humility. “I beg of you, Tai-en, to allow me to explain before you cast me out of your presence, as any lord would feel every right, every compulsion, to do. For time uncounted, for years beyond years, Keinaba has served the Yaotai Kobara princely house and the Tai Kaonobi dukes. We served well and faithfully, as any merchant house ought.”
The violet shade to his skin deepened. “Yet now we are shamed and utterly cast down. I do not presume to know the doings of the Yaochalii-en, may peace be with the Sun’s Child, but the Kobara princely house and the Kaonobi ducal house are no more. Their names have been obliterated from the imperial view, and they are as if they had never been. With a full sense of our disgrace, I mention them now, but for the last time.”
Charles arched one eyebrow. This was, perhaps, the most interesting news he had gotten out of the Chapalii since his own elevation to the nobility. “I am surprised, then, that the name of Keinaba may still be spoken.”
Echido’s skin was all violet by now: deep, and rather attractive against the white-washed lattice walls of the gazebo and the purple flowering wisteria trailing down to the ground. “The Yaochalii himself, may peace surround his name, conducted the investigation into the charges of conspiracy and breach of protocol against the prince whose name may no longer be heard, and although the Tai line was tainted by the stain, it was found that Keinaba had no part in this terrible offense against protocol. The Yaochalii himself, may his name endure forever, granted a dispensation from the rite of extinction to Keinaba, if we were able to find a new lord.”
“Knowing full well no lord or duke would wish to take on the allegiance and obligation of a house so dishonored,” said Charles.
Echido bowed his head in the deeply subservient fashion of the ke, the most menial of all Chapalii classes, who were not even granted the dignity of given or family names.
“Your command of Anglais is not just remarkable, Hon Echido,” Charles continued. “It is astonishing. What offense did the princely house commit?”
Echido’s skin lightened perceptibly to a pale violet. “I do not know. But always, the yaotai, the princes, struggle for the yaochalii’s favor.”
“And only one prince may become emperor.”
“There are protocols to be observed. So there have been for time uncounted, for years beyond years. To stray from the path of right conduct is to dishonor oneself and one’s family.”
“Tell me, Hon Echido, are you certain that the Tai-endi Terese boarded the Oshaki?”
“Quite certain, Tai-en.” Echido’s skin paled to white. His hands shifted, and he regarded Soerensen evenly.
“Why did you not debark from the Oshaki when she reached Odys?”
“I was not allowed to, Tai-en, and when I protested, I was reminded of the disgrace of my family and our lords.”
“Yet you disembarked at Hydri and made your way back to Earth.”
Echido arranged his hands in a way Charles had not seen before. If only Suzanne, or Tess, were here to interpret. “Tai-en, you are the only lord with whom we of Keinaba have any hope of maintaining our house. If we must lose our name and become as the ke, then that is only just. But I told my elders that I would approach the daiga, the human Tai, and so determined, I have now done so. We await your judgment, Tai-en.”
“The dispensation from the emperor?”
“I have a copy, Tai-en. The original rests in his hand, may it hold firm and bring peace to our lands.”
Charles rose. Hon Echido rose like an echo. His skin was pale white, balanced with equal parts of hope and fear.
“Hon Echido.” Charles put his hands together carefully into that arrangement known as Imperial Choice. Then he waited a moment while the scent of roses hung in the air and a bird called piercingly in the silence. “I take you in.”
Echido flushed red first, shading away into the orange of peace. “Tai Charles.” He bowed to the precise degree indicating the fullnes
s of his loyalty. “I am yours.”
“Deliver the dispensation to me tomorrow at the zenith. You may go, Hon Echido.”
Still orange, Echido bowed again and retreated, his stewards flanking him three steps behind. Charles watched them go and then retraced his path. He found Jamsetji kneeling in the dirt, thinning irises.
“What do you think?” Charles asked.
“Cursed trouble, I think. But by damn, Charles, they’re sharp, that merchant house. I think they’ll be worth the trouble.”
“I hope so. And what is the protocol involved in taking over a merchant house from a dishonored duke?”
“Wasn’t done, I’d have thought.”
“I’d have thought, too. This is the kind of thing we must learn.”
“Good thing your sister speaks the language so well.”
“A good thing, indeed. We learn as we go.”
“Damned chameleons,” said Jamsetji, without much heat.
“Dinner tonight, then? Good.” Charles nodded at him and strolled away, taking his time, out through the greenhouse and into the palace, coming at last to his office. He sat down at his desk and considered the mud flats. Then he called up the models by the technician Karima and stared at them, at the lines tracing flight paths and potential landing sites, all in the northern mass of the continent on which Jeds lay far, far to the south and west. He smoothed a hand over the callpad on his desk.
“I want a message, scrambled, to Jeds. To Marco Burckhardt from Charles Soerensen. Marco, I have no further message from Suzanne. It is time to take action on Rhui. Take the emergency kit and the model of landing sites provided by Karima. Sail north. End of message.”
Tess woke from a deep, soundless sleep into total darkness, her first impulse to snuggle back against the cushion of warmth behind her. Then she remembered where she was, and she became aware all at once of several things: his deep, steady breathing and the warmth of his breath on her neck; an arm flung around her, casual as a lover’s embrace; the smell of sweat and horse and lingering blood. She felt unnaturally hot, except for the chill lingering in her toes. Cloth tickled her face. She searched upward with her hand, gently, not wanting to wake him, and found that they were completely covered, toe to head. The horses shifted without nervousness to one side. She heard the hush of rain and the low whine of the wind. She shifted slightly. His arm tightened around her as he sighed in his sleep. His face moved against her hair. She was far more comfortable than she wanted to be, far more comfortable. She fell asleep.