by Kate Elliott
Feodor Grekov made a tiny, strangled noise in his throat. “That’s her, isn’t it?” he asked. “That’s Bakhtiian’s niece.”
Aleksi, with some disappointment, realized that the woman soldier’s coloring was as dark as her uncle’s. Where was Tess?
Six men and one woman, soldiers all, sat under the awning. In front of them, on a single pillow at the edge of the awning, half under the awning, half out under the open sky, sat the man on whom all attention was fixed. Ilyakoria Bakhtiian absorbed the force of their regard effortlessly. And yet, even at such a distance, Aleksi felt Bakhtiian’s presence so strongly that it was as if Bakhtiian was standing right next to him.
“Come on,” he said to Feodor, and he led the other man around the fringe of the assembly. No one paid them any mind. At the tent, etsanas and dyans came up in pairs to pledge their loyalty to Bakhtiian’s war, and to be pledged to, his allegiance to their tribe, in return.
When they were about fifteen paces from the tent, off to the side, Aleksi stopped Feodor with a touch to the elbow, settled down on his haunches, and waited.
Ilyakoria Bakhtiian sat cross-legged on a square pillow embroidered with stylized horses intertwined, galloping, racing. His expression was composed, but intent. One open, one curled into a loose fist, his hands lay as still as if they were carved in stone, in contrast to the restless, passionate intelligence that blazed from his eyes. To his right, propped up on a little stand of wood, rested a carved wooden staff somewhat longer than a man’s arm.
After an endless time, sun and wind beating down on them, only the Ten Eldest Tribes had yet to speak. There was a silence. The tinkling of bells whispered like the murmuring of the gods, watching over them. From somewhere in the middle of the assembly, Aleksi heard the soft droning chant of priests, intoning the endless cycle of the gods: Mother Sun and Father Wind, Aunt Cloud and Uncle Moon, Sister Tent and Brother Sky, Daughter Earth and Son River, Cousin Grass and Cousin Rain. Here and there in the crowd Aleksi identified the glazed stare of a man or a woman who was memorizing each word to pass on to the tribes. Even one of Bakhtiian’s personal commanders, Josef Raevsky, had that vacant expression on his face, although he was a soldier and not a Singer.
Abruptly, Bakhtiian rose.
“Ah,” breathed Aleksi, realizing what Bakhtiian meant to do. He glanced at Feodor, to see if his companion also appreciated the coming gesture on Bakhtiian’s part. But Grekov was staring like any besotted fool straight at Bakhtiian’s niece. The woman shifted slightly and glanced their way, and immediately Grekov’s gaze dropped and he stared down at the ground.
Like an echo of his niece, Bakhtiian shifted his attention from the assembly and turned his head to look straight at Aleksi. Even knowing that most of the audience must have turned as well, to see what was attracting Bakhtiian’s attention, Aleksi could not feel their stares at all. Bakhtiian’s overwhelmed everything else.
Aleksi stood up. He did not fear Bakhtiian, but he respected him, and he was grateful to him for never once objecting to the way in which Aleksi had become a member of his tribe. Aleksi valued Bakhtiian’s protection almost as much as he valued that granted him by his new sister. Bakhtiian gestured with his left hand, and his niece jumped to her feet and walked briskly over to Aleksi. Feodor Grekov climbed hastily to his feet as well. He kept his gaze fixed on his boots.
“Aleksi,” said Nadine by way of greeting, “You’ve come from camp.”
“Sergei Veselov is dead.”
“Ah,” she replied. Then she grinned, and Aleksi grinned back, liking her because he knew that she had the same kind of reckless, bold heart as he did. And because she had never cared one whit that he was an orphan. “Trouble will come of that, I trust.” She sounded satisfied, as if she hoped the trouble would come soon, and in an unexpected and inconvenient manner. “Well met, Feodor,” she added. “I missed you.”
Then she spun and strode back to the tent. She knelt beside one of the seven commanders under the awning. Anton Veselov’s fair complexion flushed red first, and then he paled. Bakhtiian turned right round and considered them, but he said nothing. After a moment, Veselov rose and walked out the side of the awning and around to the semicircle. The youngest etsana shifted to let the soldier sink down beside her. He drew his saber and laid it across his knees: his authority as the new dyan of his tribe.
“The gods will look askance at that,” murmured Feodor.
“There’s no other man in the line to give it to,” said Aleksi, but he also felt uncomfortable, seeing a sister and brother sitting together in authority over a tribe.
Bakhtiian waited for the stir to die down. Aleksi settled back into a crouch to wait, and Feodor slid his gaze back to Nadine Orzhekov. As if she felt his gaze, she looked back over her shoulder at them. A smile—or a smirk—quirked her lips up. Feodor flushed. He collapsed ungracefully beside Aleksi, looking pale and staring hard at his hands. Bakhtiian’s niece sat down in her place and did not look their way again.
The wind blew. The assembly was silent. The sun’s disk slid down toward the western horizon.
A flame winked. Aleksi blinked, staring at the tent, and discovered where Tess had been all along. The tent flap that covered the entrance to the interior had been tied up just enough to let an observer hidden inside watch without being seen. Now, with a lantern lit at her side, Tess Soerensen was visible to him. Her head bent, as if she was tired, or too burdened to bear up any longer. Bakhtiian’s khaja wife, sitting silent in her tent as her husband declared war on all khaja people. Aleksi felt a vise grip his heart, in fear for her, and for himself. What if she left him here, to return to her brother’s lands?
Then, with a grin, he relaxed. Her right arm moved, a slight movement but one he recognized. She was writing. It was a foreign word, and a khaja thing to do, recording words and events with these scrawls she called letters, as if she hadn’t the memory to recall it all properly, in her heart. Which she had often, and cheerfully, admitted that she had not. She glanced up. She was staring at someone: at Ilya Bakhtiian? No.
Aleksi followed the line of her sight and he saw that she was staring at the sky, at, in fact, the only star bright enough to show yet in the twilight sky. She often stared at the heavens that way, as if they held an answer for her, as if she sought something there, like a singer who seeks the heart of a song in the gods’ lands. Oh, yes, he knew she held some secret inside her, a secret that her own husband did not guess at. What it was, he had not yet divined, but Aleksi had spent most of his life watching people, interpreting their slightest action, their simplest words, because until this last four months he had only his powers of observation and his undeniable skill with the saber to keep him alive. Tess Soerensen was not like other people, not like her adopted people the jaran, certainly, but not like the khaja either. She was something altogether different, betraying herself not in obvious, grand ways, but in the subtle, tiny things that most people overlooked.
Tess’s gaze fell from the star and settled on her husband. She loved him in a way that was, perhaps, a bit unseemly for a woman of the tribes. But Tess wasn’t jaran; like Aleksi, she was an outsider. Suddenly she glanced to one side and spotted Aleksi, and grinned, swiftly, reassuringly. And went back to her writing.
“I will protect you,” Aleksi muttered under his breath. He loved her fiercely, as only a brother can love a sister, the oldest bond between a man and a woman and the most important one. She had saved his life, had taken him into her tent, had given him the security he had not had since he was a tiny child. Perhaps her other brother, the khaja prince who lived far to the south, loved her more: Aleksi doubted it. Perhaps Bakhtiian loved her more, but it was pointless to measure oneself against Bakhtiian. Bakhtiian was not like other men. He belonged, not to himself, but to the jaran, to his people, and if his passions were greater than other men’s, so, too, were his burdens and his responsibilities.
Bakhtiian moved. He walked, lithe as any predator, across the gap between his pillow and the semicirc
le of elders, and knelt in front of his aunt.
“With your permission, my aunt,” he said. She did not speak, but simply placed her palm on his hair and withdrew it again. He rose and walked to the other end of the crescent, to kneel before the etsana of the eldest tribe, Elizaveta Sakhalin. He kept his eyes lowered, as befitted a modest man.
The elderly woman regarded him evenly.
At last, Bakhtiian spoke.
“When Mother Sun sent her daughter to the earth, she sent with her ten sisters, and gifted them each with a tent and a name. The eldest was Sakhalin, then Arkhanov, Suvorin, Velinya, Raevsky, Vershinin, Grekov, Fedoseyev, and last the twins, Veselov and Orzhekov. Each sister had ten daughters, and each daughter ten daughters in turn, and thus the tribes of the jaran were born. This summer we begin our ride against the khaja lands.” Now he lifted his eyes to look directly at her, though she was his elder, and a woman. “Of the ten elder tribes, who will come with me?”
Sakhalin rose. She was a tiny woman, well past her childbearing years, and strength radiated from her. She examined her nephew first, then each of the other nine etsanas and their warleaders in turn. Each man went forward and laid his saber in front of Bakhtiian’s pillow. Each woman unbound the horse-tail from her staff and bound it, in turn, to the staff resting beside Bakhtiian’s pillow. Nine sabers, ten horse-tails. The priests’ chanting droned on, a muted counterpoint. The standard atop the tent, a plain gold banner, fluttered wildly.
“Bakhtiian,” Sakhalin said, which meant He-who-has-traveled-far. “All will come.” She raised him up and released him, and he walked back to the pillow and sank down onto it. He took the staff into his hands and held it, weighing its strength. Then he lifted his gaze to the endless blue sky.
Sakhalin turned to survey the assembly. She stretched out her arms to the heavens. “Mother Sun and Father Wind be our witness,” she said, and though she did not seem to raise her voice, it carried effortlessly across the plateau. “All will come.”
A great shout rose, shattering the stillness.
“Ja-tar!” they cried. “To ride!”
Elizaveta Sakhalin sat down, and a hush fell.
Yaroslav Sakhalin rose, dyan of the eldest tribe, and he walked forward and took his saber from the ground and held it out. Its blade winked in the torchlight.
“Where will you lead us?” Sakhalin asked.
Bakhtiian did not answer. His gaze had taken on a distant cast, as if he were looking at something not there, some place, some person, some vision that only he could see.
“Leave him,” said Elizaveta Sakhalin. “We must leave him here to talk to the gods.” It took half the night for them all to negotiate the narrow trail down to the camp below, leaving Bakhtiian alone above.
A day passed and Bakhtiian did not come down from the height.
Neither did he the next day.
But at dawn on the third day, smoke rose from the hill, billowing up into the sky. “He’s offered the tent to the gods,” his aunt said approvingly. In orderly groups, elders and dyans, commanders and etsanas, gathered at the base where the path twisted up the hillside. Aleksi stuck close to Tess and so gained a vantage point right at the front.
Soon enough they saw a single figure, red shirt, black trousers, black boots, a saber swaying at his hips, walking down the path. He gripped the horse-tail staff in his left hand. Seeing the crowd, he halted. First, he sought out his wife’s figure in the throng. He stared at her as if to make sure she was real and not a spirit. Aleksi could not otherwise read Bakhtiian’s expression. But then, Aleksi was never entirely sure of what Bakhtiian felt about anything, as if the sheer force of the emotions welling off Bakhtiian served to hide his true feelings.
At last Bakhtiian lifted his gaze to stare at the assembly spread out, waiting for him. Here at the front, the elders, the women, the commanders, stood and watched. Farther back, many of the young men of the army had already mounted, holding their restless mounts tight reins.
Bakhtiian’s face was lit, illuminated by the gods themselves, or by some trick of the morning sunlight, Aleksi could not be sure which. He raised the horse-tail staff and, with that small gesture, brought silence. Then he drew his saber.
“West,” he said. So calmly did he raise the fire that would scorch the khaja earth. “West to the sea.”
ACT ONE
“HE THAT PLAYS THE king shall be welcome.”
—SHAKESPEARE,
Hamlet
CHAPTER ONE
“Look here my boys, see what a world of ground
Lies westward from the midst of Cancer’s line,
Unto the rising of this earthly globe,
Whereas the sun declining from our sight, Begins the day with our antipodes…
And from th’Antartique Pole, eastward behold
As much more land, which never was descried,
Wherein are rocks of pearl, that shine as bright
As all the lamps that beautify the sky,
And shall I die and this unconquered?”
IN THE HUSH OF AUDIENCE and air alike, Diana moved quietly around to the back of the second balcony to watch the final minutes of the Company’s final performance on Earth. Tamburlaine the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shepheard by his rare and wonderful Conquests became a most puissant and mighty Monarch, And (for his tyranny, and terror in War) was termed, The Scourge of God. Divided into two Tragical Discourses. Somehow, the two plays seemed ironically appropriate for a repertory company that was about to leave the civilized worlds and spend a year on the last planet in known space where humans still lived in ignorance of their space-faring brothers and sisters.
Next week the entire Company, together with Charles Soerensen and his party, would board a spaceliner that would take them to the Delta Pavonis system and the Interdicted world, Rhui. Owen and Ginny had founded the Bharentous Repertory Company in order to give themselves room to experiment with the theater they loved. This would be their greatest experiment fulfilled: bringing theater to unlettered savages who had not the slightest sheen of civilization to pollute their first experience of drama.
Amyras knelt before his dying father Tamburlaine. “Heavens witness me, with what a broken heart And damned spirit I ascend this seat…”
Diana sighed. Hal always overplayed this part, doubtless as revenge against his parents. But it didn’t matter. Gwyn played Tamburlaine so very finely that she never tired of watching him. She leaned her arms along the wood railing that set off the back row of seats from the balcony aisle and watched as Zenocrate’s transparent hearse was rolled in. Tamburlaine’s final speech: she let herself fall into it.
“Now eyes, enjoy thy latest benefit…For Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God must die.” He died. Tears wet Diana’s cheeks. Another set of arms slid onto the railing and, startled, she glanced to that side.
The man standing there smiled at her. He looked familiar and, in any case, she recognized the kind of smile he was giving her. Men enough, and a few women, came to the Green Room to court a pretty, golden-haired ingénue.
Hal said Amyras’s final lines. The play ended. The audience rose, applauding enthusiastically, as the players came forward to make their bows.
“Shouldn’t you be up there?” asked the man casually.
“You’re Marco Burckhardt!” exclaimed Diana. “I thought you looked familiar.”
“Wit as well as beauty.” Marco placed his right hand over his heart and bowed to her. “I hope my reputation has not preceded my name.”
Diana laughed. “‘Come, Sir, you’re our envoy—lead the way, and we’ll precede.’ And it’s appropriate, too, you know. You’ve been on Rhui. You’re coming with us, aren’t you?”
“With Charles,” he agreed. He looked out over the house, over to one of the boxes where a sandy-haired man of middle height stood applauding with his companions and the rest of the audience. As if he were just any other playgoer. Which, of course, he emphatically was not.
Marco swung his gaze back to
Diana, and he smiled, deliberately, invitingly. “But now that I have met you, golden fair, I need no other inducement to travel so far.”
Diana felt a little breathless. In his own way, Marco Burckhardt was a legend. “Is it true that you’ve explored most of the planet? Rhui, that is. All alone, and without any aids whatsoever? Not even a palm slate or a fletchette rifle or any modern weaponry? And by only the primitive transportation they have on planet? That you’ve almost been killed?”
Marco chuckled. “I do carry an emergency transmitter, but I’ve never used it. And this scar—” He took her hand and lifted it to touch, like a caress, the pale line that wrapped halfway around his neck. “You have soft skin,” he murmured.
Diana traced the smooth line of the scar, the sun-roughened skin on either side, and then lowered her hand back to the railing. “Is that the only one?” she asked, a little disappointed. Beyond, on the stage, Gwyn and Anahita—Tamburlaine and Zenocrate—came forward to take their final bows. A few in the audience were already filtering out of their seats. Charles Soerensen and his companions had not moved, which surprised her, since most VIPs left immediately and by a side entrance otherwise reserved for cast and crew.
“Not the only one,” said Marco, “but I can’t show you the others in such a public place.”
Diana smiled. “I’m almost convinced, but not quite. Is that the closest you’ve ever come to death?”
Marco looked away from her, not into the distance, precisely, but at the stage, at Gwyn, in his armor and holding spear and sword, the Scythian shepherd turned conqueror. “No. I could run faster than the people chasing me, that time. The time I came closest to death, there was neither room nor opportunity to run. Did the Company deliberately choose this play as their final performance?”
“What do you mean?” Gwyn and Anahita retreated into the wings, and the audience broke off their applause and burst into a stream of talk and movement. A few young men had rushed down to the stage, to try to bully or plead their way into the back, to court Anahita and Quinn and Oriana—and herself, of course—and a few to court Hyacinth. In his box, Charles Soerensen was entertaining visitors, as if he had the knack of turning any space into a sort of political Green Room. Conversation flowed over and around Diana and Marco, broken into snippets and phrases and abrupt scenes.