The Novels of the Jaran

by Kate Elliott

  “Women!” Vasil exclaimed.

  “We had to bring in the archers. It would have been slaughter otherwise.”

  “Did my dear sister fight, then? She’s been mad for it, ever since that skirmish.”

  Ilya laughed harshly. “Gods, she’ll make a commander yet. She’s a terror on the field.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “A better fighter than you.”

  “She’s a damned sight more vicious than I am. As you know.”

  Ilya looked up at him. Was there the briefest softening of his expression? Tess could not be sure. “Vasil, you know damn well you can’t be found here.”

  Vasil crouched, so they were all on a level. “Why not? You were gone, Tess was here. Why shouldn’t I have come in?”

  Ilya rounded on Tess. “Did you invite him? Did you? I’m not sharing you with him!”

  “Ilya, why did you get drunk?” she asked, stupidly stuck on this one point.

  He jerked his head away from her and stared at the far wall.

  “Because he’s mad at you,” said Vasil. “And anyway, isn’t an ugly battle excuse enough to get drunk?”

  “Aren’t all battles ugly?” Tess demanded.

  “There were children in that citadel,” said Ilya under his breath. “Children. They slaughtered them, rather than let them fall into our hands. Gods. There was a baby, a tiny baby. And a pregnant woman.” He covered his face with his hands. He shuddered.

  “Oh, Ilya.” Tess embraced him. The blanket fell down from her as she pressed against him. Almost as quickly, Vasil moved and crouched down on his other side, running a hand up Ilya’s arm, up his shoulder and neck, up to the luxuriant mass of his dark hair.

  “No,” said Ilya. But he did not move away.

  “You do love him,” said Tess, amazed by this revelation. Amazed that, faced with the truth, it no longer frightened her.

  “You don’t understand,” Ilya said into his hands. “I love you, Tess.”

  “I know you love me,” Tess said. And he trusted her. He trusted her to see this. She felt such a rush of confidence and joy that he must have felt it as well, because he sighed audibly and turned his face into her hair.

  So close, across Ilya’s body, Vasil smiled at her, and she was struck by a second revelation—that she desired him in part because Ilya desired him. “You see,” Vasil said to her, “how much you and I are alike. I love him. You love him.”

  “And he is gods-touched by a vision in his heart. This is all very well, Vasil, but the bitter truth is that no matter how he feels, he already chose his vision over you.”

  “But I’m a respectable married man, now,” said Vasil. “So is he. There’s no reason we can’t live in the same camp. Not any more.”

  “Stop discussing me as if I’m not here,” said Ilya into Tess’s hair. “Given the choice, you must know that I’d choose Tess over you without hesitation.”

  “Did I ask you to make a choice?” asked Vasil.

  Ilya went quite still.

  “What are you suggesting, Vasil?” Tess asked, astonished and appalled and abruptly intrigued.

  Vasil leaned close across Ilya and kissed her. It was a lingering kiss, and his hand slid caressingly up her bare back—except it wasn’t Vasil’s hand, there, on her back. It was Ilya’s.

  “Do you want me to leave?” Vasil murmured.

  “No,” said Tess, surprising herself, because it was the truth. Ilya said nothing. Neither did he move away from them. They took his silence for assent.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  THE MONITOR IMPLANTED IN David’s ear buzzed, stirring him out of his drowsy lassitude. The candle had burned out, leaving the little room in darkness. Even the high window, paned with a transparent substance stronger than glass, let through only the light of stars, not enough to illuminate anything more than dark shapes against darker background. The dark of the moon.

  “Oh, hell, I’ve got to go,” he said, sitting up.

  Nadine yawned and pulled her legs up so that he could scoot past her. “Umm,” she said, and fell silent, undisturbed by his nocturnal comings and goings. She ought to be used to them by now, he thought, glancing back at her as he struggled to get his clothes on. He swore as he got his trousers tangled up. He shook them free and tried again.

  “David.” He felt more than saw that she raised herself on an elbow to peer at him. “You aren’t married. Do people think you ought to be?”

  “No. I don’t think it’s any of their business, anyway. Do people think you ought to be married?”

  “Of course.” Her tone was caustic. “I even have a suitor, who would mark me in a moment if he didn’t know that I’d cut him to ribbons if he tried.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  She shrugged. “I like Feodor well enough. He’s a pleasant lover. But he doesn’t care about Jeds or anything I learned there. He doesn’t care about maps. He doesn’t wonder about anything, he just rides in his uncle’s jahar and acquits himself well in battle, and is a good son to his mother and a good brother to his two sisters. He doesn’t have any imagination, David!”

  “And you have enough for two people. A trait I’m rather fond of.” She smiled at him, and David grinned back. It was one of her great charms: he was fond of her, and she of him, and yet there was no possessiveness in their relationship. They shared what they shared while they shared it. Beyond that, they had their own lives. “But if you don’t want him, then what is there for people to complain of in your behavior?”

  Her voice darkened to match the room. “Because women aren’t supposed to have any choice in marriage. Because every woman ought to be married, so that she can have children.”

  “Do you want children?” He gave up trying to get his trousers on standing up because he couldn’t manage to keep his balance. He sat down and slid them on one leg at a time.

  “No. I want to ride.”

  “With the army?”

  “I like the army. I’m a good commander, too. I’d rather explore, though, like Marco.”

  “Like Marco!” He chuckled and stood up, fastening his belt on. “Yes, you and Marco would make a good team.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I admire him. He reminds me of Josef Raevsky, but perhaps you don’t know Josef.”

  “No, I’m sorry. Listen, Dina, I have to go.”

  “Why? I know the prince is expecting a party to arrive from the coast, but surely they won’t arrive until daylight. How can you know which day they’ll arrive, anyway?”

  David sighed. He was growing annoyed with this constant slippery sliding he had to engage in to get around her tireless, curious questioning. It would have been easier if he’d never taken up with her, but he liked her, damn it, and as the days passed he found his irritation being directed more and more at Charles. Charles should never have proclaimed the interdiction if he didn’t mean to hold to it. Damned hypocrite. It wasn’t Charles who had to dance the delicate dance of truth and lie to avoid giving away privileged information, to avoid the betraying slip of the tongue, to avoid telling this stubborn, affectionate spitfire that her beloved uncle was unconscious and possibly dying.

  “I’m sorry.” Nadine lay back down. “It’s none of my business.”

  Which only made him feel worse. He went back and kissed her, and left, thankful that she was both sensible and understanding. He padded down the hallway to Charles’s room. The door was latched shut. He knocked twice, a pause, and twice more. Jo opened the door. He slipped inside. Inside, Cara Hierakis’s image stared at him without seeing him.

  “—preliminary signs show that he’s no worse for the wear. He’s weak, as might be expected after almost sixteen days in a coma, and he’s a damned difficult convalescent, if you ask me, but I don’t at this time expect a relapse.”

  “How is Tess?” asked Charles.

  “She’s ecstatic. Hello, David.” The image raised its eyebrows and glanced behind itself, toward nothing they could see. “Her health is fine. I m
ust go.”

  “Off here,” said Charles. The image snapped and dissipated into nothing. A cold light illuminated the room, a steady gleam that seemed alien to David’s eyes after the flickering lantern light he was growing used to.

  “What happened?” David asked.

  “Bakhtiian came out of the coma and seems fine, if weak.”

  David put a hand to his chest. He felt—relieved, and was surprised to find himself so happy. Certainly he had no reason to care about Bakhtiian and perhaps good reason to wish him dead. “That’s good news to give to Nadine,” he began, and then remembered that Nadine didn’t know that her uncle had even been in a coma.

  “We’ve got the landing scheduled for three hours from now,” said Charles, dismissing the momentous news as if it was of trivial importance. “We’ll split the party. Marco and Rajiv and Jo to the landing site. Marco, you’ll stay with the shuttle for as long as they stay on-site. Rajiv and Jo will escort the technicians back here. David, you’ll run interference with the jaran, since you have the best excuse to be able to speak khush well. Did you come up with any ideas on keeping them out of the way?”

  David sighed. “I’ll run a survey tomorrow of the north and west walls and gardens, a real old-fashioned kind with string and survey markers, and I’ll ask for help. I can use quite a few of them doing that, and perhaps keep the rest entertained.”

  “Maggie?” Soerensen asked.

  “Mother Avdotya has already agreed to let me observe the worship services and also I have her and a few of the older priests willing to let me interview them tomorrow about their myths and the history of the palace as they know it. I’ll make it all last as long as possible.”

  “That will have to do. I’m most concerned about Mother Avdotya and Nadine Orzhekov, since they seem consistently to be the ones who are most likely to notice anomalies in our behavior. Do your best.”

  “Nadine will be interested in survey methods,” said David. He glanced at Marco, who lounged casually against one wall, arms crossed on his chest. “She said she admires you, Marco, because you’re an explorer.”

  Marco chuckled. “What? Does she want to join me?”

  “Yes. I rather think she would, if she could.”

  Marco shrugged. “And why not? She’s quick on her feet, a better fighter than I am, smart, and curious.” He cast an inquiring glance toward Charles. “Why not?”

  “One bridge at a time,” said Charles. “She is also Bakhtiian’s niece, and I believe his closest living relative. She has a duty to him.”

  “A woman’s duty in this kind of culture,” said Maggie, “is usually to get married and produce heirs. Neither of which I see her doing. I like her. I wish we could take her back with us.”

  The comment produced silence that was sudden and uncomfortable.

  “Fair trade,” said Marco with a twist of his lips that wasn’t quite a smile. “The sister for the niece.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Charles smoothly. “Now. You’d better go. You’ve got a long ride, and it’s dark out there.”

  Rajiv gathered up his hemi-slate and the six long tube-lights they were going to use for trail lights and landing markers. Marco shrugged on his cape. Jo pulled a second, heavier tunic on over her clothing and belted it at her waist. Without further ado, they left. Maggie went with them, to escort them down to the stables and run interference, as Charles called it, in case anyone came investigating this nocturnal exodus.

  “Is there a problem, David?” Charles asked abruptly.

  “A problem?” The question took David aback.

  Charles sat down on his bed and considered David with that level, bland gaze that had come to characterize him. However busy he might be, however many pans he might have frying in the fire, he never did two things at once. If he spoke to a person, singling that person out, then all his attention focused on the conversation. Even his hands sat at rest, folded neatly in his lap. David knew how deceptively mild his expression was.

  “You’re upset about something,” said Charles, “and I don’t keep sycophants around because they don’t do me any good.”

  Thus neatly forcing David to speak his mind, even if he was reluctant to. “It’s this damned interdiction. It’s hypocrisy and you know it. I’m tired of lying to Nadine—well, to all of them, if it comes to that, but to her in particular. Don’t you think they know we’re holding things back? Aren’t we harming them more by being here than—?”

  “Than if we hadn’t come at all? No doubt about that. But Tess came here, and so here we are. Think of it as damage control.”

  “It’s not damage control,” said David. “Oh, Goddess, you mean that message that came in this morning.”

  “About the actor running away? Yes, in part that.”

  “What are you going to do about him?”

  “Rajiv is hunting down the code on that transmitter. We’ll likely get a fix on him within five or ten days. If he’s still alive by then.”

  “You’re cool about it.”

  “David, you know me better than that.”

  “You’ve changed, Charles. I say that as one of your two oldest friends.”

  Charles regarded him evenly. “What choice? No choice. I do what I must.” He gave a short laugh and grinned, looking for an instant so much like the young man David had met at university that David might almost have thought they were the same person again, and that the gulf that had grown between the old Charles and the new one had suddenly closed. “Bakhtiian confided in me before we left the army that he couldn’t tell what he could and couldn’t believe out of all the things Tess had told him.”

  “If he expected you to enlighten him, then I’m sure he was disappointed.”

  “You are angry.”

  “It’s disrespectful, beyond anything else,” said David. “Treating them like children—as if we know better, as if we have to protect them.”

  “The interdiction did protect them.”

  David sank down into the single chair and rested his forehead on a palm. “Which is true. Oh, hell, Charles, it’s just an untenable situation.”

  “Yes,” Charles agreed without visible emotion. “Remember as well, David, that this is the only planet we have any real control over, because of that interdiction. Chapalii can’t come here without my permission—or, if they do, as that party that Tess fell in with did, they must do it covertly. We can’t afford to lose that power. Cara can run her lab in Jeds precisely because the Chapalii can’t investigate it at their whim. This is our—our safe-house. Our priest hole. Our hideaway. Not to mention the entire philosophical issue of whether it would be ethical to ram our culture and technology down their throats in the name of progress. So it’s to my advantage to keep the interdiction in force.”

  “Even if you break it yourself.”

  “Even so. I’m not a saint, David.”

  “However much you try to be?”

  Charles chuckled, a refreshingly and reassuringly human sound. “I only try to be because I know that whatever I do wrong will come back to haunt me tenfold. I don’t like this situation any better than you do. If we took Tess away, we’d be quit of it.”

  David lifted his head off his hand. “Would you force her to go? Could you?”

  “Of course I could. I control this planet, David. Would I?” He thought about it. The little room the priests had given him to sleep in mirrored him in many ways: simple, plain, without obvious character. But David knew that behind the plain whitewashed walls ran a complex network of filaments and power webs and ceramic tiling for strength and the Chapalii alone knew what other technological miracles and contrivances, hidden from sight but always present, there where they couldn’t be seen. “I don’t know. I haven’t been forced to make that decision yet.”

  “Goddess help them both when you do.”

  “Both?” asked Charles.

  “Both Tess and Bakhtiian. And his people. And the countries in the path of his conquest. He’s a madman. You could stop him.”<
br />
  “I could kill him physically. I could tell him, show him, the truth, which Tess believes would kill him spiritually. What’s so strange about him, though? Earth has had such men in her past.”

  “Does that make it right? Knowing we could intervene?”

  “I don’t know. Is intervening right? Will it make any difference in the long run? Does this argument have anywhere to go except around in circles? He’s better than most, David. He thinks, he’s open-minded and curious, he cares about law and legal precedence, and I believe he cares enough about what Tess thinks of him that he’ll temper brutality with mercy.”

  “Like that man he executed for rape? He did it himself, and he didn’t look one whit remorseful about the act to me.”

  “Who knows? Perhaps killing him on the spot like that was a merciful punishment, compared to what he might have received.”

  “Without a trial?” David demanded.

  “He had a confession. But I can’t help thinking about the actor. Three of them alone in hostile territory.”

  “And horse-stealers, too. That must be punishable by death, under nomad law.”

  “Do you think their deaths will be easy, or quick?” Charles asked.

  “Don’t forget, the actor has a weapon with him—one of our weapons. And other equipment. That gives him an advantage.”

  “And it breaks the interdiction in exactly the way I did not want it broken,” Charles added.

  “In fact, it might well be easier if the poor boy did die, and his companions with him.”

  “It might well. But then there’d be all that equipment out there to be recovered. Either way…” Charles shrugged.

  David felt suddenly heartened. He chuckled. “You know, Charles, I don’t envy you. I’m perfectly happy to be sitting here, and you sitting there.”

  Charles’s pale blue gaze met David’s brown one. His lips quirked up. “As well you might be. Now, I’m going to get some sleep.”

  David realized that that was as close to a confession of the burdens weighing on him as Charles was ever likely to give him, or to give anyone. Perhaps Charles could no longer afford to be vulnerable. Perhaps Charles regretted what he had lost but knew well enough that the loss was permanent, that there was nothing of his old self that could be recovered, even if he wanted to.