The Novels of the Jaran

by Kate Elliott

  It worked. Diana knew it worked. They all knew it had worked. At the end, sweating and exhausted and for once sated, she took Gwyn’s hand—he had played the soldier and lover Simon—and, with the lifelike doll that represented the child tucked in the crook of her other arm, she, and he, and the others, took a single bow, which was all that they needed to take, or that the audience understood. Straightening, she flashed a grin at Gwyn and he smiled back, wiping sweat from his forehead. She turned to look toward Arina, who had watched it all from a wagon over to one side, and discovered that Vasil had dismounted to stand next to his cousin and was regarding Diana, and the stage, with uncomfortably intent interest.

  “You’ve made a conquest, Di,” said Gwyn in an undertone as he turned to go back to the dressing room and strip his makeup off.

  “I hope not. Wait for me.” Veselov bothered her. One of the things she so liked about Gwyn was that when he was offstage, he was off; he did not drag the one world into the other. She knew she emoted offstage, at times, but it wasn’t a habit she wanted to foster in herself, and she usually only did it when the person she was with seemed to expect it of her. A professional knew how to separate work and life. But Veselov was always on, always aware, always projecting. The Goddess knew, it ought to be tiring, going on like that all day and presumably all night. She went with Gwyn back to the awning and wiped her face clean. They took down the stage. By the time they got the wagons loaded, the afternoon had mostly passed, and the marketplace lay quiet and almost empty. They started back.

  “I liked that story,” said Arina. “It was true, what the judge did, knowing which woman was the true mother. But I can tell it’s a khaja story.”

  “How?”

  “Well, it isn’t a man’s part to make such a judgment. That is women’s business.”

  “But we changed it,” protested Diana, “when we did it at the camp. We made Azdak into an etsana.”

  “I didn’t see that.” Arina smiled, looking ahead, and lifted a hand to greet a rider. “Here is Vasil.”

  Vasil reined his horse in beside them, on Diana’s side of the wagon. “Why is it I’ve seen none of these songs of yours before?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. We’ve—sung—them many times, and we—practice—every night, in our encampment.” She could think of no words for “perform” and “rehearse” in khush.

  Veselov did not look at her directly, and yet Diana felt his attention on her as much as if he had been staring soulfully into her eyes like a besotted lover. She shifted on the hard wooden seat. He sat a horse well, and his hands were light and casual and yet masterful on the reins. For an instant, she wondered what he would be like in bed; His lips twitched up into a bare, confiding smile, as if he had read her thoughts and promised as much as she could wish for, and more.

  “I would like to see more,” he said, but did he mean more plays or more of her? “You become the woman in the song, yet you remain yourself.”

  “Yes,” said Diana, surprised, because Anatoly had yet to grasp the concept of acting.

  A rider called to Vasil from farther down the line, and Veselov excused himself and rode away.

  Arina coughed into one hand. “Although he is my cousin,” she said, “and I love him dearly, I would recommend to you, Diana, that you be wary of him.”

  “I’m married, after all!”

  “What has that to do with anything?”

  Diana changed the subject, and they discussed other things until they got back to camp at dusk. Where Kirill waited. He came up to them immediately, Lavrenti nestled on his good arm, his other arm hanging free for once. Diana could see the fingers on his withered hand twitching and curling, but without much force or coordination.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Diana to Kirill as Arina climbed down, “I must return to our camp and I just wanted to know … is there any word of my husband?”

  “He wasn’t with his uncle,” Kirill assured her.

  “Oh, then he’s at the besieged city?” Karkand, it was called, the seat of the Habakar kings.

  Kirill shook his head. “No. Bakhtiian sent him to capture the Habakar king, who fled on beyond his city.”

  “I don’t understand. Anatoly went after him?”

  “Yes, with a picked troop of five thousand riders.”

  “But where did the king flee to?”

  Kirill shrugged. He glanced at his wife, as if for help. “To the lands beyond, I suppose.”

  “Out ahead of his uncle’s army?” Diana demanded. “All by himself?”

  “Well,” replied Kirill apologetically, “he did promise Bakhtiian to bring back the king’s crown, coat, and head, for the offense the king gave to Bakhtiian’s personal envoys.”

  “Thank you.” Diana stuttered over the words and started the oxen up as quickly as she could, to get away. She felt sick. The wagon jolted over the uneven ground toward the Company’s encampment, and all she wanted to do was to throw up. The day’s triumph turned to ashes in her mouth. Anatoly had ridden out into hostile enemy territory in pursuit of a king. Was he mad? Was he suicidal? Had he had the slightest thought for her before driving forward into unknown lands without his uncle and his uncle’s army in order to avenge Bakhtiian’s honor? Already she pictured Hyacinth lying twisted and dead on the ground, slain by arrows or knives, lying alone, left to rot. Now a second image rose unbidden to meld with Hyacinth’s, that of Anatoly tumbled from his horse, lying half-dead with a spear through his left breast, swarmed by rank upon rank of enemy soldiers rabid for jaran blood.

  Would she ever see him again? She would have cried, but she had already wept enough tears to bring life to the trampled, parched fields over which she now drove her wagon. She had a horrible, wrenching premonition that she had done crying for him. Like a little shield, the first layer of bricks had gone up, sheltering her. She couldn’t go on, hurting and hurting, never knowing, always wondering: would he come back? when? would he still love her? and when would he leave her again?

  The Company encampment loomed before her, sturdy, plain, with its practical square tents and the little canvas cubicle that housed the necessary off to one side. Entrance flaps lay askew, revealing the friendly beacons of lights burning inside the tents. A single fire smoldered into ashes between the tents, but the actors had left it and gone inside to spend their time with the comforts of the technological luxuries they had smuggled along on this barbarian year.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AFTER YAROSLAV SAKHALIN LEFT at dawn, to return to his siege of the royal city of Karkand, the council dragged on for the rest of the day. In the morning, they all sat out under the open sky. By noon, with the sun overhead, they moved onto carpets rolled out under a vast awning. Bakhtiian sat on a pillow at one end, and the council fanned out in a rough semicircle in front of him.

  Aleksi swallowed a yawn. The talk had been going on since yesterday and, as usual, the discussion had reached that point where the councillors were talking at each other, not to Bakhtiian. Ilya often ran his councils this way: The councillors talked for so long over the greatest and least choice at issue that in the end they reached a consensus without him having to demand obedience.

  The longest council Aleksi recalled was the one soon after the assembly on the khayan-sarmiia, which had lasted six days and included three days of vicious argument between Yaroslav Sakhalin and Mikhail Suvorin and their respective supporters. In the end, Bakhtiian’s patience had worn them all down. Now that he had what he wanted—the loyalty of the jaran—he no longer had to be so impulsive. Before that long council had begun, Tess had told Aleksi in confidence what Ilya’s hopes were for the council; and so it had fallen out—with a few changes wrought by good advice or prudent compromise—exactly as he wished, and it was the councillors themselves who agreed upon the issue, among themselves and not as a mere passive instrument to Bakhtiian’s voice.

  So Bakhtiian sat now, listening more than he spoke.

  Tess sat at Bakhtiian’s right hand, and Aleksi sat to Te
ss’s right and back a bit, close to Josef Raevsky, whose lips moved soundlessly as he memorized the proceedings. The blind man canted his head from one side to the other, to catch a sentence here, a tone there, as the women and men seated in attendance on Bakhtiian spoke in their turn.

  Now and again during the exhausting session, Tess rose and walked away—sometimes to relieve herself, sometimes just to stretch her legs, once to sleep for several hours—and returned to sink back down beside her husband. No one minded; she was half gone in pregnancy. The children of the Orzhekov tribe brought drink and food at intervals. Sonia sat in on the council, as her mother’s representative.

  Aleksi leaned forward and found an angle at which he could peer between Tess and Ilya and catch a good glimpse of the two parchment maps spread out flat in front of Nadine, who sat on her uncle’s left. Mitya sat next to her, stifling a yawn with a hand. The poor boy had fallen asleep three times now, and Aleksi supposed he would probably be allowed to nap this time. Since the shock of Ilya’s illness had forced everyone to realize that it was remotely possible that Bakhtiian might actually someday die, poor Mitya had been displayed prominently at every gathering and forced into a passive role, listening and learning about the duties and burdens of adulthood. Not that he hadn’t been involved in such things before, but now it seemed he was at Ilya’s side at every council, every assembly, and riding out with him to inspect jahars each morning. Often Galina went with them, since she would most likely become etsana of the Orzhekov tribe in time. Today Sonia had left Galina in charge of making sure that drink and food flowed freely.

  “Twenty days ride to the south,” Nadine was saying, shifting the maps, she had so laboriously drawn over the last fifteen days, “according to the merchants and caravan masters Tess and I interviewed, there lies a great trading city called Salkh. From there the road leads to two more great cities, Targana and Khoyan, Targana about fifty days ride southeast and Khoyan about sixty days ride southwest. The caravan masters say that if you go along past Targana in the summer, there is a high narrow pass over the Heaven Mountains beyond which lies Vidiya, although there is another safer route to Vidiya lying much farther to the east. I imagine, Uncle, that Khoyan lies along the road that would eventually lead all the way down through southern lands to Jeds and the cities of the Rhuian peninsula. But I don’t know.”

  Bakhtiian’s tent lay pitched on a grassy knoll overlooking the river and the gleaming city beyond, called Hamrat by the Habakar and sarrod-nikaiia, Her Voice Is Merciful, by the jaran. Sakhalin had spared the city because it was here that he and his army had been encamped when the first messenger had ridden in with the news that Bakhtiian had woken from his sorcery-induced trance.

  “Karkand lies about fifteen days ride to the west, and there is a city ten days ride to the northwest called Belgana which Sakhalin took before he rode on to Karkand. North beyond Belgana on the edge of a great forest stands another city, Niryan, which has already surrendered to us. West of Karkand lie two more cities, neither as great as Karkand, and a range of mountains, a forest, a great lake, and a river, and on that river a city called Margana by the Habakar merchants but Parkilnous by the people who live there.”

  Aleksi admired Nadine’s maps. She admired them as well; she had worked diligently enough on them since her unexpected arrival about fifteen days ago. She said that one of the Prince of Jeds’s men had taught her a great deal about maps and mapmaking. David ben Unbutu, that was it; the one who had been so hasty with Tess the day the prince and his entourage arrived at the jaran camp in the spring. Aleksi suspected that Nadine had taken him as a lover, but, of course, she never said as much.

  Bakhtiian leaned forward and touched the map nearest him reverently. “And beyond this city called both Margana and Parkilnous?”

  “They don’t know. That’s as far as they trade. At Parkilnous, other merchants take the goods and travel on with them, and trade goods from the south in return.”

  “So.” Bakhtiian removed his hand from the map.

  The discussion erupted again. Send the entire army to Karkand. No, that’s stupid; the broader the net, the more game could be drawn in. Send ten thousand men to each city, then. That’s doubly idiotic; if you only knew a tenth again as much as Yaroslav Sakhalin about strategy; many small forces are weak against a single large army, and it isn’t impossible that the Habakar king might be drawing together an army for a final strike. The Habakar king is running like any damned coward into the west, with Anatoly Sakhalin at his heels—no longer a threat. How can the honored dyan possibly know that? Why, because only a beaten coward would abandon his own tent and family, of course. How else explain that he had deserted his own royal city? All this talk of fighting is all very well, but what about the camp? What are the water sources between here and the southern cities? How much forage? How bad are the winters here, and farther south? When do the caravans stop running? Can a large detachment winter off forage from the countryside, in the south? Will there be food enough for the wagon train? And so on.

  Nadine had made many cunning little marks on her maps, each indicating information about water sources and forage and towns—insofar as the caravan masters and merchants knew or were willing to part with such information, insofar as any of it could be trusted. Of course, it was all hearsay. Still, Aleksi did not doubt that in the short time Nadine had been back with them, she and Tess between them had tripled jaran intelligence of the lay of the land. Aleksi wondered about Tess’s sources of information, too, because now and again, during the interminable translation sessions between Tess and the interpreters and the Habakar merchants, Tess would make a sudden correction to something Nadine mapped in. Had Tess had access to maps in Jeds that were more accurate than the merchants’ recollections? But why would they have such maps in Jeds? Jedan merchants never came here, as far as Aleksi knew.

  Or perhaps, perhaps if that had not been Bakhtiian’s actual spirit that Aleksi had seen hovering in the air, the night Bakhtiian had been witched away to the gods’ lands—or to the heavens from which Dr. Hierakis claimed she and Tess had come—if it really had been an image of his spirit, of his body, then perhaps Tess knew how to make an image of the land that was equally accurate. Everyone knew that the land remained constant, that seen once, and remembered, you could ride that way again twelve years later and find your way. That was how the jaran navigated the endless plains. That, and by the stars and the winds. Along the Golden Road that ran east to the riches of Empire of Yarial there was said to be a country where the land did shift, where no traveler might walk without becoming lost, where mountains moved at night and rivers changed their course between the seasons. But Aleksi knew that such a place could only exist because every khaja in it, child, woman, and man, was a sorcerer born and bred, or else because the gods had put a curse on it.

  The afternoon wore on. Fifty disagreements dwindled to ten, and ten to two. “But if we are agreed,” said Venedikt Grekov, dyan of the Grekov tribe, “that Bakhtiian must direct the siege of Karkand personally, because of the insult given him by the king, then wouldn’t it be wisest to send Sakhalin south to Salkh? If that city is so valuable?”

  Heads nodded all around. Fifteen days ago, Venedikt Grekov would never had been so bold as to speak with this much authority this late in the council. Now, however, his nephew was going to be the father of Bakhtiian’s heirs. The Grekov tribe, important as one of the Ten Elder Tribes, had just taken a sudden and impressive leap in status—though with Mother Sakhalin’s blessing, of course. Nadine had a frown on her face. She did not look up at the speaker, which was impolite. Everyone knew she wasn’t happy about the marriage.

  “Surely,” added Kirill Zvertkov, “we should secure the two cities west of Karkand, so no Habakar army can march from their protection on Karkand.”

  “Will it take so long for Karkand to surrender to us?” asked another dyan.

  Mother Sakhalin cleared her throat. All fell silent. “My nephew assures me,” she said, “that the stone tents
of Karkand are built in such a fashion that simple force, even using the archers, cannot overcome the walls.”

  “Had we been forced to storm the walls of Qurat,” said Kirill, “we would have suffered severe losses. Sakhalin said that Karkand is better placed.”

  “Then, as Zvertkov says,” replied Grekov, “we had better ride a ring around Karkand and cut it off from the rest of the country. Then the khaja can starve or surrender.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “If we take prisoners,” said Vershinin, “then when we do attack, we can drive them before us as we did at Tashmar—you weren’t there, Bakhtiian—up to the walls as the first wave.”

  “There are other ways,” said Nadine suddenly, “to break a siege. The Prince of Jeds has an engineer with him who knows many tricks. I expect the prince’s woman soldier Ursula el Kawakami does as well.”

  “What kind of tricks?” asked Bakhtiian.

  “Well, if we can make the walls collapse, then they can’t protect the khaja army, can they?”

  “I will think on this,” said Ilya. “Meanwhile,” he glanced up to survey the council, “as you say, Sakhalin ought to ride south to Salkh, once I arrive at Karkand, and Grekov, Vershinin, you will double your jahars in numbers and ride on west, to the cities beyond Karkand. Nadine.” He tapped a finger on her maps, but northward, now, at the edge where the Farisa city lay, the one the Habakar general had himself burned, at the northeastern boundary of Habakar lands where they bordered the plains. “You will return to Morava, to escort the Prince of Jeds back to me.”