by Kate Elliott
“We can’t give them our protection?” asked David. “It’s ridiculous that they were punished so severely for homosexuality. It isn’t even a crime. But I suppose it’s all of a piece, when you consider how primitive this planet is.”
“Why, David,” said Marco, “you’re singing a different tune these days.”
David shrugged.
“If we give them our protection,” said Charles softly, “then what becomes of them once we leave? As we inevitably will. I’ve thought of that, David, but I don’t see how we can manage it. Still, they’re the least part of our problem. We need to bring in that shuttle and transfer the medical equipment for Cara onto the pack animals. Without alerting our escort.” Charles grinned suddenly. David had long since realized that Charles enjoyed himself most when he confronted a seemingly insolvable problem. “Any suggestions?”
“Kill them all,” said Marco facetiously. “That solves the problem.”
“Except we have to explain it to Bakhtiian once we arrive at the army. Anyone else?”
“Well,” said Jo, “that’s not so far from the mark, though, Charles. We have to render them unconscious somehow. Drug them. I don’t know. So we can send out an expedition to bring in the actor and pick up the supplies.”
“But how do we explain how we found Hyacinth?” demanded Maggie.
“As you see,” said Charles, “this kind of masquerade gets more and more difficult to bring off. Jo, can you drug them?”
“Probably. But how do we explain it to them when it wears off? They’d wonder, surely.”
“Wait a minute,” said David. “You know these people drink like fish. Get them drunk, add just enough of a dose of—whatever—to make them sleep late and wake up with terrible hangovers. If we can get within ten K range of Hyacinth, that should give us enough time to pick him up and rendezvous with the shuttle, and get back by mid-morning. If we leave before dawn. Don’t you think?”
They all regarded him openmouthed, all except Charles. Charles rose and paced over to the table, placing his hands palm open, flat, on the surface, examining the topographical model laid out before him. “That’s perfect, David. Perfect.”
“I admit it might work,” began Maggie.
“Mags, your praise overwhelms me.”
“Quiet, you. But what possible reason do they have to get drunk in the middle of a long trip south? And at the pace we’re riding, too?”
Charles straightened up. He smiled. “A perfect reason. We haven’t celebrated Nadine Orzhekov’s marriage yet. Remiss of me, as her host. We’ve made good enough time that I can excuse an early stop tomorrow, and a late morning start the day after.”
All of David’s triumph in thinking up a brilliant idea burned away to ashes. Charles was right, of course: celebrating Nadine’s marriage provided the perfect excuse. It didn’t mean he had to like it. “Well, if that’s settled,” he said brusquely, “I’ve some things to attend to. Are we done?”
Charles glanced once, sharply, at him, but mercifully only nodded. David escaped out into the camp. He strode out to the fringe of camp, to the screen of straggling trees that hid the pack train. The animals grazed peacefully, some hobbled, some on lines. Packs stretched in neat rows along the ground. About one hundred meters away, a mob of horses milled beside a pond, jostling for drinking space. Three jaran riders supervised this chaos. David recognized two of them instantly. One was the quiet boy, Vasha. The other was Feodor Grekov.
He sighed. Was this what it meant to be in love? Purely, simply, David was jealous of Feodor Grekov. In the ten days since Nadine had rejoined their party, David had found it impossible to address the young man with any semblance of politeness, so he avoided him instead. Only Marco twitted him about it; perhaps only Marco noticed. No, Charles must know. Charles knew everything. But by and large, Charles respected privacy to an almost extravagant degree since he valued it so keenly for himself. Now David had leisure to reflect on Bakhtiian. No wonder Bakhtiian had looked daggers at him, all those months ago, thinking that David had slept with his wife. Then, David had feared that he had violated some taboo. Now he understood that Bakhtiian’s anger stemmed from jealousy, from possessiveness, perhaps even from fear. And why shouldn’t Bakhtiian be afraid? Tess belonged to David’s kind, she belonged to Earth—to Erthe—not to the jaran.
Only, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she did belong to the jaran now. Or at least, for now, for a time. Nadine didn’t belong to the jaran; that was one thing that angered David. Nadine deserved better, deserved more than to be a brood mare for her uncle’s convenience. She wanted more.
“David!” The voice made him wince. He spun, to see that he had not been paying attention well enough. If he had seen her coming, he would have fled. She grinned down at him from her seat on her horse. Dusk shadowed her, but she seemed cheerful enough. “Walking sentry duty tonight?” she asked. If she knew that her husband rode herd on the horses close by, she gave no sign of it. “I just spoke with the prince. I don’t suppose, since he insisted, that I can refuse the honor of a celebration given by him.”
“You don’t want a celebration for your marriage?” David asked.
She shrugged and turned her face to one side. She had a fine profile, sharp and distinctive. He watched as her mouth twitched down into a frown, watched her rein herself in, watched her lips straighten and assume a smile again. “It’s fitting,” she said at last, in a toneless voice, “that a marriage should be celebrated with a feast and dancing and drink. I don’t suppose we can have dancing; there aren’t enough women. And there’s scarcely enough interesting food for a feast. But the prince promises a rare wine, that he wishes to share in honor of the marriage. That’s generous of him.”
“Well,” said David awkwardly, “we all like you, Dina.”
Her gaze flashed to him, and away. She wasn’t usually so coy. “You all like me,” she said softly, “and pity me for what has happened.” Abruptly, she reined her horse aside and rode away, out toward the sentry line.
David watched her go. He swore under his breath and walked back to camp.
The next day they camped in the late afternoon on the outskirts of a burned-out village that huddled up against the low hills. The vast gap of land—more than a valley, less than a plateau—through which they rode on their way south to the Habakar heartlands spread out around them, bounded by steep hills to the east and west and mountains to the south. Rajiv calculated that the actor had made his camp 9.4 kilometers away from them, up in the western foothills. He mapped out a path from the village to the signal emitted by the actor’s transmitter.
Charles poured the wine himself, pressing the jarah riders to drink from the bottles Jo had spiked. David managed to swallow his ill-feeling long enough to participate in one toast to the happy couple. Then he left the party and went out to the horse lines.
“Go on,” he said to the young man standing guard. “I’ll watch tonight.” The rider hesitated. They could both hear the distant sound of lusty singing. “I can’t stomach the celebration,” added David, appealing to the other man’s sympathies, “since I—well, you know. Now she’s married to another man.”
The rider’s expression softened. “Well, and you being khaja and all, I don’t suppose you’d any hope to marry her, since she’s Bakhtiian’s niece. If you don’t mind … Just a sip, and then I’ll come back.”
David waved at him to go on. Then he waited. He set the perimeter alert on his knife and paced up and down the lines. The singing grew louder and less tuneful, then quieted, and finally ceased altogether. Eventually, about two hours after midnight, Marco and Charles appeared. They saddled up four horses and slung packs on two of the pack animals; at Morava, they had loaded two of the animals with packs filled with extra odds and ends, so that once they made the pickup there wouldn’t seem to be any change in the amount of gear they carried. Then they set off.
Once out of sight of camp, leading the horses, they switched on lanterns to light their way. The steady glare lent a gra
y color to the landscape as they wound their way up into the hills. Rajiv had coded a pathfinder into Charles’s slate, and it guided them up dried-out streambeds and along the curve of the hills, gradually working up into the wilderness. A few wild animals tripped their perimeter alerts. Otherwise, nothing stirred. The isolation mirrored David’s mood.
Just before dawn, with a faint glow rising in the east, they led their train down a defile and halted in the shadow of a copse of trees. With a word, Marco shut off their lamps, shuttering them in the half light of dawn. Beyond the trees, set out on a rocky slope, stood a tent. An off-world tent, that much was obvious by its cut and weave and by the tracery of filaments woven into the canvas, shining like dew-laden spiderwebs against the khaki fabric.
Marco cast a glance down at his slate, hanging open from his belt. “There’s a perimeter alert activated inside the tent. We’ve already triggered it.”
“Let’s wait a moment,” said Charles. “We’ve no guarantee that some bandit hasn’t murdered Hyacinth and stolen his gear.”
David winced. No matter how stupid the actor had been, David could not believe that he deserved such an awful fate. He glanced at Charles, but in the dim light could not read Charles’s expression—if indeed Charles let any emotion show at all on his face, anymore. “It’s true we ignored the emergency signal that came—what?—weeks ago,” he muttered. “We don’t know what happened to him after that, or if he even survived.”
“You know very well, David, that we couldn’t send a shuttle down cold, without marking the ground first. He chose his exile. He knows what it means, that Rhui is interdicted. Marco. Alert the shuttle. I think this is an isolated enough spot for a safe landing.” Charles surveyed the sky, lightening ever more in the east, and then looked directly at David. “You were going to say something?”
“You’re a damned hypocrite, Charles.”
Charles nodded, looking thoughtful. “It’s true. So often people in my position are. I wonder if there’s any remedy for it? I condemn that poor boy for a crime that I then turn around and commit myself.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“I do what I must.”
“Shhh,” hissed Marco. “Someone’s coming out of the tent.”
They watched as a man dressed in jaran clothing emerged from the tent, wary, holding his saber in front of him. He glanced all round and then stared straight at the copse of trees, although surely he couldn’t see them. Perhaps he could hear or smell the horses. A moment later another man ducked out of the tent, holding a knife in his left hand.
“I don’t recognize either of them,” said David in an undertone. The second man wore a dirty tunic over dirty trousers. What color the clothes had once been was impossible to tell. The man’s hair was a coarse muddy blond.
“Look at those eyes,” said Marco in an undertone. “I think that’s Hyacinth. None of the natives in these parts have the epicanthic folds.”
David stared, trying desperately to match his memory of Hyacinth with this filthy, coarse-looking man. He looked altered beyond imagining from the glamorous, golden-haired actor who had played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with such athletic and sensual flair. Then the man flipped open his slate and keyed into it. Lights flashed, and a sudden image projected out from the screen, suspended in midair. It was a heat projection of the surrounding area, betraying their presence. The man’s jaran companion did not even start at this sorcerous apparition.
“What the hell?” muttered Marco. “It looks like he’s already broken the interdiction.”
“Call down the shuttle,” said Charles to Marco. He took five steps forward, out into the open, and raised his voice. “I’m looking for the actor known as Hyacinth, legal name, Sven Rajput Nguyen.”
The man with the slate jerked his head around at the sound of Charles’s voice. He staggered forward three steps and then collapsed onto his knees, signing himself with the Goddess’s circle of grace. “Oh, Goddess,” he wept. “Oh, Goddess. I thought we would never find you.”
Charles gestured to David and Marco, and they came out onto the slope, the horses and pack animals behind them. Light rose in the defile. The sun had come up, although it had not yet breached the high walls to glare down on them directly. Hyacinth struggled to his feet, ran forward, and threw himself prostrate on the gravel in front of Charles.
The first thing David noticed, even from two meters away, was the smell. Hyacinth stank like he hadn’t had a bath in months, or even changed his clothes.
Charles knelt and raised the young man up gently. Behind, by the tent, the jaran rider stood and watched, his expression guarded. He did not sheathe his saber.
“I knew that if we kept riding north, we’d come to you. I knew you wouldn’t abandon us. I told Yevgeni that you’d rescue us. Oh, Goddess, why couldn’t you have heard the transmitter? Maybe you could have saved Valye.” Hyacinth babbled on, one grimy hand gripping the sleeve of Charles’s shirt as if he never meant to let it go.
Marco walked up beside them and pried Hyacinth loose. “You look the worse for the wear,” he said mildly, letting go of the other man as soon as he had freed Charles.
“I hate this planet,” said Hyacinth with a hatred so implacable that his tone sent a shiver down David’s back. “I want to go home.”
“I think,” said Charles, “that we can grant your wish. What about your friend? What’s his name? Yevgeni?”
“Yevgeni Usova.” Hyacinth turned. “Yevgeni! Come here. You must meet the duke.”
The other man obeyed, but he approached cautiously, though he sheathed his saber. “The duke?” Yevgeni halted six paces from Charles and regarded him measuringly. He was of the dark-haired strain of the jaran, David noted, with a blunt nose and brown eyes. He appeared marginally cleaner than Hyacinth, and he certainly didn’t smell as rank.
“I mean the Prince of Jeds.”
“How did you find us?” Yevgeni asked, evidently still suspicious of Charles and his little party. “Is this your entire party? Are you truly a sorcerer?”
“Yevgeni!” said Hyacinth impatiently. “I told you that we’re not sorcerers.”
“Then it is true that you come from a land that rests in the heavens? I know that Singers tell many strange stories, and have often visited the gods’ lands, but I didn’t know that you were also a Singer.”
“A shaman?” Charles allowed himself a brief smile. “I’m not a shaman.” He turned his bland gaze on Hyacinth. “So. What have you told him? What does he know?”
Hyacinth’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “How did you find us? You must have traced my signal. But that means—” He caught in his breath and David tensed, waiting for the explosion. When Hyacinth spoke again, he spoke in Anglais, hard and fast. “That means you must have picked up my emergency transmission. How could you not have responded? Yevgeni’s sister died because no one responded.”
Charles sighed. “May I remind you that you chose exile? You knew you were putting yourself at risk. You knew—”
“That Rhui is interdicted? Yes, I knew that. But you’re here. The Company is here. That’s breaking the interdiction. But I suppose that since you own this planet you can do what you damned well please!”
“Quite true. Now, how much does he know?” The timbre of Charles’s voice had altered, and though he did not raise his voice at all, the words cracked over Hyacinth and reduced the young man to silence. “You’re responsible for him, now, you know,” added Charles. “If he knows too much, he can’t go back.”
“Goddess! Don’t you know anything? He can’t go back anyway. His exile is permanent. Without me, he’ll die.”
Charles glanced at Marco. “Time?”
“Twenty-three minutes.”
“Well, then,” said Charles. “Take him with you.”
Yevgeni edged closer to Hyacinth. David could not tell whether the young rider’s proximity was meant to protect Hyacinth or to seek shelter for himself. Startled, Hyacinth gaped at Charles and then turned hi
s head in a smooth motion to stare at Yevgeni. Yevgeni arched an eyebrow, questioning. David admired his stoic silence, his patience, his ability to stand there and hear an argument in a language he couldn’t understand and simply wait it out. Or perhaps he had long since grown resigned to death, to his fate, whatever it might prove to be. But David recognized the gleam in his eyes, underlying his composure. He was in love with Hyacinth, and he trusted him.
What a fate lay in store for him.
“I could take him with me?” Hyacinth asked haltingly.
“Indeed,” said Charles, “I begin to think you’re going to have to take him with you. That would be the easiest solution.”
“Wait. You’re not taking me back to the Company?”
“How do I explain to the jaran how I found you? No. The shuttle lands in twenty-two minutes. Take down your tent. You’re going with them.”
“Off planet.” Hyacinth shut his eyes. A look of peace smoothed his expression. “Thank you. Thank you.”
“I’ll help you take down the tent,” said Marco. “We don’t have much time.”
“Hyacinth,” said Yevgeni in khush, “what is happening?”
Hyacinth turned, took hold of Yevgeni’s hands, and kissed him on the mouth. “We’re going home. We’re leaving. You’re coming with me.”
Yevgeni disengaged his hands and glanced at once, sidelong, at Charles and David, as if to gauge their reaction to Hyacinth’s show of affection. Marco had already walked over to the tent.
“I hope you understand,” said Charles softly, to Hyacinth, “that the transition will be particularly difficult for him. He’ll have no one but you. I’ll arrange for a stipend for him, that much I can do, but you’ll be the only person he knows. And life will seem—very strange—out there. Do you understand the burden I’m laying on you? Can you manage it?”
Hyacinth drew himself up. “I chose exile because of the burden I had already laid on him. They stripped him of his saber, of his horse, of his name, of his connection to the tribe. It’s my fault he got exiled, and exile is tantamount to death in this world.”