by Kate Elliott
Stung by her honesty, he snapped at her. “Get servants!”
“Tess won’t have them,” she said reasonably.
“But you have authority over camp, through your mother.”
“That is true, but all the same, if Tess doesn’t want a thing to happen, it does not happen. She told me once she finds them too much like slaves to be comfortable with having any about. Aleksi, you might trust me that I do this for you as well as for the tribe.”
It was hard to stay angry at Sonia. And it was true that she had always treated him well. “You could use more help,” he agreed, placated by her even tone. He hesitated. “And it’s true I wouldn’t mind being married.” She accepted his confession equably. “If you can find someone, and I like her, then I’ll mark her.”
“Thank you.” Sonia kissed him on the cheek and, seeing Ivan crouch beside Josef, went over to them.
An unfamiliar emotion settled on him as he watched Sonia kneel beside Josef and solicitously help the blind man to his feet. Josef did not need her help to stand, of course, but what man would refuse it? It took Aleksi a moment to name the feeling: Envy. He envied Josef the simple kindness Sonia showed him now. Gods, it hurt, like his heart had cracked. He fought to seal it up. He forced himself to watch them dispassionately.
Sonia guided Josef around to the square tent, set back behind the two great tents, where Josef and Tess conducted their jahar of envoys and accepted petitions from khaja supplicants. Josef was a good man, still dignified, and only a few years older than Bakhtiian, and he had been a brilliant general, every bit Yaroslav Sakhalin’s equal, until the expedition to Habakar. Sonia was right. The Habakar king didn’t deserve a merciful death. Ursula had suggested that they pour molten silver down his throat until he died. In fact, Tess had left the council right after Ursula had made that suggestion. Would Tess try to talk Bakhtiian out of killing the king? And yet, Bakhtiian had to show the khaja that they could not kill his envoys, and he had to show the jaran that such an insult would not go unpunished. Even if Tess urged him to show mercy, even if he wanted to, he could not.
If Tess was appalled enough by the sight, would she leave with her brother and go back to Jeds? No, not to Jeds; to Erthe. Jeds was a khaja place. Erthe—Earth—was in the heavens. Soerensen meant to leave soon; how soon, Aleksi did not know. Perhaps no one knew but Soerensen himself. Certainly, Bakhtiian did not know. Aleksi supposed that Soerensen could not really leave until Karkand had fallen, since Bakhtiian had no troops to spare him for an escort. Except, if Earth lay in the heavens, then maybe the prince did not travel there by horse or by ship. Maybe he did not want an escort.
Aleksi ducked back inside the tent and checked on Tess, but she still slept. He lingered there, reaching out to touch her hair the way Anastasia had touched his hair all those years ago, soothing him to sleep. Tears stung his eyes. He blinked them back and wrenched himself away. And went to see the doctor.
The tall woman with skin the color of riverbank mud greeted him. “Oh. Aleksi. I’ll see if Dr. Hierakis can come out.” She returned a moment later and showed him all the way in to the inner chamber.
Dr. Hierakis glanced up from the counter. She smiled, and her smile warmed him. “Hello, Aleksi.” The machine that made pictures was on. It showed a strange spiraling pattern, doubled, like the spirals embroidered onto pillows and woven into tent walls. “Jo, can you finish these measurements? We’ll do the correlation later, but I think we’ve reached an endpoint here. I’m not getting any results I haven’t gotten before. We need something altogether new, and I don’t think we’re going to get it from this pool. Aleksi, how is Tess?”
He started, jerking his gaze away from the spirals. “Tired.”
“Hmm. In a bad way, or do you judge her just tired?”
“I think she didn’t like to hear the talk about how the king will be killed.”
“Ah. No doubt.” She stepped away from the counter, leaving room for Joanna Singh to take her place. “Why did you come by?”
He hesitated. She felt his hesitation and, kindly, she placed a hand on his sleeve. Embarrassed, he eased his arm away and yet he stood as close to her as he dared. And in any case, she held the answers to his questions. “Doctor. I know you’re leaving soon—”
“I’m leaving when Tess is safely delivered of a healthy child.”
“But the prince—”
“May leave sooner if he has to, it’s true.”
“But how will he go? How do you travel, in the heavens?”
Dr. Hierakis chuckled, and Jo Singh cast a glance back over her shoulder, looking surprised at his question. Then she turned back to her work. “Here, come with me, Aleksi.” They went into the outer chamber, and she gestured to the table. He sat, though he still did not like sitting in chairs. “If you traveled from Karkand to Jeds, you could travel by horse, or you could travel by horse to a port and then travel by sea. If you traveled to, say, the Gray Eminence’s lands, that they call Tadesh, you would have to sail in a ship because there’s a great ocean between his lands and these lands.”
Aleksi nodded. “Yes. I’ve seen a map that Tess drew. It showed a great sea as broad as the land itself. But Earth is in the heavens.”
“Well, think of the stars as lands. Well, no. Think of the stars as lanterns, and around some of these bright lanterns worlds like this one orbit. Earth is such a world, like Rhui, with lands and seas on it. We sail in ships from world to world.”
“Is there water out there? Vast seas? Is that what the ships sail on?”
“Think of it as an ocean of night. If I had time, I’d show you some programs, a stellar map. But I don’t. I’m due at the hospital. Do you know how soon Bakhtiian intends to start the main assault?”
“Oh, yes. It was just decided this afternoon. Day after next, at dawn.”
“Ah. Then we’ve much to prepare for. Well, Aleksi, keep an eye on Tess for me. Keep well.” She hesitated and then, to his astonishment, she kissed him on either cheek, in the formal way, and left. He sat for a moment, just staring. She had left some of her warmth with him. Surely Dr. Hierakis had no reason to be nice to him except simple kindness. Unless by winning him to her side she hoped to win Tess back to the prince. He sighed, gazing at the lantern that wasn’t a lantern—was that how the sun looked?—and wished mightily that he knew how to see these maps for himself, to understand what kind of ship might sail the ocean between the worlds.
Outside, twilight had lowered down over camp. At last, he strolled back to the Orzhekov encampment, wondering what kind of a woman Sonia would find for him to marry.
The assault began as the first hint of light paled the eastern horizon. Aleksi stood beside Tess on the ramparts of the outer wall and watched as, far away along the inner walls, flaming arrows arched into Karkand. He watched as the artillery flung trails of fire and sparks over the walls. As the sun breached the horizon, the siege towers rumbled forward and battering rams rolled into place, their crews sheltered by stiff screens of hide.
“Oh, God.” Tess sank into the chair that Mitya, who now stood up to the left in the height of a watchtower, had carried up onto the wall for her. Since the parapets on the outer walls faced outward, to protect the suburbs from an outside attack, these walls served as a good vantage point from which to observe the jaran attack on the inner city.
“Tess, you don’t need to watch,” said Aleksi. “You can go back to camp.”
“No.” She looked grim. “I need to watch. I won’t turn my eyes away from this.” She folded her hands over her abdomen, laced her fingers together, and an instant later unlaced them and stood up again. “Why couldn’t you people just have stayed out on the plains where you belong? Why did I have to fall in love with him, damn it? Why couldn’t I have married a nice sweet jaran man like Kirill?”
“Couldn’t you have married Kirill?”
“I’m not talking to you!” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Aleksi. I just don’t understand why we must always be blessed and cursed toge
ther.”
“But if the gods only cursed us, then we would hate them. And if they only blessed us, then—well, then we’d care nothing for their laws because we’d respect nothing but our own pleasure.”
She sank back into the chair. “Oof. Oh, I hate this.” She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, rubbing her belly. “It was meant to be a rhetorical question, but I suppose that answers it as well as anything does.”
“And that is why you are blessed and cursed? Are there no wars on Earth?”
“There are no longer wars like this. That’s something we learned at long last to stop. But Charles—well, in the end, what he’s planning may well lead to the same kind of thing. Who am I to judge what I see here? ‘More nor less to others paying/Than by self offenses weighing.’ So I watch, though it hurts. But I refuse just to look the other way, knowing what I married into.”
“Hurts?”
“All I can think of is all the people who are going to die, and the pain they’ll suffer.”
“Oh.” Aleksi crouched down beside her chair. She rested a hand on his hair, and he leaned against her, melting into this sign of her affection.
In the distance, the first line of siege towers jolted into the walls. They sat too far away to see anything but a tiny blur of movement; dust rose—or was that the blur of arrows?—and smoke streamed up into the clear morning sky. To Aleksi’s ears, the attack sounded like the distant roar of a cataract. Above, on the battlements, Mitya stared toward the conflagration. A small gold banner whipped in the wind above his head, snapping rhythmically. Next to him, his dark shadow, stood Vasha, the boy’s gold shirt like an echo of the banner. Katerina and Galina had also come to watch, but the rest of the children had stayed with the camp.
“Well,” added Aleksi after a while, “the gods send us to our fate. They sent you to Bakhtiian, after all.”
She blanched and removed her hand.
“Tess? Are you well?” he demanded, alarmed.
“It’s not that. It’s true, what you say. We might as well have been sent by the gods to aid Bakhtiian in his victories. Look at the modifications David made to the catapults, changing them from the lever to the counterpoise system. Look at Cara’s hospital. Gods, look at Ursula, advising him with all of her textbook knowledge.”
“What is textbook? Has she fought in such wars before? Certainly she knows a great deal, and Bakhtiian listens to her advice.”
“She’s only studied war before now, but still, the breadth of her knowledge…it’s inevitable that her knowledge, given to him, alters the balance of power.”
“But then if it’s true that the gods favor Bakhtiian, why should we be surprised that the jaran are always victorious?”
She only shook her head, but as much as if she agreed with his comment as disagreed. She stood up again and paced down the length of the wall toward the tower, turned, and returned to Aleksi. Their escort ranged out around the base of the tower: Anatoly Sakhalin’s jahar, resplendent in their armor and red silk surcoats, lances gleaming in the first light of the sun. Behind the jahar lay fields and the jaran camp; between them and the inner walls stretched the now deserted suburbs, emptied out by the army.
“Aleksi, go ride to see him.”
“To see who?”
“Ilya. I’m just restless. I just—feel strange; I’m afraid that something bad might happen to him today. Just go and make sure that he’s well and then come back to me.”
She needed him. Heartened, and yet disturbed by her mood, Aleksi examined her. Finally he rested a hand on her shoulder. “Very well. I’ll go. Shall I send someone up to sit with you?”
“Mitya and the girls are close by. Go on.” She smiled at him, grateful, and he felt content.
He left. Below, he mounted, reported to Sakhalin, and rode out. He circled the outermost walls, crossing a stretch of fields and bypassing a straggle of refugees thrown out of the suburbs, passed back into the outer city, and came at last to a rise overlooking the great main gates of the inner city. Here, Bakhtiian had stationed himself and his jahar. His gold banner lifted in the wind, stirring gently, and every rider’s spear bore a pennon of gold silk. No one spoke here; they only watched, and the pennants fluttered and snapped in the breeze. These ranks of riders wore gold and red surcoats, richly embroidered; their burnished helmets bore a tuft of horsetail, and the harness of their gray horses was ornamented with tassels and gold braid.
At the height of the rise, two riders sat side by side looking out of place in the midst of such panoply because they were so plainly outfitted. Bakhtiian wore lamellar armor covered with a plain red surcoat, and his stallion was distinguished only by the fact that it was the only black in the troop. He sat with his helmet tucked under one arm and turned his head to address a comment to Charles Soerensen, who wore a heavy quilted coat, belted at the waist, and no other armor. They might have been any two kings, allied in conquest, watching over their latest victory.
As Aleksi rode up to them, he considered what Tess had said. Perhaps they were. Although Charles Soerensen had no army here, and apparently no great army in his city of Jeds, perhaps he commanded stronger forces than soldiers.
“Aleksi!” Bakhtiian beckoned him over as soon as he saw him. “What are you doing here?” Soerensen turned his head to regard Aleksi as well.
“Tess was restless.”
“She can’t come in this close. I forbid it.” Bakhtiian looked out toward the great gate. From this vantage point, the figures fighting up against the wall appeared to be the height of Aleksi’s hand. Two troops of horsemen armored only in heavy coats and brocaded robes waited between Bakhtiian’s jahar and the troops besieging the wall. The arrow fire itself obscured the walls. The siege tower burned. Men swarmed up ladders, only to fall, stricken, or be drenched with steaming liquid. The constant pounding of the siege engines sent stones falling like rain into the city. Columns of smoke rose from inside the walls, and Aleksi saw, for the first time, the lick of flames on the roof of a minaret that stood within the walls. To the far right, missiles hurled from the siege engines crumbled the ramparts of a long stretch of wall. Like a still eddy in the midst, the scaffolding on which they had trussed up the Habakar king sat about two hundred paces away from the main gate. Aleksi could not see the king from this angle, to know whether the monarch was dead or alive. Certainly the heat of arrow fire around the gates was withering.
All at once, far to the right, to the north and west, a roar went up from the jaran army. In seeming concert, a rumble shook through the ground and to the left a portion of the wall sagged and gave way. Clouds of dust streamed into the sky. Bakhtiian drew his saber. Rags rose, passing the order down the line. A distant mass of Farisa auxiliaries, their wicker shields held angled in front of their bodies, charged forward toward the collapsed wall.
A small gate within the main gate opened. Khaja soldiers poured out, racing toward their king. Foot soldiers fanned out in a line and then men on horseback raced out, charging for the scaffolding. At once, the jaran troop below started forward, and a line of archers fired into the khaja ranks.
Bakhtiian turned. “Konstans. Go.” About a third of the jahar detached itself from the group and drove forward, heading for the sortie.
“You send your own men?” Soerensen asked.
“The other jahar is lightly armored. They can’t sustain under the fire from the walls. In any case, the insult remains against me.”
“Ah.”
Jaran fire peppered the ranks of the khaja riders and foot soldiers alike, from the women shielded by the front line of the troop. “That’s the Veselov jahar,” said Aleksi.
“So it is,” said Bakhtiian. “No doubt their dyan will choose caution and pull them back.”
Already Konstans’s unit pressed forward past the back ranks of the Veselov jahar, which split to either side to give them room to pass. But the foremost of the khaja horsemen had already reached the scaffolding, and four men flung themselves down off their horses and climbed t
o free their king.
A single rider broke away from the front rank of the Veselov jahar, spearing straight for the khaja ranks. They spun to face him, but he made it somehow through a barrage of arrows and leapt off of his horse onto the scaffolding, saber drawn, fighting. As two khaja warriors dragged the limp body of their king toward the horses, two more khaja arrived to confront the lone jaran man.
The pounding of hooves threw up dust, obscuring the scene below as Konstans and his riders charged into the enemy ranks beyond the scaffolding. Out of the cloud, figures appeared, running for the gate. A riderless horse caparisoned in the Habakar manner bolted free of the melee, followed by another. A man weighted down in armor stumbled wildly toward the small gate, but it closed before him.
The jaran unit emerged from the dust, wheeled, and drove back through. Arrows rained down from the walls, like a second cloud, like a storm of rain.
Out of the chaos the gold pennons appeared again, riding away from the walls. In their midst, they dragged along on the ground a figure dressed all in gold, gold surcoat, gold crown, tumbling in their wake—dead already or killed in the sortie, who could tell? Out of arrow’s range one of the riders turned back in his saddle and cut the rope free, leaving the corpse all forlorn out on the churned-up field. By the time the unit rejoined Bakhtiian, enough dust had settled that Aleksi could see the scatter of bodies strewn haphazardly between the gates and the scaffolding. Veselov’s jahar had pulled back out of catapult range. One of the archers set an arrow alight and fired; the arrow lodged at the top of the scaffolding, and flames licked at the pitch-covered wood. Three bodies lay at the base, two in khaja armor, one jaran.
“Konstans!”
Layered with dust and spattered with blood, Konstans rode up beside Bakhtiian. His face bore a cheerful grin. “That got the bastards.”
“Casualties?”
“A few, but we got everyone back except for him.” He nodded toward the lone jaran corpse.
“Who is it? It was foolhardy, but bravely done.”