by Kate Elliott
She climbed the metal stairs to the attic storage rooms, not expecting to find him—why would he come up here?—but recalling with sudden clarity the musty smell of the costume attic where she and Valentin would hide, burrowing beneath mounds of old moldering costumes and choking down giggles when their father or Yomi, the stage manager, came looking for them. Old habit made her cautious and quiet.
The hallway was unlit. She found the door more by touch than by sight. It was an old swing style door. With a slight pressure from her fingers, it opened silently into the vast murky loft of the costume attic. A thin slit of windows cut through at the eaves. Dust spun like snow there, blending into twilight and thence into the swollen shadows that filled the rest of the space. Racks of clothes like lines of summer trees ranged along one side of the space. Barrows rose behind them, burial mounds for forgotten costumes. Some creature was rustling around up here, a mouse maybe or a cat or…
Her eyes adjusted at last.
Like Shiva and Parvati, commingling in nesh, two people stood back among the costumes, intertwined, kissing. Dust settled in silence, leavened by the soft rustling of their feet, shifting, and their breath forming into sounds that were not quite words and yet not only sighs. One was her father. She knew his shape instantly. The other she did not recognize, except that the cut of the clothing he wore seemed oddly familiar but unidentifiable in the dimness. Did they not realize she was here? Or did they simply not care?
Ilyana had seen her father flirt. She had even seen him insinuate a hand on a lover’s arm or thigh, a half-hidden, intimate gesture, always brief. But she had never seen him actually in the act before. She was mortified. She couldn’t stop watching. She just stood there, rooted into the ground, staring through the darkness at them, at the way a hand snaked up a thigh and buttocks to come to rest on the small of the back, at the way a finger interposed between lips and was itself kissed and made part of their joining, at the way their bodies flowed against each other, pressing, moving, seeking a new fit.
Vasil’s lover arched back just enough so he could play with the buttons on Vasil’s tunic, and somehow, with the angle altering subtly, Ilyana felt as if she had just succumbed to a sudden hallucination. A dark-haired, bearded jaran man, undressing her father with slow sensuality. It couldn’t be… except she knew those clothes. But no other jaran had left Rhui. The other man had Vasil’s tunic half off. Ilyana didn’t know what to do. If she moved now, they would surely notice her. If she didn’t move, then she would see everything, things no child ever ought to know about their parents, her father and Ilya Bakhtiian—
Ilyana’s heart pounded in her ears like the stamp of feet. For an instant, she could believe it, even though she knew it wasn’t true. For an instant, she thought it was still her heart beating so loudly.
The door swung open behind her, just missing her back, and a wash of noise and the press of bodies bore in behind it and thrust her forward as on a rising tide into the room.
A light snapped on, flooding the attic with unforgiving brightness.
M. Pandit came to rest not three steps from Ilyana. She had a half-dozen thugs dressed as quisling officers with her.
“Separate them,” she said in a frigid voice.
The thugs swarmed past Ilyana, but by the time they reached the two men, Jazir had already jumped away from Vasil. Pandit’s husband was indeed dressed as a jaran rider: scarlet shirt, black trousers, black boots. Under the hard light, he looked absurd.
The thugs surrounded Vasil, who looked more dazed than anything, and began to beat him up. Outnumbered and outweighed, Vasil covered his face with his arms and dropped to the floor. They kicked him, eerily silent about their task.
“Hey!” yelped Ilyana, and bolted for him.
Pandit grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her to a stop. “Get out of here,” she said.
Ilyana kicked her. Pandit grabbed Ilyana’s right arm and wrenched it up behind her back until the pain made her cry, and she watched her father get kicked and beaten through a haze of tears.
Jazir circled around the thugs and slunk over to M. Pandit.
“I didn’t—” he began.
With a sour frown, M. Pandit fingered the fine red silk of his shirt. “This is obscene.” She let go of the shirt and brushed her fingers together as if she was trying to wipe off slime. With her other hand she tightened her grip on Ilyana’s arm.
Ilyana yelped. “It hurts! You old pig.”
Pandit slapped her. She had strong hands. Then she turned back to her husband. “Get out of those things and go home.”
So briefly that Ilyana almost didn’t see it, he winced. Then he smoothed over his expression, turning the full force of his gorgeous brown eyes on his wife. “Don’t be angry with me.”
“Go.” She turned her attention back to the thugs. “Not his face, you idiots. That’s enough in any case. You three, escort my husband home.” They left. The remaining three stationed themselves equidistant around their quarry.
“You may stand up,” said M. Pandit in a calm voice. “I trust you have learned your lesson.”
Vasil unbent stiffly. “Gods,” he said, blinking at the floor. Gingerly, he touched his fingers to a bruise already forming on his naked left shoulder. He swore, and then explored his face. Finally he looked up. His eyes widened, seeing Ilyana, and he swore again. “Let go of her!” he demanded, and Ilyana saw him reach instinctively for his saber. Which was, of course, not there.
Pandit let go of Ilyana’s arm, and Ilyana gasped in relief and ran over to her father.
“Not so hard,” he said, flinching when she hugged him. She choked down a sob and turned to look at M. Pandit.
“Now.” Pandit lifted a hand, and the thugs retreated, coming back to stand behind her. “I don’t like other people seducing my husband, especially not you, M. Veselov, with your obvious attractions. I don’t intend to risk that you or he will be rash enough to try this again. Therefore, you will leave Earth. Your family does not have to leave, just you. But I can make life very difficult for you if you don’t go of your own free will. Do you understand me?”
Vasil had found a bruise on his left cheek and seemed to be more interested in exploring the extent of the damage than in listening to Pandit’s threats.
“You can’t just make us leave!” cried Ilyana.
Pandit blinked, looking bland. “Of course I can. I can do many things. I can destroy your father’s face and career. You’re a particularly lovely child. I can see that you disappear into a servitude that you would not enjoy.”
At this, Vasil did look up.
“But that’s illegal,” said Ilyana.
“You may be assured that I know what is illegal and what is not. There is always a black market for handsome boys and girls. Both you and you brother would serve my purpose, your brother especially, since he would be easily controlled. The younger children don’t seem blessed with looks, unfortunately, although at their age that might not matter to some people.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” said Vasil suddenly. “It goes against every law of the gods to treat children in such a fashion.”
“I am not concerned with the law of the gods, M. Veselov. I am concerned about my husband. Because I’m generous, I’ll grant you one month to make your plans.”
“But, Father—!” began Ilyana.
“Hush,” said Vasil. He looked remarkably intent now, as if the threats to his children had focused his thoughts.
“Do you understand me?” M. Pandit asked.
“Perfectly,” replied Vasil coolly.
She left. Ilyana heard footsteps ringing down the steps, and then they faded and she and her father were alone.
“How could you?” she demanded, letting go. A horrible wrenching misery took hold of her. Everything they had built here, her friends, her school, a place for the little ones, all gone because her father wanted to pretend that he was—well, anyway, she didn’t understand what her father wanted or what drove him. He was hugely succe
ssful, everyone said so, and yet she could never shake the feeling that he had left something behind on Rhui without which he was doomed to remain incomplete.
“She reminds me of Ilya,” said Vasil suddenly, softly. “He made me leave because he was afraid that Tess was falling in love with me.” He winced. “Gods. I’m going to look like hell for the next ten days. I’ll have to cancel my appearance at Cannes.”
“But what are we going to do?” She sniffed hard, strangling tears.
“Oh, gods,” he said under his breath, and assayed a step, and another, flinching each time. “We’ll go, Yana.”
“But I don’t want to leave! Daddy, I don’t want to leave! Please, don’t make us go.”
“Oh, I’m sure we can come back in a year or two or three. She’ll forget. And I won’t bother him anymore. These khaja are very strange. They let two men or two women marry, so why should she object to me taking him as a lover? I don’t understand them.”
Ilyana knew that if she tried to say anything more, she would begin to cry in earnest, so she said nothing. What could she say, anyway? Nothing that her father would hear. Her feet felt heavy with the weight of her desolation. She didn’t want to leave, but he would never leave his family behind, especially not knowing that M. Pandit had her eye on them. She dragged along after her father. Even beaten badly enough that it hurt him to move, he seemed unaffected by the whole episode. It didn’t matter to him if they left Earth.
Ilyana had to stop, the illumination hit her like a blast of light. Nothing mattered to him, not really. Nothing had, since they had left Rhui.
“What are we going to tell Kori and her Uncle Gus?” she asked finally as they paused at the door.
Vasil smiled. “That I fell down the stairs.” He winked at her. Ilyana giggled. He held her to him, and she laid her head against his shoulder. “Gods, you’re getting tall.” He examined her quizzically. His left eye was purpling. “M. Pandit is right. You’re a beautiful girl, just as you should be.”
Uncomfortable, Ilyana extricated herself from him and snapped off the light. They negotiated the steps, made their excuses to Kori and her uncle, and went home in a private car.
A package waited at the door for M. Veselov: a set of jaran clothes, scarlet shirt and black trousers, pressed and impeccably folded, and black boots polished to a supple sheen.
Ilyana helped her father upstairs. “Put in a call to Owen Zerentous,” he said as soon as they crossed the threshold. “Voice only.”
CHAPTER NINE
Recompense
“ARE YOU SURE,” DIANA asked for the fifth time, “that you want to come with the Company? I don’t know how long we’ll be on this tour, or even exactly where we’re going, if it’s true that we actually get to go to Duke Naroshi’s palace. You know you and Portia are welcome to stay here with my family. You know they’ll be glad to have you.”
“Gods!” Anatoly Sakhalin jumped to his feet and stalked to the edge of the brick patio. Beyond lay the bright patchwork of the flower garden, exhaling in the sun, and beyond that the fields of rye and barley and the stark frame of the great greenhouse. The wooded hill that had given the farm its name loomed above the greenhouse. Behind him, through the open patio doors, he could hear the cheerful rumble of Diana’s family as they chatted and worked and prepared family dinner inside the house. He smelled bread baking, and a soufflé. Portia shrieked with laughter. A bee droned lazily through the flowers, and from the lawn to the west of the house he heard the crack of a cricket bat and one of the cousins yelling.
“You don’t want me to go with you,” he said.
“Well, what will you do? We’ll probably be confined in a small area, we’ll be rehearsing and performing all the time, everyone else there will be part of the Company.”
He turned to look at her. She wore the face he liked least: She was going to be reasonable, to appeal to practicality, to rationality, whatever that meant. Anatoly was damned tired of being reasonable. He had been reasonable for five years now, after the fiasco with the Couture Festival, and the only thing it had gotten him was a daughter, although Portia was certainly worth every otherwise monotonous year that had passed.
“How can I be any more confined than I am now?” he demanded. “At least I will get to see something of the lands away from Earth.”
“If you would bestir yourself to get some kind of occupation, then you wouldn’t be so confined!”
“I have an occupation! One I trained for for many years. I am a soldier, and I offered my services to Charles Soerensen when I left Rhui.”
“Not this again! You are so inflexible and stubborn, Anatoly! This isn’t Rhui. This isn’t the jaran. You’re as bad as Karolla, living in the past.”
“I beg your pardon!”
“Oh, I know, I know. You get along very well here. You take your classes and ride at the stables and fence and teach at the Academy. You’ve learned how to get around and I swear you know how to use all the obscure bits of technology better than I do—!” That made her chuckle, and he saw her soften; she always did, eventually, when they fought. This time he was not inclined to forgive her. “No one can ever accuse you of not being single-minded. Or of not being smart enough to do what you want.”
“Thank you,” he replied sarcastically.
She stood up, defensively crossing her arms on her chest. “Then why can’t you admit that you aren’t a jaran soldier anymore? You’ve got to make a new life for yourself. It’s been seven years since you left Rhui!”
“I am a jaran soldier.”
“Ah, Goddess, you’re impossible!”
They lapsed into an angry silence, glaring at each other. Diana’s Aunt Millie, laughing at something someone had said behind her, stepped out through the patio doors, halted, frowned, and went back inside, leaving them alone on the patio again.
Diana sighed, finally, running a hand over her eyes. He could see that she was close to tears. “Oh, Anatoly, why do we have to argue all the time?”
She was in a mood to soothe him, but he wasn’t in a mood to be soothed. “You have done nothing to help me. Why did you ask me to leave Rhui when you never intended that I become a part of your tribe?”
She bit down hard on her lower lip and did not reply, but he saw tears brimming in her eyes and he pressed his advantage.
“You only had the baby to placate me.”
“That’s unfair! I love Portia!”
“But you wouldn’t have agreed to have her, would you, if it hadn’t served to distract me from the discovery that all those enterprises I had gotten involved in, that all of them were just using me as a pet, as a… what do you call it?…a sideshow freak? If you truly cared for me, you wouldn’t ask me to stay behind, as if I were a servant. A man does not stay behind when a jahar goes riding; he rides. It’s insulting, Diana. As if you think I can’t take care of myself. You could think about me for once, instead of only thinking of yourself.”
“Only thinking of myself!” she gasped. “How dare you? If you think I haven’t struggled all these years… how dare you say that! I’ve had to make sacrifices, too.”
“That is all I am to you now, an obstacle. You would rather leave me behind with your family who will smother me with their kindness and conceal your shameful infatuation within the walls of the tent. So I won’t embarrass you again, because I know you were mortified after I showed those whimpering festival producers what a battle is really like. No one patronizes a Sakhalin!”
“I stood up for you!”
“Only because you had no choice! Not because you truly meant it!”
She burst into tears. “You can’t even see that it’s been hard for me, too,” she choked out, and she broke past him and ran out along the graveled path that led toward the greenhouse.
Anatoly contemplated the ruins of their argument with grim satisfaction. After a moment he realized that his hands were shaking, and he clenched them.
Aunt Millie stepped out onto the patio and surveyed him. He lifted his c
hin and faced her stubbornly. “Routed the enemy, I see,” she said conversationally.
“I didn’t—!”
“Now, Anatoly, come inside and help me wash the vegetables for the salad.” Once he would have protested that men did not cook, but that excuse was not tolerated at Holt Farm. He followed Aunt Millie inside meekly and took up a station beside her at the double sink. Most of the rest of the family—and there were a lot of them—had adjourned to the west lawn to watch the cricket game. Through the west window he saw Portia sitting on her grandfather’s lap, golden head resting on Granfa’s arm and two fingers stuck in her mouth. She was tired.
“You’re discontented,” observed Aunt Millie.
“It isn’t right that Diana should want me to stay behind,” he said promptly, taking the dispute to where it should have been essayed in the first place. “This could be a chance for me to use my skills, the only chance I’ve truly had so far.”
“It could be,” she agreed mildly. She was a big-boned woman, quite unlike her niece, appealingly strong, with powerful hands and arms from decades of carpentry work. “But I can’t say that you further your cause by driving Diana to tears.”
“She fights just as well as I do.”
“Certainly she can be just as cruel and cutting when she wishes to be, but she doesn’t have your years of tactical and strategic training, so, I would give the advantage in that department to you, I’m afraid.”
He had the grace to look ashamed.
“I know from my own experience that it’s sometimes impossible to forgo a chance to make a person whom you’re angry with cry just because it feels like recompense for your anger. But that isn’t the way to build a marriage. If I say that Diana has had to struggle these last years, I don’t say it to belittle what you’ve gone through, Anatoly. But you have to accept that she has had to make as many adjustments as you have.” She paused and looked at him with what he knew was a keen eye. “Do you disagree?”
Anatoly was not in the habit of disagreeing with aunts and etsanas, and in any case, he had discovered over the years that Aunt Millie did not give advice often, or lightly. Nor was it wise to ignore her. He tried to sort out his feelings, but they were far too chaotic. He settled for the direct approach. “I’m very angry. I want to go.”