by Kate Elliott
“There sits Lord Shiva in his aspect as the supreme Yogi. On the tower of ice called Mount Kailasa, he meditates upon the eternal. He is both unchanging and unchanged. There he will sit while one hundred civilizations rise and fall, while vast reaches of space are explored and abandoned and an immense net of light spreads its tendrils between thousands of star systems and then collapses back in on itself until it is only a weak flame burning at a single point, soon to flicker out from lack of fuel.”
“He looks very calm,” said Ilyana, staring up at the rock face. She liked the dancing Shiva better.
“His disinterest is truly divine.”
“But if nothing is immortal, then how long will he sit up there?”
Genji turned away and walked back toward the doorway that led them into the hall of the dancing Shiva. She seemed amused. “Temporality has so little to do with the massive presence of eternity, Il-ya-na Ar-kha-nov. Like imaginary space, it is infinite, all-encompassing.”
That made Ilyana think of Valentin. “Uh, I always wondered, I mean, I know you have nesh here. Some people—” Fleetingly, Ilyana wondered if Genji could read minds and know she was thinking about her brother. “—some humans, that is, they think that the imaginary space of nesh is more real than here, the real world. But maybe that’s like these two kinds of time—what you said—linear time that moves and monumental time that really isn’t time but just is.”
“Building occurs as a biological process,” answered Genji. “All of what we call life is a building, a fine edifice that rises and decays and vanishes only to rise again in a new form, balanced against the static repose that is the meditation of Shiva upon the eternal, the fathomless waters.”
“I remember what this is called,” said Ilyana, pausing in front of Shiva dancing and then running to catch up with Genji, who had kept walking. “Kori and I did a project together on her Uncle Gus’s set of dances. Anandatandava, the fierce dance of bliss. Shiva’s dance is him doing five things at once.” She bit her lip, trying to remember it; she felt impelled to impress Genji with her knowledge. “He creates, maintains, veils, unveils, and destroys his creation, which is the world, but at the same time he grants release to the person who worships him.”
“Here is the gate, and your escort. You will visit me again.”
“Uh. Yes, I will.”
Genji turned away. The soft rustling of her robes skittered through the hall, the faintest of echoes.
“Wait,” said Ilyana, aware of David standing in the shadow of the passageway. She gathered up her courage to ask the question she had most wanted to but had not been sure she ought to or was allowed to ask. “I just wondered, why did you ask me to visit you?”
“Because you came to my notice.”
“Well, uh, how come you have a human creation in this hall?”
“Learning begins with what is familiar, and what is simple.” Genji moved away, back into the hall. The dark floor was polished to such a sheen that the colors in her robes seemed to scatter and flash along it as she departed.
David came to the very edge of the passageway but did not set foot in the hall itself. Ilyana hurried over to him.
“It’s like teaching me about architecture by beginning with compression and tension instead of right away starting to build a Gothic cathedral, isn’t it?” she asked him.
“There’s a Gothic cathedral in here?” he demanded.
“No, just Shiva.”
They emerged from the pylon and walked back down the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes. “I hope you’re going to tell me what happened, Yana. You were gone for four hours.”
“Four hours! It can’t have been that long.”
“Did she give you any idea why she asked you to come visit her?”
“I dunno. I think she’s curious about human females.”
“What did you see?”
“We looked at two statues of Shiva, and talked about time. We saw Shiva as Lord of Dance and the other one was him sitting on a mountain meditating.”
David cracked a smile, beginning to relax finally. “I always liked the statues of Shiva and Parvati best. Well, anyway.” He seemed embarrassed suddenly. “Do you know how we’re getting back?” They came out onto the portico and descended the stairs to the granite entryway. The gray disk waited patiently for them.
“I guess the same way we came in.”
“Oh, wonderful,” groaned David, eyeing the disk with loathing.
Ilyana hesitated before she stepped onto it. “You know what else, though? It was like Genji was giving me a lesson. And she wants me to come back.”
Startled, he examined her for a long moment, making her uncomfortable. “No doubt Shiva told her he’s lonely,” he said and then, at once, “Sorry.”
Quickly, he stepped onto the disk and she jumped on after him. The plate began to rise and soon was swallowed up in the glass tower. “That’s great news,” he finished, and said to himself in an undertone, “Goddess, what an idiot you are, David.”
Ilyana stared at her feet, dim now, since they were surrounded by the black tunnel. The only illumination came from the ring demarking the boundaries of the gray disk. She had remembered who Parvati was: Himalaya’s daughter, who was so beautiful that Shiva loved her divine body without respite for a thousand years. Blushing, she tried not to think of the dancing Shiva, but the more she tried not to, the more she did think of him, his graceful limbs and slender torso, the sensuous flow of his hands.
At last, they emerged into the tower chamber. The little ship was waiting for them, docked now so that only a hand’s width line of air separated the ship from the ledge. Ilyana crossed over and sat on a bench and spoke not one word the entire journey back, even though she could tell David was burning to know what had happened. She just could not bring herself to talk.
When they arrived back at the dome, Gwyn was waiting instead of Hyacinth. His rehearsal was over for the day and Hyacinth had been called. The sun was setting. Only the planet’s great rings peeped over the horizon. One moon gleamed softly in the sky.
When she got back to her mother’s tent, Valentin had not come home. Nor, when she went out to the ruined caravansary, had he touched the food she’d left that morning,
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Game of Princes
VASHA LOOKED FORWARD TO the games of castles he played with Prince Janos. They were well matched, and sometimes a game went on all evening while the women sewed quietly on one side of the room and Rusudani read aloud in her melodious voice from The Recitation. She had several attendants now, but they all looked alike to Vasha: khaja women with dark hair and the irritating habit of covering their mouths when they were amused, as if it was impolite to laugh out loud. This time spent in the solar belonging to Janos and his lady was also the only time Vasha saw his father, who usually stood at attention, face blank, near the princess.
During the day Vasha languished in captivity, locked in a stone tower with nothing to do and often no one to talk with, since Stefan and Mikhail had servant’s duties to attend to. Vasha quickly figured out that khaja princes did not wait on themselves, so after the first two days, in order to maintain the charade, he did not attempt to help the others.
Now, on the evening of his sixth day in captivity, he sat with his boots drawn up on the stone bench that overlooked the only true window in the room and wondered why he had not been summoned to attend Prince Janos. He heard the door being unbarred, and he stood up. The door opened to admit his father, carrying a tray of food and wine. Vasha hurried over at once to take the tray from him, then stopped, because the guards were looking on. Ilya set the tray down on the table and the guards shut the door on them.
Vasha did not quite have the nerve to embrace him. Nervously, he hovered next to him. “Sit down, Father,” he said, pointing to the chair. “You’re still thin. You must eat more. Are they feeding you enough?”
Ilya did not reply. Instead, he went to each window in turn and looked out, studying the ground
below. One recess had been completely opened into a window divided into nine panes which looked down over the inner ward and the well and outbuildings.
“That’s where I sit most of the time,” said Vasha, “there on that bench. I see you down below.” He did not add that watching his father at the well was, besides the one glimpse he’d had of Rusudani crossing the inner ward, the part of his day he most looked forward to.
Ilya sat down on the bench abruptly and just stared out the window. Vasha brought the tray over to him. “You must eat something.” He set the tray down on the bench beside Ilya’s knee. Ilya glanced up at him. His gaze was searing. Vasha flinched back, and an instant later realized that the anger wasn’t for him, it was for their captivity. “Please take something!” Vasha snapped finally, wondering if his father’s wits were addled. “It’s too dark to really see much anyway. Sometimes I see you picking up pebbles from the dirt.”
Ilya took a piece of bread from the tray and examined it. “Vladimir and I play khot,” he said, and Vasha breathed a sigh of relief.
“Perhaps you’ll bring the stones up here so we can play.”
Ilya’s lips quirked, but it was not a smile. “I do not command my own movements,” he said softly.
“Gods, you must hate that,” Vasha blurted out, and at once was sorry he had said it. Ilya began to shred the slice of bread into small pieces while he stared out through the cloudy panes of glass. His fingers ripped at the bread with fine fury. “Don’t waste the food!” scolded Vasha, picking up each scrap as it fell to the bench and the plank floor. “How Tess puts up with you I’ll never know.”
Ilya dropped the rest of the bread, jumped up, and began pacing. Watching him, the grim, arrogant set of his mouth, the crisp authority of his stride even clipped by the size of the room, Vasha wondered how anyone could possibly mistake him for anything or anyone but Bakhtiian? Prince Janos was not, perhaps, quite as astute as he seemed to think he was. Ilya continued to pace. The silence grated on Vasha’s nerves.
“Have you seen Katya?”
“I saw her yesterday morning. She is. being held in…there.” He crossed the room to one of the arrow loops. “You can just see the tower through here. We could only speak together in Taor, so we could say nothing useful, since the khaja prince stayed with us the entire time. Someday I am going to kill him.”
“Isn’t it a bit hasty to assume that he’ll serve us better dead than alive?”
The glance Ilya shot him would have burned a lesser man to ash, but Vasha was beginning to have the glimmerings of an idea about his father, and it not only surprised but strengthened him: Ilya had a touch of madness in his mind, and without Tess around to steady him, he was becoming trapped in the whirlpool of his own rage and frustration. There was a pause. Vasha carried the tray over to the table, and without being asked, Ilya sat down to eat with him.
“What do you mean?” Ilya asked finally after he had demolished most of the food, which Vasha kept pushing onto him.
“He doesn’t hate the jaran. He’s just ambitious.”
“He killed Konstans and half of my jahar.”
“No. Andrei Sakhalin killed them by betraying you to Prince Janos. But what if you could make Janos an ally?”
“Impossible.” Ilya pushed away and strode back to the window bench. Sitting, he was lost in shadow.
Vasha took the wick of a second lantern and lit it from the first, throwing a new pattern of shadows into the room. “But if you—” he began, and stopped, studying his father’s face. Ilya looked as impervious and unbending as the stone walls of this tower prison. Perhaps it was better to wait to expand on that train of thought. “If you brought stones in, if you can come up here again, we could play khot.”
“I hear you are a good khot player.”
The praise stung. “You might have played me yourself to find out, not just heard it from other people!”
Ilya winced and turned away to cover it, but Vasha caught a glimpse of his expression, and it startled him: Ilya looked ashamed. Vasha steadied himself on the table with one hand. When he was in command, Ilya seemed invulnerable and unapproachable. Now, here, Vasha felt for the first time as if he might come to understand his father.
“Are you ashamed of me?”
“Why should I be ashamed of you?” Ilya demanded irritably.
Vasha hesitated, then boldly went on. He had nothing really to lose, anyway. If he was Janos, and an army came to rescue his prisoners, he would kill them out of hand and be done with it. “Because I’m a bastard. Because I’m not truly your son.”
Sunk half in shadow, Ilya’s face yet captured enough light to highlight the sweep of his hair and the dark line of his beard, a little ragged now, growing longer than he liked it, to soften the profile that so often Vasha had seen present a hard, unyielding face to those men he had taken prisoner. One of his hands played with the green ribbon woven into his belt buckle. “Tess says you are truly my son.”
“Tess is very kind, but she is khaja. I am jaran.”
“By the laws of the jaran it is true that you cannot be my son, but I was the man who was lying in the blankets of your mother when the winds breathed your spirit into her body.”
Vasha shivered. Cold leaked in through the windows and rose up from the stone under his feet. There was a small hearth in the room, laid into the wall, but it had not been lit. “Would you have married her? My mother, I mean?”
“No.” Ilya stood up abruptly and hurried over to the window loop that looked out onto the tower where he had said Katerina was being held. “I see torches there. Someone is coming out, but I can’t see… only the light. Damn it. I don’t trust him.”
“Trust who?”
“Trust a khaja prince with Katya in a locked tower.”
“Father! Lady Jadranka granted women’s sanctuary to Katya. I know khaja sometimes treat women badly, but—”
“Gods! You spent time in Jeds. Don’t be so naive, Vassily.”
“They aren’t all enemies, as you should know!”
Behind them, the door banged open and Stefan came in loaded down with firewood, which he dropped with a splintering thud next to the hearth, blowing grit out of his face and brushing chips off his clothing. Seeing Ilya, his face lit, but he glanced back at the guards and said nothing. A man Vasha recognized as the khaja priest assigned to the women stepped into the room and beckoned to Ilya, barking a command that included Princess Rusudani’s name. Perhaps Ilya had relaxed a little, even engaged in a conversation as perilous as the one he and Vasha had embarked on; now he stiffened and Vasha saw it all crack away from him to show the brittle fury underneath. As he passed Vasha, Vasha reached out and brushed his hand; the gesture startled him. Then he was gone.
“Do you see my father often? Outside?” Vasha asked Stefan as soon as the door slammed shut. “How does he seem to you? Does he seem well?”
Stefan shrugged. “He’s still a little weak from his wounds, but he healed well. Otherwise…he’s quiet. He doesn’t say much. Now that you mention it, he rarely talks at all. Mostly what we say between us comes from Vladimir, if I see him.”
“I think he’s going mad. Gods, I hope Stanislav Vershinin escaped those khaja he was sold to. If the army doesn’t get word of this soon….”
“And manage to track us down here,” Stefan added helpfully.
“What does he do all day? My father, I mean.”
“What does a slave do? Hauls water. Hauls wood. I’ve gotten to work in the stables a bit, which is a blessing, although these khaja horses stink from being shut up. They don’t let me ride. I saw Nikita, too. He’s been sent to dig ditches outside the walls, and he was filthy. They never let him wash. What Bakhtiian does I don’t precisely know beyond that. Vladimir says they often stand in attendance on Princess Rusudani. Unarmed, of course. That’s why they’ve been allowed to clean themselves up a bit.” Stefan was rather disheveled, in fact, but spoiled the effect by whistling as he piled the wood into the hearth.
“W
hy are you so damned cheerful?”
Stefan smiled, looking rather foolish. “I saw Jaelle. She embraced me, Vasha! I kissed her!”
“Did she have news of Katerina?” Vasha demanded, annoyed at Stefan’s good fortune and by Ilya’s insinuations. He tried to imagine Rusudani embracing him, but he could really only picture her leaning over her Recitation, reading from it, her lips moving and sometimes the tip of her tongue licking out to moisten her soft upper lip…. “You could have told me about Katya first!”
Stunned, Stefan turned round and gaped at him. “She didn’t say anything about Katya except that they’re fed enough and left alone. They’re in the tower—” He paced over to the window! “Well, you can’t see it from here.”
“You can see it through that window. She said they’d been left alone?”
“Yes.” Stefan did not go look at the tower. He seemed distracted. “I told her I loved her, Vasha.”
Relieved and irritated, Vasha went and kicked a log. It hurt his toes. “This is all very well, Stefan, but we’ve got to escape before my father goes mad.” Stefan’s face fell, and suddenly Vasha felt guilty for ruining his friend’s pleasure. He had never before heard Stefan talk this way about a woman. “Do you think she loves you?”
“I don’t know. How can you tell with these khaja?”
“You must find a way to meet her again. This time we’ll have a message ready to send to Katya through her.”
“Oh, yes,” said Stefan dreamily. Abruptly he laid his hands on the paned glass and stared down into the dark ward. “Gods, how I hate being a prisoner.”
“Can you get me stones for khot? It would give me something to do.”
Stefan pushed away from the window and came back to help lay the fire. “Poor Vasha. At least I get outside. You must hate this tower.”
“I don’t see any use hating it. We’re here, and we’ll stay here unless we find a way to escape or the army finds us. Or… or if I can convince Prince Janos that it would be in his interest to release us. All of us.”