by Kate Elliott
“What was a scholar from Byblos doing in Targana?”
“I do not know, my lady, or even if the Targana merchant received it in Targana or elsewhere. There are a few words in the Vidiyan script, here—” He helpfully held the scroll up toward one candle. “—which may be in the hand of the Targana merchant. Scrolls from Byblos are uncommon, my lady. This one has particular value because a translation of the Byblene script into Habakar has been interpolated between the lines.”
“Who did the translation?”
“I cannot answer that question, my lady, but I can only assume that the Targana merchant did so. It is a careful translation, worth more than jewels.”
“But then why would he have written this inscription in Vidiyan? Why not translate it into Vidiyan instead of Habakar?”
“I beg your pardon, my lady.” The scribe stood up suddenly, looking over her shoulder.
Tess turned to see that she and the ke had attracted a small but interested crowd, all men, some few of whom she recognized from her previous forays into this arcade.
The scribe slid past the table. Immediately one of the men came forward and there was a whispered conversation. Tess could interpret the drift of the conversation by the exaggerated expressions of shock and fear that coursed across the poor scribe’s face.
When he returned to the table, he bowed several times in a most obsequious fashion. “I beg a thousand pardons, my lady. Here, let this worthless scroll be yours as my gift.” He pushed it across to her.
“I’d like to see it first.” Setting down Galina’s cloth, Tess eased the scroll out of the sheath and unrolled it, peeling off the layer of oilcloth. It was good quality parchment, and the quality of the lettering was remarkable: elegant and clear. Even the interpolation had no smudges. “What is this worth?” Tess asked the ke in Chapalii.
The ke studied it. “In barter or in coin?”
“In coin.”
“Two yekh, by the standard devised by the civil administration here in Sarai.”
“That much?”
“It is a good quality of reproduction, for these primitive methods, and the text itself is both rare and has arrived here from a considerable distance.”
“You can be sure of that? Do you think it actually originated in Byblos?”
The ke extended a hand, gloved, of course, and the scribe took one step back, caught himself, but did not move forward. She ran two fingers down the parchment, which Tess still held open. “It is woven of different fibers. It is more sophisticated in manufacture, like the four other artifacts of Byblene manufacture which have come to the library.”
“Hmm. I’ll have to get a Habakar interpreter who can help me translate it into Rhuian. It will make a fine addition to the library.” Tess rolled the scroll back up carefully and tucked it into the sheath, rummaged in her pouch, and came up with two of the newly minted yekhs. She set them down in front of the startled scribe, smiled at him, and picked up the scroll and the cloth.
“That is not necessary, my lady. Your presence here is payment enough.”
“I trust the transaction is satisfactory?”
He bowed several more times. “May the Almighty God smile on your children, my lady. May he bring fortune to your—” He broke off, looking flustered. “You are most generous and gracious. May God grant you and your husband long life.”
Tess took pity on him and left, the ke keeping step beside her. “I didn’t know you came so often to the marketplace.”
“On occasion it is useful. Is there not a saying in the Habakar tongue: ‘A bird caged in luxury would rather the poverty of the wild wood’?”
Was there a wistful lilt to her voice? Tess could not tell. “Yet you chose exile knowing that it would bring isolation.”
The ke slipped into the deeper tongue, as if the answer was too important to voice in one of the lesser tongues of what she had once called “the superficies of the Empire.” “Out of exile comes true seeing.”
“ ‘It is only through many eyes that we can see ourselves,’ ” replied Tess in the lesser tongue. So few things translated easily into the deeper tongue, which as far as Tess could tell used no pronouns nor even truly recognized the existence of the existential individual.
But the reply evidently contented the ke, who said nothing as they walked down the avenue that led back to the library. They paused on the steps of the library to watch the clouds roll down over the north ridge. Tess heard the rumble of thunder in the distance.
“There will be a great storm.” The ke lifted her head as if to scent the air.
Tess smiled. “I can feel it in the air.”
“You can feel it?” The ke did not quite sound surprised, but she turned to regard Tess. Tess could just make out her eyes with their odd vertical lozenge through the thin slit in her veil. “Humans are not known for this capability.”
“Anyone can feel the electricity in the air at a time like this.” She paused, sorting out what the ke had said. “You can feel it as well?”
“I can see it,” said the ke. As if that ended the conversation, she went up the stairs to the door that led into her private chambers.
Tess just stood there, holding the cloth and the scroll. She stared at the clouds roiling down on them, trying to imagine what it would be like to see the fields of force emanating around the storm, at the pressure and the wind and the static charges shifting and building. But didn’t the Chapelii see in infrared? Last Tess had heard, most xenologists agreed that the Chapalii saw in degrees of heat. What if, like some marine creatures on Earth, they perceived electrical fields as well?
A spatter of rain drove her inside the main building.
“Tess!”
“Sonia! What are you doing here?” She needed only one look at Soma’s face to see that there was trouble. “What’s wrong?” Immediately her heart froze. Something had happened to Natalia or Yuri.
“It’s Niko. He’s taken quite ill suddenly. Varia Telyegin says his heart has failed him.”
“Oh, gods.” Her first impulse was relief that her children were fine. Her second, fear for Niko. “Here, do you have something I can wrap these things in so they won’t get wet?”
“My cloak.”
They hurried out across the plaza. The wind picked up, blowing hard across the open expanse, kicking up Sonia’s skirts and tugging Tess’s hair out of its loose braid. Rain spattered them, but the storm didn’t break until she reached Juli Danov’s tent. Then, just as Tess slipped inside, lightning streaked across the sky and thunder pealed, so loud that the tent seemed to shake.
Niko lay in the front chamber of the tent, attended by his wife, two of his grandchildren, by Varia Telyegin, and by Irena Orzhekov. He breathed shallowly, and appeared unconscious.
“What happened?” Tess asked in a whisper, dropping down between Irena and Juli and grasping Juli’s free hand. The old woman looked frail with worry.
“He collapsed,” said Varia in a strong voice, not whispering at all. “A pain in his chest while he was consulting over a patient with me, and then he was gone, like this. It was quick, and peaceful.”
Thunder boomed above them as the storm rolled over Sarai.
“The gods themselves have come to take him,” said Irena softly. “Listen to their voices.”
They listened. Tess wept silently as the wind tore at the tent and rain pounded on the felt roof and walls, torn by the splintering crash of thunder.
As the storm rolled away southward, Niko breathed his last and passed over into the other world.
Stunned, Tess left Juli with a few words of sympathy—she hardly knew what she was saying—and went to find her children. She found, instead, three mud-spattered riders waiting outside her tent.
“Cara!” she exclaimed.
Dr. Cara Fel Hierakis swung down from her horse, handed its reins over to one of her attendants, and shook drops of rain out of her hair. “I’d like to try those baths of yours,” she said, grabbing her saddlebags off her horse before i
t was led away and throwing them down on the carpet under the awning.
“What are you doing here?” Tess demanded.
“Come in out of the rain, my dear. It is your tent, you know. You don’t have to ask my permission. In fact, the weather satellites showed that the thunderstorm was coming over this area so I decided to use it as a cover, as an excuse, to fly in, having neither the patience nor inclination for the overland journey this time. So we’ve just ‘ridden in’ from Jeds, so to speak.”
Tess dredged up enough wit to notice that Cara wore, rather like a halo, an aura of expectancy about her. “What happened?”
“I have braved the perilous frontier, Tess. I have crossed the river, after which there is no turning back. Now…” She laughed a little wildly, quite unlike Cara. “I don’t know. I need to steady myself for a few days.”
“Niko is dead.”
That brought her to earth. “Oh, no. That’s sad news, but not entirely unexpected.”
“He just died, Cara! Not an hour ago!”
“Ah, Goddess. If I’d only arrived two hours earlier, perhaps I could have—”
“No, no.” Tess shook her head violently and grasped Cara’s hands in her own. They were cold. “You’re right. Better to let him go. He wouldn’t have wanted anything else.”
“Wiser than most of us, I fear.”
“That’s true enough. Gods, I’ll miss him. Ilya will be furious.”
The rain slowed and gave out altogether, and a shaft of sunlight broke out between clouds. Water slid down off the awning and dripped to the ground. The air smelled fresher. Tess pushed into her tent and set the scroll and Galina’s cloth down onto the table.
“Was it Arina?” she asked, turning as Cara followed her in. “The baby is well enough, although not particularly strong.”
“No, I didn’t come because of Arina. I’d like to change. I’m truly filthy. We only rode a few kilometers, but all through the worst of that storm. It was exceptionally exciting.”
“I’ll walk with you to the baths. But let me find the children first, to make sure they weren’t too frightened.” They went back outside and Tess watched as Cara swung the saddlebags over her shoulders. “What did you come for, then?”
“I did it.”
“You did what?”
“I’ve broken the code.” Cara said it so casually that the words did not sink in. “We are no longer constrained by the treatments that the Chapalii have granted us, to make us live with extended youth and vitality but for only the span of one hundred and twenty years.”
“What does that mean?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? The Chapalii treatments merely postponed senescence, compressing the disabilities and diseases of old age into the last five to ten years before death. But the Rhuian natives were tampered with. They actually are in general less susceptible to disease, especially given the primitive nature of conditions here, and more competent at somatic maintenance—that is, general maintenance of the body—than the other human populations. And from that, from the tissue and blood and genome samples, I—”
“Let me sit down.” Tess collapsed onto a pillow wet with rain.
“It’s just,” finished Cara, crouching beside her, “that I find it ironic to ride in here all on fire with the prospect of immortality, or at the least a doubling of the normal life span, only to be greeted with the news of Niko’s death. All because of unraveling a code brought to me through my interaction with the jaran.”
“Code! That’s it. That must be what the tripartite sequences represent. When merchant ships transmit information through the vectors as their shipping clearance, and send it out in three discrete bunches, it’s coded to different cycles, and thus to different end points. One is clearly some kind of public record. One is evidently to themselves, private, to their own house affiliates. But there’s a third level, which is neither public nor house.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If we can understand what that information is, and where it goes, and if we can disrupt it, then we can disrupt Chapalii shipping, can’t we? By a subtler and more potent method than outright use of force, which we haven’t got enough of anyway.”
Cara got a curious expression on her face. “We don’t know how long the Chapalii live, do we? But if our life spans expand to match theirs, wouldn’t that give us an equal advantage?”
“Unless a short life span, if you’re aware of it, makes you rasher and more aggressive in getting what you want. If you have a lot of time, it might not seem so urgent.”
“Which is one reason you could choose to stay with Ilya and the jaran.”
“Yes.”
“What a strange, tangled web we weave, my dear.”
“There they are.” Tess got to her feet and waved at her children, who came out of Mother Orzhekov’s tent in a herd, gabbling and shouting. Only Yuri waved back. Natalia was too busy arguing with Lara, and the whole herd of children headed out behind the tent, intent on some goal. They did not look as if they had heard the news of Niko’s death yet, or as if the thunderstorm had bothered them one bit. She gazed thoughtfully on her children as they vanished from sight. “Are you saying, Cara, that you can do this now?”
“I have a formula. It needs further testing and refinement, and the main problem is that actual results in humans won’t be quantifiable for decades.”
“So my children could live for centuries, perhaps?”
“No, Tess, not just your children. You could live for centuries. Perhaps. Do you want to?”
“I don’t think I’m quite ready to consider that question. Could we please resolve all the moral issues involved in interfering here on Rhui as well as free ourselves from the Chapalii hegemony before we tackle that one?”
Cara smiled. “Somehow I suspect they’re all related, intertwined like the many strands of a web.”
“And like the strands of light that make up a web, the darkness against which the strand appears must also exist in order to set it off.”
“I hate to sit on these moral questions alone,” said Cara softly. “That’s why I came to see you.”
Tess extended a hand and lifted her up. “Oh, thank you,” she said wryly. “We must go say good-bye to Niko.”
“What will happen to his body?”
Tess recoiled from her. “You’re not—”
“No, no! I didn’t mean I wanted to do an autopsy.” She looked sheepish for a moment, but recovered quickly. Already, above, patches of blue sky chased the clouds southward. “I just wondered, that was all.”
Tess lifted her chin to let the wind stream off her face. It smelled of rain and damp felt. “They’ll take him out to the plain and leave him there, so that his soul may enter again into the world in another body.”
“That’s right. Metempsychosis. The transmigration of souls. It’s a form of reincarnation belief. But that’s not what happened to Arina Veselov.”
“No. She was released from this world.”
“I’d like to see the baby.”
“Yes. There, I see others going over as well. There will be a vigil tonight. At dawn his relatives will take him out onto the grass.”
Cara went over with her. Cara was one of those people who had the art of good manners down perfectly: She stayed long enough to honor her connection to the deceased, but not so long as to imply that her connection was any greater than it actually was.
Tess stayed longer, well into the night, kneeling on the carpet under the awning, first with her children on either side of her and, later, when they fell asleep and were carried off to bed, by herself. The entrance flaps were thrown wide, to admit Father Wind, but it was still night, oddly enough, and the candles burning at Niko’s head and foot illuminated him with a steady light. As if to reflect his steady wisdom in life. She wept softly, but more for herself, for losing him, than for him in death.
She dozed off finally and woke and dozed off and started awake again, hearing bells. But she had been dreami
ng: The scene remained unchanged, only the candles had burned to stubs.
No, there were bells, messenger bells. She stood and stepped off the carpet, into the night. The sky had cleared utterly, and the moon hung low, spraying its silver gleam over the pale marble dome of the library. It was cool.
There. Tess saw the torches, men loping alongside a horse. She walked out to meet the messenger, and blinked once, twice, there was something so familiar about his posture on horseback. Then he swung down and turned into the direct light of a torch.
“Kirill!” Beyond that word, nothing more came out, she was so surprised to see him.
He looked travel worn, he looked weary, he looked—gods—older than Ilya, but he still looked like Kirill, only markedly grim. Seeing her, his expression softened somewhat, although he looked almost… cautious.
“I came to attend my wife at the birth of our child,” he said hoarsely. She said nothing. She needed to say nothing. “But I heard what happened on my way here.”
There was a long silence. She took one step closer to him. “The child still lives, Kirill. A girl.”
He took off his helmet and shook out his hair, pale in the moonlight, still cut short. The bells strapped to his chest and back whispered as he moved. “That is not the only reason I came. South past the desert there is a pass that leads into the eastern wilderness that borders Mircassia, or so my intelligence reports. In two or three months, when the rains have stopped, it will be passable. I can lead my army over that pass and into the heart of Mircassia while Sakhalin comes down on them from the north.”
“But, Kirill—” She faltered. She felt so terrible, thinking of Arina, that it took her a moment to realize that the grim look on his face was more concern for her than distress over his own sorrow. Good reasons, both of them, but neither of them truly reasons a dyan would leave his army during campaign season, not even with a capable second to hand over into command.
