by Kate Elliott
“You look a little like him,” she said, as if to say, but are otherwise utterly unlike. “What about Mircassia?”
“I wanted you before I wanted Mircassia. I swear by my own gods that that is the truth. But it is nevertheless beside the point, Princess Rusudani. You must marry me, or another man.”
“You do not treat women so in the jaran.”
“All woman marry in the jaran as well.”
“How can you claim that the women of your people are not ruled by men?”
“What does marriage have to do with that? A woman can marry and still wield the power that is rightfully hers.”
She set down her cup on the table that separated them and touched, like a reflex, the tiny knife that hung on a gold chain around her neck. “I am to meet with my grandfather this afternoon. Lady Tellarkina says that my grandfather has a Mircassian lordling in mind to marry me, a grandson of an old retainer of his, after we have gotten rid of you. But I know nothing about this man. He will be loyal to his grandfather and to my grandfather, to the council of ministers who have agreed to his elevation. He will become their tool. He will not care about me.”
“What are you suggesting, Princess Rusudani?”
She met his gaze, clearly and cleanly, for the first time. “That we marry at once.”
“The baby—”
“It is Janos’s child, no matter what your barbaric customs say. As soon as it can travel, I will send it north to Lady Jadranka. I will not suffer Janos’s child to live by me. She wants it. She may have it. But you and I will marry now, Prince Vassily. I will not become their pawn. Better that I ally with the jaran, who will give me a power base outside of this court, where I am the outsider, the interloper, than be isolated within the net of their intrigues.”
“Once you no longer need me, will you betray me as you did Janos?”
“He forced me to marry him. I had no choice. Now I do have a choice, between you and this Lord Intavio. You have no power here except through me, and if I had you killed and the jaran invaded and conquered Mircassia, if they could, they would force me to marry another jaran prince, one I didn’t know.”
“I suppose,” said Vasha bitterly, “that I needn’t have asked that question, because you betrayed me once already, to Janos, when we were first captured.”
Now she looked away from him. A flush stained her cheeks. “I did that to protect Bakhtiian.”
Embarrassed, jealous, he almost took a drink of the tea just to do something with his hands. But he caught himself in time. She saw his hesitation.
“Here, child,” she called to an attendant, “bring a new pot, and pour into both our cups from it.” She emptied her cup onto the stone paving. She smoothed a hand down over the curve of her stomach. “Once I was content to devote my life to God, to prayer, but God did not mean me to follow such a destiny. I am ambitious, too, Prince Vassily.”
Deliberately she leaned forward, having to stand up to get her abdomen over the table, and kissed him chastely on each cheek. “We will go to meet my grandfather together.”
King Barsauma heard Rusudani out in silence. Vasha could not tell if he was disgusted, infuriated, or pleased. When she was finished, he coughed. A servant hurried forward and wiped a drop of spittle from the drooping side of his mouth.
“Are you in love with him, granddaughter?” he demanded.
“No.”
He grunted. “That is good. No fit marriage was ever founded on infatuation.” He turned his head to glare at Vasha. His stare reminded Vasha of a vulture’s, waiting until the dying animal stopped thrashing. “There are two provinces in eastern Filis that by right ought to belong to Mircassia.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, your highness.”
“Hmph. When your father conquers it, and has killed that heretic Basil and that puerile half sister of his, I want those provinces returned. That is the only offer I will accept.”
“Then we have a bargain, your highness. But I will keep the pages.”
“Ah, God,” muttered Barsauma, “what has it come to, that I lose my fine sons and have to endure seeing a convent-bred child and a barbarian take my place?” He thumped his cane on the floor many times, his face getting red. Vasha wondered if he was about to collapse with a fit of apoplexy.
Rusudani reached up from where she knelt before him and took his withered hand in hers. “It is God’s will, Grandfather. You will not be disappointed in us.”
He settled down slowly, and his servant gave him a sip of spirits and wiped the sweat off his face and straightened his collar. Still breathing heavily, the old man measured first his granddaughter and second, Vasha. “Pah,” he said scornfully: “A mere girl and a bandit.” But he did not thump his cane. “Well. Qiros, come here, come here. Bring more glasses, pour all round. From the same borne.”
By that gesture, Vasha saw that he now had an alliance with the Mircassian king.
Ten days later, Rusudani was invested as the heir to the throne of Mircassia, the ceremony taking place in the great cathedral of Kavad.
Here, in the south, bordering on the heretic realm of Prince Basil, the huge windows in the church were laced with colored glass, and the afternoon sun streamed in through the windows and illuminated the interior with dazzling light.
The presbyter read the service with great flourish, and King Barsauma managed with every steely bit of will that he possessed to crown her all by himself, with one weakened and one withered arm.
Then the queen of Mircassia, her pregnancy showing through the heavy robes of state, turned to look toward her future husband. Vasha, knees trembling beneath equally heavy robes, mounted the steps and halted beside her.
So it was that Vasha came to be married in a khaja church by a khaja ceremony, to a khaja queen. He became a prince, as his mother had long ago promised him, but in the khaja manner, by right of paternity, by right of marriage to a woman, the ways that khaja measured rank. Not by jaran custom.
But he could hear the whisper of his father’s words: You’ll do, Vassily.
He was content.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Himalaya’s Beautiful Daughter
THE CARAVANSARY ECHOED WITH the ghost voices of the company, long since gone back to Earth. Ilyana stretched out belly down on the bench in the courtyard, letting the sun warm her back through her silk shirt. She reveled in her solitude.
“You have been idle for fifteen minutes,” said her slate. “Do you wish to close the Karnak program?”
She yawned. “Yeah, sure.” She crossed her arms over the slate and lay her head down on them. The back of her neck between the part in her braids got sun for the first time in an hour. She tucked her chin down, to expose more of her neck to the glorious warmth.
A boot scuffed the pavement at the entrance gates.
She jerked up, swinging her legs off the bench. But it was only David. He dumped a saddle and bridle just inside the gate and walked over to her, pulling grass out of his hair.
“You were out riding. What happened?”
He rubbed one shoulder. “Damned horse threw me. It got startled. The dome came down.”
“I didn’t hear—”
“It wasn’t the noise. It was the flash when the field was shut off. You didn’t notice it?”
“I had my eyes closed.” She bounced up to her feet. “But that means the dry season’s here, just like Genji promised when she made us put those weird membranes on. Now we can go live somewhere else.”
“You don’t like it here?”
She shrugged, unwilling to admit to him that the ruined caravansary still made her nervous. She never went there alone.
“You’re sure, Yana, that you don’t want to go…”
“Home?”
“Back to Earth.”
“No. I like it here, really.”
“Even after two months alone? It’s pretty quiet.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“I don’t mind it, Yana, but it’s generally accepted
that adults can adapt to many circumstances for a finite period of time. Meditative retreats are considered beneficial to mental and physical health, after all. But you’re still young—”
“As you keep reminding me,” she snapped, irritated by his avuncular meddling. “I like it here just fine, thank you! It’s nice to be alone for a while. And anyway, Genji says she’s working on Duke Naroshi to invite Augustus Gopal here, to dance, so then my friend Kori could come visit.”
“Ah. That would be nice for you.”
Ilyana rolled her eyes, grabbed her slate, and stalked outside. She had been a little nervous, two months ago when the company had finally packed everything up and left, about staying alone here with just David. She wasn’t quite sure about what, what there was to be nervous about, or if it was something about David or something about her, but that had changed. She liked David—well, in some ways she really loved him, because he showed her more attention and affection than her parents ever had. But really, he was positively becoming as tiresome as a parent, constant questions and worrying about her and wanting to know every least thing Genji said to her during their visits and if she was going out when she was coming back. It went on and on and on, so that even though there were only two of them here—just two humans, that is—sometimes she felt crowded.
Tucking her slate in her belt, she hoisted up her saddle and saddlebags and went out to the horses. She rode Sosha past the burnt circle of ground that was all that was left of Valentin’s pyre and kept going, all the way to the rose wall and through the gate that opened for her. Armed now with a kind of a second skin, an invisible membrane that did something with the air, filtered it somehow, she forged forward, unafraid. Naroshi’s palace was huge, and she and David were just beginning to mark out a basic map of it. But some routes she knew quite well.
Naroshi’s palace lived in a jungle. The wet season lasted for five months, and the dry for six, more or less, according to human measures of time calculated by Genji. But these “monsoons” dropped as much as sixty feet of rain in a season, which was why Naroshi had had his steward Roki erect the dome, knowing that the humans were adapted to what Genji called a “savannah” climate.
The vegetation steamed under the sun, still drying out. The smells came so thick that they almost choked her. Animals writhed through the undergrowth, but she didn’t look closely, just stayed on the path. There were more birds than she had ever seen and trees a hundred meters high, slim towers piercing toward the great rings of the planet above. The sun stood at its apex, so that she and Sosha cast a lumpy shadow that moved along on the packed earth path beneath the horse’s hooves.
After about an hour, taking two right forks and one left, Ilyana came to Genji’s cottage. Genji sat on a bench grown out of the limb of a tree, one hand held to the bark as if she was listening to something. Seeing Ilyana, she stood.
“Your cousin, the prince of Sakhalin, approaches this palace,” said Genji calmly.
At once the equanimity Ilyana had gained on her ride was overthrown.
To hide her flush, her suddenly shaking hands, Ilyana turned aside and hobbled Sosha near a pool of water surrounded by grasses. This mundane chore settled her. Was she really so self-centered that she would think that Anatoly Sakhalin was coming to Naroshi’s planet to visit her? Probably, if everything she had heard was true, he had to negotiate with Naroshi about the disposition of the territories, Earth and the League, that had once belonged to Naroshi and had now come into the possession of Sakhalin. She gave Sosha a final pat and walked over to Genji.
“We will go to the palace of memory,” said Genji, having evidently dismissed the specter of Anatoly Sakhalin. Ilyana vowed to do the same. “One of the attendants will take the horse back.” Genji’s skin gleamed in the sun, faintly iridescent, the pearllike surface shot through with color in its depths. “Today we will begin to discuss the art of building.”
They went in a barge, open now to the air. Ilyana hung on the railing and watched the palace skim past beneath them. The air streamed around her face, whipping her braids back into the wind. The whole palace seemed to steam, releasing months of rain toward the sun. It was beautiful.
“Will we start with tension and compression?” Ilyana asked when the barge floated down in front of the palace of memory and she could talk.
Genji alighted on the steps and waited for her. “My child, any building must start with the foundation.”
Abashed because she hadn’t thought of what was so patently obvious, Ilyana followed her inside without another word.
“The hall of building and the hall of time wrap around each other as in a maze,” said Genji, “being necessarily intricately intertwined.”
They came to a branching in the hall, and Ilyana stared to her right, where a hall receded into dim shadows. She saw the statue, lost in gloom, that stood in the center of that hall: She knew it, as a tingling on her skin. It was Shiva. He was waiting for her.
Shaking off her disquiet—or was it anticipation?—she followed Genji straight through the intersection. A pylon fronted this hall, painted with inscriptions and human figures. A statue of ibis-headed Thoth, holding a staff and an ankh, seemed to watch them as they went by. Passing through the pylon, Ilyana realized that they were in an undersized model of Karnak.
“We will begin in Egypt,” said Genji, leading Ilyana forward to an altar presided over by a female figure carved into the stone. So this was not a precise model of Karnak, Ilyana thought, but a fantasia built on the theme of the old temple at Karnak. “Here is an altar dedicated to the goddess Seshat, the Lady of builders, of writing, and of the House of Books.”
Ilyana peered at the statue. The shaded chamber muted the painted stone, a clay red dress, a headdress, the tools of her trade: a measuring stick, a square, and a triangle. At her feet lay coiled rope tied in knots at intervals. Ilyana got that nervous feeling again, as if at any moment the statue might come alive. She no longer trusted the creatures in Genji’s hall. If Genji “grew” them, might they not be alive in a way that wasn’t quite like a biological being?
Genji pulled a batch of scrolls, bound together by a string, out from a niche in the stone. “The legendary Imhotep was said to be the author of The Book of Foundation for Temples, and it is here we should start. With rock, with soils, with stability. With soil bearing capacity, soil properties, permeability and shear strength. Footing types.”
But Ilyana was still staring around the chamber. The pillars were carved to look like flowers, or like bunches of reeds, painted in flat reds and greens and blues. “How come you have all this Earth stuff here? I mean, I always wanted to ask, but it didn’t seem polite.”
“ ‘I had access to all the writings of the prophets; there was nothing which I did not know of that which had happened since the beginning.’ ”
“What does that mean?” Ilyana reached out and, tentatively, touched the statue of Seshat. The goddess stared at her, sloe-eyed, her eyes outlined in heavy black; she wore a necklace and multicolored bands on her arms. She did not move. She felt as solid and quiescent as stone. “How do you know so much about Earth?”
“I became acquainted with daiga—with humans—when Third Brother was alive.”
“Who is Third Brother?”
“His name is no longer spoken within the Empire. It is true that he transgressed the boundaries. I am sorry for his passing. I planted towers in his memory before I brought Fourth Brother out of the nidus.”
“But that still doesn’t tell me who he is. I mean, was.”
“My brother discovered the planet which you call Earth.”
“But it was the famous Chapalii traitor called the Tai-en Mushai who supposedly discovered Earth. That’s why there’re humans on Rhui. He transported some there during the Stone Age. Or at least, that’s what I was taught.”
“Yes.” Genji slipped the string off the scrolls. A bit of dust came with it, and Genji used her sleeve to brush off one of the scrolls. The dust was so thick that it was caked
on the papyrus, but none stuck to the sleeve of Genji’s robe, and as soon as it drifted to the floor, a tiny, humming creature glided out from the walls and ate it up, disappearing back into a tiny niche at the base of the wall.
“Oh, you have dust-eaters, too,” said Ilyana. “I figured you did, but I never saw any before.” Then, as if it had taken that long to sink in, she registered Genji’s reply. She swallowed. “Do you mean it?” Gods, what David would say when she told him! “But Naroshi is your brother, too.”
“He is Sixth Brother. I confess that after Third Brother brought daiga to me, I became fond of them and learned what I could, studied, was not displeased when the emperor reabsorbed daiga territories because then I could study in earnest. It has become a bit of a project of mine. We each of us have projects. I am something of a renegade among females, interesting myself to a small extent in the activities of the males, of the empire. I pulled…strings, you might say, so that Sixth Brother would receive the daiga holdings in his time. Now they are taken from him.”
“Uh, does that make you angry?”
“Angry? What does this mean?” She had moved under a well of light sinking down through an opening in the roof above. This close to her, Ilyana looked into her eyes and was puzzled to see that they looked flat. Genji did not have eyeballs. “ ‘A feeling of extreme displeasure, hostility, indignation, or exasperation toward someone or something.’ No, that does not make me angry. Should it?”
“I guess only if you’re human, or if you wanted to be emperor.”
Genji was amused. She turned to look down the axis of Karnak; had to turn her whole head to change her angle of vision, Ilyana realized now, because she could not roll her eyes in her head. “I am a builder. I have told you this before. I am training you, Ilyana Arkhanov, in the art of building.” She lifted a hand to encompass with an economical gesture the whole of the hall. “In the time of the Egyptians, after the master builder had completed the design she would transfer the design of the building onto the site. This was done with the plan net.” She blinked, and beneath Ilyana’s feet a grid appeared, knotted at intervals like the rope coiled at Seshat’s feet. “The ground was staked and a cord stretched between the stakes to delineate the outline of the building, to mark the formative axis.”
