Jaran

by Kate Elliott

  Sakhalin considered and spoke with her nephew, and then they all walked off together. Vladimir trailed in their wake. Only Fedya remained, standing quite still, head tilted slightly, as if he was trying to hear or taste something on the wind. He turned slowly and walked off, toward Tess at first, and then veering away toward the edge of camp, tracking some unseen path.

  “It is a beautiful tent.” Tess looked round to see Nadezhda Martov standing four paces away from her.

  “It is,” agreed Tess cautiously. “It was gifted me by Mother Orzhekov. It used to be her daughter’s.”

  “Then you are, by her decree, Ilyakoria Bakhtiian’s cousin,” said the woman pleasantly. “Mother Orzhekov is a renowned weaver. Her niece wove the finest patterns I have ever seen.”

  “Her niece?”

  “Bakhtiian’s elder sister. I knew her before she died.”

  “Ah,” said Tess, not knowing what else to say.

  “You are from—a long ways away?”

  “I am from a—city—a place of many stone tents—Jeds…”

  “Yes, I have heard of it. Ilyakoria speaks of it.”

  For an instant, Tess had an uncomfortably vivid image of just when he spoke of such things to Nadezhda Martov. She suppressed it and smiled instead.

  “Those are borrowed clothes, are they not?” asked Martov. When Tess nodded, she nodded in return. “Come. Though you must ride in men’s clothing, I think you will benefit from having women’s clothing of your own, as well. And with your coloring—” A gleam of challenge lit her eyes. “I know just what will suit you.”

  They did not leave until midday. Bakhtiian gave them one of his khuhaylan mares, and most of the tarpans were exchanged for fresh mounts. Tess was forced to consult with Yuri on how to add her burgeoning possessions to her saddle roll: a fine suit of women’s clothing gathered by Martov from women throughout the tribe. Tsara gave Tess a fine silver bracelet. Yuri managed to fit the roll of clothing on to one of the ten horses now burdened with the generous provisions given to the jahar by the women of the tribe.

  “So, Yuri,” asked Tess as they rode out of the tribe, “how did you find Konstantina Sakhalin?”

  Yuri blushed crimson.

  “Poor Kirill. He’s sorry to be going.” Kirill was half turned in his saddle, gazing back at the cluster of women who had gathered to bid them heartfelt farewells. “Are you?”

  Yuri set his lips and refused to be drawn.

  “Soerensen.” Bakhtiian pulled in beside them. He did not glance back at the tribe. “We’ll be riding forward scout.”

  Tess laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I don’t know,” she said truthfully, but she whistled as she urged Myshla forward to ride out with him.

  Chapter Nine

  “The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.”

  —HERACLEITUS OF EPHESUS

  THE SWEEP OF GRASS, the clear air, the high sun; these were her day. Summer surprised them. Now the plain flowered a second time, the stalks of the flowering plants hidden, engulfed in the grass, only the petals showing like brilliant spots of emerald and turquoise, ruby and amethyst. Occasionally it rained. Herds of khey, deerlike animals that proved more placid than the migrating antelopes, provided meat.

  One day, when they stopped early to take advantage of a good campsite, Tess convinced Fedya to take her hunting and was rewarded with her first kill, though she made Fedya cut its throat once she had brought it down. Together they brought back her kill and the one Fedya brought down, and so great a fuss was made over her that Tess finally escaped all the attention by going to pitch her tent with Yuri, an act no man but a brother would ever suggest overseeing.

  “Fedya is almost as good a hunter as the women,” Tess said as she rolled out her tent. “Is that why he rides scout so often? Even Bakhtiian doesn’t ride scout every day.”

  Yuri shrugged. “He likes to be alone. And he has sharp eyes.”

  “Yes.” Tess paused in her work to gaze at the distant fire and the figures gathered around it. “He’s so melancholy, but not sorry for himself. And he’s kind.”

  Yuri smiled but said nothing.

  Bakhtiian now spoke very little Rhuian with her as they rode scout, using khush almost exclusively. But when they talked about Jeds and the disciplines studied at the University there, he lapsed back into Rhuian. Tess began to appreciate the breadth of his learning: conversant with all the things a jaran man must know, he had also taken full advantage of his three years at the University in Jeds. Gallio and Oleana, Narronias and the great legalist, Sister Casiara of Jedina Cloister, these Tess knew because she had read their works on Earth in order to keep her Rhuian fresh. But Bakhtiian’s knowledge took surprising turns at times.

  “Aristotle!”

  “Well, you pronounce it rather differently. Surely you’ve read his works on natural history?”

  “I suppose you’ve read Plato, too?”

  “Pla—? Oh, yes, Playtok. But I never found his arguments convincing. I find his dialogue form too self-conscious.”

  “Ah,” said Tess wisely, beginning to wonder what her brother had been up to these past ten years since she had last set foot on Rhui. But then, she had been too young those three years she had spent in Jeds with Charles and Dr. Hierakis, too shocked by the death of her parents, to be aware of what they might have been doing in the midst of the burgeoning renaissance of the city.

  “But perhaps…” He hesitated, and then, decisively, he reached into his saddlebag and withdrew a leather-bound volume and opened it. “Perhaps you can help me understand this.” He read aloud. “‘Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state—’”

  “Let me see that,” she demanded, and he handed the book to her without a word. “My God. This is Newton’s Principia.”

  “So you have heard of him.”

  “Ah, yes, I have. I suppose you have a volume of Descartes back there as well.”

  “Dhaykhart? No, I have not heard of this philosopher.”

  “Thank God. Where did you get this?” She gave the book back to him, and he tucked it neatly back into his pouch.

  “I have a—a friend in Jeds. We arranged, before I left, that this friend would send books to a certain port and a certain inn proprietor. Every other year or so, we journey near that port—this year, we will put the khepelli to ship there—and then I collect the books.”

  “Oh. I wondered how you and Niko got books. But where did that book come from, the Newton?”

  He shrugged, mystified by the intent of her question. “One of the printing houses in Jeds. I have only had it one year. My friend writes that this Newton lives overseas, but Jedan traders have brought in many new philosophic volumes to the University in recent years.”

  “Overseas,” muttered Tess. “Of course.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “No, I was merely surprised because I studied overseas near…where this man lives—”

  “Have you met him?”

  “Ah, no, no, but I was simply surprised because his works were so swiftly translated and sent to Jeds.”

  “Perhaps your brother was the one responsible,” said Bakhtiian, watching her far too closely. “Soerensen…the name is familiar, but I can’t place it. He must trade extensively to have chosen to send his only sister so far away to study.”

  “Perhaps he was,” said Tess, not liking the measuring way in which Bakhtiian examined her. It was easy enough to forget that the Chapalii had accused her of spying, and that Bakhtiian had told Sonia he thought Tess was lying about herself, about her merchant brother and her reasons for being here, about how much else, she could not guess. “But,” she added a little sharply, “he is not the only man to have sent his relatives a great distance to go to a university.”

  And Bakhtiian remembered that he was, after all, speaking with a woman, and he looked away from her to scan t
he level plain and the arching sky.

  “Look,” said Tess suddenly, “look there! A khoen.”

  “You are learning to use your eyes.” They brought their horses up next to it, a small mound layered with an elaborate arrangement of rocks, mostly hidden in the grass. He stared down. His shoulders tensed and his lips thinned. “Damn them,” he said softly, followed by a word Tess did not know. He twisted his reins twice around one fist, unsheathed his knife, looked at it, sheathed it again. Tess waited. He untwisted the reins and his horse put its head down to graze. “So.” He squinted briefly at the horizon. “The last three dyans are combining forces against me. Now that I’m on a long journey with a small jahar, they think this time they can kill me because they know that once I have those horses, it will be too late. You chose a poor time to accompany us.”

  “Who’s combining? Isn’t Doroskayev’s group behind us? Yuri says you still don’t know which dyan those men call loyalty to, the ones who tried to kill you in Sakhalin’s tribe. And how can you read all that from these rocks?”

  “Why are women always so damnably curious?” asked Bakhtiian. He smiled.

  “Because men keep everything from them, of course.”

  He laughed. “Very well. I relent. I’ll show you.” He glanced around before dismounting to explain the intricacies of this language of stone and stick and earth. When they were riding again, he said, “The jaran have no language that is set down, unlike Rhuian. Our poetry and songs live in all our memories. Only the stone mounds have meaning.”

  “No written language at all?”

  “Some priests carve in stone, but few know the secret of that tongue.”

  “Do you?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “Then you do.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

  “Why are men always so damnably evasive?” asked Tess. She smiled.

  “Because of women,” said Bakhtiian.

  For some reason, this produced a silence. A bird called loudly overhead. Tess gazed up at the sky. It had a slate color, a tinge of gray, as if one storm cloud had been ripped to pieces and mixed in with the blue. In Jeds it had the blue of turquoise, but in Jeds the other colors had not seemed so bright. A torn wisp of cloud clung to the horizon.

  “Why did your brother send you overseas?” he asked.

  She turned, astonished and irritated, to stare directly at him. “You don’t trust me.”

  His lips tightened, and he reined his horse away from her so abruptly that it shied under the hard rein. He turned it downslope and let it have its head, Tess trailing behind.

  She retreated immediately to the company of the young men that evening, and sat at the fire watching Mikhal and Fedya across from her as they sang a riddle song to an appreciative audience.

  “Yuri, I’m hungry,” she said peevishly, still annoyed and troubled by her afternoon’s conversation. “Why can’t we eat?”

  Yuri sat with his arms curled around his one upright knee, staring morosely into the fire. “Didn’t Ilya tell you? Tomorrow we come to zhapolaya, the sacred hill. We have many laws that we must follow at a holy place.”

  “Including starving? Have the khepelli been out of their tents at all since you set up camp?”

  “How should I know? Do you think I care?”

  “Well at least you’re hungry, too.” Yuri made a face at her, but it was a half-hearted attempt. “What is this zhapolaya?”

  “The stone that crowns the sacred hill. Something the gods left us.”

  “How nice of Bakhtiian to tell me,” Tess muttered.

  “What?”

  “Is this one of the sacred places the khepelli want to see?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Wait. Are you saying that they knew it was here?”

  “But everyone who knows this land knows of it. Why shouldn’t they?”

  Of course they would have asked Bakhtiian to direct them to holy sites. Something the gods had left. Could it be the relic of some star-faring civilization? But this planet had been discovered by the League Exploratory Survey, annexed at the same time the League had been annexed by the Chapalii Empire, and then deeded to her brother when the emperor had honored him with the dukedom. Perhaps some ancient Rhuian empire had laid tracks across this trackless plain and then vanished. Perhaps. It was the easiest explanation.

  Tess followed the shifting red of flame up and across and found that her gaze had drawn and met Fedya’s where he sat next to Mikhal. He smiled in return and looked away, the smile lingering on his face as if he had forgotten it. Tess ran her knuckles over her lips thoughtfully, focusing on the darkness beyond so that her knuckles separated into two exact duplicates, one solid, one shadow. She rose, bidding Yuri good night, and wandered out toward the Chapalii tents.

  But what if Yuri had meant his comment literally—what if the Chapalii had known exactly where they wanted to go and had chosen this way, riding cross-country, to get there as unobtrusively as possible?

  The four tents stood isolated beyond the fire and the casual clutter of the jahar. Three stood dark against the night sky. In the second, the tent of Hon Garii and his companion, Hon Rakii Makokan, another son of a merchant house, a low gleam of steady light filtered from the tent. But shouldn’t a light inside canvas reveal silhouettes? This one did not. She shook her head, impatient with herself. What could she do, alone on this journey, except keep an eye on them for Charles? Spy on them. She ought to at least use the correct word. Someone coughed nearby. She turned to see a figure standing about twenty paces from her, a tall, slender form traced dimly against the spread of stars. She knew that it was Bakhtiian. Watching her. Watching her spy.

  “Damn him.” She stalked off to bed.

  In the morning, she felt nauseated with hunger. Bakhtiian’s pace as they scouted only emphasized the hollow jolting, and now and then, when he wasn’t looking, she would put her hand over her mouth. To her unspeakable relief, they reached the sacred hill in the early afternoon.

  The hills they had seen on the horizon the day before now rose abruptly out of the plain as if the earth had frozen in the act of bubbling. The grass here, more brown than gold, grew sparsely enough that soil showed through in patches. The zhapolaya was distinguishable from its companions only by the standing stone at its peak, a dark rectangle whose angularity and solid mass looked unnatural against the fluid hills. A standing stone—some kind of marker, perhaps, like the milestones the Romans had used.

  “There is a hollow for a camp,” said Bakhtiian, and they found it out of sight of the sacred hill. These were weak-soiled, low hills, crumbled in spots from the winter rains. Several dry watercourses ran through the hollow, but there were no clouds, no danger of a washout.

  “No storms. Not yet.” Bakhtiian laughed. Some tone in his laugh caught at her, made her shiver all the way down her spine, made her warm. The jahar rode in and she watched them, acutely aware of the lines of their bodies, their movements as they dismounted and walked and stretched and glanced—one or two—at her, quickly and then away. She turned away to hide her blush, and she knew: the long drought had caught up with her at last. Some tone in his laugh: remembered pleasure, or anticipation. She dismounted, glad to unsaddle the horse.

  She took as long as she could caring for Myshla, checked her hooves twice over, brushed her until her coat gleamed, talked to her. The Chapalii retired early to their tents. The jaran men settled down around the fire, their tents a close wall behind them. Tess walked over reluctantly and sat down beside Yuri, aware of their glances, their bodies, their presence. Niko scattered herbs over the flames, and a sweet, strangely harsh scent drifted out to them.

  “What is that?” Tess asked, not sure that she liked the powerful tang.

  “Ulyan,” whispered Yuri. “All the men carry some.” He shifted so that she could see a tiny pouch snuggled up against the hilt of his saber, looped to his belt.

  “Why?”

  “To greet the gods. A man who dies in battle, or a w
oman in childbirth, is welcomed to the gods’ lands, and we burn ulyan with him on his pyre, so the gods’ messengers will come to carry away his spirit. Jahar riders and pregnant women always keep a pouch of ulyan with them.”

  “I can’t stand the scent. It’s so strong. I’m going to take a walk.”

  Yuri patted her hand. “It also covers the smell.”

  Tess left, walking aimlessly out into the gathering darkness, the hollow lost behind her, the sacred hill hidden behind the hill to her right. She touched her belt in four places, a little ritual: saber, knife, mirror, and Chapalii knife. Covered the smell, he had said. Of burning flesh? With any luck at all, I’ll never find out.

  The moon, large and bright and not yet half full, rose like a cautious animal over the horizon and began its leisurely circuit of the sky. Stars appeared here and there.

  Beneath her feet the ground sloped upward. Tess followed it, letting other forces dictate her movements. She came upon him unexpectedly, sitting on a rock embedded in an overhanging lip of hill. The view was of nothing, except the formless shape of hills. He was, perhaps, watching the moon.

  “Hello, Fedya.”

  “He is happy tonight,” he answered, by way of greeting. He did not look at her.

  “Do you mean the moon?” She sat beside him, cross-legged, her hands on her knees.

  “Of course.” He looked at her fleetingly.

  “Do you call the moon a man, a male, in the jaran?”

  “What a strange question. Yes.”

  “In my land, we call her a maiden or, sometimes, an old woman.”

  “But the moon is not nearly as bright as the sun.” Fedya considered the moon, tilting his head to one side. He had a soft profile, blurred by his mustache and thick lashes, and by the clean, round line of his jaw.

  “Then what is the sun?”

  “A woman.” He looked at her, puzzled. “Of course.”

  She looked down. It smelled of soil here rather than grass, a heavy scent unstirred by wind. “There is so much that is different.”