Jaran

by Kate Elliott

“I meant, of course,” she added hastily, “only songs that it is appropriate for a man to teach a woman.”

  All four laughed, Yuri lowering his hands and cuffing Tess on the neck.

  “Now, Tess,” said a voice above them, “you don’t suppose that Bakhtiian would ever do anything inappropriate, do you?”

  All four looked up, startled. Kirill had surely chosen that direction to approach them from because the fire, behind him, made a halo about his form. The glow lit red highlights in the thick waves of his fair hair, shone through the angles of his elbows where they stood away from his body, and outlined his stance, easy, a little arrogant. He had his head cocked to the right and he smiled down at her. Nature had, unfortunately, endowed him with a smile as sweet as a girl’s, one much at variance with the impudence in his eyes and his demeanor.

  Bakhtiian stood up. He was no longer smiling.

  “Hello, Kirill,” said Tess, because no one else was saying anything.

  “I thought you were supposed to be on watch,” said Yuri.

  “Well, Yuri, you must have been mistaken.”

  The big fire sparked, flaming until a rider stamped it down to coals. “As I remember—” Bakhtiian folded his arms on his chest.

  “Fedya!” called Niko.

  Fedya wandered over. His glance went first to Bakhtiian before skipping briefly back to Kirill. He gave them all his quick, unpretentious smile as a greeting. “Tess,” he said in a quiet voice, “I admired your singing.”

  “Thank you, Fedya.”

  “I admired your singing, too,” said Kirill. “As well as the rest of you.”

  Tess flushed.

  “Kirill.” The lowness of Bakhtiian’s voice made it more threatening. Yuri scrambled hastily to his feet.

  “But it’s true.” Kirill spread his palms upward in front of himself with such an expression of innocence in the face of false accusation that Tess could not help but giggle. Niko coughed.

  “The men in my jahar have manners, Kirill.”

  “Are you saying I don’t, Bakhtiian?”

  Bakhtiian’s left hand moved to his saber hilt. Kirill’s right hand brushed the sheath of his knife. Tess, caught in the middle, pushed herself back.

  “You know, Ilya,” said Niko quickly, “Fedya escaped without having to sing tonight.”

  For a moment, all movement stopped. Bakhtiian’s gaze moved to Niko. Some look Tess could not interpret passed between the two men.

  “That is true, Niko.” Bakhtiian settled back on his heels, his left hand dropping to hang by his thigh, and he transferred his gaze smoothly to Fedya. “You promised me once to teach me some more of your songs.”

  Kirill was playing with the embroidery on one of his sleeves, his fingers pale in the dim light.

  “Did I?” Fedya asked. “I’m not sure I agreed to give them up so easily.” His audacity amazed Tess.

  “Well, I don’t intend to start pleading,” said Bakhtiian.

  Fedya smiled. “My lute is over by the small fire. We could go now.”

  “Yes. If you will excuse us.” Bakhtiian nodded briefly at Tess, and he and Fedya left together. Tess sat forward with a long sigh, brushing off her palms.

  Yuri rounded on Kirill. “You don’t have any manners.”

  “Aren’t you a little young to lecture me, Yuri?”

  Yuri stiffened.

  “I am not too young to lecture you,” said Niko. “You provoke him deliberately.”

  “What of it?”

  “Kirill, I will not bother to answer that question. But I will say that your conduct is not always well considered.”

  Kirill shrugged. “We’re well away from the sacred hill. I have nothing to fear here.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” Tess asked, annoyed because there was some long-standing enmity here that she did not understand. Kirill and Bakhtiian were only five years apart in age, yet Kirill was clearly included with the youngest men of the jahar.

  “On holy ground,” said Niko, “the slightest misstep or misconduct, even accidental, may bring the wrath of the gods upon you. Even the khaja know this to be true. It is desecration.”

  “The priests scared me enough when I was little. I’m not going near such places,” Kirill said, and he grinned when Niko chuckled. “Yes, I know, and you’d advise me not to, for my own safety.”

  “But what would happen?” asked Tess.

  “It would be sacrilege,” said Niko.

  Tess did not reply. The big fire burned down to coals, a dull red speckled with black.

  “Kirill! Ho!” Konstans strolled up. “Think to escape from your watch, do you? Nikita sent me. You’re to relieve him.”

  Kirill gave Tess a long-suffering look as if in apology and left.

  “I thought so,” muttered Yuri.

  “Niko.” Tess lifted her hands to blow on them and then lowered them to her lap. “It isn’t only misconduct at a holy place, is it?”

  His hair seemed cast of starlight, a finer light than the coarse red of flames. “Sacrilege away from holy places is limited to those few actions that are repulsive to the gods and which flout without shame their few direct prohibitions. But at a holy place, many things we do gladly in normal life are offensive to the gods.”

  “At all holy places?”

  “Not all. Only those the gods have left quiet. The shrine of Morava, for instance, is not quiet at all, and priests live there.”

  “What do you mean by quiet?”

  “Left to the birds and the animals.”

  “The birds. Niko, what happened to the three men who tried to kill Bakhtiian at Sakhalin’s tribe?”

  “They were left for the birds.”

  “Ah.” Tess decided she didn’t really want to know. “So some things, like the man in your tribe who killed a bird, those things are always sacrilege?”

  Niko considered her. “That shocks you.” He nodded. “We have a story, Tess, of a hawk that warned the first tribe of jaran, who were camped against the mountains, of an avalanche, and saved them, and so saved the people.”

  “That’s in the tale Fedya sang about the first dyan.”

  “Yes. Because of that hawk, all birds, who fly above and can therefore see farther, are sacred to the gods.”

  “Do you believe that story?”

  “My child.” Someone stirred the fire, covering most of the coals, killing their light. “If the people did not believe in one way, then there would be no jaran.”

  Tess could find nothing to say to that. The three of them sat in silence for a time. Tess finally rose and excused herself.

  Her path led her near a small fire removed from the rest of the camp. She paused in the dark beyond it. Fedya and Bakhtiian sat there together, the light on their faces, Fedya bent over his lute. As she stood silently, watching, she heard Fedya sing a line and Bakhtiian sing it back to him. And she wondered, for there was something in this music not quite like the usual songs the jaran sang by the fire at night or with their tasks during the day. And she wondered at Bakhtiian, for his bearing as he sat beside Fedya gave to the younger man the status of an elder; she had seen Bakhtiian command the respectful attention of women and men twice his age. She stood for a long time, listening to the two voices, one a high, sweet tenor, one rich and full, but she did not approach them. It was late when she went to bed.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Also, in certain caves, water drips down.”

  —XENOPHANES OF COLOPHON

  TWELVE DAYS LATER THEY reached another holy place, the site of a crumbling temple called zhastoynaya. Tess and Bakhtiian reached it first.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Tess.

  The temple lay at the base of an escarpment. The cliffs had crumbled away here and there to obliterate much of the back half of the ruins. Behind them lay a river, shallow, sluggish, and muddy, which they had forded to reach the temple grounds. The water somehow signaled the limit of the plain, separating that mortal place from this retreat of the gods, which seeme
d greener, richer, quieter than the lands humans haunted. A spring bubbled from the ground in the center of the ruins and coursed down, a fluid line shot through with sunlight, to stream silver into the river and then, a meter out, mingle and lose itself in the brown waters.

  They let the horses stand and wandered up through the temple. In this land where a tent was the largest shelter, the ruins—no more than three fallen buildings—seemed enormous. Most of the central columns still stood like two lines of soldiers at attention, fluted, wider at the base and top and chipped all along their length, worn away by the wind and the rain. There was no roof. Two buildings flanked the first, one a low line of stone, the other an outline of waist-high walls and stone lintels without doors.

  Bakhtiian led her up to the spring and knelt beside it. The water gushed up from an invisible source, filled a stone basin to the rim, and sluiced down between parallel columns half in and half out of a stone trough that had been sunk into the ground to guide it down to the river.

  “It is said that a person who drinks from this spring will gain courage and wit and the respect of those worth being respected by.” He looked up at her. “Will you drink?”

  She gazed at the spring: clear water, without a doubt cold and satisfying. “Who says that?”

  “It is an old legend, left here by the gods.”

  “Then I will drink.”

  “Drink your fill.”

  The water was so cold it made her gasp; it took only a little to satisfy her. “Don’t you drink, Bakhtiian?”

  “Drinking once gives you the favor of the gods. Drinking twice…only a greedy man drinks twice.”

  They wandered down the avenue of columns and, at Tess’s insistence, explored a bit more. He drew the line at climbing the cliff, so Tess climbed one of the taller walls—chest-height—and sat on it, letting her heels drum the stone as she gazed out beyond the river, watching for the arrival of the jahar. Bakhtiian leaned against the wall beside her. He took out his knife and his hands played with it absently as he, too, studied the distant swell of golden plain. A wind bent the grass tips down, sending fluid patterns of light across the land. Tess would have known this place was a temple even without being told. The touch of the gods lay on it, deep, heavy, eternal. A few birds whistled above. Insects droned dreamlike in the grass. The sun beat warmly on her face, and she sighed and closed her eyes.

  And thought of the Chapalii.

  “Does this temple belong to one of your gods?” she asked.

  The knife lay still in his hands. “The jaran have no temples. Our gods are as restless as we are, although there is One you can petition in the dark, in the night, if you are in desperate need. But the gods have touched this place, so we honor it.”

  “You don’t know who it was built for? Who built it?”

  “Does it matter? Winds blow from all directions.”

  “What if it’s important what direction it blows from?”

  The corners of his lips twitched up. “Ah, yes. Will it be a cold wind or a warm one? Fierce or gentle?” He lapsed into Rhuian. “One that will guide a ship into port or break it on the rocks? That, of course, would be a Jedan analogy. No. I don’t know who built this place. Perhaps the khepelli do.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Tess muttered under her breath. But this place was so old, ruined—and the transmitting station was functional. She could not link the two.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I just—I would have thought that the jaran would be more—more jealous of their own gods.”

  He considered this a moment. “But they aren’t jealous of us. When I was in Jeds, I read of a land across the seas where they worship five underground pools and think their Lady resides within. At the zhapolaya, the khepelli worshiped the stone as if their god lived there. And you spoke of a people who abstain from pleasure and fill themselves instead with their god’s passion. They are all gods. That they are different, and so many, does not lessen them. I would never presume to say that my particular gods are worthy of a temple, and not any others.”

  The wind moved in her hair. “And yet you killed a man for your gods. Are other gods as worthy?”

  “I remember. But I have learned that the world is a delicate thing, and the gods—all gods—are as one with it, are the keepers of that balance. And since the world is within me as well as outside of me, if the balance is disturbed and not righted then I am also left in discord, and if I do nothing to correct this imbalance, then we, the world and I, shall never return to harmony. And if this is true for me alone, how much more true it is for an entire people.”

  “But Yuri said that—” she hesitated—“that you gave him a merciful death, compared to what—what he was meant to receive.”

  Bakhtiian looked away from her, his expression shuttered. “I am not a savage,” he said almost inaudibly.

  Tess fell silent. The wind brought to her a sharp, rich fragrance, like vanilla. “It’s true,” she said finally, “that the world forces us to make bitter choices. I suppose that makes it hard to search for the truth, especially if we believe that truth can only be found along the path that is familiar to us.”

  He tossed his knife up. It caught the sunlight and flashed. For that instant, as he watched the knife reach its peak and begin to fall again, his face opened somehow, giving her a glimpse of the boy, twenty years ago, who had played with such dangerous toys with the same unself-conscious joy and absorption with which a child plays with building blocks. Then the knife fell, and he caught it.

  “God, isn’t that dangerous?”

  He laughed. “Of course.” He sheathed the knife. “How can any one of us claim to know which paths the gods walk? How can we hope to walk on their path at all? Except for philosophers like Newton, of course.”

  “Newton walked many strange paths. I have to suppose that all paths have gods of one kind or another. But I think we are responsible for finding our own way.”

  “We must do what we can with what we have?”

  Tess pushed herself to the edge of the wall and jumped down. Bakhtiian put out a hand to steady her landing, a momentary touch, no more. “Is that what you believe?”

  “What I believe?” Leaning back against the wall, he folded his arms over his belt. Wind caught a strand of his hair and blew it up away from his forehead. “I don’t know where the sun and the moon came from, how the grass and the hills came to be. I suppose they came by themselves. But I believe that there is truth to be found, and I’m not always certain that it is only to be found in the gods. Or in what we call the gods.”

  “You’ve been reading too much philosophy.”

  He smiled. “Is philosophy dangerous?”

  “Very dangerous.”

  “What do you believe, then?”

  “I believe that there is truth to be found inside every person, but that very few people find it because it is dark inside, and deeply hidden, and the trees grow thickly.”

  “But you forget, there are always springs one can drink from.” He looked toward the plains. “Ah, there are our fellow mortals.”

  “Come to bask in the fragrance of immortality, however fleeting?”

  “Bask in the fragrance? I think you mean bask in the warmth.”

  They walked down to the grazing horses to wait for the approaching riders. The jahar splashed over the ford and halted beside them. Most of the riders wandered aimlessly around the ruins, curious. A few drank at the spring. Ishii and Garii and Rakii made the most cursory of inspections before returning to their horses.

  Ishii came up to Bakhtiian. “We have seen what we need here. We can go on.”

  If this surprised Bakhtiian, he concealed it very well. The entire company set off westward, Tess and Bakhtiian waiting till the rest had gone.

  “So it is a temple. I knew it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The khepelli asked to see the zhapolaya, didn’t they? Did they ask to see this place as well?”

  He blinked. �
�I am beginning to think the prince has curious concerns. What do you mean?”

  “Oh, hell,” she said under her breath, but she had no one else to ask and she needed to know. “Specifically, by name.”

  “Ah,” said Bakhtiian, meaning by that breath of a comment nothing Tess could fathom. “Yes, they did. Why do you ask?”

  She grinned. “I’m searching for the truth.”

  He smiled. “Have it your way. For now. I’m patient, and our journey is a long one.” He reined his horse out, over the ford.

  Tess lingered a moment, staring up at the cliffs. The touch of the gods. She was glad that this place had nothing to do with the Chapalii, that it did indeed have gods, that it existed for itself alone. And she was relieved that the Chapalii didn’t know everything there was to know about Rhui, that they had believed these ruins might be of interest to them. In which case, did that mean they had known that the transmitter was a transmitter, or not? Neither prospect was reassuring. She sighed and followed Bakhtiian.

  They rode southwest through low hills. In the early afternoon the ground broke under them, the uniformity of the plain disturbed as abruptly as a pebble breaks the still surface of a pond. At first, steep hillocks and low sheer slopes radiated out, and then the earth itself fell away on either side, a few rivulets descending past curves, lost to her sight. Coming around the last of the little hills, they pulled up.

  Tess saw the lake first, a pale jewel at the center, before her gaze fanned out to the huge basin that cradled this circle of blue. It was an ancient crater; nothing else could form such a distinctive shape, could be so unnaturally round. Or could account for the strange hills, flung out like debris from some massive impact. A meteor, surely—and then Myshla shied away from the bright wink of sunlight, glancing off a smooth surface embedded in the ground. Bakhtiian, ahead of her, had not noticed.

  Tess pulled up Myshla and stared down. Dirt had eroded away from a plate of metal. It gleamed, uncorroded. A shock of grass obscured most of the plate. In days, Tess thought, the entire patch would be grown over. She dismounted and tried to pry it out, but it was too thick. Where the grass ended, the plate disappeared back under earth. She drew her knife and dug down, working quickly. A third of a meter down there was still no break. This was not the artifact of a primitive culture. Bakhtiian called back to her, and she mounted and urged Myshla forward to catch up with him.