Jaran

by Kate Elliott

  Staring around at the steep slope of the crater, down to the flat-bottomed basin below, she wondered how big a ship, crashing or purposefully blown up, would make such a mark in its leave-taking.

  At the same time, she realized that it was not the deepness of the crater but the pall of smoke over the land below that gave the bottom an indistinct tinge. She saw neatly laid out fields, some still green. Others looked strangely altered, as if they had been trampled.

  It was the town that was on fire, flames licking up from some of the houses huddled inside the earth wall that from this height seemed pitifully insignificant. In another quarter, a whole street lay blackened, smoking like cold breath on an icy afternoon. Figures ran and labored under the sun. A broken line extended out to the lake, a tenuous string to the water.

  “Curse them,” said Bakhtiian. “Come on.” He turned his horse to ride along the edge of the crater.

  “We’re not going down there, are we? I didn’t know there were settlements out here. What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice, like his shoulders, was as taut as a strung bow. “But see, there are vultures.”

  She saw the birds, circling near a few squat trees. Below, none of the hurried figures took any notice of the pair far above them.

  “I’m sorry,” said Bakhtiian suddenly, “that you have to see this.”

  They weren’t trees. They were posts, driven into the ground. Six posts stood in a semicircle just above the well-trodden path, marked by a solitary seventh post, that led down into the valley. The birds cried out raucously and flapped away as Tess and Bakhtiian approached. The stench hit, fetid, overwhelming.

  Three jaran men, clad in red shirts and black trousers, had been tied to the posts. All three were dead, and while one, perhaps, had died naturally of his wounds, the manner of execution of the other two was quite obvious.

  “They may have been my enemies,” said Bakhtiian quietly, “but I can only hope that they were dead when that was done to them.”

  A bird, emboldened by their stillness, settled onto the slumped head of the farthest body.

  “Go away!” Tess kicked Myshla forward. The bird squawked and fluttered away. She found herself on top of the scattered and half-eaten entrails that littered the ground in front of the men. Insects swarmed over the remains. Jerking Myshla hard to the left, she pulled away, gagging, to halt in front of the solitary post that marked the descent of the trail.

  “Look here,” she said quickly, desperate to stop her gagging, to not have to look behind her and see the burnt-out, bloody eye sockets, the gaping abdomens—“There’s writing posted here, but I can’t read—here at the bottom it’s a bit like Rhuian. I think that’s a ‘b’ there and some vowel, I think an ‘o’ maybe, and I’m sure that’s a ‘c’ but it would be a hard ‘c’ if it was related to the northern dialect that the sailors in Jeds spoke and then that must be—my God! It’s your name.” She put one hand over her mouth.

  “It was the obvious choice,” said Bakhtiian, so close behind her that her startled gasp almost made her retch. “Don’t be too proud to be sick if you have to,” he added, more gently.

  “Not as long as I don’t have to touch them. Can you read what it says?”

  “A little. Evidently a jahar attacked and set fire to this settlement. I suppose their goal was to blame the attack on me, and thus make the khaja hatred for me greater than it already is. My enemies have done this before.”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  “Oh, yes. They’re Doroskayev’s men. You never saw them.”

  “No,” she said faintly.

  “We’d better go.” He reined his horse around. “Look. They’ve seen us.”

  “Bakhtiian!” In her outrage, turning Myshla after him, her gaze flashed past the three strung-up bodies to follow his back. “Aren’t you even going to bury them?”

  He kept riding. “Bury them? You’d condemn them to burial for raiding a village?”

  She came up beside him as they rounded the curve of a steep hillock, the crater and the site of execution shut out by the slope. “Condemn? I don’t understand.”

  “Let’s get away from here.” He urged his horse to a canter. Emerging onto the plain, rolling here toward a range of low hills, they slowed the horses to a walk.

  “Forgive me if I was hasty,” he said after a silence. “Burial is the worst thing that could happen to the jaran. But perhaps in other places that isn’t—” he shuddered—“true.”

  “It isn’t. Why is it so bad?”

  He turned his head to stare at her, amazed. “To be trapped beneath the earth, forever separated from the sky, never again to live where the wind can touch you? That is only for the sacrilegious.”

  “Is it better to be torn to pieces by the animals?”

  “But they are the gods’ creatures, scattering our bodies back to the wind. And the wind gathers us up and pours our spirit into the womb of a woman ripe for conception, and the world receives us back again.”

  Tess was silent, staring out at the wide stretch of plain, that sudden sink of land lost behind them like a dream. Around them the grass seemed empty of any life but the wind’s. “But I thought you burned the dead.”

  “That privilege is only given to those who die in battle, men in honorable war, women in childbirth. The fire releases you from all bonds to the earth, and the gods, alerted to your coming by the bitter herb ulyan, welcome you to the heavens. And your spirit is free forever from this world.”

  “And everyone else…”

  Bakhtiian said nothing for a moment. “It is also an honorable death. Many choose it.”

  “How can you choose to be left lying on the ground?”

  “Old people, ill ones, those who can no longer keep up, often stay behind of their own choosing, knowing that their time has come.”

  “You abandon them?” She had such a horrible vision of sitting alone among the grass and insects, figures growing smaller, gone, finally, the sun silent above, that for one wild instant she thought all this the dream and herself still far north, lost forever in grass.

  “We move, always. We cannot wait.” His eyes, his whole expression, seemed remote, staring at something she could not see. “That is how I intend to die, when the time comes, not seeking to prolong it.”

  “You have no intention of dying in battle?”

  “None at all.”

  “But you carry ulyan.”

  Now his gaze focused on her, but it made her feel quite isolated. “But I don’t. I want to come back.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence. The three men, hung out like leavings for the birds, and the half-buried plate of metal ran like loops through her mind, first one, then the other, then the first again, until she wished she could simply stop thinking. Bakhtiian planning war against the khaja; his enemies trying to start that war early to disrupt his plans. Or simply trying, one way or the other, to get him killed? Or simply enamored of killing—how was she to know? The moon was up when, having been challenged by three separate sentries, she and Bakhtiian trotted over a low hill and down into the scatter of tents.

  Niko jogged up to them immediately and took the reins of Ilya’s horse. “So many sentries?” Bakhtiian asked.

  “Tasha spotted a scout this morning and held on, but the fellow veered east. Josef got a glimpse of him this afternoon, but he slanted off again. Josef thinks he’s solo.”

  Bakhtiian nodded as he bent to check his mount’s left foreleg. “See here. It’s swollen and hot.” Niko frowned with concern and examined the stallion’s leg while Ilya watched. “Let’s see if we can lure this scout in tonight and capture him. I wonder if Mikhailov has at last picked up our trail or even joined up with Doroskayev? Gods, I can’t believe Mikhailov would stoop so low.”

  “Couldn’t it be one of Doroskayev’s men?” Niko asked.

  Bakhtiian smiled slightly and, glancing up at Tess, moved decisively to hold Myshla’s bridle so that she, too, could dismo
unt. “But we have news,” he said as Tess swung down, “that will put things in quite a different light. Assemble the riders. Single sentry should be sufficient for now.” Niko nodded and went off.

  “Do I have to hear this?” Tess asked.

  “No. Yuri will have put up your tent.” He led the black away.

  Finding herself alone in the gloom, Tess allowed the tears to come, but the force of them overwhelmed her and she shut her eyes, leaning against the comforting bulk of Myshla. The image of the three mutilated bodies flared so vividly in her mind that she gasped.

  “Tess?” She put out her hand and grasped substance, an arm, the silken sleeve of a shirt, ridged with embroidery.

  “Fedya.” She opened her eyes.

  “It will only be a short assembly.”

  “Yes.” Her fingers slipped down his arm to grasp his hand. “Afterward.”

  “Past the horses is a spring and past that a copse.” He squeezed her hand, so gentle a pressure that the feeling it left vanished as quickly as he did, gone after Bakhtiian.

  She unsaddled Myshla, checked her hooves doubly carefully, groomed her and hobbled her and set her out with the other horses under Pavel’s care. Pavel nodded at her but he was busy plastering a cold compress of herbs on the foreleg of Bakhtiian’s black, the fine khuhaylan stallion that no one wanted to lose to lameness. The saddle was an easier burden than her thoughts as Tess walked through camp, past the assembly to the very edge of the tents, where Yuri had pitched hers.

  As she knelt to dump the saddle on the ground, she saw four Chapalii walk out over a low rise into the darkness. Making a quick tour back through camp, she realized there were no Chapalii anywhere, unless the rest were all in their tents. Surely they could not intend to trek all the way back to the crater by night? A ship, blowing up…What if it had been a Chapalii ship? But that was impossible. Whatever impact had made that crater had occurred millennia ago. Had there been an alien empire before the Chapalii? A greater one than theirs? A hundred possibilities presented themselves. She circled around toward the spring, passing Nikita on sentry duty, and then she was alone again.

  She found the Chapalii past the copse, hidden by a rise. They had gathered in a tight clump in the declivity made by the joining of two rises. On her hands and knees, pausing just behind the crest, she could make out all eleven figures, shadowed by the moon. A tiny blue-white light gleamed softly from within their ranks. The night lay still around her. No breeze stirred the air. Voices drifted up to her, phrases broken by pauses and replies.

  “…identified two previous…unsure whether the duke…Keinaba…constant surveillance…insufficient evidence to believe…”

  A communication. They were communicating—with whom? A Chapalii ship? But none stayed in orbit around Rhui. How far could they transmit? How far did this conspiracy reach? She pulled the little knife Garii had given her from her belt, and hunkered down even more to conceal herself from them as she stared at it. White lights speckled the hilt. She hadn’t a clue how to operate it, and either Garii had purposefully left her ignorant or he had simply not thought he needed to tell her. Tess stuck it back in her belt and lifted herself up carefully to watch again. The scene had not changed.

  Wind moved the grass above them. Startled, Tess looked in that direction. In the instant before she really saw, she realized that a man was creeping down on them, was halfway down the hill opposite. Light-haired? Had Nikita followed her? But this man was stocky. My God! She stood up. Fedya must have come after her.

  At that same moment one of the Chapalii said something, a slight cry. As if in sudden panic, another of the aliens whirled and crouched. Light streaked out soundlessly toward the man on the hill. He seemed to leap backward, half-rising. The thin line of light cut out through the night again, and the man fell, tumbling down the slope to land at the feet of the aliens. Tess cried out and ran down to him.

  Ishii’s voice. “Do not shoot her, you imbeciles.”

  She stopped short, facing four knives. Red beads of light shone sharply at their hilts. Armed. Lethal.

  “Let me go to him.” Her voice broke on the edge of a sob.

  “Let her go,” said Ishii. A path formed for her.

  She stumbled past them, collapsing on her knees beside the body. The second shot had opened up his abdomen, a cleaner cut than those endured by Doroskayev’s men, half cauterized by heat. Blood seeped onto the grass. “Oh, God, Fedya,” she cried, reaching out to touch his shoulder.

  Her touch jostled his head, and it rolled, back, staring at her, one eye strangely shut. One eye scarred shut. It was not Fedya at all, but Doroskayev. She jerked her hands back. The Chapalii clustered around her.

  Ishii stood above her, seeming almost to touch the sky. “How fortunate that it is not one of Bakhtiian’s men. For a moment I feared that my man’s rashness would be irreparable, but now I see he may have done Bakhtiian a service.” Tess stood up slowly, still shaking. “Excuse my impertinence in speaking without your leave, Lady Terese, but I saw that this situation needed a male’s firmness. Please allow me to assure you again that we have never wished to do you any harm. You have only to say the word, and the suspicions that have grown between us shall be laid to rest.” He clasped his hands in that arrangement known as Lord’s Supplication.

  Tess stared at him. She shook. She did not dare look down at the body. She had not the slightest idea what to do with her hands. Ishii could have let his men kill her, could have buried her, and who would have known? Standing alone among them, their only witness the moon and the stars, she could not imagine any human set against her in such a delicate dance showing such forbearance. She outranked him; she was heir to a Chapalii dukedom; she was sacrosanct. Ishii gazed back at her. The moon washed his face so pale it seemed almost translucent. Like the plains beyond, the Chapalii mind had many aspects that seemed unchanging to an alien. Lost in that careful game of diplomacy and treachery that Charles and the Chapalii played with each other; lost on these uncharted plains of Rhui; the two circumstances of her life seemed very similar right now.

  “Truce,” she said.

  “You honor us, Lady Terese.” He bowed, and the others echoed the bow as befitted their stations. Straightening, he turned to his men. “Cut away the sod carefully. We must inter him so that there is no trace. Perhaps, Lady Terese, you will indulge us by identifying this man. He was, I think, one of Bakhtiian’s enemies?”

  “Yes.”

  Emboldened by her passivity, Ishii went on. “Perhaps you will permit me to allow Hon Garii to escort you back to camp? You need not stay for the interment. I understand very well that females have heightened sensibilities.”

  They moved away from her, preparing a grave. Trapped beneath the earth. Had Doroskayev deserved such a fate? She walked past them, stumbling slightly in the darkness. Garii followed her, unasked. At the base of the hill, she stopped. He stopped behind her. Without turning around she put her hand on her knife.

  “How do I use this?” she whispered.

  He did not reply immediately. When she tilted her hand to see him, she saw that he had glanced back to where dark figures worked just beyond the crest of the rise.

  “If I may be permitted to speak, I have attuned it to human use, Lady Terese,” he said at last. “The heat of your thumb, pressed over the third and second lights, causes the beam to activate. Forgive me. A thousand thousand pardons be granted me that I did not realize you needed instruction in this gift.”

  “You are pardoned,” she said automatically.

  “I am yours, Tai-endi,” he said, the formal response, and he bowed, as liegeman to his liege.

  “Go,” she said hastily, abruptly afraid that she had acknowledged something far deeper than she realized. “Ishii will be watching.”

  “As you command.” He retreated back up the hill.

  I am yours. Lord, Tess, you’ve gotten yourself into it now. The wording had been precise and formal: the bond of servant to master, not any slight thing bound by a wage
or a common goal, but true fealty. Surely Garii was already bonded to Ishii’s family, and such bonds lasted until death, and beyond death into the next generations.

  Light flashed, a brief, searing pulse, and she started and hurried away toward the copse and the spring. Bodies on grass. They should leave him to rot. She would have been left out there, months ago, walking on the plains. A body could lie a hundred years in such space—

  By the spring, someone waited for her, sitting on a low rock. She broke into a jog, remembering how she thought they had killed him.

  “Fedya,” she said. Stopped. It was Bakhtiian. A blanket and his cloak lay, folded neatly, on the rock beside him.

  “Did you catch a glimpse of our mysterious escort?” he said with a slight smile, but his tone was serious and his eyes met hers. One of his hands rested casually on his blanket. “But if he eluded Josef, he could elude anyone.”

  For a long moment she could not speak. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I just had to be alone. I’m modest.”

  “All good women are.”

  “And good men?”

  “Even more so,” he answered, not a trace of humor in his voice. There was a pause. “We’re extending our sentry ring tonight,” he said at last. “If you feel crowded in your tent, it would be safe, tonight, for you to sleep outside of camp.”

  “I know.”

  Blanket and cloak tucked under one arm, he stood up so that they faced one another on a level. “I understand that you have sustained a shock.”

  “Oh, hell,” said Tess under her breath, putting one hand to her face to stop the sudden flow of tears. Bakhtiian took one step toward her. Footsteps rustled in the grass.

  “Tess?” He came up beside her, bedroll in one hand, cloak slung over his shoulders. “Ilya!” Now he was startled.

  There was a very long silence.

  “Excuse me,” said Bakhtiian abruptly, and he left.