by Kate Elliott
“He knew he was going to die,” she said aloud, trying to absolve herself, but all the riders had moved away. She shuddered, drawing her hands in to her chest.
“There are some who seek release from the burdens of earth.” It was Bakhtiian’s voice, not too close, but low and gentle.
She stood and turned to him. The tears in her eyes blurred his form. “He was protecting me, wasn’t he?” she demanded, suddenly furious. “He took me out there to make sure I stayed away from the battle.” As if, if he had not, he might still be alive. She walked away from all of them, found her way to the shaded, empty overhang, and wept.
The sun, bright and silent, viewed the earth from her high seat and found nothing there worth mentioning, not even the stretch of ground where so short a time ago two bands had met and struggled and come to a temporary decision. Now the field of battle lay empty, yet from such a height it looked the same whether peopled by fifty or one.
Or two. These two were dark and fair, night and day, maturity and youth. They lay without moving on the slope, watching their horses, watching the vacant plain, watching the last flames of the pyre.
“Ilya?” Vladimir sat up. “Will it storm soon?”
Bakhtiian did not move. “Yes.”
“Down from the mountains.” Something lit in the eyes of the younger man. “When will we reach the mountains?”
“You should be able to work that out for yourself. Forty days.”
Vladimir took a breath, hesitated. “When we get back to our tribe, would you object if—if I marked Elena?”
“Why should I object, Vladi?”
“Why should—?” Vladimir swung his head around so fast that his hair caught for an instant in his eyes. “Don’t be coy, damn you. It’s common knowledge that she makes up to you every chance she gets.”
“Is it?”
“You’re laughing at me.” He jumped up and began to pace. “You always laugh at me when I talk about this. I know very well you’ve got no eye for her, but so much is said and—and it’s true I’ve nothing to bring her, being an orphan—and I never know what she thinks, and the gods know I want your approval.” He stopped in front of Bakhtiian.
“Vladi, it isn’t my approval you need. You’d best discuss this with my aunt. Or Niko’s wife, perhaps.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant. If you worry a bit more about what people are saying or thinking about you, then you’ll be almost as unsure of yourself as I was at your age. In this matter, my opinion isn’t important.”
“It is to me…” Vladimir’s comment trailed off into silence. He sat down.
“Vladi, who do you suppose built that temple?” Ilya picked a blade of grass and chewed at it halfheartedly, gazing out over the plain, half watching, half waiting.
“I don’t know. The gods did.”
“I don’t think the gods build in that manner.” He traced the curve of his lips with the rough, broken end of the stem. “It must have been long ago. What people could they have been?”
“What were the khaja doing so far out on the plain?”
Bakhtiian curled the stem around one finger and snapped the finger up, splitting the fibers. “I was also wondering that.” He touched his tongue to the moisture left on his finger. “I wonder who built the shrine.”
“Which shrine?”
“The shrine of Morava. I wonder who she thinks built it.”
Vladimir grimaced. “I’m glad I don’t have to go to this Uynervirsite in Jheds that everyone talks about. It’s madness, wondering so much.”
“It might be, at that,” said Ilya, sitting straighter and staring at something in the distance. “But don’t be so sure you won’t have to go.”
“Ilya! You wouldn’t. Here I’ve finally got a place and—oh, damn you. I never know when you’re joking. Is that Yuri and Niko? Why did you tell the others to send them back?”
Ilya stood and walked down the slope to meet them. They pulled up and dismounted, the horses snuffling and blowing.
“Mikhailov’s jahar?” asked Niko.
“Josef and Kirill are still tracking them. Tasha brought me the last report. I think we’re rid of them. For now.”
Yuri had been looking about. “Ilya, you’ve got Myshla. Where is Tess?”
“Get her and bring her to the new camp. She’s up—” He motioned.
“I know.” Yuri led his horse over to Myshla and then, taking both leads in his hands, walked away up into the hills.
“She’s been up there all this time?” Niko demanded. “After she saw Fedya? Damn it, Ilya! You know better. Why didn’t you go up?”
Bakhtiian looked up at the sky, down at the ground, and, finally, out of the corners of his eyes at the old man. “Because I’m a damned coward.”
“Ilya.”
Bakhtiian colored, turning quickly to walk over to Vladimir. “Ah, thank you, Vladi.” He took the reins Vladimir offered him. “Shall we go?”
Tess watched silently as Yuri left the horses below and climbed the rocky slope. She did not rise as he reached her, but when, wordlessly, he put out a hand, she gave him hers and let him pull her to her feet. They paused a moment, frozen there.
“Oh, Tess,” he said, the barest whisper, but his eyes held a grief surely greater than her own. She turned in to him, hugged him for a timeless while. He was alive, he was here with her, solid and comforting. She did not want to think, but her thoughts wound around viciously nonetheless: what if she had been given the choice, to save Yuri or Fedya? Was it wrong of her to be glad that Yuri was alive? Not glad that Fedya was dead, never that, but she could not help but feel that her preference for Yuri, given the inevitability of the death of someone she cared for, had somehow influenced the outcome.
Moisture cooled her face. She pulled back to look at him; tears wet his cheeks. He wiped at them quickly, the movement made jerky by his embarrassment. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said in a low voice that caught even as he spoke.
“Oh, Yuri, I’m sorry. You knew him better than I did.”
He shook his head, unable to reply. In the sun, his hair had the same dull gold cast as the grass.
His sorrow so eclipsed hers as to make her ashamed, and doubly ashamed that where she might be allowed her grief, he must hide his. “Oh, God,” she said, directing her shame into self-loathing, “I slept through it. How can anyone sleep while someone else dies?”
“Gods. Tess. I hope you never see battle.”
“No. I’d rather have seen it. He was here, and then I woke up, and he’ll never come back. I don’t want to live like that. I want to see the things affecting me.”
“You don’t want to see that.”
But I do, she thought, but she did not say it. Yuri’s face was white and strained. Below, Myshla pawed restlessly at the ground and pulled at the tether. “Where is everyone else?” she asked.
“They’ve gone on to the new camp.”
“Do you mean Bakhtiian has entrusted me to you?”
He rallied. “Just for the afternoon, dear Sister. And we’ve got a long ride to camp. If we don’t get there before dark, Bakhtiian will skin me and use my hide for a tent.”
“How revolting, Yuri. And what did the Chapalii think of all this?”
He shrugged, clearly not much interested in the Chapalii. “Lord Ishii is as cold as a stone in winter. He’s never the least bit afraid. But the younger one, Garii—he offered to Niko to help him tend the wounded.”
“Garii offered to help tend the wounded?”
Yuri nodded.
“And Ishii did not forbid it?”
“Why should he forbid it, Tess? If Garii has some knowledge of healing…Any man would do the same.”
“Any man,” Tess muttered under her breath, wondering what game Garii was playing now. “Come on.” She took two steps down the slope, heading for the horses.
“What’s wrong?” he asked when she paused.
“Wait.” She hesitated, turning back t
o regard the entrance to the overhang. With resolve, she crawled back inside where the blanket still lay. She brought it back out, shook it as Yuri stared, and rolled it up neatly. “It’s Fedya’s blanket,” she said at last, when he still did not speak.
“He has a sister,” he said finally.
A sister who would mourn him. A sister who did not even know yet that he was dead. Tears filled her eyes, and she wiped at them impatiently, as if that would make them stop.
Yuri took her hand. “Come, Tess,” he said softly. They went down together.
Chapter Fourteen
“The best men choose one thing above all else: everlasting fame among mortal men.”
—HERACLEITUS OF EPHESUS
IF THEY TREATED TESS more and more like one of their own, she scarcely noticed it because it seemed to flow naturally from her time among them. The ways of the jaran lay in her hands: she examined each one and let it settle within her until her strange hybrid of customs grew so complex and interwoven that, at odd moments, she forgot where one left off and the other began. The days removed her from Fedya’s death; he became increasingly the inhabitant of a sequestered dream.
For months now she had become accustomed to the swell and flow of the plain, a grand monotony alleviated by hills and the occasional watercourse slicing through it. But the plains do not continue forever, just as happiness and sorrow both eventually come to an end. Their first hint of the highlands was a rough stretch of land pitted with gorges and rugged valleys that were barren of cover and composed of rock as stubborn and sharp and unyielding as a saint. The jaran playfully called it krinye-tom, the little mountains; Tess called it hell and wondered what the big mountains were like.
They slowed their pace to a crawl and ranged wide to find enough fodder for the horses. The dirt clung to Tess. The heat baked the walls of hard stone, and sweat plastered her shirt to her back. The men veiled their heads in cloth to protect themselves from the sun. Tess’s scalp itched, but she did not dare undo her braided hair, having no water to wash it in. The horses got the greatest share of the water. Was there a point past which one could not become clean again? She dreamed of showers. At least the others looked as filthy as she felt, and they joked about it constantly, liking it as little as she did. Only the Chapalii, who did not appear to sweat at all, appeared unaffected; Tess knew that this heat was doubtless a relief to them, being closer to their natural climate.
At long last, they came out onto the watershed of the mountains, grass and shrubs and a scattering of trees on level land. Not a lush land, by any means—that would be far far south, across the great range—but a breeze cooled her cheeks and her shirt dried. They came to an isolated khaja village, and Bakhtiian traded gold trinkets and two tarpans for grain.
Two days’ ride out from the village, Bakhtiian called an entire day’s halt when they came to a deep-bedded stream. Tess found a pool upstream from the horses, stripped, and washed herself and her hair—that twice—and every piece of clothing in her possession, for the dirt had contaminated even the saddlebags. Surely this stream of all streams was blessed by the gods, for the clearness of its water and the lazy trickle of its flow. She spread her damp blanket over a smooth-surfaced rock and, naked, stretched out on it to dry.
Pulling her mirror case free of her gear, she undid its clasps and slid the mirror out. Her face surprised her, she had not seen it in so long: the blunt chin, the high cheekbones, the deep green of her eyes. Not a bad face, after all, though the green eyes seemed out of place; she kept thinking they ought to be blue or brown. She had grown lean. Streaks of gold lightened her hair. Her hands were strong. She felt—content.
Except for Charles. Somewhere, Charles was worrying about her, searching for her. At least she was headed in the right direction. Yet at this moment, Jeds seemed like a goal too distant to agonize over. Turning over to let her back dry, she rested her chin on her laced fingers and stared at the rippling water. Light sparked off it, ever-changing, a constant, inexorable flux.
Her privacy was assured, a privilege, not a prison, conferred on her because she was female, and that was a thing she had never known on Earth, where locked doors bought privacy and privacy could be violated by crime or, for those unlucky enough to be related to the most influential human in the Chapalii Empire, by the media and the ubiquitous Protocol Office. Only the most degraded of outcasts would assault her here and, as for the Chapalii, she outranked them. In this land, a person’s fortune could be measured in sun and sweet wind and kinship with other people. Material possessions became, in the end, a burden; what you possessed of the spirit was far more valuable. Gloom was disdained: in a world of fighters it was a hindrance; to a people beside whom freedom ran like a hound, it was absurd.
Except for Fedya. But for Fedya, it had proved fatal. With a sigh, Tess sat up. She braided her hair, pinned the braid atop her head, and went swimming. The water felt cool and soft against her skin. The sun warmed her face. She did not go back to camp until evening.
In the morning she rode out with Bakhtiian. Ahead, dark stained the land, and she asked him what it was.
“Don-usbekh. The dark wood. Days of it, east and west, and south to the mountains. The khaja say it is haunted.” He smiled, looking at her to see what her reaction would be.
“Haunted by what?” she asked, not quite laughing.
He shrugged. “The khaja fear many things, not least their own nightmares. I do not know.”
“Do you think it is haunted?”
“I think that no khaja will live there. But there’s an old road that runs through it, so once people must not have feared it as they do now.”
An old road. “Will we follow this old road?”
“It’s the only track through. See there—that broken pillar. We’ll follow the road from there.”
But despite her fears—or hopes—the old road proved to be just that—an old road. Ancient, stone paved, half grown over in spots, it looked exactly like what she guessed it must be: some relic from an old empire, thrown across the vast land.
“Perhaps the people who built this also built the great temple on the plains,” she said to Bakhtiian as they waited in the first outlying tendril of the forest for the jahar to catch up with them.
“Perhaps they did.”
She spotted the first ranks of the jahar in the distance, tiny figures moving closer. “Bakhtiian, if Mikhailov’s men could find you on the plain, aren’t you worried that they might find you more easily on a road like this? We’ll be trapped on it, on a single road surrounded by trees.”
“Mikhailov, whatever else he may be, is not fool enough to follow us into khaja lands. For that is what lies beyond the don-usbekh.”
“Then why are we going?”
Bakhtiian’s stallion shifted beneath him. Bakhtiian stroked the black’s neck with affection. “For more of these horses, I would risk much more than this.”
And one hundred more of these horses he would have, should they reach the end of this journey. “Well,” said Tess, but nothing more. The jahar arrived then. Bakhtiian sent Josef and Tasha and Niko back to cover their rear, and he rode ahead with Tess, leaving the main group to ride at their leisure in between.
Soon enough the close ranks of trees began to seem oppressive to her even while she told herself that this forest was far more open than many. A dank, rotting scent hung in the air. So much vegetation, falling in and covering itself, and no wind to sweep the air clear. Even the colors turned somber and dense. Now and then an animal that had ventured too close to the road would flee into the forest, a trail of sound marking its path. It was never entirely still. Noise scattered out from the undergrowth, and rodents chittered and birds called from the branches above. The light bled down in patches and stripes so that day never came completely and night came without even the grace of stars.
That night a storm blew down from the mountains. The constant drumming of rain and the patter of falling leaves and twigs disturbed her sleep as she tried to make her
self comfortable inside her tent. It was a relief to ride the next morning, although the trees dripped on them all that day and the day after. By the third morning, the forest had leached itself dry in the warm summer air, though the undergrowth looked greener for the drenching. They rode on, having to cut away growth in some places to clear the road, and Tess began to wonder if the forest would ever end.
“I’ve never seen Ilya so cheerful,” said Yuri one evening as he helped Tess set up her tent. Because the trees grew up to the very edge of the road, indeed overgrew the road in many areas, the jahar set up camp on the road itself at night. “He must smile once a day now, and he never smiled but once a month before. What do you two do while you’re riding?”
“We talk, Yuri.”
He chuckled and sat down next to her tent, fishing in his saddlebags for his spare shirt and his embroidery needles and thread. “Do you want to try again?”
“And ruin your shirt? No, thank you.”
“Well, it’s true women have little hand for embroidery. But you’ve taken to saber well enough.” He threaded a needle with a thick golden thread and began to embroider golden spirals through the thick black pattern that textured his sleeves. “I thought you might take to this if you tried it again.”
“Yuri, I’m sore from my saber lesson tonight. May I just lie here for a while and watch you?”
“If you think this stone is a comfortable bed, then please, lie there as long as you wish.”
She laughed. It was not quite dark yet, and a fire built within a ring of stones some ten paces away gave light as well. Here, in this deserted place, game was plentiful and easy to kill, and deadwood for smoking the meat was in vast supply. Bakhtiian had decided to halt for a few days, to hunt, to graze the horses in nearby meadows, to rest. “I’m teaching him some of the songs I know,” Tess said at last.
