His Conquering Sword

by Kate Elliott

  He found Arina Veselov reclining on pillows in the outer chamber of her great tent. She was pale still, but she greeted him with a smile.

  “Aleksi Soerensen,” she said, nodding as he sat down before her. “I am pleased to see you. What news of Tess? Is she well? How is she recovering?” She glanced at her own little son, who lay on a pillow at her feet, pushing himself up on his arms and grunting as he tried to crawl.

  Aleksi gave her a report, drawing it out. Arina considered it all gravely, as well she might, since she had come close enough to losing her own son, another early child.

  “Ah,” she said, lifting a hand to interrupt him. “Here is Svetlana. Yes, Lana, Lavrenti is ready for you.”

  A young woman with pale blonde hair drawn back in four braids ducked inside the tent and knelt to pick up Lavrenti. The child gurgled and flopped down on his face and then pushed up again, scooting toward Svetlana. Aleksi watched her from under lowered lids. She had a bright face and an easy manner, and she paused long enough to examine Aleksi carefully before she scooped up the baby and carried him off outside. He knew he was blushing, but he tried to convince himself that Mother Veselov would not notice.

  She coughed into her hand. He glanced up at her in time to see her hide a smile. “Svetlana is an industrious young woman,” said Mother Veselov casually, “good with children, and handsome, too, I think. She lost her baby this summer to a fever, but she has another child, a healthy girl of about four winters. She also has a younger brother and sister who came with her when their mother died last year. They’re both very strong, and the younger sister is a fine archer already. The brother is good with horses and fights well, although he isn’t old enough to ride with the army yet. They don’t come from an important family, it’s true, but their aunt is a good weaver and they have a cousin who’s risen to become a second in the Veselov jahar.”

  “Oh,” said Aleksi, stricken to dumbness. He felt a pang, knowing he could never marry Raysia Grekov; but then he thought of the smile that had played on the lips of Svetlana Tagansky, as she had measured her prospective husband, and he felt that he might endure her company easily enough.

  “Go on.” Mother Veselov waved him away. “Tell Tess that she must come to me, when she can, since I’m not allowed to walk yet.” She sighed, and Aleksi could see the ready sympathy on her face for Tess’s loss. “Go on,” she repeated. “You’ve seen what you came to see. May the gods watch over you in the battle tomorrow.”

  He bowed his head and thanked her for her blessing. Outside, Svetlana Tagansky loitered under the awning. She smiled at him as he passed, and modestly, risking a glance straight at her, he smiled back. She had brilliant blue eyes, as fiercely bright as if fire lit them. A girl of about Kolia’s age hung at her skirts, and farther off, two adolescents, a girl and a boy, stood staring at him. Aleksi had a feeling that the sudden addition of a family, so many and so varied, might well help Tess get over her grief. Or at least, it would keep her too busy to dwell on it. Even the prospect of a difficult and perilous battle tomorrow could not ruin his good spirits.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  VASIL LAY IN AN agony of pain, some of it physical. He had to stop himself from touching his face again, reading with his fingers the evidence of the wound that had destroyed his beauty. He raised himself on his left arm and tried yet again to get his legs to work, but they did not. He could see them, lumps underneath the blanket, and he could feel them, feel their presence, but he could not get them to move at all. He had only the vaguest memories of the event that had brought him here, to this blanket on the ground under an awning, here at the hospital. He remembered only succumbing to an overwhelming impulse to stop the Habakar king from being rescued: If he, Vasil, could spare Ilya that insult, then surely Ilya would be beholden to him; surely Ilya would turn to him in gratitude. Dr. Hierakis came down the aisle of wounded toward him, kneeling beside each patient, speaking a few words, examining them. A man two blankets down from Vasil moaned, helpless against the pain assaulting him, and his young sister, who attended him day and night, dabbed a damp cloth on his brow and spoke softly to him. It was all she could do. Others cried only at night, when they thought the rest were sleeping. But really, the men here had it best: They had received some kind of surgery and were expected to recover, and most of them had a relative who helped nurse them until such time as they could be released to their tribe. Vasil suspected that under another awning lay men who simply waited to die. He suspected that he ought to have lain under that other awning, but that other forces, other people, had decreed that he lie here. A young healer had told him that Dr. Hierakis herself had performed the surgery that had saved his life.

  Reflexively, Vasil reached up and brushed his fingers along the ragged gash that had laid open his left cheek from his chin almost to his eye. It hurt, and it still oozed.

  “Don’t touch that, please,” said Dr. Hierakis, crouching beside him. “You won’t do it any good if you worry it like that.”

  “Gods,” he said harshly, “what does it matter? I’d be better off dead, anyway.”

  “Possibly,” said the doctor curtly, and he flushed at her tone. “You’re going to have to find a different way to kill yourself next time, though, since I don’t think you’re going to be riding any time soon.”

  He lay back down and stared at the awning. The fabric was, thank the gods, colorful enough, with the light shining through the pattern of squares set within circles set within a frame of squares. She pushed the blanket aside and examined his various wounds; a fine collection—she said so herself, in that dry, sarcastic tone she used. He winced when she touched his shoulder; winced at her hand on his abdomen, but below the hips he felt nothing but the weight of his legs and a steady, numbing ache. At last she shook her head and sat back on her heels.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She sighed. As was fitting, the men on either side of him had turned their heads away to afford the healer and her patient privacy in these close quarters. “Vasil.” She sighed again. The awning rose, filled with air, and bottomed out again. A few squares of sunlight dappled the ground, piercing through the palest colors in the design. “I don’t know if you’ll ever ride again, or even if you’ll walk.”

  He gazed at her, at her serious expression, and then he realized what she had just said. “What about my face?” he demanded. “Will it ever heal?”

  Her eyes widened. “It will heal, in time.”

  “But I’ll always be scarred.”

  “Yes. It’s going to be a bad scar, too. I won’t lie to you.”

  “Gods.” he murmured. What had she said? ‘You’re going to have to find a different way to kill yourself.’ He had never done anything as rash in his life as riding out alone into that skirmish. He had always been cautious. But it was true enough that he hadn’t cared any more whether he lived or died. But then why had he struggled back toward the jahar? Why had he cared enough to want to live? He should have just given in and let Grandmother Night take him, but every time in his life that Grandmother Night’s hands reached out to gather him in, he had fled from her. Maybe Ilya was right. Maybe he didn’t love Ilya more than he loved his own life.

  “I’d be better off dead,” he murmured, but even as he said it, he knew he did not believe his own words.

  “You have visitors,” said the doctor. “I’ll leave you now.” She rose and stepped away, and he saw Ilya approaching him down the aisle, flanked by his usual retinue.

  Vasil grabbed the edge of the blanket, covering the laceration, and he turned his face to the side so that his right side, the unmarked side, showed.

  Bakhtiian’s retinue halted some ways down the aisle and dispersed to walk among the wounded. Ilya came on alone. He was pale with exhaustion and with some other overwhelming emotion. His eyes were dark with it, and the mark of marriage on his left cheek glared vividly against his dark skin. And yet, on Ilya, the scar did not mar his beauty; it had simply become part of him. His steps slowed as he
caught sight of Vasil, and he halted beside him and knelt.

  “Veselov,” he said roughly. Stopped. He reached out and took hold of the blanket, to draw it down. Vasil gripped it tighter and pulled away from him. Ilya let go and sat back. “You saved my honor, in the battle,” he said in a low voice, in the formal style, “at great cost to yourself. Is there some favor I may show you, to repay you?”

  “What I want, you will never give me,” said Vasil. Tears burned at his eyes but did not fall. “There is nothing else I want.”

  “It was bravely done,” said Ilya in a whisper, eyes cast down. “You ought to have died.”

  “I ought to have died many times in the last eleven years. But I never did.”

  A smile touched Ilya’s lips and passed away into nothing. “No, you never did. By such means does Grandmother Night work Her justice.”

  Vasil shuddered, to hear Her name spoken in daylight, and he shifted farther away from Ilya. And then realized that he had done so. “There’s nothing more I want from you,” he said finally, hoarsely, “except to see that my wife and children always have a tribe and a tent of their own.”

  Bakhtiian lost even more color. Vasil listened to the ragged sound of Ilya’s breathing while he controlled himself; at last he spoke. “Tess lost the child. We burned it, five days past.”

  Vasil felt the comment like a wound to his heart. All that pain in Ilya, and it was for the dead child, not for him. At that moment, he hated Ilya, hated him fiercely and without forgiveness. He had a sudden memory of the day when he had stood beside the couch where Ilya lay, his body empty and his soul taken up to the gods’ lands, and Dr. Hierakis had read him words and he had spoken them back to her. “‘How would you be,’” he murmured, recalling the lines, “‘if She, which is the top of judgment, should but judge you as you are?’”

  Ilya’s gaze jumped to Vasil’s face. The fire that lit Bakhtiian’s eyes now was fueled by grief and helpless fury, and Vasil felt a sudden, surprising pity for the khaja who were sure to bear the brunt of Bakhtiian’s anger at the gods for taking from him the child he so desired.

  But when Ilya spoke, his words only bewildered Vasil. “If you only knew,” he said softly, voice rough with pain, “you would be glad to be rid of me.”

  “You will never understand me,” whispered Vasil. He closed his free hand into a fist and held the blanket taut, concealing his face, with the other. “I want no favor from you. Be assured that I will not bother you again. Goodbye.”

  He gained some satisfaction from the hurt that passed over Ilya’s face and was as quickly controlled. Bakhtiian rose and left him. Vasil forced himself not to watch him go, not to follow his exit, and so he was startled when another man cleared his throat beside him and knelt, and addressed him.

  “Veselov. I just heard you were badly injured. I’m so sorry.” Owen Zerentous sat there, looking concerned and intent, regarding Vasil with that keen eye of his. “Dr. Hierakis tallied up your injuries for me. They’re an impressive lot, and some of them are quite serious.”

  “Your concern honors me,” muttered Vasil, mystified by Zerentous’s presence.

  “You can’t ride again, can you?”

  “The doctor says not.”

  Then they sat for a while. Squares of light shifted on the wounded soldiers as the wind moved the awning up and down. A boy walked down the aisles, seeking his brother; a wife knelt beside her husband and farther away, a husband wept beside his injured wife. Vasil smelled like a faint perfume the bitter scent of ulyan, the herb the jaran burned with the dead. Zerentous regarded the air. The director sat perfectly still, except for his right hand, which twisted at intervals in the cup made by his left hand.

  “I have this idea,” said Zerentous finally, and lapsed back into silence. From watching rehearsals, Vasil had learned that Zerentous often worked this way; that he thought aloud, not in words but in the way he projected the fact that he was ruminating over some idea of great moment. The actors simply waited him out, having long since learned patience. Vasil, of course, had nothing better to do. “I approached the prince, and he seemed to think we could work something out. But it makes a perfect coda to the experiment we’ve conducted this past year, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” said Vasil, curious now in spite of his pain.

  “Well, wouldn’t you like to be an actor?” Zerentous demanded. “At least to try?”

  The emotion that hit and swelled over Vasil was worse than the physical pain he endured, worse than the agony he had brought on himself by repudiating Ilya once and for all: It was hope. “An actor!”

  “Oh, it won’t be easy. You’ve some instinctive talents, but there’d be much much work to be done, training, practice, endless rehearsals, and even with the Company to support you, you’re far behind them in skills right now. Still, to have brought our theater here and then to bring one of you back, to see how you might reflect our tradition back at us, how you might interpret it, that would be fascinating!”

  “But—I’d have to leave the jaran.”

  “We’d be your tribe. We theater people always have been a tribe unto ourselves.”

  “But my family—?”

  “Can’t they come? Are they fixed here?”

  Vasil winced as a pain stabbed up from his hips and splintered into a thousand pieces all the way up his backbone. “No,” he said, gasping a little. “No, not at all. They live only on the sufferance granted them by my cousin. My wife long ago left her tribe, and my children only have her. But could they—?”

  “Oh, they could come too,” said Zerentous blithely. “We’ll fix some kind of pension on them. You needn’t worry about leaving them behind. What do you say?” Zerentous was clearly in the grip of his obsession now. His dark face shone.

  “But the doctor says I can’t walk.”

  Zerentous coughed into his hand and glanced around, the gesture so acting-like that Vasil almost smiled. He bent down closer to Vasil. “We’re going back to our country,” he said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “To Erthe. There, you’ll find that…we can do things there…it won’t matter. Truly. It won’t.”

  Vasil felt sick with hope and despair intermingled. He felt as if the gods themselves had conspired to offer him his heart’s desire and yet make it impossible for him to grasp it. Like Ilya, who had never really been his, because the gods had already marked him as theirs.

  “I can’t be an actor,” he said finally.

  “Why not?” Zerentous demanded, looking affronted.

  Vasil took in a deep breath, for courage, and pulled the blanket down and turned his lacerated face to the air.

  “Well?” demanded Zerentous again. The director’s gaze had flicked onto the gash and then returned to stare into Vasil’s eyes. The force of his gaze was immense, like a weight bearing down on Vasil. “Why not?”

  “But …” Vasil faltered. “My face.”

  “Oh.” Zerentous dismissed the terrible disfigurement with a wave of one hand. “I said it won’t matter. We have arts of healing—we can erase it. You must believe me. More than that I can’t say now. Veselov, what I’m offering you will be safe for you and your family. What’s left you here—if you’re crippled—I can’t guess. Stay here if you will. Or come with me and the Company. The choice is yours.”

  There was, in Owen Zerentous, a certainty that Vasil found attractive. He was so sure of himself and of his vision.

  “Yes,” Vasil said before he realized himself that he meant to say it. “I’ll go with you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BEFORE DAWN, MANY PARTINGS.

  Diana had stayed up half the night, helping Anatoly and two boys from the Sakhalin camp polish his armor. She had persuaded him to come to bed at last, but she slept far more restlessly than he did, and she woke before him, before dawn. A kind of bitter fatalism had descended on her, and she lay curled around him and watched him breathe. Today they launched the final assault on Karkand. Everyone expected the fighting to be prol
onged and bloody, and Diana knew that Anatoly meant to throw himself and his men into the thick of it. She had a horrible premonition that he was going to die.

  He was a heavy sleeper. When she ran a hand down his arm he did not stir. From outside, she heard horses and conversation and the creak of leather armor. He opened his eyes and sat up.

  “Diana!” He started to scramble to his feet, then flung an arm around her and kissed her warmly. He murmured something, sweet phrases, and then jumped up and dressed. She hurried and dressed and followed him outside. Already, the same two boys had arrived, waiting for the honor of helping him into his armor. Diana wanted to help, but it was a privilege reserved for the adolescent boys and she knew better than to interfere. She held on to his helmet instead, running her fingers through the black plume that ornamented its peak while she watched the boys tie Anatoly into his armor and check for the fourth time all the iron and lacquered-leather strips that made up the body of his armor. For her was reserved the honor of belting on his saber. She did so gravely, and handed him his helmet. He put it on. A boy brought his horse, and Anatoly mounted. The other boy gave him his spear and, last, one of Bakhtiian’s officers rode up and handed to Anatoly his staff of command.

  Anatoly smiled down at Diana. He looked utterly confident. He looked magnificent, with his fair hair and his gleaming, plumed helmet, his polished armor and bright silk surcoat. He reined his horse aside and rode away, leaving her there. She watched him go. A horrible weight pressed against her chest, like a stone caught in her heart. She was convinced that she would never see him alive again. A bleak agony settled onto her, and she felt that every emotion except dread had been washed away with the first light of morning.

  The boys had already excused themselves and run away to other duties. In such a camp, on such a day as this, no one had patience for idle hands. Diana went back into her tent. Shrugging on her old khaki tunic, she set out for the hospital. In the distance, she heard the steady thudding of the siege engines, hurling stones and flaming arrows into Karkand.