Earthly Crown (11 page)

“No, not that much,” Tess admitted. “But you know as well as I do that I can’t just have the privileges of my position. I have to accept the dangers as well.”

“Otherwise,” said Nadine, slipping easily from khush into Rhuian, “you’re just a player in a masquerade. All show.”

“Yes, all show. I don’t care to live that way. And I’m not jaran. So I don’t have to. Ilya keeps forgetting that.”

“You’re wrong, Tess. He’s never forgotten it. That’s why he wouldn’t let you go to the coast with him.”

Tess went pale with anger, and her fingers clenched, and unclenched, on her reins. Zhashi shied sideways, and settled. “The business with Sakhalin was inexcusable,” she said in a voice made low by fury. “But to refuse me the journey to the coast to meet Charles—!” She broke off.

Nadine watched for a few moments the interesting spectacle of Tess Soerensen too angry to speak. Then she lifted a hand to signal the jahar forward at a walk. Rather than looking at Tess, Nadine examined the timbered palisade that surrounded Basille, noting its gaps and its open gates and the sudden blur of activity at the gates when the approach of two hundred horsemen was noted by its guards.

“He’s afraid,” she said softly. Tess did not reply. Perhaps she had not heard her. Perhaps she did not—or could not—understand what Nadine knew to be true. “Off the fields!” she shouted at two idiot stragglers, and she led them along a dirt track that wound in toward town.

Out in the fields, workers breaking the ground in preparation for the spring ploughing raised their caps to stare, while others scattered back across the furrowed earth to find safety in hovels and behind low carts. A string of watchers appeared on what still remained of the palisade of Basille.

Nadine regarded these signs pensively. “Poor things. They hadn’t a chance, you know, when they brought out their pitiful army against Veselov’s ten thousand with my jahar and Mirsky’s jahar in reserve. After the first day they saw it was useless and negotiated a surrender. They would have done better to close their gates and try to wait out a siege. We weren’t very good at sieges that first year.”

Tess chuckled. “You spent one year too many in Jeds, Dina. Are you sorry for them, now?”

Nadine shrugged. “What the gods have brought them, they will have to endure. Still, it’s true enough. One year too many in Jeds marks you, just like any good jaran woman is marked for marriage.”

“Like you aren’t.” Tess touched the scar that ran diagonally from cheekbone to jaw on her left cheek.

Nadine smiled, unmarked. “Gods, it’s no wonder he married you. He would never have married a jaran woman, not after the years he spent in Jeds. Sonia and Yuri—that’s why they only spent a year there. They didn’t want to be changed. Or couldn’t be.”

“Poor Yuri. It’s probably just as well he died. He would have hated this. Three years of war—one battle after the next. So much killing. He would have hated it.”

Nadine examined Tess reflectively—the hair and eyes no color ever seen in jaran-born; a good rider, for a khaja; and she could fight, it was true. Nadine recalled the cousin she had last seen years before, that gentle boy Yuri. It was true he had hated fighting—could do it, but hated it. Tess was good, probably better than Yuri, had ever been, but she lacked the love of the art itself, she lacked the indifference to killing: and to be a truly good fighter one must have both of those traits in moderation, or one in excess. Good timing, and a fine eye for distance: those were Tess’s skills.

Tess watched her, one lip quirked up in ironic salute. “Judged and found wanting?”

“Your skills aren’t at issue, Tess. Just remember, there are only five women I know of in Bakhtiian’s army. Before you came, not one woman rode to battle. It’s no dishonor to you to choose not to ride now.”

The set of Tess’s mouth tightened. “It’s not such a simple choice for me. It never was.”

Nadine sighed. Poor Tess, always agonizing over what was the right thing to do. She changed the subject. “Would Yurinya have hated it? I never knew him that well. We weren’t of an age, and anyway, he was so quiet.”

“Unlike you.”

“Judged and found wanting?” retorted Nadine. Tess grinned. “The entire coast subject to his uncle’s authority? Half the southern kingdoms that border the plains? We ride into a town now that gives us tribute so that we’ll never again attack them. One more season of campaigning and we’ll either all be dead or we’ll see the other half recognize us as their kind protectors, and we’ll seal alliances with the Vidiyan Great King and the Habakar king, and—gods, Tess, and then we’ll be free to ride north and east along the Golden Road.”

“Yuri would have hated it,” muttered Tess.

“Ilya is a fool,” said Nadine. “He believes what he says, that it’s our duty to conquer them so that all jaran will be safe from the khaja forever. Gods, what nonsense.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“Why bother? You’re the only person I know of who has the slightest chance of changing his mind—even my mother couldn’t have done it. We all know what happened to Vasil Veselov when he tried. But you could, Tess. Maybe. Are you going to try?”

Tess looked away. “How can I?” she asked in a low voice. “This is what makes him what he is.”

Nadine had long ago made a pact with herself not to think too deeply about her uncle. She loved him; how could she not? She hated him, because it was his fault that her mother and little brother had died. And in between, tangling it all up, the harness of duty that constrained her, her duty to her family, and the memory of her mother—the most wonderful person in all the tribes—telling her that of all men, it is to your own brothers and your mother’s brothers that you owe the deepest part of your affection.

“Good,” she said, mocking herself more than Tess. “I wouldn’t want you to change his mind about his wild sweep of conquest. Gods, I’d be bored if I didn’t have this to do.” And the specter of boredom, of having too much time to think, was the worst one of all. “Look. There’s a party assembling at the main gate. The ambassador must have arrived before us. He’ll have had time to worry.” She lifted a hand to sign for the troop to spread out, leaving them room to maneuver. The horsemen shifted position with that absolute mastery of riding that each one had, having been practically bred and raised in the saddle. Feodor looked their way, and averted his gaze when he realized she had noticed him.

“He’s in love with you, you know,” said Tess suddenly.

“Our ambassador? He hasn’t even met me, Tess. How can he be in love with me?”

“Feodor.”

“Oh, him.” She did not bother to look at him. “For a sweet, modest jaran man, he’s a bit too obvious about it for my taste. And the gods know, after three years in Jeds I came to appreciate sweet, modest jaran men.”

“Did you?”

Even the broken, pitiful walls of Basille reminded her enough of Jeds that she was stricken with a longing to return there—now, this instant. “Of course I did. I loved that city. I could easily have forsaken the plains for Jeds, except I’m too much jaran to live in a place where only one group of women can make advances to men—women who get paid to do so. Paid! It made me heartsick. They’re barbarians, these khaja. I didn’t want barbarians as my lovers. It’s the only reason I came back.” She meant the comment to be light; the force of it surprised even her. Tess, kind Tess, made no reply.

At the gates of Basille, a party had indeed gathered. As they neared, Nadine could distinguish between two styles of dress, and she saw that a certain, delicate distance separated two groups of people—a group of men dressed in plain, dull cloth, and a smaller group arrayed in golds and purples and jade greens made the more vivid by the muted garb of their neighbors.

“It appears,” said Nadine in Rhuian, “that Basille’s elders can scarcely wait to pass their visitors on to us.” She lifted a hand and the jahar halted, a semicircle ringing the gate out of archer’s range. She glanced at her riders and smiled. Solemn, austere, with an arrogance that frightened khaja everywhere. Why, jaran riders had such contempt for all khaja that they did not even bother to touch khaja women. Was that what khaja thought? She had often wondered, but never found the opportunity to ask.

“Grekov. Yermolov.” Her voice carried clearly into the silence. “Will you attend?” And softer: “Tess?”

“Assuredly.”

The four of them rode forward. The crowd at the gate watched, stilled either by fear or by anticipation.

“Lord,” said Tess, “look there on the steps. Is that our ambassador? From the vast and fabled empire of Vidiya?”

Nadine shifted her gaze self-consciously from the blond head of Feodor Grekov, who had come up with Yermolov on her left, to the low stairway that led up to the night portal in an intact portion of the palisade. “Gods. He’s young. And is that supposed to be his retinue—what, six besides himself? Only four hands of guardsmen? He can’t be very important if that’s the lot. Ilya won’t be pleased if he thinks he’s being snubbed.”

They halted equidistant between the steps and the group of elderly men marked with the heavy chains and pentangles of the town’s stewards. There was silence. Nadine waited.

A young man stood on the steps, utterly and obviously foreign by his purple and green striped overtunic and huge, belled trousers of cloth of gold, by the odd sculpting of his dark beard and mustache, and by the white turban that concealed his hair. He lifted one manicured hand. An older man, less flamboyantly dressed, stood one step lower; he coughed, preparing to speak. Both their gazes stopped briefly on the two women and flicked away again as quickly, dismissing them.

After a moment the older man addressed Feodor Grekov in rough, but serviceable, Rhuian. “I am Syrannus, bond servant to the Most Honorable Jiroannes Arthebathes, ambassador from His Imperial Majesty, Honor of the People, Great King of All Vidiya, may his name be sung for a thousand years. We place ourselves and the rest of our party in your hands, sir, as you are to be our escort to the court of the Bakhtiian.”

Feodor looked at Nadine and shrugged. Nadine sighed and urged her mount two paces forward. “I am Nadine Orzhekov. I am the leader of the party that will escort the Most Honorable—” She let the syllables roll off her tongue. “—Jiroannes Arthebathes and his—ah—retinue to the camp of Bakhtiian.”

“But—” sputtered Syrannus. For an instant he looked like a man trapped by starving wild animals. Basille’s elders whispered among themselves.

“You
lead my escort?” said the ambassador suddenly, curt and doubting. “A woman? Perhaps one of these men will verify this outrageous assertion.” He waved toward Grekov and Yermolov.

“Since they don’t speak Rhuian, they can’t.” Nadine grinned, enjoying his indignation.

“You
are the only one in your party who speaks Rhuian?” demanded the ambassador. “That is absurd.”

“Not the only one,” conceded Nadine. “This woman, Terese Soerensen, speaks not only Rhuian but Taor and, I believe, a few words of Vidyan as well.”

At this unfortunate juncture, especially given the appalled looks on the faces of Jiroannes Arthebathes and his servant Syrannus, Tess started to laugh.

“D
AVID,” SAID MARCO, “YOU
will
come sit through this banquet with me. I refuse to endure hours of rancid food and city elders sucking up to Charles and Bakhtiian all by myself.”

“Maggie is going,” said David.

“Maggie,” said Maggie tartly, “is serving an official function. I’m going to be the wine pourer for His Nibs and Attila the Hun.”

David groaned. “Are you for me or against me? You’re no help.”

But there was nothing for it. He could see by the look on Marco’s face, and by the light in Maggie’s eyes as she laughed silently at him, that he was doomed to sit through the state dinner and audience that the barons and elders of the town of Abala Port were holding for the man who had conquered them, Ilyakoria Bakhtiian, and the prince who was his chosen guest.

“As long as I don’t have to act as food taster,” he muttered, “although with that army in this town, I don’t think I’d try to poison anyone.”

“You wouldn’t try to poison anyone anyway,” said Maggie. She rummaged through her carry bag and drew out a clean tunic and the only skirt she possessed. She went on talking as she changed, letting her old clothes drop into a heap on the slatted floor of their tiny inn room. “Owen Zerentous has asked permission to hold an impromptu performance at the end of the banquet, or after the formal audience. Evidently the city elders have some cases they need tried, some people accused of crimes, that they’re going to bring before Bakhtiian.”

“Trial by personal whim?” asked Marco.

“You said yourself he was educated at the university in Jeds,” retorted Maggie. “He must have some concept of justice. Damn it! Where’d that brassiere go?” She upended the contents of her bag onto her cot. David, from his cot, hooked a dark toe through the brassiere strap and hoisted the garment up into the air. “Where’d you find that?” she demanded.

“On the floor, where most of your clothes eventually come to rest.”

She snatched it from him with a mock growl and put it on, then a linen shirt, and then her tunic and skirt. The room was crowded in part because it was small, but mostly because neither Maggie nor David could bring themselves to sleep on the straw-filled mattress that served as the room’s bed. They had set up their traveling cots instead, one on each side; a tiny aisle led to the door, where Marco stood with his arms folded, surveying the mess.

“Shall we go? It can’t smell any worse there than it does here.”

“Just because we’re over the stables,” said Maggie with a laugh. “And where are
you
sleeping, may I ask?”

“You may not.”

“Marco! You’re frightening me.”

That teased the shadow of a grin from him. David sighed and rose, pulling his sketchpad out of his carry bag. He brushed two flealike bugs off his sleeve and five earwigs off the sketchpad, and ran his other hand along the ends of his hair and through his name braids. “I’m just sure they’re crawling all over me. It
can’t
be worse in the town hall.”