Earthly Crown (71 page)

“Not even your father?”

“My father rode out a lot in those days. He was a Singer. The gods called him at strange times, on strange journeys.”

“Your sister?”

“Natalia’s first husband had just been killed in a feud with the Boradin tribe, while she was still pregnant with her first child.”

“Was that Nadine?”

“Yes. Oh, Natalia was fond enough of me, and kind to me, considering what an embarrassment I must have been to her, but she was busy and preoccupied. Riders were already beginning to come round, to see what they could see of her, to ask if she was ready to marry again.”

“But, Ilya, women have no choice in marriage.”

He tilted his head to look directly at her. His lips quirked up. “Nor should they,” he said, and grinned. Then he yelped, because she pinched him.

“That
for you, and don’t think I’ll ever forgive you for taking me down the avenue without me knowing what it meant, either.”

“Perhaps it was rash—”

“Perhaps!”

“But, by the gods, I’d do it again. Tess.” He pressed her against him, as close as he might, and kissed her long and searchingly.

There came a cough. There stood Vasil, framed in the entrance by curtain and striped wall. “If you will talk about me, then I wish you’d do so in a language I can understand. And, Ilya, my love, I don’t know how you can expect me to leave here unseen if you post guards at the entrance to your tent.”

Ilya swore.

“Wait,” said Tess in khush. “Ilya, it’s true he can’t get out by the front entrance without being seen. They all saw you come in here. You’ll have to go out front and distract them with something, and he can sneak out the back.”

“You have a back entrance?” Vasil asked, looking interested.

“Go on,” said Tess, forestalling what Ilya was about to say, which she guessed would be ill-considered and rude. Vasil stared at him as he dressed, but he dressed quickly and pushed past the other man without the slightest sign of the affection he had shown earlier. A moment later, Tess heard voices outside, engaged in some kind of lively conversation. “Here,” she said, standing up with a blanket pulled around her. She went to the back wall of the tent and twitched the woven inner wall aside to reveal the felt outer wall. Here, low along the ground, the felt wall overlapped itself and, drawing the extra layer aside, Tess revealed a gap in the fabric just large enough to crawl through. She knelt and peered out.

Vasil laid a hand on her bare shoulder. His fingers caressed the line of her neck. “Here, I’ll look. I’ve done this before.”

Tess made a noise in her throat and stood up, and away. “I have no doubt of it.”

He hesitated, and bent to kiss her. Then he knelt and swayed forward. Paused, surveying his ground. A moment later he slid outside. Tess knelt and looked out after him, but he had already vanished into the gloom. She twitched the fabric back, let the inner wall fall into place, and called for Ilya. After a little bit, he came back in, swearing under his breath.

“Well, you can hardly blame him,” she began.

“I can do what I like,” he said peevishly. “He’s so damned charming that it’s easy to forget how much trouble he causes.”

“I think I’d better sew that back entrance shut.”

He cocked his head at her. “Probably.” He stripped and snuggled in beside her. And sighed. “It was a stupid thing to do.”

“What? Letting him get out of here unseen?”

“No.” By the constraint in his voice, she could tell he was embarrassed. “What—we did—tonight.”

“No, it was the right thing to do. It never does any good to run away from what you’re afraid of. I should know. I’ve done it often enough.”

“What was I afraid of?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think you’re afraid of Vasil anymore.”

His face rested against her hair. He stroked her along the line of her torso and down along her hips, and up again, and down, while he considered. “No,” he replied, sounding surprised, “I don’t think I am.”

“So. Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

His hand stopped. “I’ve kept no more hidden from you,” he said indignantly, “than you’ve kept hidden from me.”

Shame overwhelmed Tess. Gods, he didn’t know the tenth of it. Yet what could she say? There was nothing she could say.

“It wasn’t Natalia they were asking, anyway,” said Ilya, “it was my mother and my aunt. It’s decent to observe a period of mourning before marrying again”

It took Tess a moment to recall where they had left off their other conversation: with his sister, Natalia. “But she did marry again?”

“Yes.” Although she wasn’t looking at him, she felt him tense. “That’s when I left for Jeds. I hated him.”

“Why?”

Ilya let go of a shuddering breath, and he clutched her tighter to him. “He mocked me. He scorned me. Gods, he tried to rape me once. He knew about Vasil; he caught us together, one time, and he held the knowledge of it over me like a saber. He used to fence with the boys, those of us who aspired to be riders, and he’d torment me. He’d cut me up, fine cuts all along my arms and my chest.”

“But, Ilya, how could your sister ever have married someone like that?”

“Oh, no one else knew. He made sure of that. He was charming to everyone else, a good rider, a fine fighter, good with horses and the herds. No one believed me. They all thought I was just jealous. They said I was too attached to Natalia. They said—” He broke off. “Anyway, I left.”

“And you went to Jeds. It’s strange, now that I think of it, how much I know about your journey to Jeds, and how little I knew of the reasons you left the tribes to go there. But, Ilya.” She laughed a little, into his shoulder. “Does that mean that the courtesan Mayana was the first woman you ever slept with?”

“Yes.” He didn’t sound amused; defensive, perhaps.

“She’s so famous, though. I remember that she used to come have tea with Cara once a week. She must have been young, even though she seemed old to me. I was only—what?—ten. She’d just recently bought her freedom from the brothel she was indentured to, so it couldn’t have been long after you left Jeds that I arrived there from Erthe. So it wasn’t only a university education you got at Jeds.”

“Are you complaining about the education I got at Jeds?”

She canted her head back to grin at him. “Not at all. Then you came back to the tribes. Was Vasil still with your tribe?”

“No. He appeared about two winters later. He’d heard that I had returned. My mother had already made me dyan, so no one wondered at first when I took him into my jahar. Josef left his tribe at about the same time to ride with me. The Roskhel tribe traveled alongside of us many seasons during that time.”

“Why did Khara Roskhel turn against you? Gods, what brought him to murder your whole family?”

But the question evoked only silence. His left hand ran a pattern, up and down, along her lower back. She felt as if the gesture, repeated obsessively, was itself the answer, but in a language she did not speak.

“Ilya?”

“No.” He lay the index and middle fingers of his right hand on her lips, gently. “No more, Tess. There’s been enough today, and tonight. I’m exhausted.” As well he might be. She sighed, knowing that if he would not confide in her now, as vulnerable as he was because of all that he had laid bare this night, he probably never would confess the truth of the troubling mystery of Roskhel’s defection and subsequent horrible revenge.

She shifted until she was comfortable. His breathing slowed and gentled, and he slept. From outside, she heard the night guards conversing, the murmur of their words but not their meaning. Or perhaps it was just one of them, reciting an old story to keep them company on a dark night.

B
OREDEOM AFFLICTED JIROANNES. HE
had nothing better to do than to interest himself in the goings-on in his guardsmen’s encampment. At dawn each day, he sent Syrannus to request an audience with Bakhtiian. Each day Syrannus returned with a polite refusal. In the mornings Jiroannes inspected the camp, ostensibly to make sure the women and children were being treated well by their keepers but in fact because the simple human contact with people other than Syrannus and the two slave-boys was as salve to him, who was otherwise alone.

There was something pathetic about how gratefully the women greeted him, eyes cast down, knowing as they did that it was on his sufferance they were allowed to be there. Sleeping with men of another race, soon to be pregnant with their children; and yet, most of them would otherwise have starved to death, or met a worse fate. They knew they were the lucky ones. The little children sucked on their fingers and stared at him. The older ones attempted to help out around the guards’ camp. A few bold children even assisted Lal and Samae and the other slave-boy—whose name was Jat—in hauling water and beating carpets and collecting fuel for the benefit of Jiroannes himself. The guardsmen’s camp tripled in size in ten short days. By the time Bakhtiian made his triumphal entry into camp, Jiroannes felt that he was master of an entire little tribe of his own.

When the citadel fell, his men went out searching for refugees. This time they brought back a princess. Waiting women and peasant women had been sheltering her, but the delicacy of her complexion and hands and the fine gold-braided shift she wore underneath the filthy gown her protectors had given her to camouflage herself in betrayed her high station. The captain brought her directly to Jiroannes as dusk lowered around them. Trembling, the woman knelt before him, hands crossed on her chest, head bent so that it almost touched the carpet, and begged him for mercy.

He took her to his bed. She was a virgin, which proved how great a prize she was. She wept a little afterward, silently; he was annoyed to discover that her grief made him uncomfortable. She was a handsome woman, insofar as any of the Habakar women could be called handsome, and she had a pleasingly full figure and soft, yielding flesh. A few drops of blood stained her inner thighs, but he had been gentle—as gentle as he could be, considering how long it had been since he had lain with a woman.

But now that he had satisfied his craving, he wondered if the jaran women, if Mother Sakhalin, would consider this night’s work as any different from a rape. Still, the woman had begged him for mercy, and she had given herself into his hands of her own free will. This was war, after all, and in war, the conquered must expect to become servants. Yet his captain had remarked that he had yet to see jaran riders carrying off any khaja women.

Jiroannes tried to talk with her, but they spoke no language in common and she seemed either stupid or so frightened as to be stupid, so he soon grew bored with the effort. She called herself Javani, but whether that was her name, or a title, or a word describing her feelings he could not tell. He called Lal to him and had the boy lead her away to the women’s tent, which now she would share with Samae.

In the morning, a rider came by to say that all ambassadors were required to attend court at midday.

“Eminence,” said Syrannus as he and Lal helped Jiroannes dress in his most formal sash and blouse and turban, “what would you have me do with the woman?”

“She will remain in seclusion, as befits her station,” said Jiroannes. “I will send for her again tonight. Make sure she is comfortable, Lal, and see that she is allowed to wash.”

Lal accepted these orders with his usual gratitude. Jiroannes wondered if the boy was ambitious. After all, since Lal was a eunuch, he might aspire to the honor of tending to Jiroannes’ wives and the other women in the women’s quarter. Not that Jiroannes had wives yet, but in time he intended to marry often and well.

“Lal, treat her as you would any woman of high station in your care, and see what you can discover about who and what she is. I would be—most—grateful for such information.”

Lal dropped to his knees and touched his forehead to the carpet. “Your eminence, you honor me with this responsibility.” Then he jumped to his feet and hurried off to his tasks.

Definitely ambitious. With Syrannus and four guardsmen attending him, Jiroannes walked through camp. As usual, the guardsmen stayed behind at the first circle of jaran guards while jaran men escorted Jiroannes to the flat triangle of ground where Bakhtiian sat invested in all his authority on a carpeted and silk-hung dais. His chief wife and a blinded man sat on pillows to his right. To his left sat Mother Sakhalin, an older man dressed as a rider whom Jiroannes did not recognize, and, surprisingly, Mitya.

Jiroannes was brought forward. He made his bows; he was recognized. As he backed up, he caught Mitya staring at him. The boy flushed and averted his gaze, looking ashamed and uncomfortable. His aunt Sonia came forward from her station to one side and spoke to the boy for a few moments in a low voice. Mitya straightened his shoulders and drew himself up. What was he doing up there? Was it possible that Mitya was one of Bakhtiian’s heirs? Was Bakhtiian showing him off, or showing him preference? Jiroannes realized that he had not the slightest idea of who might or might not succeed Bakhtiian if Bakhtiian died, and this irritated him. But at least Bakhtiian looked hale, if a little pale about the lips. If Bakhtiian had indeed been ill, he looked no worse for the experience. Other ambassadors came forward in their turn and were recognized and dismissed to the audience.

The afternoon dragged on as one embassy after the next appeared to entreat Bakhtiian for clemency: Habakar city-elders and Habakar governors and one furtive-looking Habakar prince with two wives and nine children surrendered one by one, begging nothing more than that they and what they offered into Bakhtiian’s hands be spared the destruction being visited on Habakar lands by Bakhtiian’s ruthless general Yaroslav Sakhalin. They pledged undying loyalty to his person; the Habakar prince offered him his eldest daughter—who looked all of twelve years old—to wife.

The offer prompted a long exchange between Bakhtiian and his chief wife which Jiroannes was too far away to follow. Partway through it, Mitya’s head jerked up as if his name had been mentioned, and the boy wrung his hands in his lap and gazed sidelong at the Habakar girl and then away.