His Conquering Sword (26 page)

She could not reply.

“Do you?” he demanded.

She could not say yes. She could not say no. She said nothing.

“If you don’t know by now—Goddess, Diana, any fool could see that you only married him to get back at me or at best because you were infatuated with the idea of marrying a romantic native prince.”

She flared, angry and embarrassed together. “Whatever it was,” she said, stumbling over the words, “I just feel that I have to stay loyal to Anatoly until I know what’s going to happen to him, and to me.”

“Well, then,” he pressed on stubbornly, “jaran women take lovers. It’s accepted—it’s even expected—in their culture.”

“I know that
now.
And it’s no wonder, if the men are always off riding for months at a time. I’m not surprised that they take lovers when they’re always left behind. But I’m not jaran. I don’t want to be jaran. I have to do what’s true to me. It isn’t you I’m rejecting, Marco. Please tell me you see that.”

“Then if you don’t want to be jaran, why in hell did you marry him?” He flinched away from her suddenly. “Oh, hell. I’m sorry,” It hurt her worse to see him in pain than it had to feel herself alone again, not knowing if Anatoly would even return before she left. He dipped his chin down, like he was containing words he wished to say but refused to say. “I will respect your decision. I’ll stay away from you.”

“I didn’t mean—Don’t feel you have to stay away from me. At least come to see me. We can talk.”

“Don’t you understand, Diana? I love you. I can’t pretend to be your friend. I can hardly stand to be this close to you as it is.”

Diana had never imagined that Marco Burckhardt might be vulnerable. He had always seemed so self-contained, so confident. It shook her horribly to see him wounded.

“Good-bye,” he said, and he walked away.

“Marco! Wait. I—do you remember, that handkerchief you loaned me? When you left for Morava? I never returned it to you. I still have it.”

“Keep it,” he said without turning around, and he vanished into the darkness that ringed the camp.

She hurt.

She just stood there and let it wash over her, as if that alone would do justice to his feelings, to what she’d done to him. Or had she done anything to him at all? They’d done nothing to each other that they hadn’t done to themselves; made mistakes, behaved stupidly, acted without thinking through the consequences of the action. Maybe Marco had made an image of her, that first meeting, that proved just as false as the one she had made of him. She had let herself fall in love—or into an infatuation, at least—with Marco before she had the slightest knowledge of who he really was. And if that was true about Marco, how much more true it was about Anatoly. She couldn’t even talk to Anatoly when she married him. She hadn’t known him at all. The choice had seemed not rash but adventurous and brave at the time. Now, with clearer sight, it just seemed reckless. A true explorer treads cautiously and with a deep respect for the unknown land. She had charged blithely in, all unconscious of danger. Well, and had she suffered so much? Only in her heart. She tried to imagine Hyacinth, straying through the wilderness, seeing one of his companions die, and could not compare her suffering to his.

“Di? Di!” There came Quinn, of course. “You left so quickly. Soerensen invited us to his camp. They’re having a little party, a reunion party, I suppose. Are you coming?”

“No, sorry, I’m not in the mood.”

For once, Quinn gave up immediately and went away.

Diana ducked into her tent and stripped and lay down. She was tired, really tired now, in the heart as well as the body. But every time she shut her eyes she saw, not Anatoly, not Marco, but Vasil Veselov coming up to her on the stage, dropping his eyes, waiting there—acting—and it suddenly came to her the one element Gwyn hadn’t caught yet, the one that would allow him to subsume completely the character of the dyan who loved the Sun’s daughter. She threw on her clothes and scrambled out of the tent and ran.

The others had already left camp, but by the single lantern left lit for their return, she saw a shadow blurring the deeper shadows on the stage, and she knew it was him, practicing, still practicing.

“Gwyn! Gwyn, I’ve got it.” She hopped up on the platform and he paused to listen to her. “It’s not just what Owen said, about showing the modesty without losing the strength. It’s about power contained. It’s about the promise of power unleashed. It’s as if, through her, you can reach your true power, just as somehow she can reach her true power through you, and the exchange is as much about that recognition of each other…” She lapsed into silence, puffing, out of breath, she was so excited. “Do you see what I’m trying to say?”

Gwyn considered. He never did rash things, not Gwyn. That remained one of his strengths, that he tread cautiously, that he considered, and when he did move, he placed his feet on the firmest ground. But he wasn’t afraid to take chances.

“Let’s try it,” he said.

“H
USBAND!”

Jiroannes flinched at the sound of his bride’s voice. Samae jerked her hand away from his feet, which she had been massaging, and sank back to kneel at the foot of the couch. Jiroannes rose from his cushions and signaled to Lal to bring him a robe. As the boy tied the robe closed with a sash, she who had once been Javani entered through the enclosed walkway that now linked her tent with his. She wore the emerald silk peacock gown and a tiered gold headdress, like a conical cap, with an embroidered shawl draped from it down over her shoulders and a veil of silk covering her lower face. The silk was so sheer that he could see her expression through it; she wanted something. Again.”

“Wife.”

Her interpreter hovered anxiously three steps behind her.

“Husband, it is impossible that I continue to live in these vulgar conditions. I have sent my steward to find a suitable house within the suburbs, near the vegetable and fruit market. Meanwhile, my handmaiden has gone to purchase silks for my wardrobe. These peacocks are very pretty, I’m sure, but the quality of the weave is mediocre.”

“Those silks were woven and embroidered in the women’s quarters of my father’s house!”

“Then I see that we will have to import Habakar weavers as well as the perfumer and the three cooks I have been forced to engage in order to afford a decent quality of living in this household.”

“And how are we to travel with this city of retainers? And pay for them? Lal, go tell Syrannus to send guards after the steward and the girl. None of these orders can go through.”

Lal nodded and slipped out, leaving Jiroannes alone with his wife. He braced himself.

“The orders must go through! I demand it. It is insupportable that I live out here among these barbarians. There are decent houses lying empty within the outer walls, not what one of my birth expects, but they will do until better arrangements can be made.”

“We’re not leaving the camp. To do so would insult the jaran. I would think you, of all people, would see the idiocy in such a course. Or would you prefer I had not married you and merely cast you off to the tender mercies of your conquerors?”

What frightened Jiroannes about Laissa was how swiftly her personality had changed once the Habakar priests had sprinkled perfume and holy water over them and proclaimed them betrothed and married by the laws of their Almighty God. At his threat, she merely drew up her chin and stared scornfully at him.

“You would have been a fool to do so, and you’re a fool to threaten me with it now. No merchant of my people would dare refuse to do business with me or with my husband’s ministers. You will keep that in mind, I hope, if you wish to prosper in these lands. I think you’re being unnecessarily sanguine about the possibility that these barbarians will hold on to their conquests. As Javani, it was one of my duties to study the records of my people, and let me assure you that barbarians have ridden through these lands before only to be chased out by our armies or by their own troubles back in the lands where they come from.”

He had thought the Habakar a civilized people. Marriage to Laissa had disabused him of this notion. Their noblewomen learned to read and write and were encouraged to study arts such as mathematics and philosophy and poetry that only men were suited to engage in, and any woman might conduct business in her own name, although it was true that she must be under a husband’s or father’s or brother’s protection.

“Furthermore,” she continued relentlessly, “whatever may become of these barbarians, you certainly won’t impress them with the paltry retinue that attends you now. If you wish for respect, then you must show that you deserve it. Your guards’ camp was a disgrace when I toured it five days ago, children running everywhere, sluttish women unsupervised and unkempt, and no priest to watch over them. I hope it is in better condition now because of my efforts, but do I receive thanks for that? Certainly not. You complain that I brought in a priest of my people to hold the hand of the Almighty God over those of us in this camp. You refuse me sufficient quarters, and then complain when I act to improve them. If you wish me to entertain jaran noblewomen, I certainly cannot do so in that cramped, colorless little tent that I had to share with my handmaiden. I have managed to enlarge the tent—”

She had, at that. Her tent, attached to his by a covered walkway so that she needn’t leave its seclusion, was twice the size of his own, now, and warrened with little rooms for sleeping and primping and administering and one with a cot for her handmaiden.

“—but I need more tapestries for the walls and more carpets. There is a certain kind of carpet from the south, near Salkh, which I should like four of, if they can be got. And some couches for visitors, and I refuse to serve anyone, even a barbarian woman, that swill you call tea. Furthermore—”

“Enough!”

“It is not enough! Furthermore—”

He cuffed her across the cheek. She gasped, and that quickly raised her right hand and slapped him. The blow didn’t hurt—she wasn’t strong enough for that—but it stung. “You dare strike me!”

Despite his anger, she didn’t shrink back from him. “The Almighty God teaches us that a woman must bow to her husband as the angels bow to God, but if he strikes her without justification, then she may strike back.”

“Without justification! A woman ought never to raise her voice to a man! Never! So has the Everlasting God proclaimed.”

“Then you are barbarians, as I thought. I encourage you to see how well you will prosper in Habakar lands without my assistance. I lived better than this before the jaran came, and had your guards not discovered my hiding place, I would have escaped and been treated among my own people as a woman of my station ought to be treated.

“Yet you were discovered, and if I judge rightly, you ought to have killed yourself rather than let yourself be dishonored.”

Her chin quivered. Silk trembled over the bridge of her nose, and her eyes flashed. “So speaks the man who dishonored me. That is for the Almighty God to forgive, if He judges that I did not do my duty toward Him. Not for an unbeliever such as yourself.”

“I hope you realize what forbearance I am showing in allowing you to bring a priest into my camp at all. It is only my respect for Bakhtiian’s proclamation that all priests must be tolerated.”

“It is only your respect for the power of Bakhtiian’s army. It was, in any case, part of the marriage contract that you signed.”

A contract witnessed by the Habakar priests and signed by him and by Laissa. As if a woman’s word was worth anything, although evidently it was to these people. Still, by birth as reckoned by Habakar standards she ranked far above him; in Vidiya, he could never have hoped for so advantageous a match: She was cousin to the reigning king and to the king’s nephew who, rumor said, was now raising an army in the southlands, and also to the princess whom Mitya expected to marry. The bitter truth was, she treated him like the commoner she considered him to be; although his family was an old and honorable house, they were not nobility. That he had been allowed to study in the palace school for boys was due to his uncle’s high standing as a Companion to the Great King, and the fact that his uncle had once saved the Great King’s father’s life in a battle. And imagine, if Mitya became king here, then the king’s wife and his own wife would be cousins!

“Well,” he said, quashing an urge to touch his cheek, where she had slapped him, “I forbid any expedition to look for a villa within the walls, but if you need rugs and carpets, and silks for your wardrobe, you have my permission to send your steward out to the market.” Her steward. She had a regular army of attendants, more than he had brought, certainly. Yet it was true that in some ways she made his life easier. She had taken over much of the day-to-day administering of the camp, which was by rights a servant’s job. Evidently she thought it a woman’s duty, and indeed, the Everlasting God proclaimed that women were the servants of men, so perhaps it was fitting.

The tent flap stirred and Lal appeared. “I beg your pardon, eminence. I thought to inquire if you had further orders for me before I left?”

Probably the boy had been listening outside. Jiroannes glanced at Laissa.

She bowed her head, but the show of humility did not fool him. “I abide by your command, husband.”

“Lal, the mistress will direct you. Also, I mean to attend the performance this afternoon. Wife, you will accompany me. Although I’m sure you feel reluctant to leave your seclusion, I think it best that the jaran noblewomen see you with me again, out in the camp, so that they can be assured that we are fixed as man and wife.”

“As you wish.” She retreated to the door and glanced back—not at him, but at the still, silent form that was Samae, kneeling motionlessly, head bent submissively, at the foot of the couch. Then she was gone, Lal scurrying after her, into the women’s quarters, a place that no man might follow Laissa into except her husband.

That sudden, lightning interest puzzled Jiroannes. Why should Laissa notice Samae? The girl now slept in the same tent as the two eunuchs, and now that he was married, Jiroannes had felt able to endure her touch again. He remained leery of bedding her so far, but he allowed her to massage him every day.