Orion Shall Rise (16 page)

Grimness responded. ‘What has he told you about the incident?’

‘Something I can’t really believe. That you had a gun and started shooting at him. That he had no choice but to crash you and bail out. He showed me the gun, but –’ Anguish smote. She gripped his free hand; her nails dug in. ‘It can’t be! Can it?’

Jovain shook his head. ‘An absolute lie,’ he declared flatly. ‘He did cause a collision, on purpose. It sheared a wing off my plane so I
couldn’t glide but fluttered down fast and couldn’t get free in time to have adequate parachuting space. Surely he meant for me to be killed. His propeller was broken, but he managed to keep altitude before he jumped. Afterward, while we were still alone, he showed me that rifle and threatened to accuse me of having brought it and used it, if I didn’t break off relations with you and stop taking an active role in Domain politics.’

Sickened, she leaned against him. He positioned his crutch in a manner that let both his arms embrace her. His lips played across her hair. Through the soft cloth, her ear and cheek felt his heartbeat.

‘The rifle was his,’ Jovain said. ‘I imagine he had it in reserve. In case I wasn’t killed, I could be blackmailed.’

‘No. Fight back. Demand a Clan court.’

He chuckled sadly. ‘My word against his. In fact, I can’t prove to you that I am not the liar, the frustrated murderer.’

‘He talked about fingerprints. Make him show them. And bullet holes in the fabric.’

‘They’ll be there, if they aren’t already. As for fingerprints, yes, I did handle the weapon, in my pain and amazement, when he thrust it at me. He snatched it back at once. His must be on it too. Not that any prints won’t likeliest be smudged beyond identification.’ Jovain sighed. His clasp upon her tightened. ‘No, what purpose could I serve by pulling the whole sordid mess forth? Nothing could be proved. There would only be scandal, and you, Faylis, would suffer the worst, though you are innocent of any wrongdoing. I can’t have that. Retirement to my beloved mountains is not a terrible fate.’

She broke free, stepped back, clenched her fists, and cried into his face: ‘But why
would
he? He’s selfish and vainglorious and – and – but I never imagined he was a monster!’

‘Oh, he probably isn’t.’ Jovain shrugged. ‘Call it a base impulse that we can hope he will live to regret. He saw me as dangerous – a high-ranking advocate of the Gaeanity he hates, who has connections in the Espayn he distrusts. Mainly, though, I think the driving force in him was jealousy. He fears losing you, and knows you and I have been close friends in spirit, however rarely we meet in person. He saw a chance to get rid of me, and he tumbled.’ Pause. ‘Yes, let us give him his due. He could have finished me off as I lay helpless – smashed my skull with the rifle butt, then hidden the rifle. Nobody would have suspected. He contented himself with
blackmail. It’s possible he never intended my death at all.’

She shuddered. ‘Tell me that again,’ she begged. ‘Tell me, over and over. I have to believe it. That Iern simply went a little crazy for a while.’

‘Because you must live with him?’ Jovain murmured. ‘Must you? For that matter, he has no right to choose your associates.’

‘But – but he could make such trouble for you –’ Faylis gulped. ‘As for why I don’t leave him, I’ve told you. My family is rural, old-fashioned. If I did go, it would hurt my father twice over, because my father-in-law will likely be the next Captain, and Dad always says there’s too much self-doubt in the Domain already; the Captain’s household must stay pure.’

She paced to a table where she let her fingers explore a cut-crystal bowl, something old, beautiful, enduring. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘Iern hasn’t mistreated me. By his lights, he’s reasonably kind and generous. We got married because of an infatuation, yes, and it hasn’t worked well but he does keep trying – not just the material things he gives me, but when he’s home he tries to be affectionate and patient – and even when his temper snaps and he storms out of the house, he’s soon back with a bouquet or an offer of a first-class restaurant dinner or whatever else he can think of. I admit I may have been doing less than my share in the effort.’

She swung around to confront Jovain. ‘But he’s shallow!’ broke from her. ‘And now this. I thought he was at least honest, but after what he’s done to you –’

The man crutched across the floor to her. At the hemline of his robe, she saw that his injured leg was not in a cast but splinted and swaddled. The fracture must be slight; it ought to heal without complications and meanwhile not handicap him too badly.

‘Darling,’ he said, ‘don’t go in fear of your life or anything like that. I’ve explained how this seems to have been an aberration. I can’t actually blame him very much. You are so lovely.’

You are so noble,
she wanted to say.

He reached her. Again they stood close. Decision came. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I am going to stay in touch with you regardless. If you want me to.’

‘What else could I want?’

‘I need your, your guidance.… Let me write to you as I’ve done before. When you write back – I’ll
give
you an address where I can pick up your letters, your dear letters.’

‘I hate to think of you being clandestine,’ he said slowly. ‘You are too good for that.’

‘But I have to. For a while, till we’ve found how to change things around.’

‘Which we will!’ He took her to him and kissed her. She kissed him. ‘We will, beloved.’

– ‘We have a week. … You aren’t completely crippled?’

‘Oh, no, Faylis, oh, no.’

‘I’ve never before – Be gentle, darling.’

He was.

Having attained a measure of Insight, Vanna Uangovna Kim possessed a serenity about her life which was more than contentment or even happiness. Those all sprang from the certainty that she was One with Gaea.

It was not that she was invulnerable. Pain and sorrow could strike her yet. They sometimes did, when she must witness the trouble of others. Reading history, she rejoiced that Krasnaya had long been at peace, in well-being, and knew that she did so on her own account as well as on her country’s, because she was spared having anguish around her.

Just the same, Gaea being what She was, there were rewards in misfortune, if only those inner rewards that come from helping somebody else. Vanna strove never to be smug, but honesty – the fundamental honesty required by her vocation – forced her to confront such a sense of worth and growth.
Well,
she told herself,
a muscle feels good when it is used, does it not?

This was as she turned from the deathbed of an old man. She left him asleep and knew he would not awaken. Her words, her guidance through the mantras to the mediation, her final blessing had brought him ease; his body now believed what his mind already understood, that the time had come to let go. After his eyes closed, she impulsively brushed her lips across his, and saw him smile. He was still smiling a little when she departed.

His family waited outside. As she closed the bedroom door, they rose and bowed low. ‘He
is
at rest,’ she told them. I think it will last until the end, which will surely come soon.’

They bowed again. ‘Reverend lady,’ said his gray-haired eldest son, ‘we have no words fit for thanks to you. None other could have done what you did.’

Vanna raised a hand. ‘Oh, you are overwrought,’ she protested.

‘I only talked with him. Be sure to have your physician come and see if any further care is needed.’

The son tugged his wispy beard, as if he must have something to clutch. Tears shimmered at the edges of his eyefolds. ‘No, I beg to remind you, it was you he asked for, not a doctor or a priest but you. Else we would never have dared rouse a proróchina in the night.’

‘I would have been grieved if you had not. Your father served the Library faithfully for many years before his retirement. That the Library, in my small person, could requite him a little, that is an honor for which I thank you and your house, Tsai Ilyich.’

Silence fell. Dawnlight slipped through a windowpane to glow on porcelain displayed in a cabinet. A bookcase stood heavy with volumes and shadows. Otherwise the room was humble. These folk were Soldati, but not of high rank or especial wealth; there were slugai who lived better. Straw mats covered a clay floor. A bench and a couple of chairs stood about a table where the dwellers ate. Warmth and odors of cooking wafted from behind a screen in front of a kitchen alcove.

The eldest wife spoke shyly. ‘Would the Librarian care to breakfast with us?’

Vanna considered. She wasn’t hungry. At most, she wanted her usual porridge and tea, followed by a bath and fresh clothes, at home. They would feed her too much here, while making awkward conversation just when she desired solitude.

But it would mean a great deal to them. ‘You are kind,’ she said.

– Afterward she did not go straight to her own place. She left the cottage as if she meant to, lest she raise a distressing question in the hearts there, then doubled behind a windbreak row of poplars. This location being on the outskirts of Dulua, the maneuver put her on a road pointed west through meadowland, away from town and lake. She would walk for an hour or two before returning to make herself presentable. No matter that she would be late for work. Nobody would ask why, nor doubt that she had a good reason.
And I am not quite indispensable anyway,
she thought dryly. She would, though, be a bad influence, however subtle, if she had not first come to terms with that which had happened.

The sun caressed her, turned grass and leaves wonderfully green, grazing cattle wonderfully red, struck brilliances from dewdrops, called forth scents of earth and blossoms. Quietness lay under heaven, making her doubly aware of her footfalls and thence of her
flesh in motion, alive, apulse, One with the entire living planet.

And dear old Ilya Danivich Li was too – still was, always would be. The Life Force was taking back his worn-out self, but his existence had given its minute urge to the onward streaming; thus he would forever be a part of reality, also after those who loved him had likewise surrendered their separateness. It was enough, overwhelming enough.

Vanna Uangovna took a while to realize this, not as words but as something more direct than the breath she drew. When she had won to knowledge, a task in which previous victories over loss aided her, grief departed like the morning’s dew and chill. Peace welled up, and ineffable joy. She went: eagerly back to her duties.

The irony seemed acute that it was later in the same day that the foreign soldiers arrived.

Events did not release her until evening. Home alone, she could not at once shake herself free of them. Instead, she forgot about making supper while she sounded her books and memories, in search of an understanding that might bring calm, if not acceptance.

Dusk deepened to night. She lit no lamp but sat motionless among the glooms that were her few furnishings. Light from sky and street trickled through windows she had left open to the breeze. She kept her eyes focused on the ghost-vision of a flower arrangement beneath a calligraphic scroll; it was her chosen mandala.

She had taken the news composedly, and proceeded composedly to organize the search which the bearer of evil tidings demanded. Underneath, a voice screamed that it was futile. But then what might be helpful? Before she could think, she must overcome horror. The end of a long life was natural, yes, right; this other thing that was going on was neither.

Gaea, Gaea All-Mother. … We cannot appeal, out of our
agony that we bring upon You
Time is both entropy and
illusion. That which we name the past is real and unreal equally with that which we name the present or the future. Let me marshal the chronicled centuries as well as the hours of this afternoon. Thereby I may perhaps once again overcome the feeling, which destroys courage, that my troubles and I are in any way unique.

Dulua was a bare forty kilometers north of the nearest cairn marking the border. Thus, in the course of history, the Krasnayan town had often been penetrated by Yuanese troops, when war
broke out. Wars had been common between the two nations, almost as common as those which Yuan, Chukri, Bolshareka, and Ulun fought in the West against the Norrmen and the Free Mericans.

Here there were no such aliens. All Mericans had long since been domesticated (if you didn’t count hillmen well to the east, and the people beyond them as far as the Sunrise Ocean, wretches whose territories had never been worth conquering). It might seem that the Soldati had no reason to contend with each other. Indeed, it might seem curious how they remained divided among five sovereignties. In the view and the languages of the aborigines, were they not ‘Mong’ together?

Vanna knew matters were not so simple. It was her business to know things, as well as to help folk into the communion of Gaea. The society of the Soldati was founded on war, or at any rate on the warrior in his regiment. It had been from the beginning, of necessity, when the ancestors fought their way out of desolated Asian lands and across this continent. Moreover, the society was not really one. A Chukrian dweller in the cold forests or on the colder tundras of the North was not, could not be very like an Ulunian rider on the prairies and sagebrush deserts of the South. On the plains in between, Bolsharekans and Krasnayans kept a distinct Rosiyan element in their cultures and bloodlines, whereas the Yuanese were closer kin to the Khalkan, Manchu, Korean, and Sinese parts of the original immigrations.

Still, their mutual clashes had usually been less ferocious than their strife with the natives. The Lodges of the Northwest Union, the city-states and tribes of the Mericans southward, the Dons of Meyco beyond the Rio Gran, were utterly foreign. When Soldati took land from them, or they took land that Soldati had possessed, it meant more than occupation; it meant the rapid transformation of the defeated, their way of life demolished, their grandchildren growing up strange to them.

On the other hand, whatever their differences, all Soldati had a common heritage. Their causes of dispute were limited, territory, dynasty, trade, pride. Their masters had no reason to ravage, when the wealth of a region they had invaded might well become theirs. Pillage was generally the work of a beaten army on its retreat – and even then, by ancient law and military discipline, a woman of the Soldati was almost always safe; only female slugai of the enemy’s
were to be raped. If a province changed hands, the lives of its inhabitants changed little. It seldom mattered much to the average soldier-herdsman that his regiment now – for example – owed service and tax to the Tien Dziang of Yuan rather than to the Supreme Gospodin of Krasnaya, or that its colonel took its affairs to the Imperial Court in Chai Ka-Go rather than to an encampment of the Sovyet. Many of its sedentary Merican slugai, among the farmers if not the town-dwelling workers, might never know that anything whatsoever had been altered.