The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (103 page)

“I thought you believed in a god.”

“I believe in the divinity of the spirit, Yana, but not in the immortality of the individual soul.”

“I have to do it, David. I ride past the ashes of his pyre every day. I have to find out for myself.”

“I’ll come with you, then.”

“I’d like to go alone. You know that I’m aware of the dangers. I’m not at risk. Of course you’ll monitor me.”

Because there was no reasonable objection, he let her hook up to his nesh unit that evening.

She walks the web of light that Genji walks at will. But she turns away from the strand that leads into the hall of memory. She knows where her lost brother has fled.

The great desert is still today. The sun bakes the sand into a hard surface, as hard as stone and yet under her bare feet it cools, because all that is Valentin, all that made it Valentin’s, seeps away without his soul to animate it. Except that can’t be. He has made it, but it remains as he made it. She is the one draining it of life, of his life.

The sand grows hot under her feet so that she has to dance, hopping from one foot to the next. She waits for the storm. It comes, wailing down from the northeast, and she forges through it as through a funnel, pulling her in toward the crack of unwavering light that is the other land.

She feels the hot breath of a summer wind and throws herself through, and she is out on a golden plain, flying above it. She is an eagle. She soars above the plain, seeking, searching, and at last with her eagle’s sight she sees the tribe three days’ ride away.

Her shadow covers the ground below, like the wind moving over the grasses, and she flies over the line of march, jahar riders in front and archers behind, surrounding the carts that carry the children and the old people. There is her uncle, Anton, and there are men dressed in the surcoats of Bakhtiian’s guard. Her aunt Arina drives a cart, and Ilyana swoops down toward her, toward the thin boy who sits beside Arina on the cart.

It is Valentin.

She lands on the wagon, perching on the rim, and she shrieks, crying to him.

“A spirit,” says Nikolai Sibirin, who rides beside the wagon.

But Valentin is a Singer. He sees with a Singer’s eyes. “It is Ilyana,” he says to the others, and then to her, he speaks: “This is where I belong.”

She cries, an eagle’s call, and he smiles at her, a Valentin smile, full of impish humor and intelligence and a trace of the old sullenness, he is not free of that yet, but most of all, he looks content. He is where he belongs. As is she.

“I love you,” he adds, “but I think we are going where even you can’t follow.”

“I’ll find you,” she says in her eagle’s voice, “I love you, Valentin.” But the cart hits a bump and jounces her off and she throws herself into the air and currents draw her upward, up and farther up. Valentin raises a hand in farewell. She circles the tribe once, but she knows that he is right. She can’t follow them, not truly. They have their own destination.

The wind pulls her backward, and she gives up fighting it as the tribe recedes into the golden ocean of the plain, lost at last to her sight. The plain is swallowed up into a single grain of sand in the desert, and she walks backward, onto the web of light, and goes home.

David said nothing. He just smiled at her fondly, sadly.

Ilyana tucked away the nesh sponge, putting everything back in its place. She wiped one tear from her right eye and got to her feet and walked outside. The planet and the sun set together, their conjoined light a rich glow on the flower beds.

She took in a deep breath, letting the sharp sweetness of the flowers sink into her lungs. It was time to raise her own tent, to follow the path that opened out from her feet. It was time to begin her new life.

She rose before the dawn and came to him with flowers in offering, where he stood at the center of the universe, which is said by some to be the human heart. In the myths, Shiva dances at critical moments: in madness, on the battlefield, before his marriage. But in life, every moment can be said to be critical; all is revealed and concealed, created, maintained, and destroyed in the great dance of time.

Ilyana laid the flowers at his feet.

Shiva said nothing, standing with one foot on the back of the demon of forgetfulness, with the other foot poised in the air, his arms as graceful as any dancer’s, muscled, strong, and sensuous. Nor did he look at her, or acknowledge the gift or the gesture.
Fear not.
He was just a statue, after all.

But she felt a breath of wind, disturbing the cloistered silence of the hall, and though she did not move, that breath stirred the sash that she held in her hands.

T
HEY RODE INTO JEDS
on the wings of a bitterly cold and unseasonably late winter storm. The jaran soldiers rode with their felt coats unbelted so they wouldn’t get too warm and those brave Jedan natives who ventured outside to watch the army enter the city huddled in blankets and looked miserable.

A few flakes of snow drifted down. Tess stuck out her tongue and with some effort got some moisture on it, licking her lips.

“In the four years I was a student here,” said Ilya, “it snowed once, like this. I thought winter was finally beginning, but then of course I realized that there is no true winter in Jeds, just a lessening of the heat.”

Tess waited, but he had finished. In the five months since the army had rescued him from White Tower, he had slowly gotten control back of his speech, although at times he still faltered or ran on as if he had forgotten what he was saying. His men seemed undisturbed by his lapses: Singers often behaved this way; it was the result of speaking directly to the gods. But she always admired—perhaps in part had fallen in love with—the precision of his mind, the incredible scope of his memory, and if one conceived of his mind as a web, a network of interconnected threads, then that captivity had worked like a knife slashing with random cruelness through some of the threads and not others, leaving gaps and unraveling ends.

“Jeds has grown,” he said. “That second course of wall didn’t even exist, and this was the hostelry district. Now it’s too far within the city.”

It was a residential district now, thrown up against the inner wall. Ilya did not even flinch when they passed under the massive inner gate and clattered down the main thoroughfare through Jeds, the army streaming out in their wake.

Tess had left ten thousand men encamped a day’s ride away from the city, but she had brought an honor guard of five thousand riders and a thousand archers with her, to remind the Jedan nobility who ruled here. Here, in the central city, the populace had braved the cold to see their prince and her barbarians. They shouted and pointed and cheered, and a few bold girls—probably prostitutes—threw flowers at the jaran men. Women and children leaned out of third-story windows. Tess smelled a hint of smoke on the air and saw a low pall toward the southeast; most likely a fire had caught in one of the districts, as it often did in the cold weather. It was always so: That one person celebrated a triumph hard against the loss suffered by another somewhere nearby.

“Twenty-five years ago I lived as an exile, a poor student, in this city,” murmured Ilya. His gaze roved restlessly over the crowd, over the roof lines and the farther spire of West Cathedral and the flatter, more massive dome of East Church, the twin towers of Market Hall and the distant blunt spires that marked the old palace. Here, along the main thoroughfare, the old tenements had been torn down and new buildings, the mercantile Exchange, the clothiers guildhall, the law courts and the playhouse and the public library and pauper’s school, erected in their place. Tess surveyed these additions—most of them completed or almost finished—with satisfaction. She liked Sarai better, but Jeds had a certain civic splendor of its own.

She glanced toward Ilya, who was looking toward a clot of people standing on the steps of the library. “And now your armies control the lands that stretch from the plains all the way south to Jeds, as you meant them to all along.”

But he wasn’t listening to her. He pulled Kriye out of formation abruptly and headed for the library. Jedans scattered before his advance, but he brushed them aside without notice, so intent was he on his goal: A group of young men and a handful of women who, by their black caps and loose, open gowns, were university students. He reined in in front of them. A few scuttled away, but most stared up at him with the twinned expressions of curious children and trapped animals. He leaned down and said something. After some hesitation, one young man replied, and then there was a flurry of conversation.

Tess brought the parade to a halt and was at once sorry. Several dignitaries pressed themselves on the guards and she had to acknowledge them. After all, her rule had benefited the townspeople as much as the nobility, and she needed their enthusiastic support to counterbalance the grudging loyalty given her by the Santer heirs and the rest of the barons and lords. So it was well past midday by the time they got out through the city and into the park that fronted the new palace.

“What did you talk to the students about?” Tess asked, having got Ilya to herself in the procession once again. Vladimir and Nikita rode in front, and Mikhail and Gennady Berezin behind.

Ilya glanced at her, glanced back toward Jeds, last glanced north, where his empire lay. His eyes burned with that inner light she knew so well. “I have questions. They and the scholars at the university may have answers. Or they may not.” That was all he would say.

Old Baron Santer was now deceased. His children met Tess in the courtyard of the palace and, together with the jaran prince who had married the daughter, escorted Tess into the audience hall.

They exchanged formal greetings. Young Baron Santer looked over the jaran escort with a calculating gaze. He leaned to whisper something into the ear of Georgi Raevsky, his brother-in-law; Tess liked the intimacy they seemed to have developed. But the real power in this trio was clearly the woman. Isobel, Baroness Santer, had inherited her father’s cold ambition.

“We have heard no recent news of Prince Basil’s army, your highness, except that the snow still confines them in the Sagesian Pass,” Baroness Santer said now. More coolly still, she inclined her head toward Bakhtiian. “Your Majesty. We did not hear how you managed to cross the hills and get past the Filistian army.”

“Bakhtiian will do. We circled around Prince Basil’s army, my lady, and crossed by the southern pass.”

“But even in a mild winter that pass is closed by snow and ice!” Astounded, she stared at him. Several men nearby cocked their heads to listen.

“My army has yet to meet an obstacle it cannot surmount.” He nodded politely at her, walked up the dais, paced around the single throne, and waved to Vladimir. “Here,” he said. To Tess’s horror and amusement, Vladimir threw a big gold-embroidered pillow onto the floor beside the throne and Ilya promptly sat down on it. Tess almost laughed out loud at the consternation that broke out through the hall. The bastard was throwing his weight around, seeing what would come of it.

The Jedans did not know what to do: Continue to attend their prince, who stood in the middle of the hall, or pay obeisance to the man who was not just her husband but the general of the army that lay outside their gates.

“How is it fitting to address him?” whispered Baroness Santer, abandoning her pose of calm to show a less composed interior.

“Bakhtiian is itself a title.”

Tess looked around as she said it and discovered something odd, watching the five hundred or so dignitaries and noblemen and women gathered in the hall as they turned to stare at the man sitting on the floor next to the throne. He still wore his armor, boiled leather and polished strips of plate tied with ribbons, his helmet sitting on the floor to his left and his saber resting across his knees. Philosophy, celebrating her triumph, smiled benignly down on him from the huge mural painted along the inner wall of the hall.

Ilya scared them.

No, it was not Ilya who scared them. They didn’t know Ilya. It was Bakhtiian who made them nervous.

Tess caught Baroness Santer by the elbow and drew her forward to the dais. “Come, Isobel, we will be friends again, as we were before your father died.”

“When you took me to the north.”

“Your husband has not been a disappointment to you, I hope.”

Baroness Santer caught herself before she looked back over her shoulder toward her husband and her brother. “He is a good husband,” she said, clipping off the words as if she was afraid that she would reveal something incriminating, that she liked her jaran husband too little, or too much.

Tess mounted the steps and sat down in the prince’s throne without looking at Ilya. “Stand beside me, and as each person comes forward, please make sure that I remember the proper name.”

So she greeted her subjects, and Isobel, Baroness Santer, gave her names and, often, a tiny squib of information with which Tess could surprise or please each supplicant. Georgi Raevsky wandered up to Bakhtiian and crouched down beside him, and the two men launched into an intense discussion in khush, oblivious to the formalities going on before them. The rest of the guard stood here and there, examining the mural (Philosophy’s dress was, perhaps, a bit indecent by jaran standards), whispering to each other, going outside when it pleased them, stamping their feet and shaking out their armor. Katya was loudly explaining the different figures in the mural to Nikita and whomever else would listen; she was showing off, unaware that she had an audience of Jedans as well, intrigued by her armor and her weapons and her authoritative, bossy manner. In all, the jaran showed no propensity to be overawed by Jeds or its inhabitants. This was the army that had burned down Karkand, after all, and conquered at least ten cities equal to or greater than Jeds. This was really just another city. Filis had not yet capitulated. And there would be other lands.

Tess sent the presbyter of all Jeds on his way and glanced down at Ilya. He looked up at her, one hand on his saber hilt. He did not smile. He did not need to. He had Jeds. He had his empire. He had what he wanted.