The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (106 page)

Summer grinned down at him. “Only in height, my dear. But 169 centimeters is below average for a man. Remember, we’re used to our princes being Chapalii, and they’re all about two hundred centimeters.”

“What’s a centimeter?” asked Katya. “Oh, it’s a unit of measure.”

“Five feet six and a half inches,” offered Benjamin, who could convert any unit, monetary or otherwise, into any other instantaneously. “Three point eight cubits, depending on the arm.”

The lock opened and they dispersed into the gleaming passageways of the ship.

“Come with me,” said Anatoly to Katerina. She followed him to the lounge. “Sit.” He sat on the couch, she on the floor in the jaran style, watching him intently.

“You have been with me for two khaja months now. How do you like it here?”

“I love it here,” she said fiercely.

“I have a task for you. Yesterday I finally got word that my message found my sister Shura, and she is now at Jeds, waiting for word from me. I want you to go back to Rhui.”

Her expression fell instantly.

“Not to stay. Go back to the tribes. Bring me one hundred men and women, to be the nucleus of my new jahar. Recruit them wisely, carefully. Find the ones who are discontent, who question—not troublemakers, but the ones who are restless.”

“I know how to find them,” said Katya quietly.

“Don’t let the others know what you are doing. Shura will help you. She, too, will know. She is one of them, as you are. If any riders live who were in my jahar before I left, and they wish to join me, bring them.”

“If they have families?”

“It’s true it would be best to bring younger people, those who are willing to leave the tribe and make a new tribe here. But I will not turn away the riders who served with me then. They must make the choice themselves. You, Katerina, will be etsana.”

She made a face.

“No, it must be you. You came here first. You are a daughter of the Eldest Tribes.”

“Your sister Shura—”

“It is not fitting that a brother and sister act together as dyan and etsana of a tribe. But you and I are cousins, of a sort, and we will do very well together, I think. I need the jaran, Katya. Surely you can see that.”

She nodded, her clear-eyed gaze steady on him. “Yes. This khaja world is very strange.”

But she had adjusted remarkably well. She had not come off the ship in shock, as he had. She had not retreated into a false world, as Karolla Arkhanov had, dragging her children down with her. With that same kind of preparation, with her guidance, the hundred riders and archers she brought off Rhui would adjust as well as she did. In their turn, when it was time, when it was appropriate, they could form the escort that would bring more jaran off Rhui, those that wanted to come.

Because not all would want to come. Nor should they.

“What about my cousin, Bakhtiian?” she asked suddenly.

He bowed his head, as any man does before the authority of a great etsana. “You must obey your aunt Tess Soerensen in this. I cannot interfere with her judgment.”

“It’s true, you know,” said Katya in a whisper. “Before I left, I went to him, but he would not speak to me. I don’t understand it.”

Anatoly felt a pain in his heart. He made an image in his mind of the man he had admired so passionately when he was a boy, the proud dyan, leader of all the tribes, who had lifted the jaran to face their destiny. Who yet, in the end, could not face the greater truth he had inadvertently uncovered. He was, gods forgive Anatoly for even thinking it, like Karolla in that.

“He is a Singer,” said Anatoly at last, unwilling to pass judgment. “He is subject to the will of the gods in a way we are not.”

He went to his cabin and lay down on his bunk, palming the top screen on and flipping through the channels idly. There was a report on his upcoming appearance before Parliament, in less than two hours. An Infinity Jilt serial. An immersion mass in the Church of Three Faiths temple in Gabon, ready to trigger once the viewer hooked into the nesh. Freefall acrobatics. A historical epic called
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
, about the great cosmological discoveries at the end of the Machine Age. The usual gossip channel. A fencing match.

He flipped abruptly back to the gossip channel.

The bastards!

A crowd of mini-globes and nesh and flesh correspondents had mobbed Chancery Lane. A golden-haired woman walked down the New Court steps escorted by a husky woman with an authoritative bearing and by her father and Aunt Millie. The voice-over was blithering on about final dissolution papers and his name and something about the appearance before Parliament, but Anatoly could see only Diana. He strained to hear her through the globes that hovered around her. Only a Singer could look so composed, only Diana could manage to look so poised, so lovely….

“M. Brooke-Holt! M. Brooke-Holt! We understand that your husband dumped you now that he’s become so important.”

“No comment,” said the advocate, the husky woman, bringing up the rear while Aunt Millie and Diana’s father forced a path through the crowd toward a private carriage.

“Isn’t there a child involved?”

Anatoly could not see Diana’s face. The advocate looked bored. “No comment,” she repeated.

“Is it true that he’s cut himself loose and is going to establish a harem of exotic primitives for himself, in the Chapalii style?”

Diana stopped dead and turned to fix a glare of monumental disdain on the hapless questioner. “Oh! You people are so stupid!” She turned her back on the camera, used her elbows to good effect, and ducked into the carriage. It sealed shut behind her, leaving the advocate in charge as the crowd moved back to avoid the backwash as the car rose and flew away.

Anatoly voiced the sound down and just stared at the screen, at the gray stone of the courthouse, at the bleak London sky above. He felt, at this moment, shame more than pain. He was shamed that his wife had abandoned him. Such a thing never happened in the tribes. What if they were to hear of it? Gods, he hadn’t even told Katerina Orzhekov the truth, and she didn’t understand the language or the tools well enough yet to discover it on her own.

Gods, what would his grandmother say? She would have accepted the emperor’s benediction calmly, without surprise; it was, after all, simply what was due to the Sakhalin tribe. But she would be furious that Diana had left him—for a second time.

You should have married the daughter of Baron Santer, she would say. You look like a fool, Anatoly. It never behooves a Sakhalin to look like a fool, and especially not a man. A man must show himself courageous, trustworthy, loyal to his dyan, and responsible to his mother, his sisters, and his wife and children. But if he allows himself to be made a fool of, then no one will respect him.

Though she was dead, he could reproduce her voice, her tone, her words with perfect accuracy, because he knew her so well. He was thankful that she was dead, so that she might never have to know.

The cabin door slid open without warning and Portia rushed in, followed by Evdokia Arkhanov. The two girls screamed with laughter and threw themselves onto his stomach, knocking the breath out of him. Moshe stopped in the entrance and covered his mouth, stifling his own laughter. “Sorry,” he said. “I hope we didn’t disturb you.”

Anatoly reached up and palmed off the overhead screen. “No.” He hoisted the girls off him and sat up. “I wasn’t doing anything productive. Now, Portia, you must get dressed in your fine clothes. You, too, Evdi.”

The Bouleuterion was domed above and below by stars, or so it appeared to Anatoly. The spider’s web of Concord, the great space station still under construction, threw odd patterns on the heavens, like etchings cut through clouded glass. Walking on the transparent floor, with only stars beneath his feet, made him nervous, so as he entered the hall and made his way through the sunken aisle to the center he kept his gaze on the amphitheater surrounding him.

Every seat in the hall was filled. At the high railings above, people stood at least three deep, judging from the heads sticking above the crowd. It was a circular hall, and the platform in the center faced no one and everyone. Four sunken aisles pierced the banks of seats into four quarters. As Anatoly came out into the middle, he let Portia down and shoved her toward Katerina, who waited in the lowest rank of benches. Portia stuck her little finger in her mouth and walked over to Katya, glancing back at her father for reassurance. When the girl sat down, wedged between Katya and Evdi, who were themselves flanked by Branwen and the rest of her crew, Anatoly strode out to the center.

He stood there alone, surrounded by over ten thousand seated assembly members doubled by a ghostly contingent of nesh and amplified by a high ring of vid globes and a hundred soft bulbs that transferred every last detail into the nesh reconstruction.

The audience kept a respectful silence, waiting for him to speak, but he could almost taste their wariness. They did not trust him. Neither did they hate him. They waited, reserving judgment.

He knelt without looking down at the void of stars beneath his feet and set the tower, his token from the emperor, on the smooth floor.

“The board,” he said. “Enlarged ten times normal size.”

At first he could not tell that the black field had manifested, since it blended with the heavens below, but then the grid of lines burned into view and the midnight black slab of stone that marked the emperor’s throne. One by one the pieces flickered into view and solidified. The horseman had moved farther yet away from the throne, shadowed by the teardrop. The other eight pieces lay scattered across the board, marking no pattern he could discern. A murmur ran through the crowd, quieting only when he rose.

“This is the game played by the emperor and the princess,” he said to his audience, which no doubt ran into the billions.

He turned slowly, a full circle, surveying the ranks upon ranks of his khaja subjects, like the ranks of an army. There, he thought he recognized the pale outline of Charles Soerensen, attending in nesh, but he couldn’t be sure. There was no one who looked in the least like Diana, although perhaps she truly was here, guising in a different form. Perhaps she still cared enough about him to watch over him, now and again. But he pushed these thoughts of her aside; they were too distracting. He could not afford to be distracted.

Instead, he walked through the game, avoiding the other princes, keeping to the lines as much as he could, and made his way to his own piece.

“This is where we stand.” He halted above the horseman, which half melded with him. “Where we go from here is up to us.”

Here he paused, to let his words sink in, here in this hall and in every hall, every chamber, every street or corner where any woman or man had stopped to hear him, to measure him, to pass judgment. For that was, perhaps, the most important lesson he had learned from Bakhtiian: Let the whole of your people be your army, all of the tribes, and let that army follow you not just willingly but passionately, with their hearts.

He looked up and nodded, satisfied. He had their complete attention.

V
ASSILY KIREYEVSKY SURVEYED THE
battlefield from the hilltop. He turned to Yaroslav Sakhalin. The late summer sun shone down, bathing him in sweat under his armor.

“His banner has fallen. The Prince of Filis must be dead.”

“We will see,” said Yaroslav, never one to hasten to any conclusions.

But so it proved. Prince Basil’s body was dragged up the slope and displayed. A Filistian lord who had turned coat last winter, after Bakhtiian himself had ridden into Jeds and taken up the campaign personally, identified the body.

“What of the Mircassian boy?” Vasha asked, but no one knew, and when he rode down into the Filistian camp, he discovered that Basil’s half sister had murdered the child and killed herself rather than fall into the hands of the jaran. It saddened him, more for the child’s sake than hers.

He examined the corpse: The boy had black hair and the olive skin of southerners, and although Vasha had heard his age estimated at sixteen, the child looked younger. If he was truly an invalid, a simpleton, no sign of his infirmity showed in his corpse, except that he was small.

“What will you do now, Vassily?” Yaroslav Sakhalin asked when Vasha emerged from the tent.

“I will take the news to my father myself, before I return to Mircassia. King Barsauma is failing, but even if he dies while I’m gone, they don’t dare try to unseat me, not now that we have defeated Prince Basil.”

“What of your wife?”

Vasha had learned that when Yaroslav Sakhalin spoke, he usually sounded censorious, even if he did not mean to be. But the habit served him well, since it made it easy to distinguish between those of his men who doubted themselves and those who did not.

“Princess Rusudani and I have an understanding, Sakhalin. In any case, she is pregnant now—” He broke off and looked away, concealing a flush of pride. Rusudani was pregnant with
his
child.

The old general laughed softly. “All young men are full of themselves when their wives become pregnant for the first time. I am told I was insufferable.”

Vasha was paralyzed for a moment by the spectacle of Yaroslav Sakhalin joking with him. Then he collected himself.

“Surely it is no more than we deserve,” Vasha replied, watching Sakhalin carefully. When Sakhalin smiled, Vasha smiled in return, relieved that Sakhalin seemed amused by this weak sally. But it seemed safer to return to the matter at hand. “It is the council that concerns me. They are not content with either Princess Rusudani or myself, and in particular, with me. I have heard it said that I hold too great an influence over her, that there are too many barbarians at court. There is a young lord who was put forward as a prospective consort for the princess, but I have seen that he was posted to the war. Unfortunately, he didn’t manage to get himself killed.”

“I’ll be sending scouting parties south, to probe,” said Sakhalin. “I could use some auxiliaries.”

“Yes. That would do very well. I will attach his company to your army before I leave.”