The Novels of the Jaran (25 page)

“Tess?” She put out her hand and grasped substance, an arm, the silken sleeve of a shirt, ridged with embroidery.

“Fedya.” She opened her eyes.

“It will only be a short assembly.”

“Yes.” Her fingers slipped down his arm to grasp his hand. “Afterward.”

“Past the horses is a spring and past that a copse.” He squeezed her hand, so gentle a pressure that the feeling it left vanished as quickly as he did, gone after Bakhtiian.

She unsaddled Myshla, checked her hooves doubly carefully, groomed her and hobbled her and set her out with the other horses under Pavel’s care. Pavel nodded at her but he was busy plastering a cold compress of herbs on the foreleg of Bakhtiian’s black, the fine khuhaylan stallion that no one wanted to lose to lameness. The saddle was an easier burden than her thoughts as Tess walked through camp, past the assembly to the very edge of the tents, where Yuri had pitched hers.

As she knelt to dump the saddle on the ground, she saw four Chapalii walk out over a low rise into the darkness. Making a quick tour back through camp, she realized there were no Chapalii anywhere, unless the rest were all in their tents. Surely they could not intend to trek all the way back to the crater by night? A ship, blowing up…What if it had been a Chapalii ship? But that was impossible. Whatever impact had made that crater had occurred millennia ago. Had there been an alien empire before the Chapalii? A greater one than theirs? A hundred possibilities presented themselves. She circled around toward the spring, passing Nikita on sentry duty, and then she was alone again.

She found the Chapalii past the copse, hidden by a rise. They had gathered in a tight clump in the declivity made by the joining of two rises. On her hands and knees, pausing just behind the crest, she could make out all eleven figures, shadowed by the moon. A tiny blue-white light gleamed softly from within their ranks. The night lay still around her. No breeze stirred the air. Voices drifted up to her, phrases broken by pauses and replies.

“…identified two previous…unsure whether the duke…Keinaba…constant surveillance…insufficient evidence to believe…”

A communication. They were communicating—with whom? A Chapalii ship? But none stayed in orbit around Rhui. How far
could
they transmit? How far did this conspiracy reach? She pulled the little knife Garii had given her from her belt, and hunkered down even more to conceal herself from them as she stared at it. White lights speckled the hilt. She hadn’t a clue how to operate it, and either Garii had purposefully left her ignorant or he had simply not thought he needed to tell her. Tess stuck it back in her belt and lifted herself up carefully to watch again. The scene had not changed.

Wind moved the grass above them. Startled, Tess looked in that direction. In the instant before she really saw, she realized that a man was creeping down on them, was halfway down the hill opposite. Light-haired? Had Nikita followed her? But this man was stocky.
My God!
She stood up. Fedya must have come after her.

At that same moment one of the Chapalii said something, a slight cry. As if in sudden panic, another of the aliens whirled and crouched. Light streaked out soundlessly toward the man on the hill. He seemed to leap backward, half-rising. The thin line of light cut out through the night again, and the man fell, tumbling down the slope to land at the feet of the aliens. Tess cried out and ran down to him.

Ishii’s voice. “Do not shoot her, you imbeciles.”

She stopped short, facing four knives. Red beads of light shone sharply at their hilts. Armed. Lethal.

“Let me go to him.” Her voice broke on the edge of a sob.

“Let her go,” said Ishii. A path formed for her.

She stumbled past them, collapsing on her knees beside the body. The second shot had opened up his abdomen, a cleaner cut than those endured by Doroskayev’s men, half cauterized by heat. Blood seeped onto the grass. “Oh, God, Fedya,” she cried, reaching out to touch his shoulder.

Her touch jostled his head, and it rolled, back, staring at her, one eye strangely shut. One eye scarred shut. It was not Fedya at all, but Doroskayev. She jerked her hands back. The Chapalii clustered around her.

Ishii stood above her, seeming almost to touch the sky. “How fortunate that it is not one of Bakhtiian’s men. For a moment I feared that my man’s rashness would be irreparable, but now I see he may have done Bakhtiian a service.” Tess stood up slowly, still shaking. “Excuse my impertinence in speaking without your leave, Lady Terese, but I saw that this situation needed a male’s firmness. Please allow me to assure you again that we have never wished to do you any harm. You have only to say the word, and the suspicions that have grown between us shall be laid to rest.” He clasped his hands in that arrangement known as Lord’s Supplication.

Tess stared at him. She shook. She did not dare look down at the body. She had not the slightest idea what to do with her hands. Ishii could have let his men kill her, could have buried her, and who would have known? Standing alone among them, their only witness the moon and the stars, she could not imagine any human set against her in such a delicate dance showing such forbearance. She outranked him; she was heir to a Chapalii dukedom; she was sacrosanct. Ishii gazed back at her. The moon washed his face so pale it seemed almost translucent. Like the plains beyond, the Chapalii mind had many aspects that seemed unchanging to an alien. Lost in that careful game of diplomacy and treachery that Charles and the Chapalii played with each other; lost on these uncharted plains of Rhui; the two circumstances of her life seemed very similar right now.

“Truce,” she said.

“You honor us, Lady Terese.” He bowed, and the others echoed the bow as befitted their stations. Straightening, he turned to his men. “Cut away the sod carefully. We must inter him so that there is no trace. Perhaps, Lady Terese, you will indulge us by identifying this man. He was, I think, one of Bakhtiian’s enemies?”

“Yes.”

Emboldened by her passivity, Ishii went on. “Perhaps you will permit me to allow Hon Garii to escort you back to camp? You need not stay for the interment. I understand very well that females have heightened sensibilities.”

They moved away from her, preparing a grave. Trapped beneath the earth. Had Doroskayev deserved such a fate? She walked past them, stumbling slightly in the darkness. Garii followed her, unasked. At the base of the hill, she stopped. He stopped behind her. Without turning around she put her hand on her knife.

“How do I use this?” she whispered.

He did not reply immediately. When she tilted her hand to see him, she saw that he had glanced back to where dark figures worked just beyond the crest of the rise.

“If I may be permitted to speak, I have attuned it to human use, Lady Terese,” he said at last. “The heat of your thumb, pressed over the third and second lights, causes the beam to activate. Forgive me. A thousand thousand pardons be granted me that I did not realize you needed instruction in this gift.”

“You are pardoned,” she said automatically.

“I am yours, Tai-endi,” he said, the formal response, and he bowed, as liegeman to his liege.

“Go,” she said hastily, abruptly afraid that she had acknowledged something far deeper than she realized. “Ishii will be watching.”

“As you command.” He retreated back up the hill.

I am yours. Lord, Tess, you’ve gotten yourself into it now.
The wording had been precise and formal: the bond of servant to master, not any slight thing bound by a wage or a common goal, but true fealty. Surely Garii was already bonded to Ishii’s family, and such bonds lasted until death, and beyond death into the next generations.

Light flashed, a brief, searing pulse, and she started and hurried away toward the copse and the spring. Bodies on grass. They should leave him to rot. She would have been left out there, months ago, walking on the plains. A body could lie a hundred years in such space—

By the spring, someone waited for her, sitting on a low rock. She broke into a jog, remembering how she thought they had killed him.

“Fedya,” she said. Stopped. It was Bakhtiian. A blanket and his cloak lay, folded neatly, on the rock beside him.

“Did you catch a glimpse of our mysterious escort?” he said with a slight smile, but his tone was serious and his eyes met hers. One of his hands rested casually on his blanket. “But if he eluded Josef, he could elude anyone.”

For a long moment she could not speak. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I just had to be alone. I’m modest.”

“All good women are.”

“And good men?”

“Even more so,” he answered, not a trace of humor in his voice. There was a pause. “We’re extending our sentry ring tonight,” he said at last. “If you feel crowded in your tent, it would be safe, tonight, for you to sleep outside of camp.”

“I know.”

Blanket and cloak tucked under one arm, he stood up so that they faced one another on a level. “I understand that you have sustained a shock.”

“Oh, hell,” said Tess under her breath, putting one hand to her face to stop the sudden flow of tears. Bakhtiian took one step toward her. Footsteps rustled in the grass.

“Tess?” He came up beside her, bedroll in one hand, cloak slung over his shoulders. “Ilya!” Now he was startled.

There was a very long silence.

“Excuse me,” said Bakhtiian abruptly, and he left.

“Tess.” Fedya reached up and gently drew her hand down from her face. “In the morning, it will not seem so terrible.”

And in the morning, it did not.

In the morning, Niko rode out with her and Bakhtiian. They circled back but found nothing, from which both men concluded that the trailing scout had veered off. Around noon, coming back to the copse and spring they had left that morning, they spotted the jahar away to their left where, Tess thought, they surely should not be. The range of hills dwindled away in front to the familiar flatness of plain. The three of them dismounted and crouched on the height, the horses downslope behind them.

Tess saw their jahar out on the plain. But the riders still in the hills—another jahar. Closing quickly, too quickly, with their position.

“Niko,” said Bakhtiian crisply. “Get our jahar to cover. I’ll delay them. We’re not ready for a battle, not yet.” But Niko did not answer, was already on his horse and riding.

“How long until they reach the spring?” Tess asked.

“Not long enough, although they may stop to water the horses. That can’t be Doroskayev. They can’t know we’re so close, or they’d not be pacing themselves…Why are you still here?” He stared at her as if he had just seen her. “Follow Niko.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Decoy them back the way they’ve come.”

“But once they see you, they’ll know your jahar is near. How many will bother to follow a lone man?”

“If that man is Ilyakoria Bakhtiian, quite a few.”

She glanced to where his remount stood, a stocky tarpan. “They’ll catch you.”

“I’ll ride Myshla. They won’t catch us. Now, woman. Go.”

Tess jumped up and ran back to the horses, grabbed the tarpan’s reins, and mounted Myshla, kicking the mare even before her seat was stable.

“Damn it,” Bakhtiian yelled, rising. “Get back here!”

“I suggest you get down in that copse and hide. And hurry.”

He took two stiff steps toward her. “Damn you, Soerensen. This doesn’t concern you. I
said
—”

“You’re wrong. I need to get to Jeds, urgently. If you stay there, they’ll run you down.” She reined Myshla farther away. “You’d better go. We haven’t got much time. Trust me.”

She turned Myshla and cantered down the slope to the copse, the remounts trailing behind.
How to throw them off the scent, how?
She tethered the two horses securely to a tree and pulled off the distinctive jahar saddles, obscuring them with the saddlebags. She ripped open her saddlebags, cursing under her breath; everything was jaran, everything. Why hadn’t she even brought a change of clothing from the ship?

“Oh, God, Tess, you’re in for it now.” What was it she had once said about maenads and madness? Sometimes you had to choose all or nothing. And sometimes your weakness became your strength. All at once she knew what to do.

She strewed all her belongings about, piling them into disarray so that their provenance might be concealed. She took her blanket and ran back into the nearest screen of trees and awkwardly—for who knew where Bakhtiian was now—took off her tunic and trousers and wrapped herself in her cloak. It was difficult enough to go out there clad in her underclothes, underneath the cloak, but she had to trust what she knew of jaran culture. The white blouse Nadezhda Martov had given her was generic enough, seen from a distance, so she drenched it in the spring and dampened her Earth-made tunic and trousers and retreated to the edge of the trees, hanging the clothing over bushes to dry. She unlaced her boots and left them by the clothes, but not before stuffing her bracelets inside them; hid the saber and knife under the saddles, but kept the Chapalii knife with her, and finally rolled out her bedroll at the edge of the screen of trees and sat down on it. Nervously she fingered her necklace, the pewter ankh from Sojourner.

The branches of one lopsided tree scraped incessantly against the trunk of another. On the other side of the water hole, the low rock Bakhtiian had sat on last night lay naked and dark in the midday sun. There was no sign of him. She prayed that he had taken refuge deep in the farthest screen of trees. She touched the hilt of the knife and withdrew her hand. Her palms were slick with sweat.

Then came the sound of hooves, pounding along the earth.

There were at least forty of them, scarlet shirts with low collars and banded cuffs, black trousers cut fuller than those of Bakhtiian’s men but clearly jaran. They pulled up, undeniably amazed. She leapt to her feet with a cry of surprise, managing to almost let her cloak fall without actually revealing anything.

By the looks on their faces when the cloak slipped, she knew she would succeed.

Chapter Twelve