The Novels of the Jaran (302 page)

A servant brought a chair. He sat down beside her. The women eyed him from behind fans; they whispered to each other, and pointed.

“You are well?” Vasha asked.

“I am well.” Rusudani got the strangest look on her face. She glanced toward her attendants and, abruptly, ordered them to leave. When they had gone, she turned back to Vasha. Even though they were now essentially alone, with only his interpreter and the one jaran soldier allowed him, with her beardless guards and the Mircassian ladies out in the garden where they could see but not overhear, Rusudani still looked carefully around before speaking.

“He does not respect the Holy Church. They say he has not attended service in the chapel since his favorite son died. They say he cursed God for taking all his children from him, and that God punished him for his impiety by striking him down. That is why he can only move half of his face. But he has not repented from his blasphemy. What are we to do, Prince Vassily?”

Vasha could not reply for a long while. Rusudani was confiding in him! “Does it not say in
The Recitation
, that ‘he who dines at Wisdom’s table and drinks of her wine, will be brought to understanding through the excellence of her food’? You must strive by your own example to bring King Barsauma back to your church.”

“You speak wisely, Prince Vassily, but you yourself have not chosen to sit at God’s table, though you were betrothed by His laws and intend to be married by them.”

She waited. Vasha was for one intense instant tempted by the perfect blue of her eyes and the delicate blush on her cheeks to throw caution to the winds and tell her that he would take part in the ritual cleansing that initiated a man or woman in to the Hristanic Church.

He bowed his head instead, briefly. “I respect your God and your Church, Princess Rusudani, but I must remain faithful to my own gods.”

She did not reply at once. The sun crept in toward them from the garden, and the fountain splashed quietly.

“You have been gracious toward me,” she said finally, so faintly that it was almost lost within the fountain’s ripple and a breath of wind that sighed through the garden. Then she stood up and walked out into the garden. The interview was over.

By posting lookouts at all the windows in his suite of rooms, Vasha could keep an eye on most of Rusudani’s forays outside of the women’s quarters. In this way he managed to attend her on most of them, seeing where the chronicle was kept and where the steward had his offices, meeting the council of ministers and sitting beside her when, on their fifth day at the palace, she held an audience for the courtiers and was, perforce, compelled to acknowledge him to them all. Each night after supper he read with her, and after that he would go to the room where the great chronicle was kept, light candles, and pore through it, sounding out the words laboriously, turning again and again to his interpreter, who could speak but not read Mircassian, and together they puzzled out the heavy script and the history of Mircassia as written by its scribes.

He did not see King Barsauma nor, as far as he knew, did Rusudani. Old men dressed in elaborate court robes watched them, that was all.

On the sixth night he sat alone in the Hall of the Chronicle with the Interpreter and his favorite guard, a young Riasonovsky rider named Matfey who was, to Vasha’s amusement, a nephew of the Riasonovsky captain who had escorted Vasha to Sarai after his humiliating dismissal from Sakhalin’s army.

“What’s that?” asked Matfey suddenly.

Vasha stood up, hearing an odd rustling and thump from one dark corner of the room. A lantern’s glow traced out shadows, throwing them into long relief, and King Barsauma came around a screen. Leaning heavily on his cane, he shuffled forward until he got to within five steps of Vasha. He stopped there. For all that he stooped now, and dragged his left leg, Vasha could see that he had once been a tall, robust man, broad across the chest, shrunken now more by his infirmity than by age. A servant placed a chair carefully behind him and helped him to sit. Metal gleamed in the shadows: Barsauma’s guards.

“I could have you killed,” said Barsauma. “And no doubt would save myself some trouble by doing so.”

Vasha faced him without flinching. “I have my own guards posted outside, at the doors, of course.”

“Huh. Why do you come in here each night and stare at the chronicles? I would stop you looking at the tax rolls if I could without throwing all hell into the palace. I know you’re only looking to see what you can plunder, having this
peshtiqi
interpreter count it up for you. How did you get into the palace in the first place? How did you capture my granddaughter? What do you want, Prince Vassily? I can pay you off, a hundred
filistri
of gold, if you will release my granddaughter from the betrothal.”

“She’s worth much more than one hundred
filistri
of gold your highness.”

“Two hundred, then. Bandit. I hear that one of your little pages got sick yesterday. I hope it wasn’t the food.”

“I will be certain in future to eat only from my betrothed’s plate. It is an old custom among the jaran for a husband and wife to eat from the same platter.”

“Three hundred
filistri.
”

“My children by Rusudani on the throne of Mircassia, and that is the only offer I will accept.”

Barsauma thumped his cane several times, hard, on the floor. The noise resounded in the chamber, unmuted by tapestries. “Five hundred. I want no damned barbarian seated on my throne.”

“I will not sit in your throne, your highness, as long as you are alive.” Barsauma snorted, and Vasha, seeing that he had perhaps amused the old man, went on. “Your greatgrandchildren may sit on a greater throne even than your own.”

“Barbarians can’t hold together an empire.”

“What if they can? Already Bakhtiian has conquered a greater empire than any I have read of.”

“So you can read. That is what Lord Tellarkus claimed, but I didn’t believe him.” He motioned curtly to his servants and they scooted his chair up to the lectern that held the thick chronicle. “Read to me. Something…here, this passage.”

Vasha sounded it out, and Barsauma grew impatient with the interpreter’s slowness and began correcting Vasha’s pronunciation and then, evidently, the interpreter’s translation.

“Pah. A useless man. You may keep him, but I’ll get you a better.”

With that, he got up and shuffled out of the hall, his servants carrying the chair behind him.

In the morning, Vasha went to the women’s quarters and asked to see Rusudani. He had to wait a long while, but finally he was allowed in, to the same arcade bordering the garden, the only place she ever received him.

“You are well?” he asked.

“I am well.”

“I saw your grandfather last night. He tried to buy me off.”

She looked startled. “Buy you off?”

“He thinks that because I’m a
barbarian
that I can only be a bandit, and that I’d be as happy to have the gold as you.”

“You did not accept the gold.”

“Of course not.”

She thought for a while, sipping at a cup of tea, then signed to an attendant to bring Vasha tea as well, poured from a new pot. He did not touch it. If she noticed, she said nothing. “What
do
you want, Prince Vassily?” she asked finally.

The question took him unawares. What did he want? “I…I want to be like my father.”

“You look a little like him,” she said, as if to say,
but are otherwise utterly unlike.
“What about Mircassia?”

“I wanted you before I wanted Mircassia. I swear by my own gods that that is the truth. But it is nevertheless beside the point, Princess Rusudani. You must marry me, or another man.”

“You do not treat women so in the jaran.”

“All woman marry in the jaran as well.”

“How can you claim that the women of your people are not ruled by men?”

“What does marriage have to do with that? A woman can marry and still wield the power that is rightfully hers.”

She set down her cup on the table that separated them and touched, like a reflex, the tiny knife that hung on a gold chain around her neck. “I am to meet with my grandfather this afternoon. Lady Tellarkina says that my grandfather has a Mircassian lordling in mind to marry me, a grandson of an old retainer of his, after we have gotten rid of you. But I know nothing about this man. He will be loyal to his grandfather and to my grandfather, to the council of ministers who have agreed to his elevation. He will become their tool. He will not care about me.”

“What are you suggesting, Princess Rusudani?”

She met his gaze, clearly and cleanly, for the first time. “That we marry at once.”

“The baby—”

“It is Janos’s child, no matter what your barbaric customs say. As soon as it can travel, I will send it north to Lady Jadranka. I will not suffer Janos’s child to live by me. She wants it. She may have it. But you and I will marry now, Prince Vassily. I will not become their pawn. Better that I ally with the jaran, who will give me a power base outside of this court, where
I
am the outsider, the interloper, than be isolated within the net of their intrigues.”

“Once you no longer need me, will you betray me as you did Janos?”

“He forced me to marry him. I had no choice. Now I
do
have a choice, between you and this Lord Intavio. You have no power here except through me, and if I had you killed and the jaran invaded and conquered Mircassia, if they could, they would force me to marry another jaran prince, one I didn’t know.”

“I suppose,” said Vasha bitterly, “that I needn’t have asked that question, because you betrayed me once already, to Janos, when we were first captured.”

Now she looked away from him. A flush stained her cheeks. “I did that to protect Bakhtiian.”

Embarrassed, jealous, he almost took a drink of the tea just to do something with his hands. But he caught himself in time. She saw his hesitation.

“Here, child,” she called to an attendant, “bring a new pot, and pour into both our cups from it.” She emptied her cup onto the stone paving. She smoothed a hand down over the curve of her stomach. “Once I was content to devote my life to God, to prayer, but God did not mean me to follow such a destiny. I am ambitious, too, Prince Vassily.”

Deliberately she leaned forward, having to stand up to get her abdomen over the table, and kissed him chastely on each cheek. “We will go to meet my grandfather together.”

King Barsauma heard Rusudani out in silence. Vasha could not tell if he was disgusted, infuriated, or pleased. When she was finished, he coughed. A servant hurried forward and wiped a drop of spittle from the drooping side of his mouth.

“Are you in love with him, granddaughter?” he demanded.

“No.”

He grunted. “That is good. No fit marriage was ever founded on infatuation.” He turned his head to glare at Vasha. His stare reminded Vasha of a vulture’s, waiting until the dying animal stopped thrashing. “There are two provinces in eastern Filis that by right ought to belong to Mircassia.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, your highness.”

“Hmph. When your father conquers it, and has killed that heretic Basil and that puerile half sister of his, I want those provinces returned. That is the only offer I will accept.”

“Then we have a bargain, your highness. But I will keep the pages.”

“Ah, God,” muttered Barsauma, “what has it come to, that I lose my fine sons and have to endure seeing a convent-bred child and a barbarian take my place?” He thumped his cane on the floor many times, his face getting red. Vasha wondered if he was about to collapse with a fit of apoplexy.

Rusudani reached up from where she knelt before him and took his withered hand in hers. “It is God’s will, Grandfather. You will not be disappointed in us.”

He settled down slowly, and his servant gave him a sip of spirits and wiped the sweat off his face and straightened his collar. Still breathing heavily, the old man measured first his granddaughter and second, Vasha. “Pah,” he said scornfully: “A mere girl and a bandit.” But he did not thump his cane. “Well. Qiros, come here, come here. Bring more glasses, pour all round. From the same borne.”

By that gesture, Vasha saw that he now had an alliance with the Mircassian king.

Ten days later, Rusudani was invested as the heir to the throne of Mircassia, the ceremony taking place in the great cathedral of Kavad.

Here, in the south, bordering on the heretic realm of Prince Basil, the huge windows in the church were laced with colored glass, and the afternoon sun streamed in through the windows and illuminated the interior with dazzling light.

The presbyter read the service with great flourish, and King Barsauma managed with every steely bit of will that he possessed to crown her all by himself, with one weakened and one withered arm.

Then the queen of Mircassia, her pregnancy showing through the heavy robes of state, turned to look toward her future husband. Vasha, knees trembling beneath equally heavy robes, mounted the steps and halted beside her.

So it was that Vasha came to be married in a khaja church by a khaja ceremony, to a khaja queen. He became a prince, as his mother had long ago promised him, but in the khaja manner, by right of paternity, by right of marriage to a woman, the ways that khaja measured rank. Not by jaran custom.

But he could hear the whisper of his father’s words:
You’ll do, Vassily.

He was content.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Himalaya’s Beautiful Daughter

T
HE CARAVANSARY ECHOED WITH
the ghost voices of the company, long since gone back to Earth. Ilyana stretched out belly down on the bench in the courtyard, letting the sun warm her back through her silk shirt. She reveled in her solitude.

“
You have been idle for fifteen minutes
,” said her slate.
“Do you wish to close the Karnak program?”

She yawned. “Yeah, sure.” She crossed her arms over the slate and lay her head down on them. The back of her neck between the part in her braids got sun for the first time in an hour. She tucked her chin down, to expose more of her neck to the glorious warmth.