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

  Anatoly was not in the habit of disagreeing with aunts and etsanas, and in any case, he had discovered over the years that Aunt Millie did not give advice often, or lightly. Nor was it wise to ignore her. He tried to sort out his feelings, but they were far too chaotic. He settled for the direct approach. “I’m very angry. I want to go.”

  She nodded, and he was relieved to see that this confession contented her. “Then that is what you must tell Diana.”

  They washed and cut broccoli in silence for a while and finally, driven by the quiet, he blurted out, “No one seems to understand. If I were still with the jaran, I would be a dyan, a commander, of my own army. These are the years that a soldier does his best fighting, and I’m wasting them away.”

  “So you’re frustrated. I understand that. But, Anatoly, you know that you’ve received treatments that will allow you to live far longer than you could have expected to on Rhui.”

  “My body has received these treatments, and my mind benefits from them, but my mind still lives on Rhui. That is, I mean—” He flushed, angry at himself for repeating the worst of Diana’s accusations against him, when that wasn’t what he had meant.

  “I know what you mean: Intellectually you understand that you’ll live longer, but in your own mind, emotionally, you still age each year the way you always expected you would. Or at least, is that what you mean?” She smiled.

  Relaxing, Anatoly smiled back. “Close enough. I can’t help but think that I ought to be doing something, but I’m not.”

  “That is up to you.”

  Diana sat at the other end of the long, long table at dinner, with Portia next to her, and Anatoly had no chance to get her alone until evening. He ran her to ground when she came downstairs and went out onto the front lawn after putting Portia to bed.

  “Diana,” he said softly, coming up behind her. He did not touch her.

  She shrugged without answering, without turning to face him.

  “I beg your pardon for the things I said. I was angry because I want to go with the Company.”

  Now she turned, looking startled. In any light, she was beautiful. Dusk softened her expression, and for an instant he could believe that she had forgiven him everything.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate you offering an apology and explaining yourself.”

  He flinched as if slapped, but he kept Aunt Millie uppermost in his mind and he forced himself to stay calm. “Diana. I had hoped we could—”

  “Kiss and make love and wake up in the morning as if nothing, no argument, had happened, like we always do? I’m tired of running that same cycle over and over and over, because we aren’t getting anywhere new.”

  She paused. It was so quiet that he felt as if he could hear the exhalation of the sky, the music of the stars, and the slow drag of the moon on the distant tides.

  A gleam of bitter humor surfaced in her face. “But I am willing to enter negotiations,” she added, “if it’s worth it to you, to build something we can live with.”

  “Of course it is worth it to me! How could you think otherwise? I left everything for you, Diana!”

  “How could I ever forget it?” she whispered, ducking her head down, as if to avoid a blow.

  “My heart,” he murmured, and caught her shoulders and pulled her into him. It was the only sure way he knew to show her that he loved her. For a moment she resisted. Then she muttered something uninterpretable under her breath and abruptly wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. They stood that way, under the stars, for a long time. No one disturbed them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sarai

  THE ORZHEKOV TRIBE CROSSED the great sea of grass in an untidy line, a thread pulled across a golden tapestry. Out on the plains, it was easy to love the passage from one pasture to the next for its own sake, to feel at one with the migration of the wind, to believe that the journey itself was endless, that no destination, once reached, was ever final.

  Tess urged Zhashi along the line. In the back of one wagon, Yuri slept soundly despite the constant movement, his head cushioned on an arm, his body swaying to the rhythm of the wagon’s ride. She lifted a hand to greet Niko as she passed him as well. He could no longer ride long distances and had to drive wagons now. But he smiled at her. The duty seemed not to bother him.

  “Dammit,” she said, coming up beside her husband in the vanguard, “it hurts me more to watch him get old than it does him to get old.”

  Ilya glanced at her, then went back to surveying the ebb and flow of grass along the low hills, rippled by the wind while the clouds sailed with majestic disinterest above. “So do we all grow old and die,” he said finally. “He has lived a long life, and has seen a child born to his granddaughter. No doubt, having lived lawfully and well, the gods will allow him to be born into his next life as a woman.”

  Tess laughed. “No doubt that will be his reward.”

  “You don’t think so?” Ilya asked, looking truly puzzled. It was at moments like this that Tess remembered how different they were. Abruptly distracted, he reined Kriye aside and headed out away from the tribe, motioning her to follow.

  Mystified, she did. They came to the crest of a rise and there, below, lay Sarai, distant enough that the line of trees along the river looked narrow and low. Ilya dismounted.

  “Here is the spot where you marked me, and I you,” he said. He looked not as much joyful as smugly satisfied.

  “How can you possibly tell?”

  Looking down on him, she saw how the sun lit his hair and shone, for an instant, on his face before the clouds muffled its light. “How can you not tell? You khaja have been crippled by your maps and your timepieces and your walls.”

  “Our maps have been very useful to you!”

  “That is true. But nevertheless, you are like the prisoners in the cave, your legs and necks shackled by your maps and your walls so that all you can see is the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave. You think they are the truth, but they are only a shadow of the truth, which lies—” He gestured to the sky and the plain and the distant spiral curl that was the growing city of Sarai. “—out here, under the gaze of the sun and the moon and the stars.”

  “Well!” Tess laughed again. “That is why you have so often been accused of loving khaja learning too much! I thought you didn’t like Plato.”

  “I don’t.” Ilya grinned and swung back up on Kriye, who sidestepped away and was in general feeling lively. “But I must use the weapons I am given or else lose all.” As soon as Ilya was on Kriye’s back, the stallion broke away and ran along the crest until Ilya finally reined him in and turned back. Zhashi snorted and lowered her head to graze, disgusted by this masculine idiocy.

  But Tess enjoyed watching it. Ilya and Kriye together made a beautiful picture. And they liked being admired. “Vain creatures,” she said to Zhashi, who found the subject too uninteresting to reply to.

  She inspected Sarai, which from this height and distance bore more resemblance to the ruins of a whorled seashell than to a city. She blinked her implant on. If she had been alone, she would have used voice triggers to bring up the program she wanted; instead, she had to sort backward through the entrance architecture by focusing her eyes on and blinking at each subfile she wanted, as if she was descending a long staircase. It took longer, but it was silent.

  They had laid out the pattern first, a great spiral at whose center rested an oval plaza, the heart of the city. Through her implant, the image overlaid on Sarai-as-she-was-now, Tess saw that pattern marked on the ground as she and David ben Unburn had envisioned it, a city blending both worlds, jaran and khaja. At last, she focused past the pattern and examined the actual city.

  On one side of this plaza spread the khaja city, on the other, the haphazard strings of jaran camps. Swathes of parkland cut through the khaja city. Following David’s plans, the surveyors had marked out areas where khaja settlers—mostly artisans and laborers and merchants brought in from conquered territories—could buil
d their own houses. Within those districts an untidy array of houses and hovels and villas rose in clumps, warrening together by clans or religions or some other designation Tess hadn’t yet figured out. These districts grew in fractured rings out from the innermost city, where the first of the public buildings now rose beside the plaza.

  “It looks like the marketplace is finished,” said Ilya.

  The image of the marketplace took form and commingled with the actual marketplace, a vast space of arches roofed with stone and wood open on the sides. Tess smiled to herself and a new image asserted itself, that of David’s third tier design, a fanciful combination of arches and fluttering cloth and elegant thin spires all bringing more loft and air to the market. But they could not build such a thing now. Not yet.

  She let her eyes roam, spiraling out and seeing the image of the city that was meant to be: a glorious shell open to the sky, with the broad oval paved in white stone and a great fountain at its center, with a forum and a second marketplace and a palace for the bureaucracy (since it was certainly not anything Ilya would agree to live in) and an audience hall and a granary and guild halls and a library (her addition) and a stadium and a theater modeled after the one at Ephesus, and at this point she and David had spent more time laughing over what Utopian absurdities they could think up than actually planning anything useful.

  “What do you see?” asked Ilya casually.

  Tess started, blinking down hard on the third tier construct and reining Zhashi—who had caught her sudden shift of mood—in with a touch of her knees. Her eyes caught an unfamiliar gleam of pale tile, and she gasped.

  “The bathhouse roof is on! It must be finished!”

  Her enthusiasm surprised a laugh out of Ilya. “Very well. Perhaps we’d better go down and investigate.”

  Tess slanted a sidewise glance at him, but mottling his face and form she saw instead David’s five-hundred-year projections for the growth and spread of the city, an ugly sprawl that reminded her bitterly of what the jaran had already lost, and what they had yet to lose. She blinked the implant off and, frowning now, followed Ilya down the slope.

  They rode into Sarai along a paved thoroughfare that began abruptly in the middle of grass and ran straight into the city. Fifty riders from Ilya’s jahar fell in around them and escorted them to the park on the jaran side of the oval in which the great tent of the Orzhekov tribe stood, the permanent symbol of Orzhekov authority. To the right, half-hidden by stands of young trees, sat the Sakhalin tent topped by a red pennant edged with gold, and to the left, farther back behind a young planted wilderness that would in time hide them from view, rose the tents of whichever of the other Elder Tribes were in residence at any given time. Right now, Tess counted three flags: the golden sword of Veselov, the blue horse of Raevsky, and, of course, the green tent striped with gold that marked the Grekov tribe.

  Tess dismounted and unsaddled Zhashi and rubbed her down while Ilya went to greet his cousin Kira and her daughter Galina, who had stayed in Sarai. Then, handing the mare over to a boy who would lead her out to pasture, Tess followed Ilya inside the great tent.

  It was vast, more like a great round hall than a nomad’s tent. It also boasted a slatted wooden floor and huge beams rising above, on which the felt roof rested and from which tapestries hung, decorating the long inner hall and closing off a series of smaller private rooms along the sides, although any one of those private chambers was the size of many an etsana’s tent.

  Ilya laughed, and she saw him at the opposite side, kneeling beside Galina’s firstborn, a chubby three-year-old.

  “Gods,” said Tess as she greeted her eldest adopted sister, Kira, “it’s hard to believe that little Galina is old enough to be having her second child.”

  “Even if she did have to marry that worthless Sakhalin prince?” asked Kira tartly.

  “Well, it isn’t my fault that Anatoly Sakhalin disappointed both his grandmother’s and my plans and Galina ended up with his uncle instead.”

  “Anatoly Sakhalin would have been a better match,” agreed Kira, perfectly willing to malign her son-in-law. “At least Andrei spends more time with the army than here. Hush, now. She cares for him, so that’s all that matters.”

  Galina waddled over and Tess embraced her. “You’re looking well, little one,” she said, and everyone laughed, since Galina was hugely pregnant. “What news?” she asked Kira, but they were interrupted by the arrival of the rest of the family from the wagons: Sonia and Stassia and the children, and Irena Orzhekov.

  For a while, bedlam raged. The gods had smiled kindly on the Orzhekov tribe. Not only had they granted one of their sons a vision that had led him to unite the tribes and lead the jaran to conquer their rightful subjects, the khaja, but they had also gifted Mother Orzhekov with five daughters (one adopted) and many healthy grandchildren, and particularly many fine girls to carry on the line. In fact, Tess reflected, sitting on a pillow with a still sleepy Yuri heaped in her lap, most of the Orzhekov line was here right now, which was why even with the muffling properties of the tapestries and the felt walls, their mingled voices rang with such an overpowering swell of noise.

  Irena’s eldest daughter Kira and her husband Sevyan had six children, of whom only one had died in infancy; Kira’s eldest son Mitya was now governing prince of Habakar, but her daughter Galina was here as were the other two girls and one boy. Stassia, the second daughter, and her husband Pavel had eight formidably robust children; two boys and one girl were out with the army, but of the other five girls, one was married and four still young. Anna, who had died over fourteen years ago, had left a boy and a girl; her husband, Gennady Berezin, was a long-standing member of Ilya’s jahar.

  Sonia’s elder children Katerina and Ivan were with Yaroslav Sakhalin. Little Kolia—well, no longer little now, since he was thirteen this year—was outside with Dania Tagansky helping with the horses while his baby sister Alyona, the daughter of Sonia and her second husband, Josef Raevsky, sat on her mother’s knee and wailed at some imagined slight. Tess’s adopted brother Aleksi was gone; he had ridden out two months ago to lead the expedition along the Golden Road. But his wife Svetlana Tagansky and their three children were here. Feodor Grekov had his younger daughter riding on his hip. Tess guessed that Nadine would be outside, already gleaning reports from whatever couriers had ridden in recently; as for Feodor and Nadine’s elder daughter, Lara, neither she nor Natalia nor Aleksi’s younger daughter Sofia were in evidence. No doubt trouble was brewing.

  “That is disturbing news indeed,” said Irena Orzhekov calmly to Kira. “Alyona, my heart, you must cease crying this instant.”

  Yuri reflexively stuck two fingers in his mouth and sucked on them intently, watching his three-year-old cousin decide whether it was worth continuing to cry. Aleksi’s wife Svetlana, with her youngest child in tow, swooped down and spirited Alyona off Sonia’s lap. Yuri settled a hand possessively around Tess’s elbow as Alyona’s indignant wails faded away when she was taken outside.

  “What is disturbing news?” asked Sonia, resettling herself more comfortably next to Tess. Stassia squatted next to them, and Kira threw a pillow down so that both she and her mother could sit.

  “Mother Sakhalin is failing. The healers agree that she is in her last days,” said Kira. She and Stassia resembled their mother, with lean faces and bright blue eyes and pale blonde hair washed even lighter with silver.

  Tess nodded gravely with the other women, but her eyes caught on Ilya where he stood by the entrance, conferring with Konstans Barshai. Konstans was ten years younger than Ilya, and yet they looked, where the sun filtered through and cast stripes of light along their figures, illuminating their dark hair, their beards, to be about the same age. Except it was Ilya and his cousin Kira who were born in the same year.

  “At least the succession is not only assured, but in safe hands,” said Irena. “Konstantina Sakhalin will be a worthy Mother Sakhalin. What concerns me, Kira, is this news of Arina Veselov.”

  ?
??Arina?” Tess’s attention snapped back to the council. “Is something wrong with Arina?”

  “She is pregnant,” said Kira. “As we suspected.”

  Tess gasped.

  “As she would not admit,” added Sonia. “But how could she have risked it? Not only her tribe’s elders and Varia Telyegin but Tess’s Dokhtor Hierakis all warned her that this time it would probably kill her.”

  “Well,” said Kira solemnly. “We shall soon find out. Varia Telyegin says she has had strong rushes all morning.”

  “Then she hid it for a long time,” said Tess, since they had only been out on the plains for four months, “or else she’s early again.”

  “Early or late,” said Irena, “if she dies, there is no woman in the direct Veselov line to become etsana. The tribe will never have Vera Veselov—”

  “I doubt she would give up being dyan in any case,” put in Tess, “a position for which she is far better suited.”

  Irena Orzhekov’s lips quirked slightly, while Sonia rolled her eyes and Stassia made a face. “Although it pains me to agree with you on this matter, I fear it is true,” said Irena. “So be it. Who then will become etsana of the Veselov tribe? Mira Veselov is only eleven years old.”

  “Could someone hold it in trust for her, until she is old enough, and proves herself worthy?” Tess asked.

  “This is also what I am thinking,” said Irena. “I am thinking that Galina should. In time she will become Mother Orzhekov, if the gods will, and in this way she would gain experience and yet there could be no suspicion involved that she hoped to supplant Mira herself.”

  “And it would give her good-for-nothing husband a bit more responsibility, which he sorely needs,” said Kira sourly.

  “Kira!”

  Kira glanced around to make sure that Galina was out of earshot. “I am sorry to say that my son married a timid khaja girl and my daughter a son of the Sakhalin tribe, and of the two I far prefer the little khaja princess, barbarian though she may be. Begging your pardon, Tess.”