Jaran

  “Who? Oh, Ilya.”

  “And he’s teaching me jaran songs. Only decent ones, of course.”

  “My dear sister,” said Yuri primly, “Bakhtiian would never think to teach a woman any songs but those that it is decent for her to know.”

  “Unlike some I know.”

  Instead of replying, he squinted at his work in the inadequate light. Kirill and Mikhal and a few of the other young men were gambling. Farther on, the conical tents of the Chapalii thrust up among the trees, like pale ghosts lost in the leaves.

  “And Newton,” she said.

  “Newton? Who is Newton?”

  “Oh, a philosopher. Not just him, but Casiara and Narronias and—and the work of many others.”

  “Gods. Sometimes I’m amazed that Ilya ever came back from Jeds. How he loves khaja learning.”

  “You’re right,” she said, realizing that it was true. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” It had not occurred to her before that there might be some link between his relentless ambitions and the constant, restless inquisitiveness of his mind. Just as she could not resist a new language, he could not resist a new philosopher. If she mentioned a name he did not know, he demanded that she recite every scrap of writing she could remember, a feat she usually accomplished by broad paraphrasing since she had not his training in wholesale memorization. He loved to quibble over the smallest point and discuss the large ones to the finest detail. The scope of her knowledge, fostered by a decade in the schools of a stellar empire, was balanced by his experience, his impressive memory, his capacity to assimilate new information, and his astuteness; she always had to be careful of what she said. “I guess I always thought,” she said, discovering that Yuri was watching her curiously, as if wondering where she had gone, “that a man with ambitions of conquest would be too single-minded to aspire to be a philosopher as well.”

  “Oh, I don’t think Ilya wants to be a philosopher,” said Yuri lightly. He yawned, laying down his shirt, and let a hand rest on Tess’s back. “He just doesn’t like other people knowing something he doesn’t.”

  Tess laughed. “That’s unkind, Yuri.”

  “Do you think so? I don’t. Ilya has no one to answer to. That means he must know everything. It would be enough to drive me mad. I think it’s the reason Ilya is so harsh.”

  “Harsh? Maybe at first, but not lately—” She grinned. “With Kirill, yes.”

  “Well, Kirill deserves it.”

  “No, he doesn’t!” She laughed again. “Maybe. But I like him. He’s—he’s Kirill. And you must admit that he’s the only one of you who has the courage to make fun of Ilya at all.”

  “He’s the only one stupid enough to do it in front of him.”

  “He’s the only one who doesn’t take Ilya as seriously as Ilya takes himself.”

  Yuri picked up his embroidery. “I resent that. You never saw Ilya at his worst. When the mood was on him, he would come into camp and, like that, everyone walked everywhere on their toes to avoid his notice.”

  Tess giggled.

  “He hasn’t been bad at all this trip. I think he likes you.”

  “Likes me?” She found a perceptible crack in the stone fitting and traced it out as far as her hand could reach.

  Yuri rubbed the light shadow of beard on his chin. “Did I leave my razor with you?” he asked, and then he went on, not waiting for her reply. “He likes Niko. I think he likes Vladimir, or at least is fond of him, and I know he likes Josef and Tasha and my mother, and Sonia, although he would never admit he likes Sonia. But you can never be sure who else he likes. I don’t even know if he likes me, but I think he likes you.”

  “Oh.” Tess brushed dirt out of the crack with her middle finger. “I like him. He’s easy to talk to.”

  Now Yuri laughed. “If I’d heard anyone say that a year ago, I would have thought they were as mad as Yevich the Weaver.”

  “Who is Yevich the Weaver?”

  “You don’t know the story of Yevich the Weaver? By the gods, that will have to be settled.”

  The story of Yevich the Weaver took four evenings to tell as told by Josef, the best tale-teller in the jahar now that they no longer had Fedya to sing tales for them. By the time Yevich had gone mad twice and finally settled his score with the wind-maiden and her four brothers, they had ample provisions. They rode on and passed out of the tangled dark wood and into the feet of the mountains.

  They traveled for a day up a series of terraces of scrubby grass linked by ridges of rock. The road had vanished entirely, and the ridges proved so devoid of paths that the riders were forced to dismount and lead their horses up each one. Now and again a drying riverbed offered easier passage and even water as they climbed from level to level through the ridges, until the last terrace spread out like a sea before them, a broad plateau brought up short by the mountains.

  Tess stared. The air was so clear that it seemed only a thin sheet of glass between her and the mountains, which were surely close enough for her to touch, and yet so distant, lacking any detail, that their size alone awed her.

  “Those are the children,” said Bakhtiian, watching her. “The grandparents are farther in. It’s said they are so high that one cannot see their tops.”

  “That would depend on where you were standing.” She grinned. “Rather like a man’s reputation, don’t you think?”

  “So awesome from a distance, so meager up close?”

  “I thought it was the other way around. Small and insignificant from far off, but massive at its base.”

  “Weighed down by its own importance.”

  “A heavy burden,” said Tess.

  “Only to the man who has had it forced on him,” said Bakhtiian, suddenly serious. “Fame is a light and welcome burden to the man who picks it up of his own will.”

  “I don’t agree. Fame becomes a heavy burden either way.”

  Bakhtiian raised one hand, like a teacher making a point. “But by choosing to carry it—Dismount!” She dismounted almost as quickly as he did. “Damn,” he said to himself, and then to Tess, “Follow.” A spur of rock jutted up, a solitary sentinel of the ridges that fell away behind it. Bushes and clinging grass patched the dark surface. They halted at its base. “Stir up the ground.”

  He took the horses around the rock while Tess trampled grass and scuffed dirt. “Good enough,” he said, returning without the horses. He studied the spur for a moment and, choosing a path, began to climb.

  Tess scrambled after him, her feet slipping on loose pebbles, her hands grabbing bare knobs of stone and long, sinuous roots. He halted at a small ledge, screened by bushes, and pulled Tess up after him, leaving his hand on her arm when she stood beside him. She could feel every point of pressure, however light, where his fingers touched her skin.

  “You may as well sit, if you wish,” he said. “They may not have seen us, but I know they saw the horses. This rock is the only cover, unless we wanted to risk breaking our necks by running down into the rough. Two against—I’d guess forty-two. We should go to ground.”

  She took the hint and sat. His hand released her, leaving a lingering tingle on her arm where he had held her. He remained standing.

  “Who?” Tess asked. “Another jahar? I didn’t see them.”

  “Another jahar, yes—” He hesitated, absently staring at his hand. “And no.”

  “If you thought these men really wanted to kill you, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  Bakhtiian transferred his attention from his hand to the plateau. Grass and mountains, nothing else. “I just want to look at them before we exchange pleasantries.”

  “The weather is fine today, and my what a lovely horse that is?”

  He looked down at her and smiled, a smile that lit the corners of his eyes. “The jaran have a tale of a woman who brought misfortune to her tribe because she was too curious.”

  She tilted her head. “Is that so? We have a story something like that.”

  “If two old moral tales won’t te
ach you, I’ll never be able to. What was the woman’s name?”

  “Pandora.”

  “Pandora. That’s prettier than the woman’s name in our story: Vlatagrebi.”

  “Poor thing, saddled with a bad reputation and a name like that.”

  “Then you’d rather be called Pandora than Vlatagrebi?”

  “By whom?”

  Bakhtiian leaned back against the rock face. A spray of dirt skidded down the face to settle behind his boots. He folded his arms over his chest. “By me. It’s only fitting.”

  “We have a saying in our land: ‘the pot calling the kettle black.’”

  “The pot calls—Shameless woman. If I were a brave man I’d—” He checked himself.

  “You’d what?”

  “I take it back. I wouldn’t.”

  “Who are they, Ilya?”

  It took him a moment to answer because the smile that crept onto his face was the kind that arrives slowly and leaves reluctantly. “I surrender.” He put his hands against the rock by his shoulders, palms up and open. “Arenabekh. The black riders.”

  “I saw nothing.”

  “You weren’t looking. You were staring at the mountains.”

  “How could you tell they were these—arenabekh?”

  “All in black.”

  “Is this a particular tribe?”

  The wind rolled a single wilted leaf past his boot. “They have no tribe.”

  “No tribe? And they’re riding, so they must all be men.”

  “They have renounced tribe, kin, women, any ties to order or custom or family.”

  “I thought my abstainers were severe.”

  “They don’t necessarily abstain.”

  “They take lovers amongst themselves?”

  He colored slightly. “This is not a fit subject for a man and a woman to discuss.”

  “But I’m khaja. And fully as curious as you are.”

  He smiled. “So you are. Well, then, some do. Not all. Some believe that our life now is not the life the gods gave us to live, so they live as it is said jaran lived in the early days.”

  “Without women? How could there be jaran now if that was so?”

  “Exactly. And how are we to know how the jaran lived in the early days, having only old stories to tell us, which may have been changed in the telling? Do you see them now? Don’t shift forward. They’re sharp-eyed, these demons.”

  The screen of bushes and hedge concealed them, but eventually she got a view of the approaching riders through a gap in the shrubbery. Bakhtiian hummed something under his breath, fingering the hilt of his saber. She felt his excitement, and it made her nervous; she had seen that same excitement in him before—for battle.

  She wished now that she was not sitting because it made her feel vulnerable, unable to move quickly, but she could not stand up now. The black riders rode straight for the spur of rock.

  “God,” whispered Tess as they neared. “They look grimmer than you ever did.” Because she had not meant to say it aloud, she looked up. He glanced down, a glint of amusement in his eyes, and put two fingers to his lips.

  They pulled up a stone’s toss away, suspicious and watchful. The dull coats of their horses, the dourness of their expressions and, most of all, the unvarying black of their dress made them cheerless and forbidding. No embroidery decorated their shirts. None wore jewelry.

  “A quick night’s camp,” said one in a strong dialect.

  If Tess had thought the jaran men of her acquaintance hard, she had no word for these. One had no right arm, only a loose, empty sleeve that stirred restlessly in the breeze. Next to him a younger man, beardless and rosy-cheeked, examined the rock with one clear eye; his other eye was scarred shut, puckered and white. These men hunted, they had their quarry trapped, and they knew it. She bit her lip to stop herself breathing through her mouth, as if even that faint sound might alert them to her presence.

  “The fox has gone to the hill,” said a bearded fellow with a haughty forehead and cruel eyes. His blond hair fell in a long braid to his waist.

  “Patience, Sergi,” said the one with the dialect, a black-haired man who had possibly been given a frown at birth and had been unable to remove it. A tic, almost hidden in his rough beard, disturbed his right cheek. “You three check around the rock.”

  The three brought back the two horses. Tess saw how all the riders stared at the stallion and the mare, two creatures so obviously superior in line and breeding to their own animals that it was rather like standing a man of the jaran dressed in all his finery next to an ape dressed in skins. Bakhtiian stood utterly still, his eyes narrowed, his expression more anticipatory than apprehensive. How easily he could blend into the group of men below. Then, startling her with the suddenness of his movement, he stepped out from behind the screen of bushes to stand in full view of the jahar below, but he glanced once swiftly back at her as he did so.

  “They are beautiful, aren’t they?” he asked. He froze, almost as if he were posing for the benefit of his audience, with one hand on his saber hilt and the other resting on the hilt of his dagger. He looked dangerous.

  “By the gods, Bakhtiian!” said the bearded Sergi. “Come here, you ill-favored son of the cold winds, and I’ll show you the special trick I’ve learned with the saber just for you.”

  “You flatter me.” Bakhtiian did not move. Leaves brushed at his boots.

  “And bring your treasure down, too, the one you’re hiding. Is it some handsome lad you’re afraid we’ll spirit off?”

  Bakhtiian caught Tess’s eye and lifted his chin. She stood up and came two steps forward. Even as she halted next to Ilya, about ten men turned their horses away and rode off to one side, backs to her, heads lowered. More than half of those left averted their faces, so as not to look at her, but the rest examined her with cold, inquisitorial interest.

  “Gods!” cried Sergi. “It’s a damned woman! Who would ever have thought it!”

  “Shut up, Sergi,” said the one with the pronounced dialect.

  “Shall I come down?” asked Bakhtiian with all the familiar pleasantry of a venomous snake.

  “Please do,” said Sergi. “But keep the woman up on the ledge. Some of our men haven’t seen a woman in five years, and I can’t answer for them if they catch her scent.”

  Tess straightened her shoulders, met his eye, and held it. “They wouldn’t dare touch me.” She laid one hand on her saber hilt, though she had no illusions about her ability to use it against any of these men.

  Sergi let out a whoop. “A khaja with spirit, and listen how she talks. They won’t touch you. Certainly not if you’re Bakhtiian’s.”

  Bakhtiian, descending with composed dignity, stopped dead. One of his feet slipped on the incline and pebbles skittered out and rattled down to the base of the rock.

  Tess drew her dagger, tossed it up into the air, and caught it. “You’ve got it half right, Sergi. They won’t touch me. I don’t know what Bakhtiian has to do with it.”

  Bakhtiian, regaining his balance, resumed his descent as if nothing had happened.

  “Sergi, shut up,” said another man. His face bore a broad, ugly white scar that stretched from forehead to chin, puckering one side of his face into a permanent leer. “You can only keep your mouth shut for as long as it takes a horse to shit.”

  On the pretext of sheathing her knife, Tess looked away. The jaran men she knew never swore in that way—or at least, not in front of her.

  “So, you are Ilyakoria Bakhtiian,” said the man with the dialect, and suddenly all attention focused on him, though he had made no obvious effort to attract it. “I am Keregin. You seem a little short for a man with such a tall reputation.”

  “That depends on where you’re standing,” said Bakhtiian, looking as though his greatest concern was the fit of his clothing.

  “Choose your man,” said Keregin. “I want to see if you deserve your reputation. Bakhtiian.” He savored the flow of the syllables. “What kind of luck got you a na
me of your own?”

  “Luck is only my lover, not my wife,” replied Bakhtiian easily. He drew his saber. “If ever I wed, it will be skill and intelligence.”

  “Tedious bedfellows,” said Sergi.

  “Shut up,” said the scarred man.

  “Choose,” said Keregin.

  Bakhtiian looked over the arenabekh one by one, his gaze measuring and keen but never quite insulting. Watching him, Tess realized she had clenched her hands into fists without realizing it. This was to be a real fight, a real duel. What if Keregin meant it to be to the death?

  “He has too heavy a hand,” said Bakhtiian, “and that one, no instinct.”

  “Got you there, Vlacov,” said Sergi.

  But Bakhtiian appeared not to hear the comment and the low mutter of laughter it produced. He examined a man far to the side whose light eyes were shadowed by dark circles beneath and whose nose was broken. “He’s too angry. There, too unsteady a hand, and that one, he drinks too much khaja wine.” He paused, then pointed with his saber at a particularly unprepossessing man of middle years, a remarkably unkempt fellow whose only conspicuous features were a long nose and brilliant blue eyes. “That man.”

  Keregin laughed. “We’ll concede your eye for flesh. Tobay, fight him.”

  “What will we do with the woman after Tobay kills him?” asked Sergi. “None of us has any use for such a thing.”

  “Sergi, if you can’t keep your mouth shut while they fight, we’ll bury your head in the ground and stuff your saber up—”

  “Silence!” shouted Keregin. “Move back. Now, Bakhtiian. Make us remember you.” The lanky Tobay dismounted and came forward, holding his saber as if he did not know he had it in his hand. “Left-handed,” added Keregin. “Or I might get bored.”

  With no change of expression, Bakhtiian switched hands and circled left, measuring his opponent. Tobay stared dumbly at him as if he had not a wit in the world. Bakhtiian had moved about a quarter of a circle when Tobay suddenly stepped left and cut in with a broad sweep toward Bakhtiian’s right shoulder. Bakhtiian parried, stepping in to the blow, and there was a moment of suspension, metal pressed against metal, and then both men fell back unmarked.