Except she knew the answer. She watched Diana register his presence, watched the Singer’s hand as it lifted to touch the golden necklace and then, self-consciously, dropped. She watched, with disgust, as Anatoly insinuated himself in with the children and thus was standing with them when she brought the Singers over to meet them.
“And these are the children of my family. Mitya and Galina are Kira’s eldest two, and Katerina and Ivan and Kolia are my own. There are also four girls and two boys still with the tribe.”
“You have more?” Quinn asked, looking astounded.
“No, just those eleven.”
“You have eleven children?” asked Yomi.
“My sisters and I have eleven children, yes. Last I heard, Stassi was pregnant, so soon there will be twelve again.”
“Oh my,” said Yomi abruptly, “look at that loom.”
Galina led her over to the loom, and at once the girl and the khaja woman became engrossed, though they could not speak any words to each other. Truly, weaving was a common language in and of itself.
Sonia looked back at the others. “Katya! Stop that! It doesn’t come off. Show respect for a Singer.”
“It’s all right,” said Oriana with a laugh, clearly not minding at all that the children were licking their fingers and rubbing at her skin. She crouched down and regarded them with a grave face. “It comes from being out in the sun too much.”
“It does not!” said Katya once her mother had translated. “Does it, Mama? There are other khaja with you who have skin like this. Mama says it’s because you’re from a place where the sun is hotter. But if that’s true, and if all of you are from the same country, then why don’t you all have black skin?”
“Good question,” said Oriana with another laugh. “Why do you have blonde hair and your uncle—well, I suppose he’s not your uncle, but your mother’s cousin, so I don’t know what that makes him to you—why does he have black hair? My skin is this color because my mother and my father had skin of this color.”
Helen regarded the children with resignation. Quinn allowed Ivan to show her every knife and saber that he could find; he was showing off, but at his age, one had to expect it. Mitya, of course, strayed no farther than an arm’s length from his hero, Sakhalin. Diana, crouching down, admired little Kolia’s first, awkward efforts at embroidery on a torn hank of sleeve. Slowly, slowly, Anatoly sidled over to stand between Sonia and the young woman. When his shadow darkened the sleeve Kolia held, Diana glanced up. Both of them looked away from one another as quickly as a horse bolts from a loud noise.
Anatoly, at least, had enough decorum not to look back down at her. “Please, Cousin Orzhekov,” he asked Sonia, keeping his eyes carefully fixed on a neutral spot between the carpet and the tent flap, “could you ask her, for me, what she thinks of the camp?”
Diana’s gaze lifted to examine him more boldly now.
“Does your grandmother know where you are?” demanded Sonia in khush. “Your manners are appalling, Sakhalin, and I hope I never see this sort of behavior from you again.”
Diana rose to her feet, ruffling Kolia’s hair absently. But she looked at Anatoly. “What did he say?” she asked, and hearing her voice he glanced at her, and she smiled at him.
Damn it anyway. It would only encourage Anatoly, but Sonia did not dare refuse to answer a Singer’s question. “Anatoly wonders what you think of the camp,” she said in Rhuian. “But he really has to go now.” And switched to khush. “Go on, Anatoly.”
Bowing to her superior authority, he left, but reluctantly. Really, his grandmother had spoiled him; it was deplorable, and yet he was at an age when men are most likely to be brash. A boy would be overawed; an older man would know better. But at twice twelve years and just honored with a command of his own, he had come into the first flush of his power.
“Oh, dear,” said Diana quietly. Tentatively, she touched Sonia on the arm and then smiled and withdrew her hand. “I hope I haven’t done something that offends you. Or him.”
“Of course not! I must apologize for his behavior.” There are some things I will never understand about the khaja, Sonia thought, for all that I have read their books and lived with them. Singers who apologized, as if they could offend anyone but the gods! Women who acted with the modesty that was really only proper for men!
“Oh,” said Diana, bewildered. “Perhaps Tess Soerensen can tell us more about your laws and ways of doing things.”
“A very fine idea,” agreed Sonia, and not just because Diana was a Singer. If these khaja were to travel a long way with the tribes, maybe it wasn’t Raysia Grekov who needed to translate, maybe it was Tess, who had grown up in one land and embraced the other, who was the only one of all of them who truly stood halfway between. “But I had hoped to show you the herds, if you’d like, or if you’d rather, other parts of the camp.”
“Oh, both, if it can be managed,” said Yomi, coming back with Galina. “This is fascinating.”
So they went on. Soon enough Sonia saw Anatoly Sakhalin again. Diana saw him, too, and now and again her gaze would jump away from the group to seek him out: He dogged them all the rest of the morning, like any good scout, vanishing when Sonia’s attention was turned directly on him, coming closer when he could, never being so forward that she could in fairness castigate him. Still, she would definitely have to discuss his behavior with his grandmother.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ALEKSI SAT CROSS-LEGGED ON the table, watching Tess and Sonia where they knelt before the wooden chest.
“This one, then.” Sonia draped a cloth-of-gold coat over her arms, displaying it for Tess to examine.
“No. Too gaudy.”
“Tess, barbarians are impressed by gaudy things. Gold and riches. Surely this Vidiyan ambassador will recognize that this coat came from the Gray Eminence’s lands across the sea and feel fear that such a prince sends gifts to Bakhtiian.”
“But Sonia, Nadine brought that coat back from Jeds.”
“He doesn’t have to know that, does he? Here, what about—”
“No, those are my marriage clothes.”
“Yes, and this shade of green does look particularly well on you. This, and the jade headdress. No, the golden one.”
“Sonia, I—”
“Or should I go to your brother’s encampment and ask if he has any of these ugly clothings the women of his people wear? Are you embarrassed of us, now that your own people have come?”
Tess hung her head and did not reply. Aleksi watched her face. Unlike her brother, Tess had an expressive face that showed emotion clearly. She was embarrassed, and this perplexed Aleksi. After all, if the gods meant for the jaran to rule all other peoples, then the jaran would do so. Why should Tess feel shame to be seen as one of the gods’ chosen people?
“This is not the Tess I know,” Sonia went on. “Of course Jeds is a fine city. Do you forget that I have been there? Perhaps they scorn us because we don’t live in stone tents, but I will never forget how filthy everything was there. Although I admit,” she added, in a placating tone of voice, “that everyone of your brother’s party seems clean.”
Tess clapped a hand over her mouth and her shoulders shook. She was laughing. “Oh, Sonia.” She reached out and hugged the blonde woman. “I’m not ashamed of you. I just—” She hesitated, then shrugged. “I think too much.”
“You worry too much,” retorted Sonia. “These khaja don’t teach their daughters to become women. You had no mother or aunt to give you a tent, but must live beholden to your brother and now your husband. Why do you think I stayed in Jeds only a year, though Ilya wanted me to stay longer? I know we have no university here, no books, no writing, but still, they are the barbarians, not us.”
“But Sonia,” said Aleksi, “the women of Soerensen’s party aren’t like other khaja women, any more than Tess is. They don’t veil their faces when they see us and avert their eyes. They wear proper clothing, even if it is ugly, and they walk with pride and not fear.”
r /> “That is true. But they’re from another country, the country where Tess’s mother was born.”
“Erthe,” said Aleksi, trying the unfamiliar sound out on his tongue.
Tess leaned over the chest and lifted out the jade headpiece, weighing it in her hands. “Dr. Hierakis came from Erthe, as well as the acting company. Women are—well, women own their own tents there. But so do men.”
“Yes, and from what you’ve told us, they don’t seem nearly as barbaric as the people of Jeds.” Sonia lifted out the gold headpiece and laid it down on the green tunic. “This looks better, Tess. I’d like to visit there someday.”
“It’s a long voyage. A very long voyage.” Tess placed the jade headdress back inside the chest and settled back on her heels. “No, you’re right, Sonia. Even though I didn’t precisely need my brother’s consent to marry, still, I married without it.”
“If you have the courage to make a decision, then you must learn to have the courage to stand by it. Perhaps Ilya’s power doesn’t seem so impressive to your brother now. In ten years, he will be happy to have such a brother by marriage. You must tell him you are thinking ahead. It is an advantageous alliance.”
“For whom?”
“Come now, Tess. I have been to Jeds. I have ridden in the countryside and gone even as far as the city of Filis, where another prince rules. Your brother is rich and his merchants sail to the ends of the world, and he is a prince to be reckoned with, but Ilya’s army is larger. Much larger. And it will grow.” Sonia shook out the calf-length tunic and a pair of belled, striped trousers and then rummaged in the chest until she found a wide belt inlaid with cloisonné and gold. “Now, Aleksi. Out.” Her own festival clothing lay draped over the chair, a tunic of vivid blue that matched her blue eyes and a headpiece of gold and gems. “We must dress. You might see if Galina needs a hand with the children.”
Aleksi gave each woman a brotherly kiss on the cheek and retired from the fray. At Sonia’s tent, her niece Galina sat with those few Orzhekov children who remained with the main army. Sonia had kept her three children with her, and Niko and Juli had two grandchildren with them. Other children, like Galina and her brother Mitya, were old enough to do adult work but not old enough yet to marry or to ride in the army.
“We saw the barbarians today.” Galina greeted Aleksi with a kiss on the cheek. She looked much like her aunt and her mother, with a merry, round face, fair hair, and cerulean blue eyes. “Aunt Sonia brought five of them by. One of them had skin that was black. Really,” she added, as if afraid that Aleksi wouldn’t believe her. “Wasn’t it, Katerina?”
“It was,” agreed Katerina, Sonia’s eleven-year-old daughter who, at two years younger than her cousin, was her shadow and champion. “We thought maybe she had painted it on, so we rubbed it, but it didn’t come off.”
“Then Aunt Sonia scolded you for being rude,” finished Galina. “But the woman didn’t mind. She was tall, too, taller than a man. And one of the other women had chestnut hair, like a horse has.” She stifled a giggle under a hand. “And another one had funny eyes, like…” She grimaced, searching for a comparison.
“Like this,” said seven-year-old Ivan, putting his index fingers on either side of his eyes and pulling the lids tight. All of the children burst into laughter.
“I liked her, though,” said Katerina. “Her name was Yomi. She knows how to weave,” she added, since this skill obviously placed the woman in a different, and superior, class from the others. “But they didn’t have any men with them. Is it true their men act like women?”
“What do you mean?” asked Aleksi. “I escorted four of the men around the camp, and they seemed like men to me. They were very polite.”
Katerina considered the question seriously, screwing her mouth up. She was a pretty girl, having inherited her looks from her grandfather, but she had as well the same vital intelligence that animated Sonia’s otherwise undistinguished features. “They say khaja men use bows and arrows to fight other men with and that they haven’t any manners toward women. And that they own their own tents, and they even say that the women don’t own tents at all. How can that be?”
“You forgot the angel,” said Mitya suddenly. He sat on a pillow at the back of the awning, too old to include himself in the younger children’s activities but too young, at fifteen, to be an adult. Like most boys his age, he spent a small part of his day helping his grandmother, mother, or aunt and the rest of it with the adult men, doing chores, learning to fight, caring for the horses and the herds, and generally tagging along. Right now he was polishing one of Bakhtiian’s sabers.
“What angel?” Aleksi asked. He knelt and helped four-year-old Kolia straighten his tunic and belt it with a girdle of gold plates.
“Anatoly Sakhalin’s angel.”
“Mitya,” retorted Galina in a disdainful voice, “she is not Sakhalin’s angel. And he showed bad manners, too, in following them around.”
Aleksi settled down on his haunches, satisfied that he was about to get some good gossip. He loved these children, who had accepted him readily once they saw that the adults of their tribe acknowledged Tess’s adoption of him. Although he had been Tess’s brother for three years now, he still preferred the children’s company to that of adults. They said what they thought, and they were not embarrassed by the fact that he had once been an orphan. Like the foreign woman’s coal-black skin, his peculiar status interested them more than it revolted them. “He followed Sonia and her party around camp?”
“Yes,” said Galina. “That’s what Aunt Sonia said. When they got here, he got Mitya to invite him in so that he could talk to her. She was very embarrassed by his behavior, as any woman would be. She flushed all red.”
“Sonia did?” Aleksi asked, astounded.
“No, no,” said Katerina. “The angel. Diana. But Sonia refused to translate for him so he just had to stand there. But he kept looking at her,” she finished with disgust.
“He never looked at her straight,” said Mitya.
“Oh,” said Galina, “you’re always defending him.”
Mitya flushed at his little sister’s superior tone of voice. “And why not? I want to ride in his jahar when I’m old enough. He’s the best rider of all the young men.”
“Mitya, everyone knows that Aleksi is the best rider. No one is as good with the saber as he is. Isn’t that true, Aleksi?”
Aleksi grinned. “Anatoly is a good commander, and he deserves the command Bakhtiian gave him, though he’s young to be granted such an honor.”
“But you wouldn’t ride in his jahar, would you?” asked Katerina, looking pleased with her sly question.
“Katya, I ride in Bakhtiian’s own thousand. Why should I want to ride in anyone else’s?” The girls laughed, and Mitya appeared mollified.
Sonia came out of Tess’s tent. “Are you children still here?” she called. “Galina, Mitya, take them and go. Mother Sakhalin will have plenty for you to do before you start serving.”
Galina and Katerina rounded up the little ones and marched them off. Mitya lingered. “Would you like to walk with me?” Aleksi asked the boy, and Mitya’s face brightened, since this was clearly exactly what he had hoped for. The chance to stroll around camp beside the man everyone knew was the best saber fighter since the legendary Vyacheslav Mirsky, who had died of old age six years ago…Aleksi chuckled. Then he felt a pang of regret. He had never enjoyed such simple pleasures as a boy. No friends, no companions. Alone—He shut it off. No use thinking about it, no use remembering. He lived in the Orzhekov camp now. “Come on, then.”
“Oh, wait,” said Mitya. “Aunt Sonia,” he called, “what shall I do with the saber?”
She had already gone back into Tess’s tent, but came out again. “Here, give it to me.” She took it, smiled at Aleksi with the warmth that she seemed to have an endless supply of, and carried the precious weapon back inside.
Aleksi walked on, and Mitya matched his pace to the older man’s. Already he was Aleksi’
s height and would probably grow taller still. Now he was gangly and uncoordinated, coltish in an endearing way. It was a stage Aleksi had never gone through, so while he felt sympathy for the boy, he could not quite understand him. However awkward Mitya might be, he had time to grow and an enviable position to grow into. Grandson of Irena Orzhekov, who was etsana of the Orzhekov tribe, Mitya was thereby related to Ilyakoria Bakhtiian himself; his mother, Kira, and Ilya were cousins. The boy wore a golden torque around his neck and golden braces at his wrists and, like his little cousin Kolia, a belted girdle of golden plates. A heavy enough burden, Aleksi supposed, made doubly so by the fact that Mitya’s father was a respected smith. It was no wonder that Mitya admired Anatoly Sakhalin, a young man with equally important relatives who had managed to gain respect on his own account and not simply because of whom he was related to.
They wandered through the late afternoon bustle of the camp. A child ran behind a wall of captured shields, hiding from her playmates. A blacksmith’s forge smoked, and two soot-stained, sweating men pounded out lance heads. Their strokes beat out a rhythm to the late afternoon. Two adolescent boys repaired bridles, and they waved at Mitya as he walked by. A group of women turned carcasses on spits over four large fires. The smell of the meat was tantalizing. Fat dripped and blazed on the coals.
“He must be very powerful,” Mitya said suddenly.
“Who?”
“The prince of Jeds. Tess’s brother. The ambassadors that come to us have greater retinues, and they bring gifts. What is an actor, anyway?”
“I’m not sure,” Aleksi admitted. “They tell stories, I think, but with their bodies, not with words and a song. Perhaps they will perform tonight.”
But they did not. On the circle of ground separating the inner group of tents from the outer ring, blankets were laid and awnings set up in a great ring. At the southwest of this compass a single wagon sat upended and shorn of its wheels, covered with leather drawn tight with ropes and laden with pillows. Before it, on the ground, lay carpets under an awning of golden silk. Large square pillows embroidered with flying birds or galloping horses littered the carpets, seating for the feasters. Now, waiting, the pillows were empty, except for a single figure sitting under the center of the awning, writing painstakingly in a book. He glanced up and saw Aleksi and Mitya and beckoned them over.