Earthly Crown

  “Stay here,” he said, struggling to get dressed. He cursed himself for not sleeping with his clothes on.

  “Aleksi! Oh, God.”

  He grabbed his boots in his left hand and his saber in his right and crawled out of his tent and ran to hers. Tess was not in the outer chamber. A single lantern lit the inner chamber, and he found her there, rocking back and forth on her heels, staring, rocking, gasping for breath.

  “Aleksi! Oh, thank the gods. Get Cara. Please.” Her voice broke.

  Bakhtiian lay asleep on pillows, a fur pulled up over his naked chest. His face was slack, and his mouth half open. He looked rather undignified, sprawled out like that. Aleksi paused to pull on his boots.

  “I can’t wake him up.” She choked out the words. Then she began to sob. “Oh, God, why did I do it? Why did I insist?”

  “But, Tess—” Her complete disintegration shocked him horribly. “Here, let me try.” He bent over her, daring much, and shook Bakhtiian gently. No response. Then, suddenly, losing patience and hating the terrible shattering condition Tess had fallen into, he slapped him. Bakhtiian’s head absorbed the blow, moving loosely, but he did not stir in the slightest. And Aleksi understood: Bakhtiian’s spirit had left his body. He had seen it happen once before, with his own sister Anastasia, some four winters after their tribe had been obliterated. Except his sister had never come back. Her spirit had stayed in the gods’ lands, and her body had withered and, at last, died.

  Like a black wave, fear and anguish smothered him. He could not move. He could not move.

  “He’s going to die, Aleksi. He’s going to die.”

  Brutally, Aleksi crushed the fear down, down, burying it. Then he ran to get the doctor. Dr. Hierakis was fully dressed, sleeping wrapped in a blanket beneath one of her wagons. She rose with alacrity and hurried back with him, stumbling once in the dark. A thick leather bag banged at her thigh. The wind whined and blew around them. The walls of Tess’s tent boomed and sighed as he went in behind the doctor and followed her in, all the way in, to stand silent just inside the inner chamber.

  Tess talked in a stream of rapid Anglais. The doctor ran a hand over Bakhtiian’s lax face, moved his flaccid limbs. She opened her bag and brought out—things.

  Aleksi effaced himself. He willed himself to become invisible, but neither of the women recalled that he was there.

  Things. Objects. Aleksi did not know what else to call them, so smooth, made of no metal he recognized, if indeed it was even metal. Not a fabric, certainly, not any bone he knew of, this hand-sized block that the doctor palmed in her right hand and held out over Bakhtiian’s head. Just held it, for a long moment, doing nothing. Then she swept it slowly down over his body, uncovering him as she went. When she had done, she covered him back up again and took a flat shiny tablet and laid it on a flat stretch of carpet and said two words.

  If Aleksi had not honed his self-control to the finest pitch, he would have jumped. As it was, he twitched, startled, but he made no noise. The tablet shone, sparked, and a spirit formed in the air just above it. A tiny spirit, shaped with a man’s form but in all different colors, wavering, spinning, melding. Until Aleksi realized that it was Bakhtiian’s form, somehow imprisoned in the air above the tablet.

  He must have gasped or made some noise. Tess jerked her head around and saw him.

  “Damn,” she said. “Aleksi, sit down.”

  He sat. “What is it? Is that Bakhtiian’s spirit?”

  Dr. Hierakis glanced up from studying the slowly rotating spirit hanging in the air. “Goddess. I thought you’d stayed outside.”

  “It isn’t a spirit, Aleksi,” said Tess. “It’s a picture. A picture of his body. It shows what might be making him—ill—what might be making him—”

  “But his spirit has left his body,” said Aleksi. “I know what it looks like when that happens. That’s his spirit there.” He pointed to the spirit. It spun slowly, changing facets like a gem turning in the light, little lines hatched and bulging, tiny gold lights stretched on a net of silvery-white wire, brilliant, as Aleksi had always known Bakhtiian’s spirit would be, radiant and gleaming and surprising only in that it emitted no heat he could feel. “I can see it.”

  “No, he’s just unconscious. That’s just an image of his body. The doctor is trying to find out why he’s fallen into this—sleep.”

  “We know why,” said the doctor in a dry, sarcastic tone. “I’m trying to find out how extensive the damage is.” Then she said something else in Anglais.

  “Oh, hell.” Tess burst into tears again.

  “It isn’t Habakar witchcraft,” said Aleksi suddenly. “It’s yours.”

  The doctor snorted. “It isn’t witchcraft at all, young man, and I’ll thank you not to call it that. But it’s quite true that we’re the ones responsible.”

  “I’m the one responsible,” said Tess through her tears.

  Dr. Hierakis shook her head. “What can I say, my dear? The serum has metastasized throughout the body, and for whatever reason, it’s caused him to slip into a coma.”

  “You can’t wake him up somehow?”

  “Right now, since his signs are otherwise stable, I don’t care to chance it. You knew the risks when you insisted we go ahead with the procedure.”

  Tess sank down onto her knees beside her husband and bent double, hiding her face against his neck. He lay there, limp, unmoving. The walls of the tent snapped in, and out, and in again, and out, agitated by the wind. The doctor sighed and spoke a word, and the luminous spirit above the tablet vanished. A single white spark of light shone in the very center of the black tablet. A similar gleam echoed off the doctor’s brooch.

  Aleksi jumped to his feet. “Where did his spirit go?” he demanded.

  Dr. Hierakis let out all her breath in one huff. “Aleksi, his spirit did not go anywhere. It’s still inside him. That was just an image of his spirit, if you will.”

  “But—”

  “Aleksi.” Now she turned stern. “Do you trust Tess?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think she would do anything to harm Bakhtiian?”

  “No.”

  “Aleksi. This slate, this tablet here, it isn’t a magic thing, it’s a—a machine. Like the mechanical birds that the ambassador from Vidiya brought but more complex than that. It’s a tool. It can do things, show us things, that we could not otherwise do ourselves or see ourselves. It helps us do work we otherwise could not do, or work that would take much longer to do if we did it—by hand.”

  Aleksi considered all this, and he considered how many times he had wondered why Tess seemed ignorant of the simplest chores and duties that the jaran engaged in every day. “Do you have many of these machines in Jeds?”

  The doctor smiled. He saw that she was pleased that he was responding in a clever, reasonable way to her explanations. He knew without a doubt that she was telling him only a part of the truth. “Yes. Many such machines.”

  “Then why didn’t Bakhtiian see them there, when he was in Jeds? I never heard Sonia or Nadine mention such machines either.”

  “Tell him the truth,” said Tess, her voice muffled against Bakhtiian. “I can’t stand it, all these lies. I can’t stand it. Tell him the truth.”

  Aleksi crouched down and waited.

  The doctor placed her tablet inside her bag and followed it with the little black block. “The truth is, Aleksi, that we don’t come from Jeds, or from the country overseas, Erthe, either. We don’t come from this world. We come from up there.” She pointed at the tent’s ceiling.

  He shook his head. A moment later, he realized what she meant, that she meant from the air above, from the heavens. “Then you come from the gods’ lands?”

  “No. We aren’t gods, nothing like. We’re human like you, Aleksi. Never doubt that. We come from the stars. From a world like this world, except its sun is one of those stars.”

  She could be mad. But he examined her carefully, and he could see no trace of madness in her. The doc
tor had always seemed to him one of the sanest people he had ever met. And as strange as it all sounded, it might well be true.

  “But. But how can Tess’s brother be the prince of Jeds, then? If he—” Aleksi broke off. “May I see that thing again? Does it show other spirits besides Bakhtiian’s?”

  “So much for the damned quarantine,” muttered the doctor.

  “What are we going to tell them?” Tess asked. She straightened up. Tears streaked her face, but she was no longer crying. “When they come in and see him like this? How long, Cara? How long will he stay this way?”

  “I can’t know. Tess, I promise you, I will not leave him. But I’ll need some kind of monitoring system. I’ll have to set up the scan-bed in here, under him, disguise it somehow. I’ll need Ursula.” She glanced at Aleksi. “And hell, we’ve got him now. With the four of us, we can keep the equipment a secret. I think. Unless you want the whole damned camp to know.”

  “No!” Tess stood up and walked to the back wall and back again, and knelt beside her husband, and stroked his slack face. “No,” she repeated, less violently. “Of course not. I just—” She looked at Aleksi. He saw how tormented she was, how terrified, how remorseful. “Aleksi.” Her voice dropped. “You do believe that I didn’t mean for this to happen. That I’m trying to help—oh, God.”

  She was pleading with him. Tess needed him. “But I trust you, Tess. You know that. You would never hurt him.”

  She sighed, sinking back onto her heels. Her face cleared. However slightly, she looked relieved of some portion of her burden. And he had done it. It was almost sharp, the satisfaction of knowing he had helped her.

  “But what will we tell the rest of the jaran?” the doctor asked. “I hope I needn’t remind you, Aleksi, that anything you’ve seen in here must be kept a secret. Must be.”

  “Will his spirit come back?” Aleksi asked.

  “It will,” said Tess fiercely.

  “I don’t know,” said the doctor.

  Aleksi rose. He shrugged. “Habakar witchcraft. They’re saying it already.”

  The doctor grimaced. “I don’t like it.”

  “What choice do we have?” asked Tess bitterly.

  “Well.” The doctor rose, brushing her hands together briskly. “There’s no use just sitting here. Aleksi, can you go fetch Ursula? Then meet me at my wagons.”

  He nodded and ducked outside. A faint pink glow rose in the east. The wind was dying. Up, bright in the heavens, the morning star shone, luminous against the graying sky. Could it be? That they came from—? Aleksi shook his head. How could it be? How could they ride across the air, along the wind, up into the heavens? And yet. And yet.

  His tent flap stirred. Raysia ducked outside, dressed and booted. She saw him and started. “Oh, there you are. Is something wrong?”

  “Habakar witchcraft,” he said, knowing that the sooner he let the rumor spread, the more quickly Tess and Dr. Hierakis could hide their own witchcraft. Their own machines. “The Habakar priests have put a curse on Bakhtiian.”

  “Gods,” said Raysia. “I’d better run back and tell my uncle.” She glanced all around and, seeing that no one yet stirred in the predawn stillness, she kissed him right there in the open. “I’d better go.” She hurried off.

  So it begins. He paused at the outcropping. The land was a sheet of darkness below, black except for a lambent glow flickering and building: Sakhalin had fired the city.

  ACT THREE

  “He, who the sword of heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe”

  —SHAKESPEARE,

  Measure for Measure

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  DAVID BEN UNBUTU SAT and stared at blank white wall. He sat cross-legged, with the demimodeler placed squarely in front of him, its corners paralleling the corners of the plain white room. He shivered because it was cold. The scan unit was on, but all the image showed him was the dimensions of the rectangular room, white, featureless, blank.

  A footstep scuffed the ground behind him. “Anything?” Maggie asked.

  He shook his head. The beads bound into his name braids made a snackling sound that was audible because of the deep stillness surrounding them. “Our scan can’t penetrate these walls, and neither can we. It’s got to be here. It has to be, but we can’t find the entrance.”

  “Or the entrance won’t open for us.” She sank down on her haunches beside him. The heat of her body drifted out to him, and he shifted closer to her, as to a flame.

  “Thirty-two days it took me, Mags, to survey this damned place and the grounds. Every way I turn it, the only space I can’t account for is right there.” He did not point. They all knew where it was, behind the far wall whose blankness seemed more and more like a mockery of their efforts. “That’s got to be the control room, the computer banks.”

  “The place Tess got the cylinder. This matches the description she gave Charles. So what’s he going to do?”

  David blew on his hands to warm them. Maggie laid a hand on his. Just as the white wall emphasized the rich coffee brown of his skin, it lent hers more pallor, so that the contrast seemed heightened, dark and pale. “We’re not Chapalii. Tess didn’t find her way in by herself. She had a Chapalii guide. If Rajiv can’t crack the entrance, then there’s no human who can.”

  “Well.” She released his hand and unwound from her crouch, standing up. “You may as well come eat. It’s almost dusk.” She offered him a hand and he took it and rose as well, bending back down to switch off the modeler and tuck it under his arm before he straightened to stand beside her. She grinned down at him. “I hear you’re the current favorite of the spitfire.”

  “Damn you.” David laughed. “You’re trying to embarrass me. I think she just wanted to see how far the melanin extends.”

  “I hope her curiosity was suitably satisfied.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I did, and it was.” She laughed in her turn. “You’re blushing. You’re such an easy target, David.”

  “I would have thought there wouldn’t be any challenge in it, then. You’re a heartless woman, Mags.”

  They crossed to the door and slid the panel aside to let themselves out. Immediately, warmth enveloped them although it stayed cooler inside the palace in contrast to the hot summer days passing outside. The ebony floors of this chamber gleamed, and networks of light pulsed in their depths, as if the flooring concealed a delicate web of machinery. Maggie broke away from David and paced out the meter-wide counter that stood in the room. It extended in an unbroken, hollow rectangle within the larger rectangular chamber; she slid up onto it and climbed over to the smaller counter, a half meter wide but also unbroken, that stood within it, and then hopped that one as well to stand in the very center of the room. The two counters separated her from David. She looked at him, and he at her.

  “What the hell do these represent?” she asked. “I don’t see anything on here, no storage places, no controls, no patterns, no heat, nothing but the smooth surface.”

  David gestured back toward the door they had just come through. On either side of the door stood two tall megaliths. “Rajiv is pretty certain that those are transmitters of some kind. Maybe this is a power source.”

  “Damned chameleons,” said Maggie cheerfully. She hopped back over the counters to return to David. They went on.

  They no longer exclaimed over the palace. They had been here forty-three days and were as used to it as they ever would be. But still, for sheer size and the elegance and profusion of its detailing, it was magnificent. And it was theirs, the only Chapalii palace where humans had ever run free, unobstructed by protocol officers, by stewards, by the simple presence of any Chapalii at all. That it was thousands of years old did not lessen their victory. For all they knew, and from what little they had been permitted to see in Chapalii precincts now, Chapaliian architecture had scarcely changed at all in the last millennium.

  Jo Singh had taken samples from every surface she coul
d get a molecular flake off of, and Maggie had covered the same ground David had in his survey, recording every detail in three media for Earth’s databanks. Charles walked the palace incessantly, as if by becoming intimately familiar with it he could somehow divine the intricacies of the Chapalii mind. After all, why should they have ennobled him? Why should they have rewarded him for his failed rebellion against them rather than simply killing him for the trouble he caused them?

  “It’s damned impressive,” said Maggie. David started, feeling that she echoed his thoughts.

  “Do you ever think,” he said slowly, “that we might just be better off as subjects in their Empire?”

  “They don’t bear grudges, you know, or at least, not that I’ve ever noticed. Not that I’m much among them, of course.”

  “Not that any of us are,” David said.

  “Sometimes I think they’re better than us. Less prone to emotional decisions. More concerned about peace, and peaceable living. About stability. They must think we’re savages, the way we go on.”

  David grinned. “Yes, rather like we look at the natives of Rhui and pride ourselves on being better than them, because we’ve grown out of their primitive state. We live well. All of us, I mean, all humans, not just you and I and the rest of Charles’s retinue.”

  Maggie paused as they went through an archway. She lifted a hand to trace a translucent spire of a glasslike substance that bordered the opening, lending its shadow to the pattern of tiles on the floor. At its core, fainter patterns mirrored the walls. “But it’s a moot point, isn’t it? Charles has already decided for all of us.”

  “Now, Mags, you know very well that the League Parliament voted full confidence in him. That is to say, that they’d follow wherever he led, knowing that he’s got his eye on freeing us from the Empire somewhere down the line.”

  “Look. Here comes an escort.”

  Down the dimly lit hall came a white-robed priest—the ancient woman called Mother Avdotya—and a figure now intimately familiar to David. He hesitated and then walked forward beside Maggie, one hand tapping the modeler nervously. It looked like a plain black tablet of polished ebony, and he always carried parchment and quill pen and ink in the pouch at his belt, so that he might be thought to be using such instruments to conduct his survey and the tablet merely as a surface to write on, but it still made him anxious to meet any of the jaran when it was visible. Nadine, especially. Nadine always wanted to see the maps and architectural drawings he made. She had a clear grasp of maps and distances; she had just last night drawn him an astonishingly accurate—for its type—map of the coastline from Jeds up to the inland sea to the port of Abala. She had a fierce, impatient personality, overwhelming and breathlessly attractive to him, and he could not help but think longingly, for an instant, of Tess’s more supple temperament. But Tess was as far out of his reach now as was the Chapalii control room. And Dina was here.