Earthly Crown

  “Did you?”

  Even the broken, pitiful walls of Basille reminded her enough of Jeds that she was stricken with a longing to return there—now, this instant. “Of course I did. I loved that city. I could easily have forsaken the plains for Jeds, except I’m too much jaran to live in a place where only one group of women can make advances to men—women who get paid to do so. Paid! It made me heartsick. They’re barbarians, these khaja. I didn’t want barbarians as my lovers. It’s the only reason I came back.” She meant the comment to be light; the force of it surprised even her. Tess, kind Tess, made no reply.

  At the gates of Basille, a party had indeed gathered. As they neared, Nadine could distinguish between two styles of dress, and she saw that a certain, delicate distance separated two groups of people—a group of men dressed in plain, dull cloth, and a smaller group arrayed in golds and purples and jade greens made the more vivid by the muted garb of their neighbors.

  “It appears,” said Nadine in Rhuian, “that Basille’s elders can scarcely wait to pass their visitors on to us.” She lifted a hand and the jahar halted, a semicircle ringing the gate out of archer’s range. She glanced at her riders and smiled. Solemn, austere, with an arrogance that frightened khaja everywhere. Why, jaran riders had such contempt for all khaja that they did not even bother to touch khaja women. Was that what khaja thought? She had often wondered, but never found the opportunity to ask.

  “Grekov. Yermolov.” Her voice carried clearly into the silence. “Will you attend?” And softer: “Tess?”

  “Assuredly.”

  The four of them rode forward. The crowd at the gate watched, stilled either by fear or by anticipation.

  “Lord,” said Tess, “look there on the steps. Is that our ambassador? From the vast and fabled empire of Vidiya?”

  Nadine shifted her gaze self-consciously from the blond head of Feodor Grekov, who had come up with Yermolov on her left, to the low stairway that led up to the night portal in an intact portion of the palisade. “Gods. He’s young. And is that supposed to be his retinue—what, six besides himself? Only four hands of guardsmen? He can’t be very important if that’s the lot. Ilya won’t be pleased if he thinks he’s being snubbed.”

  They halted equidistant between the steps and the group of elderly men marked with the heavy chains and pentangles of the town’s stewards. There was silence. Nadine waited.

  A young man stood on the steps, utterly and obviously foreign by his purple and green striped overtunic and huge, belled trousers of cloth of gold, by the odd sculpting of his dark beard and mustache, and by the white turban that concealed his hair. He lifted one manicured hand. An older man, less flamboyantly dressed, stood one step lower; he coughed, preparing to speak. Both their gazes stopped briefly on the two women and flicked away again as quickly, dismissing them.

  After a moment the older man addressed Feodor Grekov in rough, but serviceable, Rhuian. “I am Syrannus, bond servant to the Most Honorable Jiroannes Arthebathes, ambassador from His Imperial Majesty, Honor of the People, Great King of All Vidiya, may his name be sung for a thousand years. We place ourselves and the rest of our party in your hands, sir, as you are to be our escort to the court of the Bakhtiian.”

  Feodor looked at Nadine and shrugged. Nadine sighed and urged her mount two paces forward. “I am Nadine Orzhekov. I am the leader of the party that will escort the Most Honorable—” She let the syllables roll off her tongue. “—Jiroannes Arthebathes and his—ah—retinue to the camp of Bakhtiian.”

  “But—” sputtered Syrannus. For an instant he looked like a man trapped by starving wild animals. Basille’s elders whispered among themselves.

  “You lead my escort?” said the ambassador suddenly, curt and doubting. “A woman? Perhaps one of these men will verify this outrageous assertion.” He waved toward Grekov and Yermolov.

  “Since they don’t speak Rhuian, they can’t.” Nadine grinned, enjoying his indignation.

  “You are the only one in your party who speaks Rhuian?” demanded the ambassador. “That is absurd.”

  “Not the only one,” conceded Nadine. “This woman, Terese Soerensen, speaks not only Rhuian but Taor and, I believe, a few words of Vidyan as well.”

  At this unfortunate juncture, especially given the appalled looks on the faces of Jiroannes Arthebathes and his servant Syrannus, Tess started to laugh.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “DAVID,” SAID MARCO, “YOU will come sit through this banquet with me. I refuse to endure hours of rancid food and city elders sucking up to Charles and Bakhtiian all by myself.”

  “Maggie is going,” said David.

  “Maggie,” said Maggie tartly, “is serving an official function. I’m going to be the wine pourer for His Nibs and Attila the Hun.”

  David groaned. “Are you for me or against me? You’re no help.”

  But there was nothing for it. He could see by the look on Marco’s face, and by the light in Maggie’s eyes as she laughed silently at him, that he was doomed to sit through the state dinner and audience that the barons and elders of the town of Abala Port were holding for the man who had conquered them, Ilyakoria Bakhtiian, and the prince who was his chosen guest.

  “As long as I don’t have to act as food taster,” he muttered, “although with that army in this town, I don’t think I’d try to poison anyone.”

  “You wouldn’t try to poison anyone anyway,” said Maggie. She rummaged through her carry bag and drew out a clean tunic and the only skirt she possessed. She went on talking as she changed, letting her old clothes drop into a heap on the slatted floor of their tiny inn room. “Owen Zerentous has asked permission to hold an impromptu performance at the end of the banquet, or after the formal audience. Evidently the city elders have some cases they need tried, some people accused of crimes, that they’re going to bring before Bakhtiian.”

  “Trial by personal whim?” asked Marco.

  “You said yourself he was educated at the university in Jeds,” retorted Maggie. “He must have some concept of justice. Damn it! Where’d that brassiere go?” She upended the contents of her bag onto her cot. David, from his cot, hooked a dark toe through the brassiere strap and hoisted the garment up into the air. “Where’d you find that?” she demanded.

  “On the floor, where most of your clothes eventually come to rest.”

  She snatched it from him with a mock growl and put it on, then a linen shirt, and then her tunic and skirt. The room was crowded in part because it was small, but mostly because neither Maggie nor David could bring themselves to sleep on the straw-filled mattress that served as the room’s bed. They had set up their traveling cots instead, one on each side; a tiny aisle led to the door, where Marco stood with his arms folded, surveying the mess.

  “Shall we go? It can’t smell any worse there than it does here.”

  “Just because we’re over the stables,” said Maggie with a laugh. “And where are you sleeping, may I ask?”

  “You may not.”

  “Marco! You’re frightening me.”

  That teased the shadow of a grin from him. David sighed and rose, pulling his sketchpad out of his carry bag. He brushed two flealike bugs off his sleeve and five earwigs off the sketchpad, and ran his other hand along the ends of his hair and through his name braids. “I’m just sure they’re crawling all over me. It can’t be worse in the town hall.”

  But it was. It was rank. Marco didn’t seem to notice that it was only a thin layer of fresh rushes that covered the floor; that underneath lay a mat of ancient straw and other, happily nameless substances, which had created a kind of fetid loam. It squished. Incense burned in racks along the walls, set up between the windows, and lanterns were set at intervals along the tables. Rank and cloying at the same time. Quite a feat, David thought, to produce two such opposite effects in one chamber.

  Charles walked in front of them, together with Bakhtiian. David hung back with Marco, who waited in his turn for the actors. But in the end, the actors sat at a si
de table and David and Marco ended up on the dais, at the very end of the long beamed table—which was actually three tables shoved together—which seated the guests of honor. The actors were in fine form, being boisterous in an engaging fashion, and the city elders were disgustingly obsequious.

  “Have you noticed,” said Marco in a whisper, “how Bakhtiian has picked out two boys, there, to eat with him, to share the food from his plate? Honoring them, because they’re both sons of important men in town. But it also ensures that no one attempts to poison him.”

  David hadn’t noticed. There was a clump of something stuck to the bottom of his shoe, and he was trying to scrape it off. The food thrust in front of him looked unappetizing in the extreme, except for the bread. He didn’t trust the water, and the wine had a vinegary-flavor. If this was the best Abala Port could do, then it must not be a very wealthy town.

  “I think this is real gold leaf on this plate,” said Marco, poking at it with his knife. A laugh burst up from the actors’ table, and Marco looked up at once, caught Diana’s eye, and smiled winningly at her.

  “How has Tess managed to endure these conditions for four years?” David demanded of his plate. “This is appalling.”

  “Maybe she’s as much of a slob as Maggie and you are. Maybe she doesn’t care.”

  “She isn’t a slob. Or at least, she wasn’t.”

  “What? As an eleven-year-old in Jeds? But wait.” Marco eased his attention back from Diana and propped his chin on one hand to regard David with interest. “You weren’t in Jeds then. How could you know? Oho!”

  David cursed under his breath. Trust Marco to know him well enough to read him.

  “You’re blushing under that attractive black complexion of yours, David my boy,” said Marco in his most annoyingly superior manner. “Out with it.”

  “Damn it. Listen. If you breathe a word of this to Charles, I’ll have your head. And then where will you be with handsome young actresses?” He leaned forward and peered down the table toward Charles, but Charles was deep in conversation with an old man in a pale blue gown trimmed with silver fur who wore a ring on each finger and a heavy bronze medallion on the end of a gold necklace. Charles’s own finery paled in comparison—his signet ring and the chain of office draped down over a painted silk tunic—and the barbarian king looked positively spartan, dressed without any ornamentation at all except the embroidery that ran down the sleeves of his simple red shirt. He wore his curved sword; no one else in the room bore a weapon except his own personal guards: ten at the door and two standing behind him on the dais.

  “Do you remember when I taught that seminar at the university in Prague?”

  “Oh, yes.” Marco’s eyes narrowed. “Tess was attending the university at Prague then, wasn’t she? In fact, I rather have it in mind that Charles encouraged you to take the position so that you could keep an eye on her.”

  David found he could not speak the words, especially since it was the one secret he had ever kept from Charles and Marco.

  “You had an affair with her!”

  “Marco! Hush. And in any case, I wouldn’t call it an affair. We grew fond of each other. True, we shared a bed, but we shared a friendship, too.”

  “What was she like? I confess I haven’t seen her since the year she left for university.”

  David smiled. In his heart, he felt her presence as an honest and pleasing warmth. She was a good person, an amiable companion, and a fine intellect, though she suffered from insecurity; as well she might, since she was Charles Soerensen’s little sister and heir, whether she liked it or not. “She was chubby.”

  Marco choked on a hunk of bread. “How unromantic of you! Chubby!”

  “Well, it’s true. She was.”

  “And then?”

  “My seminar ended, and I left. Later I heard she got engaged to another student, but evidently it didn’t work out, which I’ve often suspected is why she left for Rhui so suddenly.” And perhaps even why she had stayed there; Tess was insecure enough that David also suspected she might nurse a wound like that for years, especially to hide it from Charles.

  “David, you see me at a loss for words. You see me rendered speechless. I am astounded. Amazed.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Marco laughed and picked at his meat with his knife, trying in vain to find a strip that wasn’t spiced to death. Liveried men lit torches and placed them in racks alongside the incense burners, adding a fine, stinging smoke to the brew. Charles laughed at something Bakhtiian said—although David could not imagine a man who looked as hard and dangerous and uncivilized as Bakhtiian did having a sense of humor—and, like a nervous echo, the city elders laughed as well. Maggie, looking serene, poured more wine for the two men. Cara, sitting down at the other end of the table with Jo and Rajiv, stifled a yawn under one hand.

  “And just think,” said David, “these conditions must be advanced compared to the way the nomads must live. Poor Tess. Whatever do you suppose possessed her to stay there? Sheer intellectual curiosity? Is the fieldwork too good to let go?”

  Marco put down his knife. “Oh,” he said, as if God itself had just granted him a revelation. “David…”

  “And don’t you dare tell Charles!”

  Marco blanched. “But, David—”

  “Give me your word!”

  Marco laughed abruptly, an odd note in his voice. “Hell. I swear it. It lends one a warm feeling to think about these youthful indiscretions, doesn’t it?”

  Marco was definitely acting strangely all of a sudden. “You talk about it like it was in the past, and meant to stay that way.”

  “It always is, David. In the words of the immortal Satchel Paige, ‘Don’t never look back. Something might be gaining on you.’”

  “Marco, did you eat something that affected your brain? No doubt there are molds aplenty in this food. Or is that lovely young actress just addling it?”

  “I’m just saying that Tess may have changed, and you should…go slowly when you see her again. And not expect too much.”

  “Hah! Odd sort of advice, coming from you. You sound positively auntly, Marco.”

  There was a sudden commotion at the far end of the hall. A woman screamed. A jaran soldier stumbled against a chair, tripping backward over it, and sprawled onto the floor. Like a wave rushing in, five men, swords drawn, plunged forward up the central aisle toward the dais. Marco jumped to his feet. David gaped.

  For an instant, nothing and no one moved except for the five armed men, who ran toward the head table with death in their eyes and a sudden scrambling of guards at their backs.

  Bakhtiian was on his feet before David realized he had moved. He grabbed the table and heaved it up and forward, and it crashed over onto its side. Plates and glasses and half-eaten food and the dregs of wine spilled onto the steps and clattered onto the floor. His saber was already in his hand in the span of time it took Charles to blink.

  David sat there stunned with his food in front of him while an attack was waged not six paces away. Marco knocked over his own chair in his haste to get to Charles. Men shrieked.

  “Aleksi!” shouted Bakhtiian as the first of the assassins leapt up the steps. A dark young man in a red shirt jumped over the upended table and cut down the first man so quickly that David did not even see the blow. Jaran soldiers closed in from the other end of the hall. A guard flung himself past David from behind and engaged the nearest assassin. The young man called Aleksi twisted his saber around another man’s sword, sending it flying, and with a cut that seemed born of the first one disarmed a second man by disabling his arms with wicked-looking slices. One man left—

  And then Aleksi suddenly sprang around and flung a cut back at Bakhtiian, who ducked away from it while at the same time shoving over Charles’s chair. Charles landed in a heap, Bakhtiian in a crouch, and Marco tackled from behind the old baron who had sat beside Charles this whole time. From whose robes had appeared an ugly looking short sword, which Aleksi had knocked away.
br />   David had not yet moved from his chair. All of the actors except Owen and the leading man, Gwyn Jones, were cowering under their table. Diana stood beside Jones. She gripped the edge of her chair, staring with bright eyes at Marco, who was sitting on top of the old baron, looking furious.

  Now, two assassins were left. The one nearest David had been driven back into a circle whose boundaries were delineated in red: the scarlet shirts of the jaran guard. One lay quivering in a heap; one lay prostrate; one sobbed, clutching his bleeding arms against his chest. The two remaining clutched hard at their deadly-looking long swords.

  Bakhtiian rose. “Aleksi, take them,” he ordered with astounding calm.

  Aleksi nodded without expression and stepped forward, and the others made way for him. The elders and other barons on the dais clumped into a frightened group. Cara had already run down to Charles, and she helped him to his feet. Marco stayed sitting on the old baron.

  And the most horrifying thing of all was that it was beautiful to watch. Barbarian he might be, but he was an artist with the sword. Two of them, against one of him, with such different weapons, but there was no doubt what the outcome would be. The knowledge made the two assassins desperate. Aleksi looked as cool as a man out for an evening stroll. One of his comrades shouted something in a joking voice, and Aleksi actually cut down one man with a swift slice along his face and chest, paused beside his comrade long enough to grab a saber in his other hand, and turned back to face the last man.

  “And you realize, of course,” said Ursula el Kawakami, appearing in all her unwonted splendor beside David, “that he’s already at a distinct disadvantage, using that saber on foot against long swords. That’s a cavalry weapon. Amazing.”

  Aleksi used one of the sabers to distract the poor man and neatly hamstrung him with the other. The man screamed out in pain and collapsed to the floor. There was a moment’s pause. The assassins were all disarmed.

  Then everyone in the hall turned to look at Bakhtiian.

  He sheathed his saber, and the scraping sound it made in the hush sent an atavistic shiver down David’s back. At once, the barons and elders of Abala Port flung themselves on the floor in an obscene frenzy of groveling.