His Conquering Sword

  “He’ll be here,” said Cara. “He’ll be here.”

  “But the men are supposed to leave camp,” said Aleksi. “It’s bad luck for a man to watch a child’s birthing.”

  “Aleksi, you may leave if you wish. I need your help, and jaran customs aren’t our customs. Which will it be?”

  “Oh, stay, Aleksi,” said Tess, and Aleksi went to her at once. She let out her breath all at once, and her voice took on a sudden intensity. “Cara, I have to push.”

  David watched, feeling useless. Jo worked on with efficient fury, linking equipment, setting up the IV. Aleksi helped Tess sit up, leaning into her, linking his arms under her arms and over her chest, so that she could prop herself up on him. Cara waited.

  It didn’t take very long for the baby to come, and it was no wonder. In two pushes the head crowned, and on the third the body eased out into Cara’s waiting hands. Its skin had a strange bluish-gray color, smeared with some whitish substance, and the body was perfectly formed: miniature fingers and toes, testicles, button nose, and perfect rosebud lips, crowned by a shockingly black crop of hair. It was a tiny little thing, so tiny.

  So still.

  Aleksi buried his face against Tess’s hair.

  Cara cut the cord.

  Tess stared. “Cara,” she said. “It’s so hot in here. Could you get me a blanket, I’m freezing.” She shuddered, all through her frame. Her eyes rolled up, and she sagged back against Aleksi.

  “David! Take the baby. I’ve got to deliver the placenta.”

  “I can’t!” Still and dead, the baby barely stretched longer than Cara’s cupped hands. It was bloody, too, streaks of it that echoed the streaks of blood along Tess’s thighs.

  “You must, David.” Cara’s voice cracked over him, and he obeyed blindly, through tears, taking the tiny thing from her and wrapping it in a white square of cloth that Jo handed him without looking at him. The body was warm and soft, cooling as he held it. One little hand peeped out of the cloth, each minute finger tipped with a white nail. He covered it hastily, binding it in under the cloth.

  He felt dazed. A numbing roar descended on him, and he watched as through a haze while Cara and Jo fussed over Tess, hooked her up to this and that, flicked on the modeler, cut off her tunic, set into a glass dish the strange veined blood-red creature that was the placenta. Tess’s image appeared, floating in the air at the foot of the bed, turning, pulsing critical red all along its length.

  Voices sounded outside. Cara did not even look up. David shook with exhaustion and realized that he was squeezing the bundle in his arms. He was filled suddenly with such revulsion that he thought he might well be sick.

  “Think, you idiot,” he said under his breath. Bells chimed.

  “I don’t think—” someone said, protesting.

  “I will see Tess!” said Bakhtiian.

  Without thinking, David stepped to the curtain and eased himself through so that the curtain sealed shut behind him. “Don’t go in!” he said. And came up short, facing Bakhtiian.

  Rajiv stood wringing his hands a pace behind the other man. “Oh, thank goodness, David!” he exclaimed. Then, like a coward, he turned and hurried back outside.

  David made himself look at Bakhtiian, but Bakhtiian only stared at the bundle in David’s arms. He smelled of smoke and dust, and his clothes still bore the impression of his armor. His face was ashen. Slowly, he held out his hands. David gave him the child.

  He cradled it against his chest. Easy enough, that was, since the bundle did not reach from his elbow to his hand. With the other hand, carefully, he unwrapped the cloth. The hair showed first, all course and black, and then the impossibly perfect face, still and shuttered. The tiny arms, the fingers, the chest, the legs, and the tiny tiny little toes. He said nothing; he did nothing but breathe. Then, more carefully than David had, he wrapped the little body back up and hugged it closer against him. He raised haunted eyes to David’s face.

  “Tess?”

  “I don’t know,” said David. “I don’t know. Dr. Hierakis is with her. We can’t disturb her.” He braced himself for a torrent of protest, but Bakhtiian said nothing. David glanced back toward the curtain. He heard Cara and Jo, speaking terse, quiet phrases that David himself barely understood and Bakhtiian certainly could not understand: IV, anesthesia, transfusion, systolic pressure, basal temperature, placenta abruptio, antibody sensitization.

  In the middle of the room, Ilya Bakhtiian stood silent, crying, holding his dead son.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  JIROANNES SAT UNDER THE shelter of his awning, a blanket over his legs, his torso and arms encased in a fine brocade coat, and watched the glow in the west where the sun sank down over the hills and blended its light with smoke and fire from distant Karkand. He sipped at hot tea. Steam rose from the porcelain cup; this cup alone, of all that Syrannus had so carefully packed back at his uncle’s villa, still remained fit for him to drink from. All the others had been chipped or broken or stained. Vines and peacocks circled the rim, a delicate round of painting. The aroma of the tea soothed him. Around him, the camp was quiet. At last.

  He shuddered. He had not known that a woman could shriek that loudly, or that a woman who so clearly feared his attentions in the bed would show such anger when he informed her that he intended to visit elsewhere that night. As if it was any right of hers to dictate where he found his pleasure. But perhaps Syrannus had been right all along. The old man had, in his mild way, cautioned against the marriage. And yet, Laissa’s audience with Mother Sakhalin had proved successful, or at least, so Laissa had reported. With the Habakar king in the hands of Bakhtiian, Habakar merchants streamed to Jiroannes’s camp to beg for an audience with the princess Jiroannes had married. No, Syrannus had been wrong: The alliance would serve him well.

  “Eminence?” Lal scurried toward him, bearing a thin-necked porcelain pitcher glazed white and etched with flowers. “May I pour you more tea?”

  Jiroannes nodded. As Lal bent, Jiroannes saw a mottling on the boy’s dark skin. “What is this?” he asked, reaching up to touch the bruise with one finger.

  “It is nothing, eminence.”

  “It is a bruise. Where did you get it?”

  Lal kept his eyes cast down. “It is nothing, eminence.”

  “I command you to tell me.”

  Lal finished pouring and backed away two steps. “The mistress struck me, eminence, when I entered her chambers after…” He faltered.

  “After we argued.” Wind stirred the awning. Beyond, smoke obscured much of the western curve of the sky, but above, stars began to show in the high bank of the heavens. It was frustrating enough never to know what was going on in camp, except that the jaran had at last assaulted Karkand. Jiroannes felt strongly that Mitya noticed and cared for him, but he doubted if Bakhtiian even remembered that a Vidiyan ambassador abided in his train. In order to complete his mission, he needed Bakhtiian’s notice. And now—now Laissa had the audacity to strike his servants. It was all too much.

  “Lal, you will cease waiting on my wife. It is insufferable that she treat you in such a fashion. Henceforth, you will serve me alone and cease going into the women’s quarters. I’m sure that will be a relief to you, in any case.”

  Lal sank to his knees, balancing the pitcher in trembling hands. “I beg of you, eminence, it was nothing.”

  “You want to continue to serve her?” Jiroannes was astounded. “After she, a mere woman, treated you in such a way?”

  “Eminence.” Lal bent his head and shoulders, curving over the pitcher. From the guards’ camp, Jiroannes heard a hacking cough and a baby’s whimper. Darkness shielded the hills. The smoldering haze of the besieged city illuminated the western horizon. “I am not a man. My mother sold me into the palace service when I was still a boy, and after they cut me, I knew that only in the women’s quarters could I rise to a position of importance. Eunuchs are not allowed to hold any office higher than that of attendant of the sash in a lord’s household, and n
ever any administrative office.” In the lantern light, Jiroannes studied the boy’s beardless cheeks. “You have treated me well, eminence. You have been generous and kind, but you know it’s true that while I can’t become an official in the Great King’s court, I am welcome within the women’s quarters.”

  Jiroannes tilted his head back. The underside of the awning lay dark above him, but he knew the scene well enough, having seen it created in the slave workshop abutting the women’s quarters in his uncle’s house: fine Vidiyan lords in their Companion’s sashes riding to battle flanked by flags and standards and the Great King seated under a parasol, observing the march. A moment’s reflection assured him that Lal was right: a eunuch was not considered a fit servant in a man’s household, except as a body servant, and certainly not in the household of a Companion of the Great King. A eunuch might tie a lord’s sash, but neither eunuch nor woman was allowed to hold the parasol over the Great King’s head. Eunuchs belonged in the women’s quarters, as go-betweens, as guards, as master of the gate and master of the treasury, as ministers seeing to the administration within the cloistered walls.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “But you remain under my protection.”

  “You are all that is magnanimous, eminence.”

  Jiroannes drained his tea, and Lal poured more into the cup. The warm liquid soothed him, and he felt the truth of Lal’s words. He had been kind and generous to his slaves, and yet, one still eluded him. “Lal, send Samae to me.”

  Lal bowed his head and retreated. Soon enough, Samae appeared, dressed in striped trousers and a quilted damask robe, and knelt before Jiroannes, head bent in submission. Her hair had grown long enough to twine into a braid at the ends, fastened off with a silk ribbon. She folded her fine-boned hands in her lap and sat so still that the only movement he could see, on her, was the stirring of the ends of her hair on her collar. The carpet sank under her knees, forming a dark hollow.

  “Samae, why did you refuse your freedom, when Bakhtiian himself granted it to you?”

  At first she said nothing. Wind rustled through the tasseled fringe of the awning and shuddered the walls of his tent. He smelled smoke from the guards’ camp; or was that a taint on the wind, blown in from Karkand?

  “I am a slave, master,” she said at last. Her voice was scarcely louder than the wind’s rustle. Her voice. It was deeper than he had imagined it would be.

  “But I command you to accept your freedom.”

  “Only the gods command me, master.” She doubled over and touched her forehead to the carpet and lay there for the space of twelve heartbeats before lifting her head up again. “I am a slave by their law.”

  “By their law? What gods? What law is this?”

  Under her lashes, she lifted her gaze to look at him. She had liquid brown eyes, dark and slanted against the pale ivory of her skin. “It is death to speak their name. Their laws are cruel, and they hate us for our ugliness.”

  “Samae, surely I do not understand you correctly,” he said, exasperated. “The Everlasting God has given man laws in order that we may live as befits His Word. He shepherds us, in our ignorance, for we are His creation.”

  “We are clay,” murmured Samae, as if she had not heard him, “clay and unclean water, and nothing else.”

  Jiroannes was too appalled to speak. Here he had thought that the great Tadesh Empire was a civilized country; certainly their concubines and dancers and metalwork and pottery were of the finest quality.

  “When my grandfather’s grandmother begged for their pity, because she was barren, they granted her wish but with this price: that one child from each generation be sold into slavery. I am the child the gods chose.”

  “But—” He took a sip of tea and choked on it. “Even a slave has certain rights, as we read in the words of the Everlasting God and his three prophets. Among those rights, the right to be freed.”

  “I am a slave,” said Samae in her stubborn, soft, deep voice, “so that my family will remain free of the curse of barrenness. I will not bring this curse back on them. I cannot. Freedom is forbidden us, who are slaves by the gods’ will.”

  “So if I command you to be free, you will not accept?”

  She bent double again, brushing her forehead on the stiff carpet. “You are my master on this earth of clay, but the gods rule me.”

  Jiroannes realized that she was not bowing to him, but to her gods. A sudden compulsion seized him: to know her, to know of her, to make her speak her thoughts aloud, to fathom what lay behind her blank expression. “Then you serve the gods as your master?”

  She remained bent over. Her voice emerged, muffled, out of the collar of her damask coat. “We cannot serve the gods, since they despise us.”

  “But if you’re so much beneath their notice, then why bother to obey their laws at all?”

  “They punish those who rebel against them.”

  Jiroannes let out a great sigh. He lifted his cup up, and Jat padded out of the shadows and took it away. Without knowing why, he extended a hand and brushed his fingers back along her hair and toyed with the ribbon holding her braid fast. “Why did you cry, when we saw the play—the dancers who speak with both words and hands?”

  “Because the jaran believe their gods are kind.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The radiance along the western horizon swelled and brightened and then faded back down to a luminescent glow. “The woman came from the heavens, did she not? And the man loved her, and he got her with child. So she gave him a sword that she had stolen from her mother, the sun. But a sword brought from heaven bears two edges. For each blessing, it brings you also a curse.”

  Her voice had a hollow unearthliness that made him nervous. He jerked his hand away from her hair. The wind picked up. Golden tassels danced and fluttered, spinning, along the awning. His sleeve quivered, like an animal shifting in sleep and then settling. “Why should you care, in any case,” he asked, “that the jaran believe their gods are kind?”

  She did not speak for a long while. At last, she lifted her head enough that he could see her pale cheeks and the dark slash of her mouth. The lantern light caught the glistening of tears on her cheeks, and tears welling in her eyes gave those eyes the brilliance of jewels. “Because they will learn otherwise,” she whispered.

  “But why—?” But he knew, to see her face, why she cared. She had lived long enough in Tadesh, perhaps even with her family, to learn their dances, the secret of which passed down only within their own race. Then, sold into slavery, she had sailed alone over the wide seas and come into a foreign country and been sold again, into the hands of a foreign master. Alone, at the mercy of her gods, it was no wonder he had never seen her smile. The only wonder was that he had never seen her cry before now. But she had never cared about him. He was only her master on this earth of clay. Probably she had never cared about anyone or anything in Vidiya; had not cared until she came to the jaran. Until she saw their women walking free. Until she was sent to the tent of a boy newly come to manhood.

  “I will undertake to treat you more kindly,” he said, wanting suddenly for her to think well of him. “It’s too bad the jaran don’t allow slaves in their camps, or I’d give you to Prince Mitya as a gift.”

  She gasped, harsh, as if he had hit her. Her hands moved frantically in a sign, warding him off. Or not him, perhaps, but the notice of her gods. She struck her forehead to the carpet once, twice, a third time, keening in a thin, muted voice, and then fell silent, and stilled.

  Jiroannes stared at her, taken aback. “Go in to my tent,” he said brusquely. “You’ll attend me when I’m ready for bed.”

  With no expression on her face, she rose, bowed, and retreated into his tent. Jiroannes swore under his breath, flung the blanket off his legs, and stood up. Jat padded forward and eased it off the carpet, and briskly folded it up, and vanished back into the shadows. Jiroannes strode to the edge of the carpet. The tassels spun over his head, gold thread glinting and sparking in
the lantern light. Beyond, the camp of the jaran army stretched on endlessly into the night. A few campfires burned, in his guards’ encampment, along ambassador’s row, and farther on, into the main camp. Stars glistened above, as unobtainable as Samae. He saw now that he would never be anything to her but her temporary master, to be suffered while she served out her penance, which could only end, for her, when she died. Perhaps he would give her to Mitya, or into Mitya’s household. Perhaps he could explain the situation to Mother Sakhalin and ask her to advise him. Mitya would marry the Habakar princess, of course, but surely a man was allowed a secondary wife or a concubine. Surely some provision could be made for her. Yes, that was the right choice.

  Determined, he spun and walked back across the carpet. The plush gave beneath his boots, and he had to step up, a little, inside his tent, where the carpets were piled five deep. A gauzy silk curtain screened off his bedchamber from the front portion of his tent, and as he crossed past his writing table, he saw a lantern shining through the fine silk, and movements silhouetted like the dancing of actors against the translucent fabric.

  Like a play, he watched it unfold before him, at first in surprise and then in horror.

  Samae knelt at the foot of his bed. Laissa, standing, extended her arm and offered the slave girl a cup. She said: “Drink this.” Samae took the cup and drank it down without hesitation.

  Jiroannes lunged forward and pushed past the beaded entrance into his bedchamber in time to see Samae drop the cup and clutch her throat, clawing at her neck. She gagged and gasped and choked, and her pale complexion faded to an obscene gray color. One hand groped out. She grasped at the drapery ringing the bed, but the fine silk fabric slipped through her fingers and she fell, retching, but all that emerged from her mouth was a hoarse, rattling sound.

  She gasped and choked out three words. “He is safe.” As she doubled over, the embroidered quilt caught on her bronze slave’s bracelet and slid down off the bed, half over, half under her. She lay still. Her head lay cushioned on crumpled quilt. Against the fine white silk embroidered with red leopards and blue peacocks outlined in gold, her black hair made a stark line, like coarse, unraveled thread.