Earthly Crown (52 page)

That evening he called Lal to help him undress. And though his blood was hot, stimulated by the fear and the tension of the day, he could not bring himself to summon Samae to his bed.

T
HE HILLS ABOVE QURAT
had a torrid beauty dimmed and softened now in the cool light of dawn. Terraces angled down to the mudbrick walls of the city. Above the fields, parched trees and grasses grew along slopes alternately steep and gentle. Two riders negotiated a streambed dried out by the summer’s heat and walked their horses at a sedate pace along a sere hillside. They rode alone, except for the three riders—one man, two women archers—riding about fifty paces behind them, and the ring of riders two hundred strong that circled them an arrow’s shot away.

“It used to be,” said Bakhtiian, reining his stallion around a dead log, “that I could take you out alone onto the grass and lie with you under the stars. Now—” He glanced to his left, where riders appeared and disappeared between distant trees, their red shirts a flag.

“When did we ever do that?” Tess asked. “Grass is an uncomfortable bed, if you ask me, and in any case, by the time we married, you were already well on your way to needing an escort whenever you left camp.”

He smiled. “No, you’re quite right. It wasn’t you. I was much younger and more impulsive. It must have been Inessa Kireyevsky.”

“More
impulsive?”

He laughed.

“Kireyevsky,” she mused. “I don’t know that name.”

“The Kireyevsky tribe is one of the granddaughters of the Vershinin tribe. Inessa was the only daughter of their etsana—”

“Of course. Was she married?”

“No.”

“Did you think of marrying her?”

Kriye pranced as Zhashi came up beside him, and Ilya reined him in. Zhashi flattened her ears, and for an instant Tess thought the mare might kick; instead, Zhashi ostentatiously lowered her head to graze. Ilya chuckled.

“Any man thinks of marrying, when he’s young. But I hadn’t been back from Jeds for that many years, and I had so much I wanted to do. I didn’t have time to marry.”

Tess studied him. Four years ago, she had been thrown together with him and his tribe. Four years ago, her life had changed utterly, and she did not regret what she had left behind. Not when he smiled at her as he did now. It was not that the essential core of restlessness, of ambition, in him was stilled by her presence: that had not changed in the least. But before their marriage a discontent, an uncertain temper, had worried at him constantly, wearing him away. That was gone now. Not muted, not faded, but quite simply gone. It had vanished the day he had marked her, and she had marked him. And to know that one had that effect on a person, especially on a personality as powerful as Ilya’s—well, it would have taken a stronger person than she was to resist the urge to stay.

He was in a mellow mood. She took in a deep breath. It was time to test the waters. “Vasil still rode with your jahar, back then,” she added.

His smile evaporated. “Vasil never learned how to let go of what was no longer his.”

Encouraging, but not an answer. “How long have you known Vasil?”

His whole expression shuttered. “I do not wish—”

“To speak of him. I know.”
And neither do I, but the truth has to be faced, by me, and by you.
“You’re very like Charles in some ways, keeping things to yourself, never sharing them with others. Ilya, if you don’t wish to speak of Vasil with me, then that is your right, but I think you ought to speak to someone about him. It’s eating away at you inside. Dr. Hierakis—”

“Dr. Hierakis? I think not.”

“Niko. No. I can see from your expression that he was too close to whatever happened. Do you know Vasil named his daughter after you?”

“Yes,” he said. For a jaran man, he certainly knew how to construct formidable walls.

Tess sighed, having used up her stores of courage for the day. She started Zhashi forward again. “What shall we name this one?” Her fingers brushed her abdomen, which had barely begun to swell.

His face relaxed, now that he saw she was willing to let the subject drop. “If it’s a girl, Natalia, after my sister.”

“Then Yurinya, if it’s a boy.”

“Agreed.” His voice dropped. “Oh, Tess. I was afraid we would never have a child. I have always wanted to have children of my own.”

Tess chuckled. “After lying with Inessa Kireyevsky out in the grass, and God knows what other women, you might well have some children.”

He shook his head, looking puzzled, and reined Kriye back as they came up to a stand of red-barked trees crowned with a sprinkling of thin leaves. “How could I have children, Tess? I wasn’t married.”

“But Ilya, you know very well that you
could
have gotten a child on some woman.”

“Yes, and in Jeds that child would be called a bastard. But here, the man she was married to would be its father, not me. And that is as it should be.”

From here, Tess could see far below, in miniature, the golden domes and minarets of Qurat, and the square citadel in the northwest corner of the city. “How much longer do we wait here?”

He studied the terrain. Although they overlooked the city here, they were much too far away to do any damage even with missile fire. Beyond the city lay the plateau and the huge camp of the jaran army, scattered out to the horizon. A thin line of river shone in the farthest distance; above it, clouds laced the sky. Closer, to the west, a narrow valley shot up into the mountains: the pass that led into the heart of the Habakar kingdom.

“I had hoped to draw them out. With the strength of the Habakar army still in front of us, I don’t want to leave this city behind untaken, not at such a strategic site. But we have now taken control of every city on this plateau but Qurat, and we must move forward.” He shrugged. “We shall see.”

“Look there. A rider is coming up.”

He sighed and reached out to grasp her hand and, drawing it up to his lips, to kiss her palm. Then he let her go. “It seems we have had our quiet for the day. Come, we’ll go meet him.”

The rider wore bells, and he was mounted on a fresh horse from the camp below. Aleksi and the two archers—Valye Usova and Anatoly’s sister Shura—joined them, and the circle of riders closed in to form into ranks around Bakhtiian. They parted to let the messenger through.

“Bakhtiian! The Habakar king is marching with a large army through the western pass toward our position.”

“Ah. So I did draw someone out. Good. How long?”

“One day. Two, perhaps. They’re slow, on the march.”

Ilya nodded. His expression closed up, becoming remote from Tess, from his companions, from everything except the matter at hand. “A council,” he said to the messenger. “You ride to the Sakhalin camp. Aleksi, get me Vershinin and Grekov. All the dyans to my camp.” The sun crept up ever higher in the sky, and Tess could see that it would be another hot day.

Another dawn. Two riders sat side by side on a slope overlooking a river and beyond it the far distant walls of Qurat and the hills and mountains behind. Where once had lain the camp of the jaran, filling the flat ground between as water fills a lakebed, now two armies moved, restless, falling into position. To the west, where the pass opened out onto Qurat’s plateau, the last of a stream of wagons, the Habakar supply line, trundled in toward the city, which had opened its gates now that the jaran had given up the ground before its walls. To the northeast, on the other side of the shallow river from the armies, huge squares of wagons had formed, making a mobile fortress of the jaran camp. Behind the two riders, along the ridgetop, a thousand horsemen waited, watching.

“Anatoly is furious,” said Tess. “He wanted to ride in the battle, not watch it from up here as part of my escort.”

Aleksi glanced up at the line of riders a stone’s throw above them. Because Anatoly’s jahar was lightly armored, red was still the dominant color of the line, diluted with the dull gleam of armor and accented by red ribbons tied to their lances. Scattered within the red line, the archers wore many different colors. “Anatoly is a fine commander, but he has yet to learn that battle is not the only way for a man to gain honor.”

“Aleksi, you can’t be any older than Anatoly. How have you gained this knowledge?”

She grinned at him, but Aleksi pondered the question, frowning. He patted his fine gray mare on the withers. Bakhtiian had given him the horse when Tess had adopted him as her brother. The irony still amused Aleksi, in a black kind of way. Tess had quite literally saved him from death; she had stopped the Mirsky brothers from killing him for the crime of stealing a horse from their tribe, a crime which it was quite true he had committed and deserved to die for. And in return, he, who deserved nothing, had gotten everything: a sister, a tent, a family, and a tribe. And this fine gray khuhaylan mare, who was a finer horse than anything the Mirsky tribe had ever owned. Certainly she was a far finer animal than the broken-down old tarpan he had stolen after Vyacheslav Mirsky had finally died. He would never have stolen a horse, but he needed to leave the tribe quickly, before they took away from him—the damned orphan the old man had taken in—the few but precious gifts Vyacheslav had given him.

“Tess,” he said finally, seriously, “though no one ever disputed how good I was with the saber, did that bring me honor? No, because I was an orphan. Even at Bakhalo’s school, though I won every contest, still, I had no standing. It seems to me that fighting in a battle can only bring a man honor if he already has honor from his family.”

Tess watched him, looking thoughtful. It was one of the things Aleksi loved about her. He had never been part of any tribe, not since he was very young, a little older than Kolia, perhaps, and his whole tribe had been killed by khaja raiders. The gods might as well have swept a plague over them, it was so sudden and so complete. All had gone, all but him and his older sister Anastasia. After that, the two of them had struggled along, always on the outside, sometimes tolerated, sometimes driven away, but Aleksi had learned to watch and guess and analyze, and in the end he had discovered that he did not see the world the same as other jaran did. But Tess never thought he was strange for that. Because Tess did not see the world the same, either.

“But Anatoly,” said Tess, “has a burden to bear as well, being the eldest grandchild of Mother Sakhalin. He wishes to prove himself worthy of his place.”

“It makes sense, in a way, that he married the khaja woman. That sets him apart, like it does Bakhtiian.”

“Anatoly should have married a khaja princess then. He married to please himself. Certainly not to please his grandmother, who wanted him to marry Galina.”

“Galina!”

“She’s young, but in another two or three years…it would have been a good match, marrying him into Bakhtiian’s family.”

“It’s true,” said Aleksi, “that although Sakhalin is the eldest tribe, and first among all the tribes, Bakhtiian stands highest now.”

“I wonder which of the daughter tribes your tribe descended from, Aleksi.”

He did not want to think about it, but he managed a calm reply, to please Tess. “I don’t know. I don’t remember much of anything really, except that I had an aunt named Marina.”

“And a sister, Anastasia.” She said it softly.

Too horrible. It was too horrible to think of her. “Look,” he said, pointing. “They’re moving.”

A moment later he realized his mistake. The color drained from Tess’s face, and she clenched her left hand into a fist. Her lips pressed together. A single tear slid down her face. She had been talking to keep from thinking about what was going on below. Now he had hurt her.

“Why the hell,” she said in a fierce undertone, “did he have to take the center for himself? Couldn’t Sakhalin have commanded the center?”

“Tess. Look out there.” Surely even in the face of her fear, Tess understood the demands of honor. “That is the Habakar king. Bakhtiian
had
to take the field personally.”

The ground sloped down from the hooves of their horses to the river, and across the river the jaran army massed opposite the Habakar legions. Banners sprouted up here and there, marking units. To the rear of the Habakar center a veritable forest of pennons and flags marked the king’s own guard, who all wore gold surcoats and who were mounted on gray horses harnessed with gold. Opposite the Habakar center massed the jaran center, which was distinguished only by a plain gold banner out slightly in advance of the front ranks.

“Gods,” said Aleksi, “surely Bakhtiian isn’t going to lead the charge?” Seeing Tess’s anguished face, he lapsed into silence. There was nothing they could do from this distance, not now. But the gold banner simply rode along the jaran lines, surveying them and surveying the enemy, and came back again, and the center parted to let it through to the rear.

Drums beat. Like the sudden strike of a snake, the two flanking units of the jaran army sprang into action. They swept obliquely, swinging wide to hit the ends of the Habakar line with the middle of their units. The center moved forward to engage their Habakar opposites, and the jaran reserve, marked by Bakhtiian’s golden banner, moved forward with them, but stayed behind the back ranks.

“I feel sick,” said Tess.

On the left flank, Sakhalin hit hard. Immediately the Habakar line began to give way, shrinking back as Sakhalin’s riders curled around the end. Stragglers trailed off from the back of the enemy line. But Vershinin was not so lucky. The Habakar flank shifted to receive his attack, and the engagement deteriorated into chaos. Sheets of arrows blurred the scene at intervals, like a cloud’s shadow.

“They’re all on foot in the middle ranks of the khaja army,” said Aleksi, trying anything to keep Tess from making herself ill with dread. “What’s that called?”

“Infantry.”

“Yes. By their colors it looks like there are two units of them, green and blue, with the king and his mounted guard behind. Why aren’t they reacting? Sakhalin is pressing, but I don’t know if Vershinin can hold. What does Bakhtiian mean to do?”

All was confusion in the center, with the jaran lines and the Habakar lines intermingling. A pall like smoke hung over the battlefield, waxing and waning: dust thrown into the air.