Earthly Crown (70 page)

Ilya shifted and suddenly he changed. All this night he had been astonishingly passive, going along with the choice Tess and Vasil had made as if he followed some long-set pattern, pursued acquiescing to his pursuer. As if that was how it had been before, between him and Vasil. Now he placed a hand on Vasil’s chest and gently, with finality, pushed him away. “But it can’t happen again,” he said quietly. “You know that.”

Startled, Vasil glared at him. “Why not? She said there were marriages like this, in that khaja land.” He reached out to Ilya’s face and splayed his fingers along the line of Ilya’s jaw. With his thumb, he traced the diagonal scar up Ilya’s cheek. “You are the only man marked for marriage in all the tribes.”

“Oh, God,” said Tess, recalling that moment vividly now. “And I was wearing your clothes and using your saber when I did it.”

“So it is true,” said Vasil triumphantly. “Can you deny it?”

Ilya closed a hand over Vasil’s wrist and drew Vasil’s hand away from his face, then released it. “It is also true that not twelve days ago a rider named Yevgeni Usova was banished from the army for lying with another man, with one of the actors. Shall I judge myself less severely than he was judged?”

“I was sorry to hear about Yevgeni,” said Vasil carelessly. “But he was stupid enough to get caught.”

“So we are to be allowed to continue as long as we are not caught? I think not, Vasil. I must be more holy than the riders I command, not less. Nothing else is just.”

Vasil looked annoyed, as if he had not expected this turn of events. “So that is why after your family was killed, after the tribes agreed to follow you, you threw me out? That is why you stopped getting drunk? I remember after you came back from Jeds, how many women used to ask you to their beds and how very often you went. It is true, what I heard later, that you rarely lay with women afterward? After your family was killed? After I was banished? Were you punishing yourself? Is there a single piece of gold in this tent from any of the khaja cities your army has conquered? Once you questioned everything, you demanded to know why the jaran had to live as our grandmothers and grandfathers and their grandparents had lived, as the First Tribes had lived. Now you are the most conservative of all. Do you know who you remind me of? You remind me of the man who killed your mother and sister. You remind me of Khara Roskhel.”

For an instant Ilya’s anger blazed off him so strongly that he seemed to add light to the room. Then, as suddenly, he jerked his head to one side, to stare at the curtained wall that separated the inner from the outer chamber. “He was pure,” he said in a low voice.

“And you are not? Because of me?” Vasil’s tone was scathing.

Ilya hesitated. Tess had a sudden instinct that Ilya wanted to say “Yes, because of you,” but that because he did not believe it himself, he could not bring himself to lie.

“Roskhel always supported you, Ilya,” said Vasil, his voice dropping. “When we got to the great gathering of tribes, that summer eleven years ago, when we rode in to the encampment, he supported you. And then, the day you stood up in front of the elders of the tribes to tell them of your vision, he was gone. What happened there to turn him against you? Did he and your mother quarrel?”

The silence following this question became so profound that Tess heard, from outside, the bleating of startled goats. Tess realized that she was cold, and she wrapped a blanket around her torso. Vasil did not move, staring at Ilya.

“Yes,” said Ilya in a clipped tone. He would not look at either of them. “Go, Vasil. You must go.”

“Ilya.” Vasil extended a hand toward Ilya, tentatively, like a supplicant. The gesture seemed odd in him, and yet, seeing it, Tess felt heartened. “You have always had such great visions, ever since you were a boy. What I want seems so small beside it.”

“Yet what you want is impossible.”

“It is because I’m dyan? I’ll give it back to Anton. I never wanted it except to get close to you.”

“You know that’s not the reason.”

“But I have children, and a wife. You have a wife, and soon you’ll have children as well. What is to stop us continuing on like this?”

“You will never understand, Vasil. Only what I granted to the gods and to the jaran, that I lead us to the ends of the earth if need be, if that is our destiny. You aren’t part of that vision. You can’t be, by our own laws. I banished you once. I’ve already made that choice. Don’t force me to do it again. Because I will.”

“Damn you.” Vasil rose abruptly, anger hot in his face. “I would have made a different choice.”

Ilya’s weight of authority lent him dignity and a sheer magnitude of presence that so eclipsed Vasil’s beauty and charisma that Tess suddenly understood the desperate quality in Vasil’s love for Ilya. “You are not me. The gods have touched me. Through my father and my mother, the gods chose to bring me here, so that I might act as their instrument. My first duty will always be to their calling.”

“What about her?” Vasil asked bitterly, gesturing with a jerk of his head toward Tess.

“Tess knows the worth of my love for her.”

“Yes,” said Tess in a quiet voice, seeing how Ilya’s shoulders trembled with emotion, and fatigue. “I do know the worth of his love for me. Vasil, you know what the answer is. You must have always known it. Why couldn’t you have taken this night as a gift and let it go?”

She could not tell if Vasil heard her. But then, whenever Ilya was near him, the greatest part of his attention had always been reserved for Bakhtiian, no matter how much he might seem to be playing to others. “Let it be my curse to you, then,” said Vasil, “that you always know that I have always and will always love you more than anything.” He spun on his heel and strode out, thrusting the curtain aside so roughly that it tumbled back into place behind him.

“Oh, gods,” said Ilya, not moving. He watched the curtain sway.

“You don’t think he’ll try to get caught on purpose—?”

“No. He knows I’ll have to kill him. Whatever he may say, he loves his own life more than he loves me.”

“Ilya.” She reached for him. He flinched away from her. She stopped dead, and then pulled back her hand. He had never rejected her before, not like this. God, what if he really did love Vasil more than he loved her? What if she had misinterpreted the brief scene played out between them? But watching him as he sat there strung as tight as a bow, edged as sharp as any saber, she knew beyond anything else that he hurt. His pain distressed her more than the knowledge—which could no longer be denied—that he did in fact love Vasil and had for many years. Ilya was not rejecting
her;
he was rejecting himself, and thus anything that loved him and might yet scorn him for what he had revealed himself to be.

“I’m a damned hypocrite,” he said in Rhuian. The curtain had ceased swaying, but he still stared at it.

Tess made a brief laugh in her throat. “Ah, Bakhtiian returns to the lands of the mortals. How unique you are. I’m sure you’re the only person afflicted with hypocrisy.”

He twisted around to glare at her. “You don’t understand what that means!”

“What? That you’re not perfect? But I’ve known that for a long time.” She could see by his expression that she was offending him, so she continued gleefully. “Of course! Why didn’t I ever see it before? Yuri always said so, that you thought you had to be the best. Kirill said it, too: that you always had to win. I didn’t see then that it also meant that you had to be the purest one, the one with no flaws, no stain on your spirit, the one who never committed the slightest offense or the least impolite exchange. Do you know how boring that kind of person is? Why, I’m relieved to see that you’re flawed like the rest of us. Even if it’s only with so common a sin as hypocrisy.”

“How dare you laugh at me!” He looked livid with anger.

“Because you won’t laugh at yourself. Someone must. Since I’m your wife, I’ve been granted that dubious honor.”

“The gods do not grant their gifts lightly, Tess,” he said stiffly, “and with that gift comes a burden.”

“Yes, a burden greater than that any other person has to bear. I’m well aware of it. I’m aware of it constantly, and it’s beginning to weary me. It may even be true, but that still doesn’t mean that you’re any different than the rest of us. That you’re any better.”

“No,” he said softly, still not looking at her, “I am worse.”

“Oh, Ilya.” This time when she leaned across to touch him, he sat motionless under her hands, neither responding to her nor retreating from her. As he had with Vasil. “You must know that I don’t think it’s wrong for you to love him. Only that I—” She hesitated. Their bed was a wild landscape of rumpled blankets, stripes and patterns muted in the lantern light, of furs thrown into topographical relief, mountains and valleys and long ridges and the far mound of her toes, of pillows, one shoved up against the far wall, two flung together at the head of the bed, more scattered beyond Ilya, and of his clothing, littering the carpet beyond. One boot listed against a stray pillow. His belt curled around the other boot, snaring it.

He said nothing, but his silence was expectant, and courageous, too; how easily he might think it would be natural for her to repudiate him, based on the morals of his culture, faced with what she now knew of him.

“He’s just so damned beautiful,” she said at last, afraid to say it, “that I can’t help but think that—that anyone would love him more than … me….” She faltered.

“Tess!” He spun back to her, upsetting her balance. She tumbled over and landed on her back, half laughing, half shocked, in the middle of the bed. “You’re
jealous
of him!”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” she demanded, rolling up onto her side. He rested on his elbows a handbreadth from her, staring astonished at her. “You’ve known him a long time, much longer than you’ve known me. It’s obvious you still love him. All that keeps you apart is that the jaran don’t recognize, don’t accept, that kind of love.”

“That is not all that keeps us apart, my heart,” he replied gravely, but humor glinted in his eyes as well. “I loved him with a boy’s awkward, headlong passion. But you,” his gaze had the intensity of fire on a bitter cold night. “You I love like…” He shook his head, impatient with words. When he spoke again, he spoke in his autocratic tone, one that brooked no disagreement. “You, I love.” As if daring her to take issue with the statement or the nakedly clear emotion that burned off of him.

Tess was wise enough simply to warm herself in the blaze, and vain enough to be gratified by it. She had heard what she had hoped to hear, and she knew him well enough by now to know he spoke the truth. Vasil was certainly more beautiful than she was, or could hope to be, but he was also the most self-centered person she had ever met. And she suspected that Vasil’s attraction to Ilya was likely not so much to Ilya as a person, as Ilya, but to Ilya as the gods-touched child, to Bakhtiian, the man with fire in his heart and a vision at the heart of his spirit.

“Still,” she asked suddenly, “if it was possible, would that tempt you? A triad marriage?”

He rolled his eyes and sat up, sighing with exasperation. “All you women ever think about is lying with men.” He surveyed the remains of the bed with disgust and rose and set to work straightening out the blankets and placing the pillows back in their appointed spots.

“But would it?”

His lips twitched. “I don’t know,” he said at last, flinging the last stray pillow at her, which she caught. He picked up his boots and his belt and folded his clothes in exactly the same order and with the same precise corners that he always folded them. She admired him from this angle, the clean lines of his body, the length of thigh, his flat belly and what lay below, the curve of his shoulders, his lips, the dark shadow of his luxuriant hair, tipped with sweat. He was a little thin yet, from the sickness, but that would pass. He sank down beside her, cross-legged, and considered her with a frown. “Does it tempt you?”

She sat up as well and shrugged. “Not really. I wonder if there’s anything there, in him, past his undoubted beauty. Tell me about him.”

He considered her. After a moment he slid in under the blankets and covered them both up. She lay on her right side, angling one leg up over his legs. But her belly, not yet large enough to need a pillow for support, still needed something. She shifted and grimaced; he turned by degrees until she found a comfortable position. She sighed and slid her shoulder in under his arm and rested her head on his warm shoulder. He lay on his back, with one hand tucked under his head and the other curled up around her back, fingers delicate on her skin.

“I was a singularly unattractive boy,” he said at last, musing. “I was awkward. I was a dreamer, and I had strange ideas and stranger curiosities. I was also afflicted with—” He sighed. She had one hand tucked down under her belly, knuckles brushing his hip; her other hand rested on his chest, so she felt the force of the sigh under her fingers. “—very sudden and very strong desires, that winter, and no girl in any tribe we met that season had the least interest in me. Why should they? I was odd, and ugly. Then Vasil arrived. We were both passionate in our youthful desires.”

“What was yours? Or was it only—”

He chuckled. “No, no, it was both. The physical craving was strong enough, but never as strong as the other: I wanted to know everything.”

“Then what was Vasil’s?”

“I suppose I was. Vasil was radiant. He was beautiful. Girls followed him. They asked him everything they never asked me. They paid him as much attention as they paid the young men who had made a name for themselves riding with the jahar. I don’t know why he chose me.”

“Perhaps he saw what you would become.”

Silence shuttered them. Tess felt as if she could hear the sound of the blankets settling in around them, caving in with excruciating slowness to fill the empty space left by the curves and angles of their intertwined bodies.

“He believed in me when no one else did,” said Ilya, almost wonderingly, as if that moment of revelation, of the adolescent boy revealing with reckless daring his wild vision only to find that his listener did not scorn or laugh but rather embraced him, had set its mark so fast and deep upon his spirit that it had branded him forever.