The Novels of the Jaran (298 page)

He leaned over toward Branwen and whispered the idea in her ear, and she noted it down on her slate. Realizing that everyone else was watching him, he turned back to Soerensen.

“Are you suggesting,” he said, “that I learn more about the League, about these worlds and the Empire itself, before I try to bring Rhui into it?”

Soerensen smiled, touched with irony, and Anatoly saw that while Charles Soerensen did not like relinquishing the power he had gained, that he was willing to, or at least, willing to share it. “That had been my intention all along,” said Soerensen. “Rhui has valuable natural resources. The Chapalii cannot interfere on her because she is interdicted. Therefore, she makes a good base for planning a revolt against the empire.”

“Why do you want to revolt against the empire? I always meant to ask that. The Chapalii do not rule you harshly. They leave you your own parliament for local matters, your lives are stable, and you go about your business much as you did before. What is wrong with that?”

Soerensen stood up, speaking down toward the table. “Call up a two-dimensional map of Rhui, continent A. Blush all territories known to be in the control of the jaran.”

Anatoly knew the map well, the great gulf that marked the northern sea, the spine of mountains that girdled the central mass of the continent, two delicate peninsulas to the southeast, and the large island in the southern sea that was home to the mysterious Byblos civilization, known only through the ancient scrolls and occasional merchant. He had met one, once, many years ago when he was hunting down the king of Habakar. He had bought an old scroll off him, but later lost it.

The red blush marking the territories of the jaran consumed about one fifth of the continent, nestled in the central territories and advancing toward the periphery.

“Do you suppose,” asked Soerensen conversationally, “that the khaja princes overrun by the jaran will give up their power willingly and happily? Do you suppose that their sons and daughters, however justly ruled they might be, will not listen to an old nurse’s story of how once they ruled themselves, and think that they could again? When you first came off Rhui, M. Sakhalin, you fell in with our plans swiftly enough. You did not want to be subject to the Chapalii Empire, nor have your people be subject to it. What has changed?”

The barrister Tobias Black was wrong about one thing: Charles Soerensen knew he had power, and he had come to like having it. Yet, at the same time, he might genuinely want only to further the interest of the human race rather than his own. Self and community, opposed and yet balanced.

“I have changed,” said Anatoly. “I have what Bakhtiian wanted all along. I have achieved his vision, that which he began, that the jaran rule over all the khaja lands. Why should I not lift my people up to meet their destiny?”

“At the expense of all the others?”

“Why should I care about them?” Anatoly asked bitterly. “They are only khaja. They have only caused me pain.”

“I told you it was a mistake,” muttered Maggie O’Neill. “You should have had the conference first and let him meet his wife afterward.”

His wife.
Not to be his wife any longer.

“At the expense of Bakhtiian?” asked Soerensen.

“Bakhtiian?” The question startled him, but as soon as he faced it squarely he knew that Soerensen spoke the truth. Even if the emperor would recognize Bakhtiian as a prince—and if any man had the power of a great prince, that man was Bakhtiian—there were only ten princes in the Empire, and all ten now had names again, since he had come into the inheritance of the missing prince. “It is true,” he said slowly, “that despite my great respect for Bakhtiian, I do not intend to give him what I now have, nor will I relinquish my position in his favor. Why should I? Giving it would be insulting to him in any case. And while it is true that, like a Singer, the gods granted him a vision, they did not promise that he would be the one to achieve it. Anyway,” he added thoughtfully, looking Soerensen straight in the eye, “if Bakhtiian came to space, to these worlds beyond,
he
would want to become emperor. He would die before he admitted it could not be done.”

“You think he could not do it?”

“With what army? With what tools? This place is very different from the plains, as you yourself also know. Horses cannot ride the oceans between the worlds. Sabers cannot defeat…” But there he halted. “It is true that in everything I have read, all the images I have scrolled through, that you know very little about the Chapalii army.”

“We’re not sure they
have
an army, as we know of one. Only that when they use force, they use it sparingly and ruthlessly, and that their weapons are more powerful than those we brought to bear on them.”

Anatoly looked at Branwen. “Note that down. That is something else we will have to investigate.” He stood up and walked to the wall, splaying his hands on the cool glass, slightly moist inside from the humidity of their breathing.

“Papa?” Portia appeared from behind the stairwell wall, sleepy-eyed, and padded over to him. He gathered her up into his arms and turned to survey the people seated at the table. Soerensen still stood. “You are right,” he said finally, reluctantly. “I can’t go to Rhui yet. I have to consolidate my position here first. I have to understand what I have, what I don’t have, and what I can do with it. So I leave you, Charles Soerensen, with your lands and your authority intact, and I trust you will continue to advise me without concern for whether I care to hear what you have to say. As for the rest of you, I mean that as well.” Portia tucked her head into the crook of his neck and stuck two fingers in her mouth to suck on, eyes open, watchful. She was warm and solid. He wrapped her a little closer into his embrace. Be damned to jaran tradition, he thought suddenly, where the child always stayed with its mother. He would keep her beside him and raise her—let her see her mother, of course, that was only fair—but he would not give her up.

Branwen and the barrister closed their slates. They all rose, made small talk, and one by one left the room, bodies and then heads receding down the curved staircase. Soerensen lingered, staying beside the table.

“There is one other question I’d like to ask,” he said.

“What is that?” Anatoly shifted Portia on his hip.

She turned her head to look out over the tule flats. “Look, Papa. Look. There’s a boat.”

“Why did the emperor make you a prince?”

“And you only a duke?” Anatoly smiled, to take the sting out of the words. “I don’t know. Wasn’t it after you became a duke that the tenth princely house was… what do they call it? It was erased?”

“Made extinct.”

“Yes. But in any case, you weren’t brought before the emperor.”

“But I was. I was brought into a great hall, lined with columns and floored with white tile. There were many Chapalii there, nobles, I supposed at the time, and I believed I supposed rightly. At one end of the hall rested a gilded throne, and when the emperor appeared on this throne, they knelt, and so I followed suit. After that, I was named a duke.”

“Ah.” Anatoly walked around the curve of the room toward the stairwell, and Soerensen turned slowly to keep facing him. “That is why you are only a duke. Women and princes need bow before no man, nor Singers before anyone but the gods.”

“When is Mama coming back?” asked Portia while they were eating dinner, and he didn’t know what to say to her. Nothing in his life had trained him for this.
She is never coming back.
That was what he wanted to say, spitefully, but he could not say it to Portia, who would not understand.

He tucked her into the bed next to which he had set up a cot for himself and told her a story about the jaran, how a hawk had warned a little girl and boy, a brother and sister, of an avalanche, and so saved their tribe.

“Can birds talk? Birds can’t talk.”

“Singers can understand the speech of birds because they are touched by the gods. That little girl and boy became Singers, and birds became sacred to the jaran.”

“Mama taught me how to sing,” she said brightly.

He had to turn away, so she wouldn’t see the tears that came to his eyes. “Yes. Would you like to hear another story?” Knowing she would. “A long time ago, when I was a boy, my sister Shura was just the same age as you are now. One morning she wanted to go riding with me and the older boys, but we didn’t want her along with us. So she—” So she had somehow gotten up onto a pony and ridden out after them, and when it had been discovered that she was missing, there had been such a wild clamor and he and his friends had gotten into such trouble for not watching over her and the whole tribe had searched frantically for the whole day only to find her at sunset sitting by a stream contentedly eating from a berry patch while her pony grazed faithfully beside her….

But Portia was asleep.

He sat beside her for a long while, a hand resting lightly on her hair, watching the rise and fall of her breathing, studying the curve of her face, her lashes, the simple beauty of a child peacefully sleeping.

A child needs a mother. A man needs a wife or a sister or a mother or aunt, to whose tent he returns. Now he had nothing, only borrowed rooms, no tent, no home. Repose deserted him. He stood up, stroked up a faint illumination from the door panel, in case she woke up, and left the room. At the outer edge of the palace, a promenade overlooked the tule flats. Clouds covered the stars. The barest mist spattered the deck, and he held onto a railing and stared out into the last remains of daylight, the gray flats receding on and on until they were lost in sea and horizon and the gathering darkness.

It had been a mistake to marry a khaja woman. His grandmother had told him that all along. But she had wanted him to marry Baron Santer’s daughter, in Jeds, so perhaps it was only Diana she had disliked. It was true that it was dangerous to marry a Singer. They had their own ways, their own calling, and the gods might lure them away at any moment.

I’ve fallen in love with another man whose life and interests…
That was not a calling from the gods. That was just selfishness.

The wind turned and hit him in the face, bringing with it the smell of salt and of things left rotting, untended among the reeds.

But Diana had already left him once. She had told him plainly enough that she had her world, and he his. He had written to her, finally, unable to endure without her company—or perhaps it would be fairer to say that although he did truly miss her he wanted to prove to his grandmother, to the tribes, that it had not been a mistake for him to marry her. He had written, asking her to make a final judgment, that if she wanted him to, he would willingly leave the tribes, the army, to come to her.

But he had left the tribes, he had left Rhui, before he had received her answer. Now, finally, staring into the lowering night, he wondered what that answer would have been.

A door soughed open, blending with the murmur of gentle waves on the pilings below. He turned to see Branwen come out onto the promenade.

“Want company?” she asked.

He regarded her for a few moments, silent. She was an attractive woman, competent, smart, and a good companion. But she was not Diana. He respected her, but he could not love her. Nor did she expect him to. “No, thank you,” he replied politely.

She smiled slightly, lifted a hand in acknowledgment, and retreated back through the door.

Ah, gods, how he wanted a family. He liked the crew of the
Gray Raven
, but they were his jahar, not his family; they might in time become friends, comrades, but that was not the same. If only Shura was here….

Why not? He had not yet heard, in the twice-yearly letter she sent him through convoluted channels, that she had married. She had stayed with the army all this time, as a scribe and interpreter. Why shouldn’t she leave Rhui and come to him? One person would make no difference.

But Charles Soerensen was right, too. Shura would be alone out here, with a brother but no sisters or female cousins or aunts. Was that fair to her?

Then, like a flare in the heavens, a sudden, piercing image of Ilyana Arkhanov burned before him and vanished. A jaran girl. Sixteen, or perhaps she was seventeen by now. That was a proper age for a girl to get married. She loved Portia already, and she could bring Evdokia with her, to be Portia’s companion. Diana had abandoned him. It would serve her right if he turned around and took a new wife. A beautiful wife. Young, one who would want children.

“Damn it,” he muttered, knowing it was unfair, and just plain mean, to marry Ilyana only to spite Diana. But he could travel to Naroshi’s planet, to see her. Who would stop him?

He could send a message to Rhui, asking Shura to come to him. He could do anything he damned well pleased.

Fortified by this thought, he went back inside, stopped beside a wall panel, and called up a route to the communications center. It lay in the south wing, perpendicular to the massive greenhouse wing, buried under an astonishingly ugly rococo hall that Soerensen used for receptions of his least favored guests.

Maggie O’Neill and three techs sat in stylish chairs, scattered around the room like islands in a sea of muted gray consoles and several tables which displayed above their flat black surfaces rotating three-dimensional images of Rhui, of Odys, and of the Delta Pavonis solar system. Two long screens on opposite walls displayed two-dee images of landscapes, one from Earth that Anatoly recognized, a mountain-scape of the Alps, and another from the sand pillar swamp of Tao Ceti Tierce. On a third wall a stellar chart glittered, seeming to sink three dimensionally into the emptiness beyond, even though Anatoly knew it was a trick of the projection itself.

Maggie jumped up and hurried over to him. “Heyo. What can I do for you? Are you here to start through that backlog of messages? If you turned each one into scroll and stacked them up around you, you’d have to wade hip-deep to get out of here. But you’ll get used to it.” She grinned.

He nodded politely. “No. That can wait. I want to put a call through to Jeds and Sarai. I want Tess Soerensen to locate my sister Shura.”