Earthly Crown (23 page)

“You’re looking well, Tess.” David sat down beside her. He smiled, awkward, and Tess was so thankful for the sight of a familiar and unthreatening face that she smiled warmly back at him. “You’re looking very—” He hesitated. “Very well. Very different.”

“Thank you, David. It’s been a long time. You’re looking well yourself. Lord, it sounds strange to hear myself speaking Anglais after all this time.”

“How do you like it out here?”

He was kind, really, to make this kind of small talk, to try to set her at ease. But David had always been kind, and Tess recalled his sojourn at Prague, their six-months-long love affair with fondness for what he had given her: confidence that she was attractive in and of herself. Without him, she might have spent her whole life believing that any least bit of attention paid her was only on account of Charles. He had recalled her to the self-respect she’d had as a child; for that, she would always be grateful to him.

“…and how did you get that scar?” David asked and, daringly, lifted a hand to touch her cheek. Tess had a sudden, vivid memory of the time they’d taken one of the ducal shuttles into Earth orbit and tried to make love in freefall. He met her gaze and she knew, immediately, that they were thinking the same thing. They both laughed.

“Sojourner warned us, didn’t she?” Tess said. “But we refused to follow her instructions. How is she, anyway? Do you know?”

“She’s doing very well. Handfasted to an aspiring young diplomat named Rene Marcus Oljaitu. After she finished her dissertation two years ago, she talked Charles into letting her and Rene apprentice to the Keinaba house.”

“Well. Good for Sojourner. Firsthand xeno experience, and they’ll be the first humans placed directly inside a Chapalii house, even if it is only a merchant house.”

“Don’t underestimate the Keinaba, Tess.” Charles placed a stool beside her and sat down. “They’re one of the richest merchant houses in the Empire.”

“But, Tess,” said David, “you never did tell me how you got that scar. In a battle?”

Others stood around them. Of course, she was the curiosity of this little gathering, the center, the focus. They’d had each other on the long journey, and now they had her. “No, it’s—” She hesitated. How to tell them: it’s what the men do when they marry their wives? Thrust in among her own people, she recalled her own reaction when she first found out about the mark of marriage. It was barbaric. It was mutilation.

What would they think of her, knowing that she had allowed herself to be mutilated? What did they think of her in any case, sitting here with her jaran clothes and her long hair braided in jaran style, looking quite jaran, except for her brown hair and green eyes and her unusual height, for a woman? Like an actor, desperately trying to live a role not meant for her.

“It’s nothing,” she said finally. Charles was looking at her approvingly. What did
he
think? That she knew better then to jeopardize his position, and her own, by revealing a marriage that would ruin her status within the Empire and perhaps cause him to face ridicule and shame? Shame, which was fatal. Or could he even imagine what the scar represented? That she had marked—mutilated—her own husband, quite against jaran custom, in return?

She didn’t belong with these people anymore, these people from her impossibly distant past.

“May I please?” Maggie dislodged David from his seat. “Tess, look at this.” She handed Tess a flat rectangle, smooth of surface, curved at its edge. “I took the abstract you wrote for Charles and applied a rather primitive translation program to it. For khush, you know.”

Tess stared at the computer slate in her hand. An illegal slate, brought downside, brought with the party. Of course Charles did not fear Ilya. He must have weapons with him, just as Cha Ishii and his Chapalii party had hidden weapons with them, four years ago, when they had made their illicit journey together across the plains with Bakhtiian and his jahar.

Then a word caught her eye. “That’s wrong.” She tapped a few keys, and found the program structure, and recoded a few lines. “No, it’s fine, Maggie, but you’re right, it’s a primitive program for this kind of translation work. And the abstract I sent to Charles was limited in and of itself, since I had to hand-write it. And it was a preliminary draft, in any case, and very rough.”

“Here, my dear.” Cara Hierakis leaned in and offered Tess a cup half-filled with some dark liquid. “I brought a good supply of Scotch with me. Will you have some?”

“Scotch?” Oh yes, Scotch.

“I suppose,” said Ursula, drifting by on the edge of the conversation, “that they drink fermented mare’s milk out here.”

Tess blinked. “At festivals. How did you know? They call it—” She took a sip of the scotch, made a face, and huddled back over the computer slate, seduced by its promise. “Oh, if I only had a modeler, I could compile a full translation model in all media, networked through…Hell, through Rhuian, Anglais—not Chapaliian, of course, the Protocol Office doesn’t let you interlink Chapaliian—Ophiuchi-Sei.”

“But we do have a modeler with us,” said Maggie.

“You do! This is wonderful!” At that moment, Tess glanced up to see that everyone was beaming at her in relief, as if they had only now been reassured that the poor misguided thing had been rescued from the barbarians intact.

At that moment, Tess decided to get drunk.

T
HAT CHARLES SEEMED WILLING
to sit by and watch his sister drink herself into oblivion appalled David. There she sat, the center of attention, tossing off the Scotch as if it were water. What drove her he did not know, but he recognized well enough the desperation the action stemmed from.

He sidled over to Diana, who was talking to Jo Singh and Rajiv on the outskirts of the group. She glanced his way, excused herself, and met him on the edge of the carpet.

“Diana, you seem skilled at creating diversions—”

She looked past his shoulder at Tess. Tess was laughing at something Cara had said even while her hand groped for her cup again. “I can see that an exit is called for.”

“Bless you, Diana. Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a angel?” She flushed abruptly and, to his surprise, looked embarrassed and unhappy. “I’m sorry. My stupid tongue.”

“No, it’s not your fault. But David, she looked so marvelous riding in on that horse, so…so competent and adventurous and confident. Did you hear the way she lit into Maggie’s program? Nicely, of course, but it’s clear she's brilliant with languages.”

David chuckled. “The Rhuian complex we all learned from was written by her at the age of twenty-one.”

Diana’s eyes widened. “Is that true? I’ve never learned a language faster than through that matrix. It made the connections so obvious. But then why is she—” She hesitated, and David could see that she very much wanted not to say anything negative about Tess Soerensen. He glanced back to see Tess shift on her stool and almost overbalance and fall off. Cara steadied her and shot Charles a meaningful glance, but Soerensen ignored her.

“I don’t know. But I remember when I won top honors from middle college and the accelerated slot to apply to the Tokyo School of Engineering—which is the most competitive, the best of the best—and they threw a big party for me at my village. I felt like a fraud, because I hadn’t worked as hard as the other kids in my region and the ones at Yaounde College. All their praise sounded cheap because I knew the truth even if they didn’t. So I got drunk.”

“That’s funny. I got admitted on my first audition at nineteen to the Royal Shakespeare Academy in London.”

“That’s young, isn’t it?”

“Very young, these days, and I always felt guilty about it. Some people accused me of having connections, but I didn’t. But then, I never wanted to do anything but theater, and lots of them had already spent time in the holos. Still.” Diana considered the party under the awning. A clot of actors had invaded, and since at least three of them—Hyacinth, Anahita, and Jean-Pierre—were already drunk, Tess did not stand out so painfully.

“Oh, I don’t mean to say that she feels like a fraud, or feels guilty, but that she feels something, and that it’s driving her to this. If you can—”

“Pull focus off of her, that’s what you want, of course.”

“Yes, that sounds right. Then I’ll ease her out and take her back to wherever it is she sleeps.”

Diana sighed. “I wonder what her life is like, with the jaran.”

David snorted. “Dirty, cold, and harsh. Don’t get any wishful illusions here.”

“They don’t seem so barbaric to me.”

“After what we’ve seen? The wounded? And Bakhtiian executing that man for rape?” David gazed out at the camp beyond, at the tents and the occasional fire, stretching out so far on either side that he could not see the end of it. He had good night vision and as he stared, he saw a single figure crouched in the gap between Soerensen’s enclave and the jaran camp, watching them. He felt cold up and down his back and then shook his head, impatient. Of course they would watch Soerensen’s camp. Why shouldn’t they?

“It’s all right.” Diana laid a hand on his elbow, a brief warmth, and removed it again. “I’ll go. Do your part, but you’ll have to be quick. What I have in mind won’t last long.”

She eased back into the throng and before David realized what she was about, she had started a loud argument with Anahita about somebody named Grusha. Anahita at any time was a formidable presence. Drunk, she was uninhibited, and David marveled as Diana applied just the right words to manipulate Anahita into dragging Charles into the argument.

David circled around and came up to Tess from behind. Cara still stood there, hovering like a protective mother. When she saw David she looked relieved. He put his hands on Tess’s shoulders.

“Come on, Tess,” he said in a low voice. “Time to go home.” Cara helped him lift her up and steer her out from under the awning and into the covering darkness between the two large tents. Tess stumbled on the level ground and swore in a foreign language.

“You’re drunk,” said David.

“I know,” she said.

“Let me help you back to your—to wherever you sleep.”

She shook her head violently, tripped over her own feet, and would have fallen if David hadn’t caught her. “No. No. I don’t want them to see me like this.” She went on, sounding angry, but she had lapsed into khush, and he couldn’t understand her.

“Cara, your tent?”

Cara frowned. “I have equipment out that’s not in place yet. Put her in your tent, and you sleep in mine.”

“Cara, we are both adults. I think we can manage to
sleep
together without—”

“David. May I remind you that we are in a foreign land, whose customs we do not know?”

“Lady in Heaven. She’s not one of them. If it was some young jaran woman…all right. All right. I’ll tuck her primly in and retire to your tent. Or Charles’s, if it comes to that. Or wherever it is Marco sleeps. I suppose you’re right, although I can’t imagine why they would care and how they would know.” Then he recalled the distant sentry. “Or, anyway, why they would care. She’s a foreigner, too, after all.”

“David.”

“I’m going.” He led the unprotesting Tess to his tent, going on a brief side trip to their portable toilet, which they were using until he could devise something more permanent. For an instant, listening outside the tiny square tent, he thought he was going to have to give Tess instructions on how to use the thing, but she emerged at last, staggering and catching onto him for balance.

He tried to talk to her. She did not reply. He was not entirely sure she understood him. She seemed morose more than anything, but at least she was not crying. David hated crying drunks. He helped her inside his tent, sealed her up inside the sleeping pouch, and retreated.

By the time he got back to Charles’s tent, the party had moved on. He could hear its remains over in the Company enclave. Hyacinth was singing an obscene song in his grating falsetto, with one of the women—Oriana, perhaps—providing the contralto descant.

Charles and Marco sat alone under the awning, in darkness. “Well?” Charles asked when David appeared.

“I’m disgusted.” David chose not to sit down.

“Yes,” said Charles. “I don’t remember Tess getting drunk habitually when she was at the university, and she certainly wasn’t particularly happy there.”

“Not with her,” snapped David. “With you. You just sat by and let it happen.”

Charles arched an eyebrow. “It is not my part to dictate Tess’s behavior.”

Marco made a noise in his throat, a short, caustic laugh. “Just her life.”

“Do I scent a mutiny?” Charles asked good-naturedly.

Marco sighed and leaned back in his chair, balancing it on the back two legs. “No. You’re right, of course. You can’t afford to lose her.”

“What the hell are you two talking about?” David demanded. “Why would you lose Tess?”

“Where is Tess?” Charles asked.

“In my tent, sleeping it off.”

Marco slammed down his chair. “David, you’d better move her. Here, or into Cara’s tent.”

“Cara wouldn’t take her. I’d hate to wake her up.”

“No, it’s fine,” said Charles. “You can sleep here, David.”

“Charles.” Marco stood. “I don’t think this is a good idea, unless you deliberately want to set up your authority against his.”

“But I do, Marco. That’s just the point. Within our encampment, we will act according to our laws. It is only once we step outside it that we acknowledge theirs. Once their laws penetrate our world, then we
have
lost Tess. Don’t you see?”

“So you’ll make a point of it now. And what about our poor David?”

“Yes,” broke in David, bewildered. “What about poor David? What are you talking about? What do jaran laws have to do with losing Tess?” He paused. “And furthermore, why are you even bothering to jockey power with Bakhtiian? He’s nothing. He’s not even important.”

Marco cast a measured glance at the jaran encampment. “Try telling that to the people whose countries he’s overrunning. Or to him, for that matter.”

“You know what I meant. I meant compared to the Chapalii Empire. To space. You haven’t answered my question.”