Earthly Crown (54 page)

Late that afternoon they reached the summit, a broad, windy height. From here, Aleksi saw the hazy outlines of land far below, fields, a miniature city, and the endless spread of land out to the blue horizon. Up here it was clear and hot, and the wind buffeted Aleksi where he stood on an outcropping staring down, far down, to the Habakar lands. Smoke rose in patches scattered across the countryside. Evidently Sakhalin’s army had already arrived.

He walked back to the front rank of wagons to find Sonia ordering that Tess’s great tent be set up, although the rest of the army was on marching orders and sleeping under wagons or out in the open for the night. The cloth walls shook and rippled, torn by the heavy wind, and Aleksi ran over to help. It took fifteen people to battle the tent into place and secure it, and even then the wind boomed and tore at the walls. They could not set up the awning at all. The gold banner, raised on the center pole, snapped loudly in the gale.

Bakhtiian watched the proceedings from horseback. He was white and his hands shook, but he did not dismount until Tess came to lead him inside. Her face, too, was white, but with an agony of the heart not of the physical body. They disappeared inside the tent. Dr. Hierakis strode up soon after and went inside. Sonia followed her in and emerged moments later,

“Aleksi! Set up your tent just beside here, and don’t leave camp.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Aleksi asked in a low voice, aware of people milling around, asking questions.

Sonia shrugged. “Vladimir says one of the Habakar priests cursed him. Perhaps it’s witchcraft.”

“Perhaps,” said Aleksi. But what if it wasn’t Habakar witchcraft? He had seen Dr. Hierakis at work, had seen that she knew how to heal wounds that even the finest jaran healers would have given up on. Everyone got sick, at times. Plagues might race through a tribe, and during the siege of Qurat, many of the jaran had gotten fevers. Children had died, as well as some of the men weakened by wounds. Why should Tess look so anguished? Bakhtiian was strong. There was no reason to think a simple fever would kill him. Unless this was not a simple fever.

Aleksi unsaddled his mare and hobbled her for the night, and set up his tent alongside Tess’s. At dusk, the wind died down. Fires were built, but with night came the strong winds again, ripping at the camp, at the tents, at the fires. Most people hunkered down to wait it out. Dr. Hierakis emerged out of the tent, alone.

Aleksi lit a lantern, shielding the flame with his body until it steadied and then sliding the glass back into place, and he offered to escort her back to her wagons.

She shook her head. “You stay here. Galina is waiting—there she is.”

“Bakhtiian?”

“He’s ill. But he seems stable. I think he’ll have a few rough days before he feels better.”

“Is it the river fever?”

She glanced at him, measuring, curious. “No, I don’t think it’s the river fever.”

“Ah,” said Aleksi. “Neither did I.”

The light spread a glow across her front, illuminating her face and the strong line of her jaw. Her black hair faded into darkness, and her plain tunic was washed gray. “You’re a strange one. Sometimes I think you see more than we know you do.”

“You speak khush very well now. You learned it quickly. The actors did, too. Have you noticed how many of their—what do they call them? Songs?”

“Plays.”

“—plays
that they’ve begun to say in khush?”

“No, I hadn’t. I haven’t seen any of their performances. Good night, Aleksi.”

“Good night, Doctor.”

She gave him a brusque but sympathetic nod and went off with Galina. Aleksi wondered how old she was. She did not look any older than, say, Bakhtiian, but she carried herself like an Elder. She carried herself like Mother Sakhalin or Niko Sibirin, and the Elders treated her like one of their own. Perhaps she, too, was a Singer, a gods-touched mortal, granted knowledge beyond her years. That might explain the Elders’ respect for her, and her own strange way of carrying on, of looking at things from afar, of measuring and watching. Like he did.

He went to bed. As he dozed off, a voice whispered at the front of his tent. He inched forward to twitch the tent flap aside. It was Raysia. Though he could only make out the outline of her form, silhouetted against the incandescent stars, he could feel it was her, knew it by the shape of her hair and the soft, clean scent she bore with her. She slipped inside. The walls of his tent shuddered in the unceasing wind, but otherwise it was silent. He fell asleep afterward with her draped half over him.

Only to start awake, hearing his name.

“Aleksi!”

Tess, calling to him. She was not screaming, not yet, but panic swelled her voice. He eased away from Raysia, and she woke, mumbling a question.

“Stay here,” he said, struggling to get dressed. He cursed himself for not sleeping with his clothes on.

“Aleksi! Oh, God.”

He grabbed his boots in his left hand and his saber in his right and crawled out of his tent and ran to hers. Tess was not in the outer chamber. A single lantern lit the inner chamber, and he found her there, rocking back and forth on her heels, staring, rocking, gasping for breath.

“Aleksi! Oh, thank the gods. Get Cara. Please.” Her voice broke.

Bakhtiian lay asleep on pillows, a fur pulled up over his naked chest. His face was slack, and his mouth half open. He looked rather undignified, sprawled out like that. Aleksi paused to pull on his boots.

“I can’t wake him up.” She choked out the words. Then she began to sob. “Oh, God, why did I do it? Why did I insist?”

“But, Tess—” Her complete disintegration shocked him horribly. “Here, let me try.” He bent over her, daring much, and shook Bakhtiian gently. No response. Then, suddenly, losing patience and hating the terrible shattering condition Tess had fallen into, he slapped him. Bakhtiian’s head absorbed the blow, moving loosely, but he did not stir in the slightest. And Aleksi understood: Bakhtiian’s spirit had left his body. He had seen it happen once before, with his own sister Anastasia, some four winters after their tribe had been obliterated. Except his sister had never come back. Her spirit had stayed in the gods’ lands, and her body had withered and, at last, died.

Like a black wave, fear and anguish smothered him. He could not move. He could not move.

“He’s going to die, Aleksi. He’s going to die.”

Brutally, Aleksi crushed the fear down, down, burying it. Then he ran to get the doctor. Dr. Hierakis was fully dressed, sleeping wrapped in a blanket beneath one of her wagons. She rose with alacrity and hurried back with him, stumbling once in the dark. A thick leather bag banged at her thigh. The wind whined and blew around them. The walls of Tess’s tent boomed and sighed as he went in behind the doctor and followed her in, all the way in, to stand silent just inside the inner chamber.

Tess talked in a stream of rapid Anglais. The doctor ran a hand over Bakhtiian’s lax face, moved his flaccid limbs. She opened her bag and brought out—things.

Aleksi effaced himself. He willed himself to become invisible, but neither of the women recalled that he was there.

Things. Objects. Aleksi did not know what else to call them, so smooth, made of no metal he recognized, if indeed it was even metal. Not a fabric, certainly, not any bone he knew of, this hand-sized block that the doctor palmed in her right hand and held out over Bakhtiian’s head. Just held it, for a long moment, doing nothing. Then she swept it slowly down over his body, uncovering him as she went. When she had done, she covered him back up again and took a flat shiny tablet and laid it on a flat stretch of carpet and said two words.

If Aleksi had not honed his self-control to the finest pitch, he would have jumped. As it was, he twitched, startled, but he made no noise. The tablet shone, sparked, and a spirit formed in the air just above it. A tiny spirit, shaped with a man’s form but in all different colors, wavering, spinning, melding. Until Aleksi realized that it was Bakhtiian’s form, somehow imprisoned in the air above the tablet.

He must have gasped or made some noise. Tess jerked her head around and saw him.

“Damn,” she said. “Aleksi, sit down.”

He sat. “What is it? Is that Bakhtiian’s spirit?”

Dr. Hierakis glanced up from studying the slowly rotating spirit hanging in the air. “Goddess. I thought you’d stayed outside.”

“It isn’t a spirit, Aleksi,” said Tess. “It’s a picture. A picture of his body. It shows what might be making him—ill—what might be making him—”

“But his spirit has left his body,” said Aleksi. “I know what it looks like when that happens. That’s his spirit there.” He pointed to the spirit. It spun slowly, changing facets like a gem turning in the light, little lines hatched and bulging, tiny gold lights stretched on a net of silvery-white wire, brilliant, as Aleksi had always known Bakhtiian’s spirit would be, radiant and gleaming and surprising only in that it emitted no heat he could feel. “I can see it.”

“No, he’s just unconscious. That’s just an image of his body. The doctor is trying to find out why he’s fallen into this—sleep.”

“We know why,” said the doctor in a dry, sarcastic tone. “I’m trying to find out how extensive the damage is.” Then she said something else in Anglais.

“Oh, hell.” Tess burst into tears again.

“It isn’t Habakar witchcraft,” said Aleksi suddenly. “It’s yours.”

The doctor snorted. “It isn’t witchcraft at all, young man, and I’ll thank you not to call it that. But it’s quite true that we’re the ones responsible.”

“I’m
the one responsible,” said Tess through her tears.

Dr. Hierakis shook her head. “What can I say, my dear? The serum has metastasized throughout the body, and for whatever reason, it’s caused him to slip into a coma.”

“You can’t wake him up somehow?”

“Right now, since his signs are otherwise stable, I don’t care to chance it. You knew the risks when you insisted we go ahead with the procedure.”

Tess sank down onto her knees beside her husband and bent double, hiding her face against his neck. He lay there, limp, unmoving. The walls of the tent snapped in, and out, and in again, and out, agitated by the wind. The doctor sighed and spoke a word, and the luminous spirit above the tablet vanished. A single white spark of light shone in the very center of the black tablet. A similar gleam echoed off the doctor’s brooch.

Aleksi jumped to his feet. “Where did his spirit go?” he demanded.

Dr. Hierakis let out all her breath in one huff. “Aleksi, his spirit did not go anywhere. It’s still inside him. That was just an image of his spirit, if you will.”

“But—”

“Aleksi.” Now she turned stern. “Do you trust Tess?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she would do anything to harm Bakhtiian?”

“No.”

“Aleksi. This slate, this tablet here, it isn’t a magic thing, it’s a—a
machine.
Like the mechanical birds that the ambassador from Vidiya brought but more complex than that. It’s a tool. It can do things, show us things, that we could not otherwise do ourselves or see ourselves. It helps us do work we otherwise could not do, or work that would take much longer to do if we did it—by hand.”

Aleksi considered all this, and he considered how many times he had wondered why Tess seemed ignorant of the simplest chores and duties that the jaran engaged in every day. “Do you have many of these machines in Jeds?”

The doctor smiled. He saw that she was pleased that he was responding in a clever, reasonable way to her explanations. He knew without a doubt that she was telling him only a part of the truth. “Yes. Many such machines.”

“Then why didn’t Bakhtiian see them there, when he was in Jeds? I never heard Sonia or Nadine mention such
machines
either.”

“Tell him the truth,” said Tess, her voice muffled against Bakhtiian. “I can’t stand it, all these lies. I can’t stand it. Tell him the truth.”

Aleksi crouched down and waited.

The doctor placed her tablet inside her bag and followed it with the little black block. “The truth is, Aleksi, that we don’t come from Jeds, or from the country overseas,
Erthe,
either. We don’t come from this world. We come from up there.” She pointed at the tent’s ceiling.

He shook his head. A moment later, he realized what she meant, that she meant from the air above, from the heavens. “Then you come from the gods’ lands?”

“No. We aren’t gods, nothing like. We’re human like you, Aleksi. Never doubt that. We come from the stars. From a world like this world, except its sun is one of those stars.”

She could be mad. But he examined her carefully, and he could see no trace of madness in her. The doctor had always seemed to him one of the sanest people he had ever met. And as strange as it all sounded, it might well be true.

“But. But how can Tess’s brother be the prince of Jeds, then? If he—” Aleksi broke off. “May I see that thing again? Does it show other spirits besides Bakhtiian’s?”

“So much for the damned quarantine,” muttered the doctor.

“What are we going to tell them?” Tess asked. She straightened up. Tears streaked her face, but she was no longer crying. “When they come in and see him like this? How long, Cara? How long will he stay this way?”

“I can’t know. Tess, I promise you, I will not leave him. But I’ll need some kind of monitoring system. I’ll have to set up the scan-bed in here, under him, disguise it somehow. I’ll need Ursula.” She glanced at Aleksi. “And hell, we’ve got him now. With the four of us, we can keep the equipment a secret. I think. Unless you want the whole damned camp to know.”

“No!” Tess stood up and walked to the back wall and back again, and knelt beside her husband, and stroked his slack face. “No,” she repeated, less violently. “Of course not. I just—” She looked at Aleksi. He saw how tormented she was, how terrified, how remorseful. “Aleksi.” Her voice dropped. “You do believe that I didn’t mean for this to happen. That I’m trying to help—oh, God.”

She was pleading with him. Tess needed him. “But I trust you, Tess. You know that. You would never hurt him.”

She sighed, sinking back onto her heels. Her face cleared. However slightly, she looked relieved of some portion of her burden. And he had done it. It was almost sharp, the satisfaction of knowing he had helped her.