Earthly Crown (62 page)

“I’ll try,” said Diana. “With your permission, Ginny, of course.”

Ginny swore under her breath. “What are we supposed to do? Take him in? Take him back to Earth with us? Like a pet dog?” Hyacinth went red. “Oh, don’t yell at me, young man. You’ve caused enough trouble. I want you to think clearly for a minute—if you can—about what it would be like for one of these people to be jerked out of the world they know and thrown headlong into ours. It won’t be an easy transition, no more than it would be for us if we were really and truly abandoned here without any of the fail-safes and modelers and slates and medical supplies and equipment and weapons we brought with us.”

“That happened to Tess Soerensen,” said Diana.

“And let her be a lesson to you, Hyacinth! Now. Go on, Diana, and why don’t you take Gwyn, too?”

“Let me go,” begged Hyacinth.

“No,” added Ginny. “Mother Veselov already gave you into our hands. They don’t want you back. Owen’s not going to take this at all well, my boy, if it means they’ll forbid you performing as well. And we’re supposed to do
Caucasian Chalk Circle
sometime in the next five days.”

“You can even think of that? With a life at stake?”

“Hyacinth, we all have our limits. I can’t save the world. I can’t stop this war. Maybe, just maybe, I can communicate a few things through art.”

He flung himself back into the chair and buried his face in his hands. The entire line of his body spoke agony.

“I’ll go now,” said Diana, more to be rid of this scene than because she desired the next one.

T
ROUBLE CAME IN THE
guise of a woman. It always did, Jiroannes reflected. The guards snuck two whores into camp and he caught them at it. He was not sure whether the guards intended to pay the women or simply kill them afterward, but the women looked desperate enough, thin and dirty and ragged. One had a child with her, a wild-eyed little creature with weeping sores around its mouth and a red rash on its arms. Once, Jiroannes would have left his men to it. They deserved some reward for their months of service in these God-forsaken lands. Jiroannes had not touched Samae in twenty days, and already even the sight of the whores’ scrawny thighs and grimy abdomens moved him to lust. The guards had gone much longer without women.

“Syrannus,” he said as the whores straightened their clothes and the guards rebound their sashes, “chase the creatures away.”

“Yes, eminence. May I give them some food?”

“Give them food!”

“Eminence, in these lands, whores receive payment.”

“Do what you wish. Don’t bother me with it.”

The next day, the guards mutinied. Politely, it was true, but they sent a delegation consisting of the captain and his two lieutenants to present their grievances to their master. This would never have happened in Vidiya.

Jiroannes received them on the carpet. Lal attended him, standing behind his chair with a large fan, which the boy worked up and down. Samae was out getting water from the river. She did the work Lal used to do, and the boy had quickly learned the more elaborate business of being a personal body servant.

“Your eminence.” The captain knelt and bent to touch his forehead to the carpet.

“You may speak.”

“Eminence, you must know that the jaran women will have nothing to do with us. They call us names, eminence, foul names, and scorn us, and there are none who will accept coin or cloth or food for lying with us. Now you forbid us congress with these women who are willing enough to come into our camp. This is unjust. The Everlasting God has also decreed, eminence, that it is improper for a man to pass more than ten days without knowing a woman, for fear he will succumb to baser lusts.”

It was true, of course. Jiroannes sighed. “I will consider your grievances, captain. I will have an answer for them tomorrow.”

The captain touched his forehead to the carpet again, rose, bowed, and backed away. His escort backed away as well, until they were far enough away from the tent that they could without deliberate insult turn their backs on their master.

“What are you going to do, eminence?” asked Syrannus.

Jiroannes smoothed out his trousers. The hot, stifling air made him sweat, even with the turgid breeze stirred into life by Lal’s tireless fanning. “I have no choice, Syrannus. I must take this matter before the jaran.”

“Ah,” said Syrannus, and nothing more.

Jiroannes sat, brooding. Smoke cast a pall over the air, adding to the stifling heat. Although the Vidiyan camp was now situated at the end of ambassadors’ row, in the least desirable site, still the tents of the jaran army spread out beyond his camp. Farther, at the eye of the storm, a city bled smoke into the heavens. Jiroannes could see its wall from here, a distant line. He thought there might still be some fighting going on there, but he could not be sure. Now that Mitya was gone, Jiroannes had no inside source of information. For twenty days he and his party had drifted along in the wake of the army, moving at the right time, camping at the right time, and otherwise utterly at sea. He did not know the name of this city, or which general was in charge of this assault. The guards had heard a rumor that Bakhtiian was ill, that he was dead, that he had been witched by the Habakar priests and that his spirit had left his body to do battle in the Otherlands for this kingdom. It might be true, for all Jiroannes knew. He missed Mitya’s information.

He missed Mitya’s friendship.

What a strange thing it was, to think of having a friend. There had been other boys at the palace school whom he had liked, but one never trusted anyone at the palace. He sighed.

“Syrannus, you will attend me. Together with two of my guards.” He rose. Lal dropped down to kneel behind the chair.

“Where are we going, eminence?”

“I don’t know. We must find Bakhtiian, I suppose, or if he isn’t here, then whomever is in charge.” The two guards took their places at his back, and they walked together out of their huddle of tents. Syrannus went ahead to accost a pair of older jaran men who were repairing a shattered cart wheel. He spoke with them for a while and then returned to Jiroannes.

“Eminence, these men say that Mother Sakhalin is in charge of this camp.”

“Mother Sakhalin? A woman?” Jiroannes sighed again, but these days he felt only mild shock at such tidings. “Where will we find her tent?”

“In the center of camp, eminence.”

“Bakhtiian is not here, then?”

“Eminence, the men say that it is true that Bakhtiian was witched, that he lies as one dead up in the pass. They say that until he wakes again, the army will lay waste to the countryside.”

Jiroannes shuddered. Fleetingly, he imagined this army trampling through the lush gardens of the Vidiyan palace, careless of the destruction they wrought to the fine architectural and decorative work that they certainly could never appreciate. But they could destroy it. It was easier to demolish than it was to build, especially for savages.

He hung his head and stared at the rings on his fingers. Topaz, that one, malachite, a thick band of plain gold, and a single diamond set in gold leaves bound with pewter. All along, it had been easier for him to scorn the jaran as the barbarians they definitely were than to try to understand them and build a bridge across which he and they could truly communicate.

“We will attend Mother Sakhalin,” he said softly.

Syrannus looked surprised, but he bowed his head and led Jiroannes to the center of camp. In the jaran camp, in the late morning, things were fairly quiet. Dawn and late afternoon were busiest, what with milking and watering and meals. A couple of boys pushed a handcart filled with dry dung through camp. Crippled men repaired harness. Two older girls churned milk to butter. Little children ran here and there, attended by the elderly. If the besieged city on the horizon disturbed them they did not show it.

At the center of camp they found a ring of guards, but just a single ring, nothing as elaborate as the triple shield that had surrounded Bakhtiian’s tent. They waited here while a messenger was sent in. Some time later a young jaran woman arrived to escort them. Jiroannes swallowed this insult with no change of expression and followed her in, Syrannus alone attending him now.

Mother Sakhalin held court in much the same way Bakhtiian did, but she was rather more ruthless, Jiroannes decided. He recognized her immediately: the ancient crone he had seen watching the mounted archers at practice, that fateful day, twenty days ago. He recalled now how scornfully he had thought of her then. Here she sat in judgment like a queen, seated on pillows on a dais with two other women, one very young and very pretty, one almost as old as the old woman, seated on either side of her. The escort motioned to Jiroannes to stand to one side. He stood and waited. Syrannus waited behind him. A cluster of women and old men argued in front of the dais. As far as Jiroannes could tell, they haggled over grazing and watering rights. One tribe had watered its herd too early, and in revenge the other tribe had grazed its herds on fields reserved for the first tribe. The old woman presided over this dispute with an expression of deep disgust on her face, and in the end she stripped both tribes of their current rights and assigned them worse rights—the last to go down to the river? the stoniest patches of grazing land?—than they had previously owned.

“You see,” said Jiroannes in a low voice to Syrannus, impressed despite himself, “that will teach them to bother her with such trivial matters.”

A troop of horsemen rode in and dismounted, all but one of their number. This last, a dark-haired young man, remained seated on his horse as if he were somehow in disgrace. A girl armed with bow and arrows was called forward to stand in front of the queen. She threw herself down and began to plead in a high voice, but the queen silenced her with a wave of a hand.

“The punishment is exile,” said Mother Sakhalin. She turned to the pretty young woman beside her. “Your dyan will strip him of all that binds him to your tribe.”

“My dyan is not here,” said the princess. Her thick black hair was bound back in four braids and overlaid with a rich headpiece whose jeweled links hung to her shoulders. She regarded the scene gravely. The audience hushed. Glancing around, Jiroannes realized that in the course of moments the number of people attending had doubled. Stillness hung over them. “But my brother will act for him in this matter. Anton?”

One of the jaran soldiers came forward. If he were this woman’s brother, then surely he was a prince, but Jiroannes could see no difference between him and the other men by the way he dressed. He was much older than the princess. Perhaps he was a bastard child of an early concubine and thus not a legitimate heir to power. He inclined his head respectfully to the two women and then turned to the mounted man.

“You,” he said to the man, “whom we once knew as Yevgeni Usova, you will dismount.”

The man obeyed. His face was white but otherwise expressionless. The girl kneeling in front of the queen began to weep. His wife, perhaps?

The captain gestured to one of his men to lead the horse away. “This horse belongs to no man,” he said. He drew the young man’s saber from his sheath and handed it away as well. “This saber belongs to no man.” Then he drew his own knife. He laid it along the collar of the young man’s shirt and cut, down through the fabric. The silk did not cut easily, and it was messy work, but with a grim face and an unrelenting manner, the captain cut the shirt off the offender, piece by piece, and let it fall into the dust. The young man stood there, silent, unmoving, and the sun beat down on his pale body.

“This shirt belongs to no man.”

On the dais, the queen watched without the slightest sign of mercy on her face. But the princess had averted her eyes, as if the sight pained her.

“Yevgeni Usova is dead to us,” said the captain. He turned on his heel and walked back to his men. At this signal, all the watchers averted their eyes. Some actually physically turned away, to show their backs to the exiled young man. He hesitated, but only for one moment. The old crone glared at him. Her mouth was a tight line, her expression implacable. The man turned and, with his head high, he began to walk away into his exile.

“Yevgeni!” The girl sprang up from the ground in front of the queen. “I’m coming with you.”

He stopped. He was close to Jiroannes now, and Jiroannes saw his face whiten at the girl’s words. If before he had looked resigned, then now he looked terrified. He turned back. “No. I forbid it, Valye.”

She cast a defiant glance toward the queen and ran over toward him. “I don’t care. I’m coming with you.”

“Valye!” This from the princess, who flung up her head. Her eyes looked haunted. “You have a place here. You know that. You must stay.”

The girl stopped beside the man. She was young, very young, with dark brown eyes and black hair like his. All at once Jiroannes saw the resemblance: they had the same blunt nose and blunt chin and narrow foreheads, features that proclaimed them to be relatives. “I won’t stay. It’s death to send him out there with nothing, and you know it. At least with my bow we’ll have a chance to stay alive.”

“No,” Yevgeni whispered harshly, under his breath. “At least I’ll know you’re safe.”

The queen rose. She was not much taller standing than sitting, but her authority seemed to enlarge with the simple movement. “Valye Usova, your loyalty to your brother is commendable, but I forbid you to leave with him. He has condemned himself by his own choice. Let him go.”

“Please, Valye,” said the princess. “You know you must stay here. You know it’s what your brother would want.”

“No! No, I refuse. You all say one thing with your mouths, but you cover your eyes to stop from seeing what you know is true. You know what your own cousin is, Mother Veselov, and yet he still rides with the tribe.”

“He was banished once,” said the queen sternly.

“Then why isn’t he here with the tribe where he’s supposed to be? He’s still up there!” The girl pointed up, to the northeast, toward the distant mountains. Her voice rose higher, and it broke as she spoke again. “You all know why he’s there, but you all pretend you don’t know. You all know that whatever Yevgeni might have done, he’s done as well.”