Earthly Crown (68 page)

You put satellites into orbit. You use aerial photography. You use computer-driven navigational instruments and beacons and…“At sea you use a sextant and the altitudes of celestial bodies,” said David instead. “On land maybe you don’t really need a truly accurate map, because you can use landmarks to guide your travels.”

“Yes, but what if you
want
one?” Nadine insisted. That was the trouble with her; she wasn’t content with what just worked.

“Orzhekov!” One of her riders burst into the room, breathing hard from running. “Messenger, riding in.”

She jumped to her feet but hard on the man’s heels came the messenger himself, wind-blown, pale, looking exhausted. He wore a harness of bells strapped over his shirt. The bells sang as he walked.

“Feodor!” exclaimed Nadine. She froze.

The young man strode across to her. By Nadine’s expression, David could guess who it was: the young man named Feodor Grekov, the one Nadine had mentioned with scornful affection. The young man of princely family who wanted to marry her. And David’s first thought, unintended and embarrassing, was to wonder if now that Feodor was here, Nadine would throw David out of her bed in favor of her jaran lover.

The bells chimed and brushed into silence as Feodor halted before Nadine. He was good-looking; David could see that even through the young man’s fatigue. He looked competent. He looked like exactly the kind of man Nadine had made him out to be: reliable, stolid, and pleasant.

“What news?” she asked, looking worried. “Have you come from camp?”

“Your uncle,” he said. The words seemed choked out of him, either from suppressed anguish or from exhaustion; perhaps from both. “He’s—” It all came out: Bakhtiian had fallen ill. His spirit had been witched from his body by Habakar priests. No one knew if he was dying, or if he was coming back to them. No one knew.

Nadine stood there dead still. Her mouth was drawn tight, and David could see the pulse beating under her jaw. She looked half in shock. And he couldn’t say a thing. He couldn’t even reveal that he understood their conversation perfectly, now that he understood khush much better than he dared let on.

“You must return,” Grekov finished. “You’re his closest living relative.”

“I must return,” she echoed, but the voice had no force of emotion. Only her drawn face did. She stared out the huge windows onto the gardens, brilliant with summer flowers. David felt sick with guilt, seeing how she suffered with fear for her uncle. Knowing she didn’t have to.

Grekov drew his saber. A murmur ran through the men standing around them. Nadine’s eyes went wide. She began to draw her own saber. She looked furious. “Grekov, this is no time to—”

But Grekov’s aspect had changed, and David mentally added ‘stubborn’ to the young man’s list of attributes. “Mother Sakhalin came to my mother and my aunt and my uncle. They agreed between them that I should set aside my—scruples and mark you. Bakhtiian must have heirs.”

Nadine had her saber half out. She seemed suspended, unable to move one way or the other, unable to act, unable to accede. “Our cousins have many fine sons.”

“That’s true,” said Feodor, “but it’s properly through his sister’s line that Bakhtiian should have heirs. You know it’s true. You know it’s your duty to marry, if your uncle dies. He may be dead already. Who will the tribes follow then? They would follow your child.” He brought his saber to rest on her cheek.

Nadine had gone so pale that David thought she might faint. But, of course, Nadine would never faint. Her saber did not move. Neither did Feodor’s. David wanted to tell her, Goddess, how badly he wanted to tell her. But he could not.

Her mouth worked, but no words came out. She shut her eyes, briefly, and opened them again, as if disgusted with herself for trying to hide from what was facing her. Then she slid her saber back into its sheath.

Feodor marked her. She submitted meekly enough, but her eyes burned. Like her uncle, her spirit showed in her eyes, and it was a strong spirit, even in defeat. Blood welled and coursed down her cheek, dripping off her jaw. A drop caught on her lips and, reflexively, she licked it off. Feodor had the grace to look ashamed, and yet, at the same time, he managed to look jubilant, as at an unforeseen victory.

David turned away. He could no longer stand to watch.

“Give me the bells,” said Nadine. “I’ll ride to my uncle’s bedside. You’ll stay with my jahar, here at the shrine, until the prince of Jeds is finished with his work here, and then you’ll escort him back to the army. Yermolov will act as your second.”

It was a trivial revenge; it might be months until they saw each other again, but Grekov did not look disheartened. Why should he be? As far as David could tell, marriage was for life in the jaran. The young rider slipped out of the bells and handed them to Nadine. She slung them over her shoulders and turned to go. Her glance stopped on David, and her mouth turned up in a sardonic smile. She knew he knew and understood what a bitter blow this was to her.

What she did not know was that he could have prevented it.

“I’m sure he’ll be all right,” David said, impelled to say it. He wanted to shout it:
He is all right. He’s alive. He’s recovering.
But it was too late. Perhaps the time would have come inevitably, the pressure for her, Bakhtiian’s sister’s daughter, to marry and have a child who could inherit through the female line closest to Bakhtiian. It was some consolation. Not much.

“Good-bye, David,” she said. He felt as if she were saying good-bye not so much to him personally, or to him as her lover, but to what he represented, the knowledge, the curiosity, the urge to explore and range wide. It was pretty damned difficult for pregnant women and women with small children to range wide.

“Good-bye,” he said and watched her go. Grekov watched her go. Her jahar watched her go. The priests, those who were there, watched her go. Yermolov escorted her out to the horses.

Charles walked in by the other door. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

About two hours after Nadine had left, Rajiv and Jo rode in with the Chapalii party. The tall, thin figures of the Chapalii looked doubly alien to David after he’d been so long on a planet where Chapalii did not set foot. David saw them ride in from his vantage point at the northwest corner of the palace, but they were far enough away that he couldn’t see them as more than distant shapes. In a frenzy of self-flagellation, he had designated Feodor Grekov to assist him personally in the surveying, with most of the other riders strung out at intervals along the space. He didn’t need them, of course, but it served to keep them busy. Feodor was quiet and helpful, and he seemed good-natured. He even asked a few questions, and he seemed interested in the concept of using triangles to measure distance. But he had nothing like Nadine’s bothersome, nagging, wonderful curiosity.

David was relieved when dusk came and he could excuse everyone and go inside to eat dinner, to pretend to go to bed. He crept out through the shrine, which he knew like the back of his hand by now, having mapped it twice over, and made his way to the room which hid the control room.

The room sat blank, white, cold, and empty, and as impenetrable as every other time he had been there. Then, a moment later, the wall exhaled and Maggie stood in a dark opening.

“Quick,” she said, beckoning. “Come in. It’s amazing.”

He hurried over to her. A narrow tunnel fell away before him. He followed her back into the blackness. The wall shut behind them and a bright light shone ahead. They came out into a chamber lit with screens and lights and stripes of color. The garish light illuminated five figures: three of the tall, angular Chapalii figures that were as familiar to humans as any ubiquitous authority figure is, and two shapes that seemed squat and thick in comparison: that would be Charles and Rajiv. Maggie took hold of David’s arm and dragged him forward. David stared. How could he help but stare? Two flat screens and three holo-screens flashed information past at a dizzying speed. Charles acknowledged David with a nod. Charles stood between two Chapalii, one resplendent in mauve merchant’s robes, the other dressed in the tunic and trousers of the steward class. Rajiv was oblivious to anything except the console at which he stood and the Chapalii standing next to him, with whom he conferred in a low, intense voice. Maggie lifted her eyebrows and looked at David, grinning, waiting for him to react.

A Chapalii female! In shape he could not have told any differences between her and the two males. But the skin…Unlike the two males in the room, whose skin was pale, almost dead white, whose skin flushed colors betraying their emotions, the female’s skin was dark, a kind of tough-looking, all-purpose gray. It seemed scaly, without being scaled. She wore a lank tail of hair hanging from the slight bulge on the back of her skull. In dim light, he could not have told them apart, except for her thin hank of hair, and that might have been a class difference. But in bright light, she looked alien. The males might pass by some far stretch of the imagination for human, or humanlike, creatures. She had the same build, but her strange coloration, her thick, dry epidermis, betrayed her fundamental otherness. She was weird; she was eerie. And David was used to the idea of unearthly beings.

“So?” David asked, when he found his voice.

“So once we got into the room, Rajiv and the ke—the female servant there—got inside the system within one hour. It’s all there, David. The contents of the Mushai’s computer banks.”

“We knew that.”

“Yes, but we never got past the surface layer before. And there’s more, much more than was on the cylinder Tess brought. They’ve spent the last five hours figuring out how to translate the information off this system and on to some transferable media. Evidently the cylinders only work off the consoles they come from. Like matched sets. Information is so valuable a commodity that it’s hoarded just like—like the jaran hoard gold.”

“They don’t hoard gold,” corrected David, “they wear it.”

“I think the analogy still holds.”

“What if they can’t transfer the data off.”

Maggie shrugged. “How should I know? Rajiv will probably come live here for the next ten years and transcribe everything manually onto his modeler. But even so he’d never get the hundredth part of it that way. Still, that ke is a brilliant engineer, according to him, and his standards are high. They ought to be able to work something out together.”

“David.” Charles came over, the merchant at his side. “You have met Hon Echido, I believe.”

“Honored,” said David, recalling his polite Chapalii. He gave a brief greeting bow, which Echido returned exactly.

“Let’s leave them to it,” said Charles. “I have no doubt they’ll be up all night. And the next day, as well.”

Charles gestured to Maggie and David to precede him. Echido waited behind Charles. The steward stayed where he was, presumably to aid Rajiv and the ke, who were oblivious to this desertion. They left the room and walked back through the quiet palace by a roundabout route. Their path took them to the vault of the huge dome. They halted there. The cavernous depths of the hall and the height swallowed them, muffling the sound of their footsteps on the marble floor, making whispers of their voices. In the darkness, the thin pillars that edged the distant curved walls gleamed a pale pink, like a hint of sunrise to come. Above, far above, the dome seemed splintered with stars and luminous cracks and amorphous blots of utter darkness, like a portal onto the depths of space.

David held Maggie’s hand, finding comfort in the heat of her skin, in her proximity. Farther off, Charles stood and stared up. Echido stood slightly in front of Charles. In the darkness, his robes, too, seemed luminous, as if fibers of light were woven into the purple fabric. The Chapalii lifted up his left hand. He spoke a sentence.

The dome lit. Everywhere, everything, lights, blinding, scattering, crystal sparking in a thousand colors and rainbows arching in vivid, astonishing geometric patterns so high above in the vault of the dome that they seemed unreachable. Across the marble floor light fragmented into colored patterns, animal shapes intertwined, plants interlaced, helices and chevrons, so bewildering in their profusion that it staggered him. All perfectly placed to create a web of light, a latticework of color, a net of brilliance, that seemed to David’s eyes to represent everything and nothing, order and chaos at once. It was glorious. It was uncanny. It was beautiful.

David gaped. Maggie gaped, gripping his hand. Even Charles gaped, for once shocked into speechlessness.

“The Tai-en Mushai,” said Echido in his colorless voice, his Anglais fluent and uninflected, “became so notorious that although his name is obliterated forever from the emperor’s ear for his rashness, his title lives on nevertheless. Not least because of his sister, who is known as one of the great artists of my people. It is she who designed the Grand Concourse leading from Sorrowing Tower to Reckless Tower to Shame Tower. I am grieved that this achievement here must rest in obscurity.”

“End it,” said Charles suddenly, startled out of his stupor by Echido’s calm voice.

“As you command, Tai Charles.” He spoke another sentence. Glory vanished, to leave them shuttered in a darkness which seemed as endless as the void. Silence descended. After some minutes, David could make out the traceries in the dome again, distinguish the faint gleam of the pillars along the walls. He understood Echido’s sorrow, that such beauty must be concealed. A moment later he realized how astounding it was, his sympathy with Echido’s sadness.

“I humbly beg your pardon, Tai-en,” Echido added, “if I have by my rash action troubled you. I recall that this planet is under an interdiction of your making and the emperor’s approval.”

“No,” said Charles, “no, I don’t mind this once. I’ve never seen anything like that. It was…” His voice betrayed his awe. “…beautiful. But it must not happen again, here or elsewhere in this palace, not as long as there are natives on the precincts.”

Echido bowed. “To have given you pleasure, however brief, Tai-en, is a great honor to me.”

“I am pleased,” said Charles, acknowledging Echido’s gift. “David has a map of the palace, and I would dearly like to know what other—art—is hidden here, and how it might be brought to life. How did you do that?”