His Conquering Sword (8 page)

“I meant, a jaran name, or a tribal name.”

“Not one I remember.”

“How old are you?” She stared at him with that gaze he recognized as impartial, measuring him against some pattern only she knew, not for any personal reason.

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, in which year were you born? Eagle? Rat? Lion? Horse, perhaps?”

“I don’t know.”

“But everyone knows that, here.”

“I beg your pardon. I don’t know. My tribe was massacred by khaja raiders when I was very young.”

“Tess mentioned that. How did you escape?”

Aleksi shut his eyes and struggled to recall anything from that time. He shrugged. “All I remember is the dew on the grass, and lying half sunk in water in a little hollow of swamp. I lay there so still for so long that a frog crawled right up onto my right hand. It was a blessing, you see. The gods took pity on me, because the khaja had taken my family, so they sent the frog to gift me with speed for fighting.”

“Why a frog?”

“Haven’t you ever seen how fast a frog jumps? He sits perfectly still, and then he’s gone.”

She chuckled. “Yes, I suppose that’s a fair analogy. But Aleksi, were they all killed?”

“Yes,” he repeated patiently, “all but myself and—” Here he faltered. Always he faltered. “—my sister Anastasia.” Her name came out hoarsely.

“No, I meant, is it possible that it was a slave raid? Or was everyone killed?”

Her question, like a blessing, allowed him to recover. His memories of the rest of his tribe were so dim that they had long since ceased to trouble him. “What is a
slave
raid? Oh, that they would take the people away to sell in other lands, to serve a khaja master. I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing any bodies except that of my father.”

“Oh, Goddess. I’m sorry, Aleksi.”

Aleksi found her sympathy interesting. He never told jaran as much as this; any respectable jaran listener would have been appalled that a child could lose his entire tribe and still go on living. The gods had cursed people for less. “It was a long time ago,” he said, to reassure her.

“Then what happened?”

This was harder. He managed it by breaking each word off from the next. “Then Anastasia took us away from there. She took care of me for as long as she could. Three or four years, I think.”

“What happened to her?”

Aleksi set the cup down and bowed his head. This one memory, he could not bear to look upon, but it flooded over him nevertheless. Anastasia had grown steadily weaker over that third—or was it fourth?—winter and then, with spring, she became feverish and unable to eat. The gods had spoken strange words through her mouth, and she had seen visions of creatures terrible to behold and creatures as sweet as flowers, and she had wept for fear of leaving him when he was still too young to take care of himself. Not that she had been so much older than he was, but her first course of woman’s blood had come on her that past autumn, so she was no longer a girl, although of course she had never received any of the rites investing her with her womanhood.

The doctor waited patiently. Aleksi’s throat was thick with emotion, too choked to speak. Hands shaking, he lifted the cup to his lips and sipped at the tea. The gesture soothed him enough that he could force out a sentence. “The gods took her on a spirit journey, but she never came back.”

“Ah,” said the doctor. She poured more hot tea into his cup, and by that gesture Aleksi knew he had her friendship. “You love Tess very much, don’t you?”

He glanced up at her, astonished. She smiled warmly at him; he did not need to reply, because she already knew the answer and the reason for it. With her, he was safe. How strange to know that. How strange to be safe at all. He felt dizzy.

“Goddess,” she said, “you must have been—what?—eight or ten years old? Well, what did you do then?”

“I wandered. I got by. Eventually I came to the Mirsky tribe late one summer. Old Vyacheslav Mirsky’s wife was very ill, but they had no children or grandchildren to help them. It was a terrible disgrace, how the tribe treated him. Everyone knew what a great rider he was, but they thought Stalia Mirksy ought to know that her time was through and simply remain behind on the grass so that she wouldn’t slow the tribe down. Stalia kept telling Vyacheslav she ought to, but she was all he had, and he wouldn’t let her do it. So I saw—well—I saw that if a small orphan boy helped bring in fuel and water and beat carpets and built fires and gathered food and went to get their share of the meat at slaughtering time, they might let that boy sleep on the ground next to their tent without driving him away.”

“And did they?”

But while the memory of Anastasia always filled him with a horrible dread, a painful, dizzying fear that his heart had been torn out and dropped into a black abyss from which he could never retrieve it, the memory of Vyacheslav and Stalia always brought tears to his eyes. “No, they took me into their tent and treated me as their own grandchild. Stalia got better. They said I was their luck. Eight years I lived with them. Vyacheslav trained me in the saber. You’ve heard of him, of course.” By her expression, he saw that she hadn’t heard of Vyacheslav Mirsky. “You haven’t! Well, everyone knows he had the finest hand for the saber in all the tribes, before he grew too old to ride in jahar. The Mirskys still brag about him, though they treated him badly once they had no more use for him.”

“And then?”

“Then one winter they both died of lung fever. They were ancient by then. Stalia told me they both would have died far sooner if it wasn’t for me. Perhaps it’s true. But as soon as they died the Mirskys drove me out.”

“Isn’t there something about horse-stealing in here?”

Aleksi considered his cup. It was metal, but the heat of the tea did not burn his hands where he cupped the round surface between his palms. An etching of fronds edged the rim and the base. Steam rose from the tea, caressing his face. But he had already trusted her with so much, and Tess, with everything. “Stalia and Vyacheslav had given me things: his saber, a beautiful blanket she had woven, the tent that belonged to her only daughter, who had long since died, their
komis
cups and flask, some other things. I overheard the etsana—their own cousin’s daughter!—speaking to her sons and daughters, saying that if they didn’t throw me out of camp immediately I’d try to steal everything in the tent and run off with it. So that night I took what I could carry, and stole a horse, and rode away. Oh,” here he glanced up at her, “I knew it was wrong. The penalty for stealing a horse is death, of course. But I couldn’t bear to lose every little thing they’d given me, because everyone else in the Mirsky tribe was so petty and small-minded.”

“Where did you ride to, then?”

“There was one jahar that would take men who didn’t belong anywhere else. The
arenabekh.
”

“The arenabekh. They were outlaws, weren’t they?”

“Men who had left their tribes for one reason or another—for some crime, because they loved men more than women, because they no longer wanted to live with the tribes.”

“Did you like it there?”

“Not at all. How can any person love a tribe where there are no children?”

“Wouldn’t someone like that boy who was exiled—with the actor—wouldn’t he seek out the arenabekh?”

“He would, if he could find them. Keregin, their last dyan, led the arenabekh into a hopeless battle in order to save Bakhtiian’s life. But Tess would know about that. She was there.”

“Was she, now? I haven’t heard this story yet.”

“Well, but with the arenabekh gone, Yevgeni Usova has nowhere to go, if he’s even still alive.”

“So there you were with the arenabekh.”

“I stayed with them for almost two years, because there was nowhere else to go. Keregin was hard but fair, and he never treated me any differently from the others because I was an orphan—or a horse stealer. Then I heard about these training schools, where young men might go to train for jahar, and I thought I’d go and see if Kerchaniia Bakhalo, the man who ran one, would accept orphans. He did. When he discovered that Vyacheslav Mirsky himself had trained me—well—he never said as much, but I knew I was his favorite pupil. But then, I was a better fighter than the rest. It was the frog, you know. And after that, Bakhalo brought us to the great camp that was growing up around Bakhtiian.”

“Where you met Tess.”

At the mention of Tess’s name, he could not help but smile. “Yes. She trained with us. Although she was Bakhtiian’s wife, she never treated those of us who were orphans any different from the rest. Of course, she is khaja, which accounts for it.”

“How did she come to adopt you as her brother?”

“Every woman needs a brother, and hers had died—that was Yuri Orzhekov, Sonia’s younger brother. She and I always got along well, and we liked each other right away. We felt—” He thought about it, two outsiders working and training together, both with quick minds and ready laughter, detached and yet involved in the jaran camp. “—linked, somehow. But then the Mirskys rode into camp. They were well within their rights to kill me, of course. In fact, they were in the process of doing just that—”

“How, in the Lady’s Name, were they doing that?”

“Well, there were five of them, and they caught me in the dark coming out of a woman’s tent, and then they beat me with sticks. But Tess happened to walk by and she stopped them.”

“You’re casual about it.”

Aleksi laughed, recalling what Bakhtiian had said to his niece. “The gods never give out unmixed blessings. So who am I to complain about bruises and a broken arm and collarbone when it brought me Tess as a sister?”

One of the things Aleksi liked about Dr. Hierakis was that she could laugh compassionately. “Who, indeed?”

“You see, they demanded to know what right she had to stop them meting out the justice I did, after all, deserve, for stealing one of their horses, and she said, ‘the right of a sister.’ And so she adopted me.”

“Did she consult Bakhtiian?”

“Why would she consult Bakhtiian? She brought me back to her tent and nursed me back to health and I became her brother and have been ever since, and always will be. Bakhtiian did take me into his jahar, then, but he might well have done so anyway—although, if Tess hadn’t adopted me the Mirskys would have killed me sooner or later, so I suppose I’ll never know if Bakhtiian took me into his jahar to give me his protection or because he admired my fighting.”

“Perhaps both.”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, you’ve led a harrowing life, Aleksi.”

He sipped at his tea. “I’m content.” And he was.

“End recording,”
said the doctor to the air. “Will you come with me?” she asked. She passed through into the inner chamber. Respectfully, he followed after her.

In this miraculous den, many strange and wondrous machines cluttered the long narrow table and crowded into each other on the carpets. An image shimmered in the air. Aleksi recognized it immediately: the shrine of Morava, with its great shining dome and its twin towers framing the curved expanse of roof.

“That’s where the prince is,” he said in surprise.

Cara glanced at the shrine. The image was so lifelike that Aleksi could not believe that he himself was not standing some distance from the actual shrine, seeing it with his own eyes. Had she witched it and brought it here, making it small enough to fit in her tent? But no, Tess said that the machines called modelers made images of things, not the things themselves.

“Lie down there.” The doctor patted a low couch with one hand. On this couch, Bakhtiian had slept through his
coma.
“I’m going to scan you. You saw when I did the same thing to Tess. Take off your saber first, and any gold or metal—yes, your belt buckle.”

Aleksi did as he was told and gingerly lay down on the pallet. Tess had lain here without the slightest sign of nervousness. Now, the doctor spoke a few Anglais words he did not recognize and he felt the air hum around him. Then she took a little box, lit with jewels of light, into her right hand and, starting at his head, passed it down over his body. The humming air moved as well, like an invisible ring of pressure, down along his torso and his hips, down his legs, dissipating at last by his feet. It took a long time. Torn between awe and fear and curiosity, he watched his spirit drawn into the air at the foot of the couch. His spirit shone as brightly as Bakhtiian’s and Tess’s did, which surprised him a little, and yet, hadn’t the gods gifted him with many blessings?

“Lady in Heaven. This is astonishing. You’re a perfect specimen, Aleksi. No wonder you survived your hell of a childhood. I think you may well be one of the keys I need to crack the code. I think whatever tinkering those damned chameleons did to the humans they transplanted here bred true in you. Have you ever been sick, a day in your life?

Aleksi thought about this, since it was the only thing in her entire speech that he understood. “No, not that I remember.”

“And your reflexes—I must find a way to test them. I’ll just bet that they’re part of the package. Aleksi, have you ever thought about having children?”

There were definitely times when Aleksi thought the doctor was a little mad. “Every man thinks of it at some time. But if I marry, I’ll have to leave Tess, and I don’t want to do that.”

“Of course. The jaran are matrifocal. Still, I’d love to try a little selective breeding—” She broke off and coughed into one hand. “In any case, this is a needle. I’m going to take blood. You saw me do that to Tess as well.”

“Yes.” He watched with interest as she pricked his skin with the tiny blade. The viscous scarlet of his blood filled a tiny chamber of glass, a red as rich as the red of his silk shirt. She removed the needle and gave him a piece of fluff to press onto his skin, though the point of entry scarcely qualified as an injury. At the long table, she busied herself with some of the machines, but he could not see what she was doing because her back covered his view of the table. Instead, he regarded his spirit, turning in the air before him.

“Oh, you can sit up now,” she said over her shoulder.

He sat up. His spirit still turned. He rose and walked closer to examine it. It seemed to emanate from the very base of the couch, like a rainbow emerging from the ground and arching up into the heavens to scatter its color across the rain-drenched sky. But it was him, clearly so. He reached to touch it, but just as his fingers met its surface, it sparked and vanished into a thousand flickering lights and then to nothing. He jumped back. The image appeared again: there, his narrow chin and thin face, in gold and white and blue; the curve of his throat a glittering, soft green; the relaxed slope of his shoulders in green and blue, with a hint of violet; his chest and hips, his legs, his feet fading into a cloud of deepest violet at their base, the exact curve of his kneecap, the knob in his left little finger, gold with a tracery of red, where it had never healed straight when it was broken many many years ago. He was crowned by a bright silver formless light, just as Bakhtiian’s spirit had been, just as Tess’s had been.