The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (26 page)

Such thoughts, more than the running, made her breath come ragged. Losing Niko would be like losing her father all over again.

When she came up, panting, to the awning of Mother Veselov’s tent, she found Irena Orzhekov holding a bundle: an infant with vivid blue eyes.

“I brought her outside while they prepare Arina for the pyre.”

At first, the words did not register. “I have to send for Svetlana Tagansky to escort Niko back from the library,” she said, staring at the infant, whose stare was fixed on Irena. “Then they can—” It hit like a shock wave. “Arina is
dead
?”

“She stopped breathing. Varia and Juli chose to attempt this cutting open that
Dokhtor
Hierakis has taught them, to see if the child still lived, although I am not sure the gods will approve of a child coming into the world in such an unnatural way.”

Tess could not find words to reply. Without asking permission, she simply pushed aside the entrance flap and went in. The sheer weight of smell overwhelmed her, blood and excreta, all the leftover products of childbirth swamped by the iron stench of blood. Tess sank down onto an empty pillow and watched, stunned, while Varia Telyegin and Juli Danov cleaned up the blood and composed the body, while Varia and Anna’s adopted sister Yeliana wrapped Arina in a shroud until only her face, pale, lax, and her cloud of dark hair remained unshrouded.

Then Mira was led in with her little brother Lavrenti. Lavrenti was allowed to kiss his mother, but to Mira fell the duty of braiding her mother’s hair for the final time. Dry-eyed, the eleven-year-old set about this task with horrifying calm. Lavrenti huddled beside her, shivering although it was hot and stuffy inside the tent. Tess shook herself out of her stupor and moved forward to coax the boy back next to her, but he wouldn’t budge. At last, Mira finished. Arina’s brother and father and uncles were all long since dead. Her husband was far away, so there was no man to pull the shroud across her face in order to shield her eyes from the living world. Numb, Tess listened to women whispering in the outer chamber. Meanwhile, the two children stared. Suddenly little Lavrenti took the last corner of the shroud in his right hand, covered his mother’s face, and tucked the cloth down to seal her in. He burst into tears.

“Here,” said Juli Danov, her voice so close to Tess’s ear that Tess jumped, startled. “You may light these.”

Obediently, Tess lit and hung four sticks of incense in burners at each corner of the chamber. But there was nothing else she could do. Already, from outside, she heard women discussing where to find a wet nurse for the baby, and how they ought to go about naming it since its mother and aunts and grandmother were all dead and its only sister not yet a woman. Tess went forward and kissed both children, but they did not acknowledge her nor did they really seem to realize that she was there. Nor did Tess truly belong here, in the tent of death, a woman who was no blood relation to the deceased.

Wrung out and feeling utterly useless, she touched the top of the shroud with her right hand, as a last farewell, and left the tent that no longer belonged to Anna Veselov.

The ke, the one who is nameless, grows and lives, in the tent of stone. Like organic creatures which have ceased to grow, stone is cold to the sight. The tent of stone, a temporary shelter which may only last a thousand orbits around the sun, grows in a primitive fashion, by the work of hands. This cold growth is strange to observe, awkward, tensile. A true building grows organically and never ceases to grow, just as it reflects the exposition of the universe. But one mark of the half-tamed animal called early cognition is that in building, the act of finishing also occurs, although the civilized know that nothing is ever finished. Living things are warm. Unliving things are cold. Thus primitives grow buildings which are dead even as flowering occurs.

The ke perceives that the heat of the daiga—the half-tamed animals who name themselves
human
—has left the chamber labeled
the reading room.
Soon all traces of daiga presence dissipate into the air. The daiga, being primitive, have the impulse to name and to label in the same way that bacteria have the impulse to divide. By these markers, the web that structures the universe is constructed, although like bacteria the daiga web is shallow, shorn of depth by the indiscriminate quality of their desire.

Under the central dome of the library, placed on a carbon table, sits a building by definition dead and also never living, a tiny simulation of a building that once lived. The daiga like to look at it for reasons impossible to fathom. The daiga name the building
Morava
and the simulation a
model.
Once the great palace sheltered the Mushai, but the great palace, the actual palace, has ceased living because of the rite of extinction; it has also become a tent of stone. Yet the Mushai is imprisoned within its walls and within the still growing walls of the great towers named Sorrowing, Reckless, and Shame, caught without means of escape, because the act of remembering has imprisoned the name of Mushai in the universe’s binding architecture. Only the nameless are not bound by the web whose filaments secure the patterns of heat and death. Without a name there is no true existence, and yet, without a name, existence is boundless.

Existence, measured by heat, by a net of turbulence, enters the reading room. The one who is nameless but who also has brought namelessness onto the daiga called
Tess Soerensen
hesitates, a stab of time halting movement. Except in size the daiga appear alike. Nothing distinguishes one from the next, although slightly different patterns of turbulence flow through and around the females and the males, and the small ones called
children
are different again, hotter, brighter, lucency diffused across the diminutive bodies rather than focused in certain spots. At first, the ke believed that the diminutive ones were a third kind of daiga, the ones who cannot flower, but instead the daiga Tess showed how over time the children flower as buildings flower, to become daiga. In this way, as the civilized grow buildings, the daiga grow themselves. In this way the potential to become civilized manifests.

But the daiga who is nameless but brought namelessness bears a peculiar tincture of heat and lucency that leaves an indelible mark. By this tincture, the ke can recognize this daiga apart from other daiga. Tess names the daiga
Ilya
, but with the promiscuity so evident in daiga behavior, this daiga wears other names as well.

The hesitation ends. Ilya moves forward into the chamber. A flare of heat reveals that the daiga has registered the ke’s presence. The warmth subsides into the usual reticulation of turbulence patching the daiga’s surface. An inclination of the head, now given by the daiga, signifies notice of the ke, perhaps. Daiga are promiscuous with gestures as well, shifting legs and arms and torsos and heads in a chaotic and restless dance. This daiga Ilya knows something of the art of stillness, perhaps learned from the nameless one Tess; perhaps not. But the ke has seen only one daiga who truly understands it: the Tai-en Charles Soerensen. The Tai-en could not have passed across the threshold of rank without the knowledge of the great dance, where movement and stillness each signify particular messages. Notice is given. The daiga crosses the chamber and passes into a separate room. The tincture of heat lingers and fades, swirling into the air’s ever-present taste.

Quiet reigns.

The ke picks up the four bound collections of parchment leaves. Here, also, the daiga confuse the living and the unliving. Knowledge is a growing thing, not a thing sewn into thin dead surfaces marked with scratches. Nevertheless, the books must be returned to specific and arbitrary places. By such means do the daiga order the world. As the ke circles back to examine the empty chamber, the door opens and on the wings of the air swirling in from outside, the daiga Tess arrives.

Of all daiga, only the nameless one called Tess can speak any of the civilized tongues. Thus, although the aura of turbulence patterning. Tess is in no fundamental way different from that of other daiga, the ke can recognize the presence of a civilized being.

There is no hesitation. Tess crosses the room to a carbon table and sinks onto a carbon stool, which is also dead. All the furniture worn by daiga is dead. Head dropping to arms, legs drawn up, the daiga Tess forms a seamless maze to the ke’s sight, hot mostly, but with the tint of cold death chasing living warmth like an echo through the pattern of the daiga’s lifewarmth.

As if sight or some daiga smell has raised a signal in farther rooms, the daiga Ilya enters. There is no hesitation. Time quickens with swift footsteps. The daiga male places a hand on the daiga female, and the ke is allowed to observe the strange and disorderly communication which goes on between the two. Some of the communication occurs through the vocal boxes. The ke cannot interpret the primitive speech without aid. Nor can the ke interpret the coils of heat and cold, brightness and shadow, that flow wildly from one to the other and back again. Heat blazes and subsides on different portions of the body.

The ke has learned to distinguish male daiga from female daiga because certain patterns of heat recur more frequently and more obviously with the males, while the female daiga manifest subtler patterns. And with these two, best known, most observed, the ke recognizes iterations in the conversation of heat and cold, as if the body of the one is familiar with the complex web of the body of the other, and back again. Although how two might interweave patterns in such a fashion, the ke is not certain.

But all creatures, even animals, deserve privacy. The ke returns to the necklace of rooms in which civilization grows, the merest seedling, on the shores of this wilderness. There, on all the walls, grow restful scenes shaded in degrees of life, hot and towering, slender and warm, cool and sluggish, tinged by motifs of incandescent blue heat and smoldering orange coals, all wrapped around and penetrated by the sinuous reach of the vine of life, ever-probing, ever-seeking, ever-enclosing.

But the ke also wonders. The daiga Tess has many shades. A new one, stained with coldness of stone, has insinuated itself boldly into the pattern today. The ke examines the walls of the entrance corridor, whose slow growth is pleasing but as yet unfinished, creeping forward to overcome the chill blankness of the daiga-built walls. Satisfied, the ke walks as far as the door which is the threshold to the daiga world.

There is a hesitation. But beyond lies only the daiga world, after all. The ke could have chosen the final act of extinction. That act was not chosen, and so a different choice was made, a choice that includes the daiga world.

Opening the door, the ke sights at once the leaping, unruly heat of fire. The ke pinpoints and locks in on the distant fire, drawing the image closer to identify the source. This custom the daiga Tess has explained; the daiga name
is funeral pyre.
The pyre is an odd daiga custom, celebrating death with heat.

The ke watches in stillness. One mystery has linked up with another, thus creating a bridge across which an answer can travel. A pyre means that a daiga has passed from life to death. The stain of cold on Tess’s pattern reveals that this death has touched the complex web of Tess’s being. Thus are the two related. Satisfied by this small but precious understanding of the daiga world, the ke closes the door.

T
HEY LEFT THE TRAIN
of merchants at the khaja city of Parkilnous and headed up over the mountain pass into the kingdom of Habakar, riding hard now that they were free of the wagons.

At the Habakar city of Birat, Andrei Sakhalin requisitioned fresh horses from the garrison, and the Habakar governor, an obsequious merchant whom Vassily disliked immediately, slaughtered twenty cattle that evening so that the party could feast as befitted a prince and princess of the jaran. Andrei insisted that Vassily sit beside him and the governor. Princess Rusudani remained secluded in her tent, but Vasha got some little consolation out of the evening by watching Katerina outface the governor, who was alternately embarrassed by her presence and perplexed by Andrei Sakhalin’s deference to her. As for Katya and Andrei, they seemed rather like two soldiers dueling with sabers, except that Andrei, instead of carrying the attack to her, used feints to draw her out.

“You’re making a fool of yourself,” said Vasha finally, leaning over to whisper these profound words to her at a safe moment when Andrei Sakhalin had left the feast to go relieve himself.

“You’re drunk,” retorted Katya. “You’re jealous.”

“Jealous of
what
?” he demanded, but then Sakhalin came back. Vasha could not properly leave until the others did, so he endured the rest of the feast in silence, drinking heavily.

When at last the feast ended, Vassily managed to walk out under his own power, a brooding sense of injustice weighing on him. Ahead of him, Katya laughed at something Sakhalin said, and Vasha stumbled. Stefan, appearing out of nowhere, caught his elbow and steadied him.

“You looked miserable up there,” said Stefan. “Are you going to be sick?”

Vasha waved toward Katya who, with Andrei, was making a florid and perfectly obscene farewell to the Habakar governor. “How can she stand it? She doesn’t even like him. She never has.”

Stefan cocked his head and considered Vasha. “Is that so? That must explain why she’s taken him for a lover.”

“She has not!” He said it so loudly that both Katya and Andrei glanced toward him.

Stefan got a firm grip on Vasha’s arm and led him away. He didn’t speak until they were outside of camp. “You shouldn’t get drunk. You’re making a fool of yourself.”

“I am not!
She’s
the one—”

Then he did get sick. Thank the gods, only two of Riasonovsky’s riders, on sentry duty, were around to see.

In the morning, head throbbing, he assessed the situation with cold agony as they rode away from Birat. Like landmarks, the signs sat clearly for him to recognize, now that he bothered to look: Katya was ignoring him in favor of Andrei Sakhalin although, as was only proper for a young woman sleeping with her cousin’s husband, she was discreet about it.