The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (45 page)

“Oh! You idiot! I fell in love with you
because
you were a rider. I just don’t like you dragging it out all the time.”

“You don’t like me teaching Portia the things I gained respect and glory doing with the tribes.”

She placed a hand firmly over his mouth. “I am
not
going to argue with you. It just went so well yesterday, that I refuse to blacken today by having the same stupid argument again.”

“All right,” said Anatoly, encouraged by her mood, liking it, and never one not to press an attack when he saw he had an opening, “then perhaps you had better remind me again of the obligations a husband owes to his wife.”

“Hmm.”

Someone rapped loudly on the wall beside the entrance to the room. “Di-aaaaaa-na.”

“Go away,” she said.

“Whatever you’re up to in there,” added Hyacinth cheerfully, “and I’m only sorry that you’re not going to invite me in to join you, we’re having a Company meeting in one hour. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He stamped off, deliberately being loud.

Diana giggled. “Anatoly, your expression!”

“I don’t find his jokes amusing.”

“Hyacinth is a good, decent person, and much the wiser for what he’s been through. I really am tired of your endless prejudice against him just because what he is isn’t accepted by the jaran. It’s so
medieval.
But go ahead, say it anyway.” She rolled off him and swung her legs over, perching on the edge of the cot. She was very distracting, sitting there naked, gold hair unbound and falling down over her shoulders. When he said nothing, she turned to look at him inquiringly.

“I don’t want to argue with you today,” he said.

They examined one another for a long while, while the light shifted and altered, heralding planetrise. Finally, getting impatient, he caught her by the waist and pulled her down against him. It was, for a little while, almost like it had been at the beginning of their marriage.

Thus fortified, Anatoly could watch her go to her meeting with equanimity. He went to confront Karolla Arkhanov.

Taking her aside, he said, “Never do that to me again.”

“If my daughter refuses to do what is right—”

“Never do it to me, or to any man. A young woman must choose in her own way and in her own time, and it is not fitting that I, a man, should have to tell this to you, her mother. But since there is evidently no one else to do so, I must.”

She looked chastened enough that briefly, he felt sorry for her, until she went on. “You don’t understand how difficult it is to raise children properly, here. You have a khaja wife. Your child is already half khaja. Mine are not.”

Anatoly sighed. He caught sight of Valentin, loitering under the awning, looking their way with the bored curiosity of a boy who had nothing better to do. Of Ilyana he saw no sign. “You are right,” he said suddenly, seeing his chance. “I will take Valentin off your hands right now.”

She looked relieved. “It would be well. He and his father…do not always get along.”

He nodded to her and walked over to the tent. Valentin eyed him dubiously. “Come with me,” Anatoly said.

“I don’t want to.”

“In the tribes, a boy would never dare to speak that way to his elders.”

Valentin stubbornly did not reply, but he looked nervous. Anatoly knew well enough that the boy needed to push, wanted to, but was scared to.

“It is not only disrespectful,” added Anatoly, “but it is impolite.”

“What do I care?”

Anatoly studied him. He was a thin child, with a lean face that always seemed to be hungering after something. Not a boy to be reasoned or argued with, not a boy to be cowed into obedience. “You care because if you learn your manners then I will take you along with me to scout.”

Valentin glanced toward his mother, who was carefully ignoring their conversation. “What do you mean, to scout?”

“I am scouting the Duke’s palace.”

“You can’t get out of the dome.” Anatoly let that one lie. After two blinks of the eye, Valentin got an odd expression on his face. “You don’t mean in the surface world, do you? You mean through the nesh link.”

“You have used these words before. What is ‘the surface world’?”

“You wouldn’t know, would you?”

“I’ll have to come back another day.”

“No, wait. I’m sorry. I just meant, most people don’t know that it’s all just like a top layer,
here
, that is, not
there
.” He hesitated. “You don’t nesh much, do you?”

“No. I like things that have weight, that are solid. How can you trust a saber that isn’t really there?”

“It doesn’t work like that. There’s way way more
there
than there is here. That’s why we call this the surface world.”

“We?”

Valentin shrugged, looking coy. “Other people.”

“Other people who also go into the world where nothing is real?”

“It
is
real. It’s more real—” Valentin trailed off and glanced again toward his mother and then, oddly enough, at the great tent rising behind him. “It’s more real than this.” He looked up at Anatoly measuringly. “I’ll show you. If you want.”

“If I am to scout, I must have a guide who can show me how to find the landmarks in that other place. In a year or two more, if we were with the jaran, you would be sent to another tribe’s jahar, to learn how to care for the horses and the weapons, to learn what it is to be a rider.”

“I don’t want to be a—” He stopped himself. He was learning. “I’d like to go with you.”

“Then you will. But first you must learn to saddle a horse.”

Valentin went pink. But he didn’t protest.

The days went by. Valentin got thoroughly sick of the horses—Anatoly could tell—but the boy did not complain. The Company rehearsed
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
Prometheus Bound
, and the fragile truce he and Diana had patched together held. Portia was happy. Ilyana avoided him.

Eight days after the first summons, a second came. That evening after the actors left in the barge, Anatoly met Valentin by the gazebo.

“What you gonna do with that saber?” Valentin asked, stopping in his tracks, eyes wide.

“A scout always goes armed.”

The boy was so excited that he was shaking. “Say goodbye to the surface world,” he said cheerfully. He twined one hand around the latticework.

“Wait. We must have a plan of action. What we will do if we are separated. How long we will reconnoiter. How we will return.”

Valentin’s mouth was thin and pale, lips pressed tight, and his eyes had a feverish light in them. “Just hold on like this,” he said hoarsely, and he was gone.

Gone. Like a Singer, his spirit had left his body. Anatoly had seen a Singer in the midst of her trance, and all at once he wondered if it would be impious for him to try to follow on the Singer’s road. He was not a Singer, he had never been called, nor had any Sakhalin child been marked by the gods for the Singer’s calling for generations upon generations. It was the price they paid for remaining first among the tribes.

But he knelt down anyway, steeling himself, and placed his fingers on the latticework in the same pattern as Valentin had. Reflexively, he shut his eyes.

Nothing happened. Until he realized that he was mounted, and wearing armor. He opened his eyes, seeing first his hands on the reins and then, at his mount’s shoulder, Valentin, peering up at him.

“I waited for you. Wow! Where’d you get that stuff? And the horse! Are you guising?”

He knew this mare. She was his favorite, not for beauty—she had no looks to speak of—but because she was a canny, vigorous, and stubborn campaigner. She had been mortally wounded at the battle outside Salkh. He had put her down himself, and she had burned on the great pyre of the dead, at his order. Now she flicked her ears, waiting patiently for his signal.

“How can I be wearing my armor?” Anatoly asked. “I didn’t even bring it off Rhui. I brought only my saber and my saddle.” Then he realized that Valentin himself was wearing, not the blocky tunic and knee-length pants that seemed to be the uniform of children on Earth, but the sort of clothes a jaran boy might wear.

“If you’re not thinking about it when you go through the lock, then I guess you could come out on the other side looking like you think of yourself in your own mind. Is that how you think of yourself?”

Anatoly glanced down, seeing the lamellar stripes of his armor, polished leather and strips of metal. It felt light and entirely natural. He lifted off his helmet and noted the white plume, signifying a commander of highest rank, which adorned it.

“I had not yet earned a white plume, but had I returned to the army it would have been given to me, as well as an army of my own.”

“Why’d you come to Earth, then? You didn’t have to, not like me.”

“You didn’t want to leave Rhui?”

Valentin shrugged.

“It is proper that a man go to live with his wife’s tribe.”

Valentin hesitated. “Can you show me a battle?”

“I don’t have my slate with me.”

“Neh. You don’t need that here. You can make anything.”

Anatoly lifted a hand to silence the boy and surveyed the landscape, except it was like no landscape he knew. It looked rather like the floor of the gazebo, white tiles spread out into a foreshortened horizon, their pale edges squared off in a seemingly infinite grid.

“There is nothing here.”

“This is just the gateway. It’s the second layer, it’s nothing, it’s all possibility. You gotta make something. Just think about something you seen once, and it’ll start forming. That’s what makes this nesh so neat. It must be something the Chapalii know how to do. It’s like a Memory Palace, only way better.”

“What is a Memory Palace?”

Like all Singers, Valentin shone with light when he spoke of the things the gods had gifted him with knowledge of. “It’s a place set into the nesh where you can build easily, like the code or something is set in place so you can construct on top of it instead of having to create a basic environment first. But this place is even easier than that. You just form it in your mind and it begins to take shape right here. I mean, it’s not that easy, but you can—what would you build? What would you like to see? Where would you like to go? Is there some place you’d like to go back to?”

Back to the scene of his greatest triumph, the battle of the Aro River, where Kirill Zvertkov’s army had swung wide to find a crossing downriver while Anatoly had driven his troops over a heavily defended bridge against the Lion Prince’s personal guard.

Diana had told him once that a memory was just a pattern of electrical impulses, a chemical code acting within a portion of the brain.
Now the battle rose up around him, he in the swirl of riders breaking past the bridge and fanning out to meet the disintegrating line of resistance. He pulled up, the boy hanging on to Sosha’s bridle and staring, so as not to endanger the child. A thundering announced the arrival of the Xiriki prince’s brother, with his thousand guardsmen arrayed in the blue of the Khai lineage, adorned with crescent moons on their silk surcoats.

They hit the front rank of the jaran riders, and at once there came the ringing of sword and saber, lance and shield, and arrows rained down on the khaja lines from the archers posted behind the front ranks. There he had fought, coming once within striking range of the Xiriki princeling: He thought he could see the golden plume of his own helmet, won by right of arms and by right of his Sakhalin name, bobbing in the center of the thickest knot of fighting.

The noise itself was deafening, but Sosha stood her ground, solid, afraid of nothing. More jaran riders poured over the bridge and swept out to push the khaja flanks back, and back, and although the engagement here would go on for half the morning already he saw the Xiriki camp where
t
he khaja had foolishly trapped themselves within the tight circle of their own wagons, like animals in a corral. Already he saw Zvertkov’s army coming up from the south and the two armies
—
his and Zvertkov’s
—
combining to surround the encampment, dust and arrows and the constant clatter of battle hanging in the air round them.

And the panic, the rout, while the Lion Prince fled and his brother alone with his picked troops tried to hold off the pursuit, but it was already too late, because the khaja were already defeated in their hearts and maddened by fear. The jaran riders had slaughtered the fleeing soldiers with less trouble than it took to kill the most placid grazel, leaving bodies strewn for a day’s ride westward like the broken trail marking their defeat….

The swirl of the battle faded, and the actors became insubstantial ghosts and, at last, faded into the white tile grid.

“Hey, cool! Can we do it again?”

Anatoly stared at the blank landscape. He didn’t want to do it again. It was boring. It wasn’t real, it was worse, it was just something that had already happened, that didn’t mean anything now. “It’s like being dead,” he whispered. “This isn’t right. We must leave here. This is not the place where the Singers go; it is the land where the demons live.”

“No, no.” Valentin tugged on Sosha’s bridle, looking worried. “We can’t go now. I’m trying to build a bridge to the other land.”

“What other land?”

“The deepest one. It’s hard to get to. But I’m almost there. I really am—just let me—”

“No.”

“Just let me—”

“No, Valentin! When you ride with the jahar, you obey the dyan instantly.”

“But I know how to get to the map!” Valentin sounded desperate, and Anatoly almost gave in, but he had no idea how much time had passed in the real world. Suddenly he wondered what lay beneath this grid. Another world? A deeper world?

“We must go back. But we will come here again, to the place where you say there is a map.”

Valentin let go of the bridle and stepped back, and Anatoly braced himself in the saddle, expecting the boy to flee. But instead a plain stone arch coalesced on the grid and Valentin retreated through it and was—gone. Quickly, Anatoly rode after him.

And opened his eyes.

The latticework wavered and then steadied into a white web, solid under his fingers, and he let go. Valentin was coughing and gulping, but he managed a weak smile.