The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (50 page)

“Ah, Goddess. If I’d only arrived two hours earlier, perhaps I could have—”

“No, no.” Tess shook her head violently and grasped Cara’s hands in her own. They were cold. “You’re right. Better to let him go. He wouldn’t have wanted anything else.”

“Wiser than most of us, I fear.”

“That’s true enough. Gods, I’ll miss him. Ilya will be furious.”

The rain slowed and gave out altogether, and a shaft of sunlight broke out between clouds. Water slid down off the awning and dripped to the ground. The air smelled fresher. Tess pushed into her tent and set the scroll and Galina’s cloth down onto the table.

“Was it Arina?” she asked, turning as Cara followed her in. “The baby is well enough, although not particularly strong.”

“No, I didn’t come because of Arina. I’d like to change. I’m truly filthy. We only rode a few kilometers, but all through the worst of that storm. It was exceptionally exciting.”

“I’ll walk with you to the baths. But let me find the children first, to make sure they weren’t too frightened.” They went back outside and Tess watched as Cara swung the saddlebags over her shoulders. “What did you come for, then?”

“I did it.”

“You did what?”

“I’ve broken the code.” Cara said it so casually that the words did not sink in. “We are no longer constrained by the treatments that the Chapalii have granted us, to make us live with extended youth and vitality but for only the span of one hundred and twenty years.”

“What does that mean?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? The Chapalii treatments merely postponed senescence, compressing the disabilities and diseases of old age into the last five to ten years before death. But the Rhuian natives were tampered with. They actually are in general less susceptible to disease, especially given the primitive nature of conditions here, and more competent at somatic maintenance—that is, general maintenance of the body—than the other human populations. And from that, from the tissue and blood and genome samples, I—”

“Let me sit down.” Tess collapsed onto a pillow wet with rain.

“It’s just,” finished Cara, crouching beside her, “that I find it ironic to ride in here all on fire with the prospect of immortality, or at the least a doubling of the normal life span, only to be greeted with the news of Niko’s death. All because of unraveling a code brought to me through my interaction with the jaran.”

“Code! That’s it. That must be what the tripartite sequences represent. When merchant ships transmit information through the vectors as their shipping clearance, and send it out in three discrete bunches, it’s coded to different cycles, and thus to different end points. One is clearly some kind of public record. One is evidently to themselves, private, to their own house affiliates. But there’s a third level, which is neither public nor house.”

“What
are
you talking about?”

“If we can understand what that information is, and where it goes, and if we can disrupt it, then we can disrupt Chapalii shipping, can’t we? By a subtler and more potent method than outright use of force, which we haven’t got enough of anyway.”

Cara got a curious expression on her face. “We don’t know how long the Chapalii live, do we? But if our life spans expand to match theirs, wouldn’t that give us an equal advantage?”

“Unless a short life span, if you’re aware of it, makes you rasher and more aggressive in getting what you want. If you have a lot of time, it might not seem so urgent.”

“Which is one reason you could choose to stay with Ilya and the jaran.”

“Yes.”

“What a strange, tangled web we weave, my dear.”

“There they are.” Tess got to her feet and waved at her children, who came out of Mother Orzhekov’s tent in a herd, gabbling and shouting. Only Yuri waved back. Natalia was too busy arguing with Lara, and the whole herd of children headed out behind the tent, intent on some goal. They did not look as if they had heard the news of Niko’s death yet, or as if the thunderstorm had bothered them one bit. She gazed thoughtfully on her children as they vanished from sight. “Are you saying, Cara, that you can do this
now
?”

“I have a formula. It needs further testing and refinement, and the main problem is that actual results in humans won’t be quantifiable for decades.”

“So my children could live for centuries, perhaps?”

“No, Tess, not just your children.
You
could live for centuries. Perhaps. Do you want to?”

“I don’t think I’m quite ready to consider that question. Could we please resolve all the moral issues involved in interfering here on Rhui as well as free ourselves from the Chapalii hegemony before we tackle that one?”

Cara smiled. “Somehow I suspect they’re all related, intertwined like the many strands of a web.”

“And like the strands of light that make up a web, the darkness against which the strand appears must also exist in order to set it off.”

“I hate to sit on these moral questions alone,” said Cara softly. “That’s why I came to see you.”

Tess extended a hand and lifted her up. “Oh, thank you,” she said wryly. “We must go say good-bye to Niko.”

“What will happen to his body?”

Tess recoiled from her. “You’re not—”

“No, no! I didn’t mean I wanted to do an autopsy.” She looked sheepish for a moment, but recovered quickly. Already, above, patches of blue sky chased the clouds southward. “I just wondered, that was all.”

Tess lifted her chin to let the wind stream off her face. It smelled of rain and damp felt. “They’ll take him out to the plain and leave him there, so that his soul may enter again into the world in another body.”

“That’s right. Metempsychosis. The transmigration of souls. It’s a form of reincarnation belief. But that’s not what happened to Arina Veselov.”

“No. She was released from this world.”

“I’d like to see the baby.”

“Yes. There, I see others going over as well. There will be a vigil tonight. At dawn his relatives will take him out onto the grass.”

Cara went over with her. Cara was one of those people who had the art of good manners down perfectly: She stayed long enough to honor her connection to the deceased, but not so long as to imply that her connection was any greater than it actually was.

Tess stayed longer, well into the night, kneeling on the carpet under the awning, first with her children on either side of her and, later, when they fell asleep and were carried off to bed, by herself. The entrance flaps were thrown wide, to admit Father Wind, but it was still night, oddly enough, and the candles burning at Niko’s head and foot illuminated him with a steady light. As if to reflect his steady wisdom in life. She wept softly, but more for herself, for losing him, than for him in death.

She dozed off finally and woke and dozed off and started awake again, hearing bells. But she had been dreaming: The scene remained unchanged, only the candles had burned to stubs.

No, there were bells, messenger bells. She stood and stepped off the carpet, into the night. The sky had cleared utterly, and the moon hung low, spraying its silver gleam over the pale marble dome of the library. It was cool.

There.
Tess saw the torches, men loping alongside a horse. She walked out to meet the messenger, and blinked once, twice, there was something so familiar about his posture on horseback. Then he swung down and turned into the direct light of a torch.

“Kirill!” Beyond that word, nothing more came out, she was so surprised to see him.

He looked travel worn, he looked weary, he looked—gods—older than Ilya, but he still looked like Kirill, only markedly grim. Seeing her, his expression softened somewhat, although he looked almost… cautious.

“I came to attend my wife at the birth of our child,” he said hoarsely. She said nothing. She needed to say nothing. “But I heard what happened on my way here.”

There was a long silence. She took one step closer to him. “The child still lives, Kirill. A girl.”

He took off his helmet and shook out his hair, pale in the moonlight, still cut short. The bells strapped to his chest and back whispered as he moved. “That is not the only reason I came. South past the desert there is a pass that leads into the eastern wilderness that borders Mircassia, or so my intelligence reports. In two or three months, when the rains have stopped, it will be passable. I can lead my army over that pass and into the heart of Mircassia while Sakhalin comes down on them from the north.”

“But, Kirill—” She faltered. She felt so terrible, thinking of Arina, that it took her a moment to realize that the grim look on his face was more concern for her than distress over his own sorrow. Good reasons, both of them, but neither of them truly reasons a dyan would leave his army during campaign season, not even with a capable second to hand over into command.

“Where is Bakhtiian?” he asked suddenly, and gestured to the torchbearers to leave them. An Orzhekov cousin ran up, a boy, and took the horse away.

“He rode south over forty days ago.”

“We captured a man coming down the southern caravan route, bearing a letter and a message for the Prince of Filis. I traced his path back as far as Habakar. There, I lost it.”

“And?”

He closed the distance between them and halted in front of her. She smelled the rain on him, and for an instant the remembered scent of the nutblossom trees in Habakar, as if he had brought an echo of them with him.

He glanced first to the right and then to the left, and when he spoke, he lowered his voice so that she had to lean toward him to hear. “The man who dictated that letter was wise enough not to expose his own identity by using his name. Someone in the tribes has set out to betray Bakhtiian.”

From behind her, like an antiphony, rose the dawn song for the dead, for the departing man, so that his soul might rise into the winds and be borne back into a woman’s body and so be born again into the world. To the east, light rimmed the horizon, and the sun rose.

T
HE CAPTAIN SHOWED HER
into a bedchamber. At first she thought that he meant her to lie with him there, but the bed itself was too richly arrayed for a woman of her background. She heard voices from behind the arras.

“My soldiers deserve a reward,” said Prince Janos. “Those barbarians fought like madmen. We took heavy losses.”

The captain deliberately looked Jaelle over, but without malice, simply with appetite. She bowed her head and tried to look meek, and watched his boots as he went out the door.

“There is a village nearby,” Rusudani replied. “Surely there are women there they can take. But I need an attendant on the ride to White Tower, and I will not take an unlettered filthy peasant woman with me.”

“You said yourself the whore is a heretic. Better an honest peasant woman than an apostate.”

“You have shown already how much you care for God’s commandments. Let me speak plainly, then.”

Oddly enough, the prince sounded amused. “I wish you would.”

“If she goes to your soldiers, they’ll kill her one way or the other, or at least she will be lost to me. Then it will be only through you that I will be able to speak with—” Rusudani bit off a word. “—the jaran remaining to me.”

“That problem is easily solved. I’ll kill them all, except the princess, and you’ll be rid of them.”

“You have already given me your word. Do you go back on your bargain?”

“No. Why are they so valuable to you, Rusudani?”

“Because of the power they give me over you.”

He actually laughed. “Your beauty alone has power over me.”

“How can you say that when you just told me that it is true that King Barsauma’s last surviving son died unexpectedly four months ago?”

“There are other claimants to the throne of Mircassia.”

“None with as clear a claim as mine. Now that my brothers are dead I am his only grandchild, that I have ever heard of.”

Jaelle heard soft footsteps nearing the arras, and she knelt hastily beside the bed. Nervously, she caught the coverlet in her hands and twisted it around between her fingers.

“And I am a younger brother with six nephews. You understand why we are now wed.”

“Yes,” she said bitterly. “But I would rather have been granted the lowliest seat in God’s house than a throne in this world.”

One corner of the arras twitched and was pushed aside. Prince Janos looked into the room. He wore an elegant overtunic embroidered with gold thread, and in the quiet, whitewashed room she could see his features much more clearly than she had been able to in those terror-stricken moments in the church: Like most highborn men in these lands, he had a mustache, a clean-shaven chin, and hair trimmed at shoulder length, a style that suited him. Without his armor, he looked far less massive but no less daunting. He studied her for a moment, half as a man measures how much he might desire a woman and a half as a captor discerns the worth of his captive.

“Your slave is here,” he said, and let the arras fall back into place.

Jaelle let out her breath. Needing something to do, she found a basin and pitcher on a side table, and poured some of the water out into the basin. Turning around, she saw that Rusudani had come into the bedchamber. Rusudani looked at her and then went and sat on the edge of the bed.

“I will help you off with your dress, my lady, and help you wash a bit if…” Jaelle trailed off. Rusudani stared at the arras, seeming not to hear her. Her lips were set and pale, her hands in fists on her lap.

She was terrified.

She had spent most of her life in a convent, expecting never to wed a man. Expecting never to face this night.

Jaelle felt an unexpected stab of pity for her. After all, Rusudani had as good as saved her life. She knelt in front of her, tentatively touching Rusudani’s hands, which were as cold as ice. “Shall I send for someone to lay a fire in the hearth, my lady?”

Rusudani gave a slight shake of her head. “God enjoins us to seek only that warmth which the sun, His servant, grants us. To desire more warmth than that is to care more for the things of this world than for the heavenly city which God will reveal to the faithful in the next life.”