The Novels of the Jaran (233 page)

Ilya stirred and a moment later stood beside her. He slipped past her and knelt beside Yuri, gently touching the boy’s cheeks with the back of a hand. “Hot,” he murmured.

Yuri coughed again and woke himself up. He whimpered and licked his lips and wiped his nose on his wrist. “My mouth hurts,” he said, his voice rising with a sick child’s wail.

“Shh.” Ilya moved his son to rest against his chest, stroking his hair. He glanced up at Tess, and she fetched a water-skin. As Yuri was drinking, Natalia woke up. Like her father, she was a light sleeper, one who woke from sleep straight into focused consciousness.

“He won’t be able to ride out on the birbas, will he?” Natalia asked, cutting to the chase.

Yuri began to wail in earnest.

“Hush, little one,” said Ilya. “I’ll stay here with you.” He looked up at Tess, anticipating her question. “The young riders and archers will have my aunt’s eye on them. That should be more than enough to convince them to perform well.”

That hadn’t been quite the question she was going to ask, but it served to answer it just as well. Would the young riders not want Bakhtiian himself to oversee their prowess? In fact, when she could untangle herself from her Earth-bound prejudices, Tess knew perfectly well that Mother Orzhekov’s stature was equal to her nephew’s.

“You cry too much,” said Natalia to her brother, which merely set him wailing again.

“That is enough of that,” said Ilya sternly to his daughter, and Yuri was not sick enough to miss the opportunity to stick his tongue out at her in triumph. The tongue was coated with a white film.

Tess sighed. “Talia, get dressed and run and get—” She almost said Niko. But he needed his rest. But wouldn’t it be worse to begin to overlook him just because he was getting old? “Get Niko.” Natalia jumped up and left. Yuri coughed again. What if, this time, it was a truly serious illness? She lived with that nagging fear all the time, that and brooding over how she was going to educate her children properly. Ilya kissed Yuri on the forehead and whispered something to the boy which made him smile. Tess watched him. Ilya was impossibly patient with his children when they were sick; it was perhaps the only thing for which he had any patience. What was she going to do when they grew into adults? She did not want her children to live only in this world.

Ilya lifted his gaze and smiled at her. He seemed unconcerned about Yuri’s cough and fever, but Tess had discovered that Ilya was a better judge of illness than she was. “The truth is,” he said, “hunting bores me. There are some books in the library I haven’t read yet.”

Tess snorted. She crouched beside her husband and took Yuri’s hand in hers, but Yuri had already slipped into a doze again. “Ilya, what do you want?”

His smile vanished. When he contemplated his vision, his gaze narrowed until Tess could almost imagine it as a single beam, piercing to the heart of the universe, capable of vaporizing any object that stood in its path. “The world.”

It was at moments like this that Tess was forced to acknowledge that he was, in some small way, insane. Sometimes out here on the plains, she could forget his vision—or at least, not the vision, since Ilya would not have been the person she fell in love with without that vision, but the plain bald fact of what it meant.

“I was dreaming,” said Ilya abruptly, “before I woke up. I had a vision of a god with four arms, and he was dancing, and as he danced he created the world. I thought,
this is a vision given to me
,
that with every great change comes a new making
.”

Tess hung the lantern from a pole and favored Ilya with a wry smile. “Was it a true dream or a false one?”

“The gods only send me true dreams.”

She kissed him, and Yuri, and went outside. What could she say to him? Because he was right. His own children would not be jaran, not truly. Already his vision and his armies and the deadly influence of Tess and her brother Charles wove a new pattern into Rhui’s history.

Outside, dawn limned the distant hills. The Orzhekov camp rose and readied itself for the great hunt. Tess greeted Niko and packed saddlebags and took Natalia out to help her bring in her string of horses. She left the horses with one of the Orzhekov boys and returned to say good-bye to Ilya and Yuri. Irena Orzhekov met her under the awning of her tent.

“Your husband is not riding out with us.”

“Why is it, Mother Orzhekov, that you call him ‘your husband’ instead of ‘my nephew’ only when you are displeased with him?”

“Humph.”

“He is concerned for his son.”

“Ilyakoria spoils his children,” said Irena firmly. Tess knew better than to disagree. But for some reason Vasha’s image leapt to her mind. Ilya had never spoiled Vasha, but perhaps he had sheltered him too well. She wondered how Vasha was faring in Yaroslav Sakhalin’s army, but then Niko emerged from the tent.

“How is Yuri?” she asked anxiously.

Niko shrugged. “I saw four other children yesterday with the same complaint. I am not concerned. Nor should you be.”

Irena made a movement toward the tent and then checked herself.

“Are you going to go back in and try again?” Tess asked, amused despite herself.

“I know him too well,” said Irena. “We are leaving now.”

“I will come at once,” said Tess, but she went inside the tent first. “Your aunt is very annoyed with you,” she said to Ilya as she kissed him good-bye. Ilya merely smiled. He sat in the front chamber. Light streamed in through the entrance flap to illuminate the pages of the book he had set on his knees where he sat in a heap of pillows. Tess could hear Yuri’s soft snore from the back. “Anatomy?”

“
On the Nature of the Body
, an old text from Byblos written by the great physician, Antomis of Thene.” The book was open to a page illustrating a pregnant woman with a child curled up inside her. Ilya flushed suddenly and turned the page, as if such matters were only for women’s scrutiny, but Tess thought at once of Arina, dead for ten days now. She pressed her lips together and clenched one hand, so she would not cry. “Do you have to go?” he asked softly.

“Yes. I’m a woman. Of course I have to go. As does most every other person in camp, except those too old or too young or too pregnant. Or too self-important.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Yes.” She relented, grinning. “I don’t mind. I like it.” She kissed him a final time for good measure and left.

They spread out in a long line and rode southeast for six days, driving game before them. At dawn of the seventh day the jahars on the wings broke off, advancing ahead of the center until they vanished into the rolling hills. By the end of the eleventh day, the wings met up with each other again to form a vast ring of riders around the chosen hunting ground. When at last the call came that the circle had been completed, the advance began: The circle slowly contracted as they drove the animals before them in toward the center.

Indeed, this was the test of the birbas which Tess most enjoyed. It was forbidden to kill the game, but more importantly, it was a point of honor for each rider not to let any animal, no matter how small, how fleet, or how ferocious, escape out of the ring as it contracted. Children rode behind the front lines, which were made up on this birbas primarily of young archers and riders who would after this be sent out to the armies in the field. What worse fate, Tess reflected, than to prove oneself unworthy of riding with the army?

At night, a string of lights—campfires—curved off into the distance on both sides. Tess took her turns at watch and slept tucked in a blanket with Natalia.

On the fourteenth day as the ring contracted further and further, she dropped back from the second rank to ride with Natalia, who wanted to range along the ring itself.

A herd of skittish antelope had fallen back against the line, and Natalia watched with interest as a jahar of young riders shifted and drove the animals on. A single antelope bolted for freedom, heading for a gap that had grown in between this jahar and another, but at once a flag went up and riders split off from the other jahar to contain it. Tess was, as usual, impressed by the coordination of parts.

“Mama,” said Natalia, “why do women and men hunt together in the birbas?”

“It trains the army, little one. An army in the field must be able to accurately judge the ground it crosses, and in battle a jahar must judge distance and time.”

“Do the khaja armies train like this?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is that why the khaja must always fall to the jaran?”

“Well, that is one reason.”

“Is Papa really the emperor of the world?”

Tess glanced at her daughter, but Natalia’s expression was serious. “Who told you that?”

“I went to the market with Aunt Stassi, the khaja market in Sarai, and that is what one of the khaja said.”

“There is a great deal of ‘world’ out there, Talia. You might as well call me emperor of the world, as him.” It would be more true.

“Are you emperor of the world, Mama?” Natalia asked, and Tess supposed that she might well seem so, to her daughter. Or at least, to her daughter at this age. That would pass.

But the question made her ponder, and her mind wandered. How tempting it would be to enforce her views onto every society on Rhui. How hard it would be to stop once she started. Perhaps one reason she stayed with the jaran was to keep herself to some degree removed from the ability, the opportunity, to meddle outside of this one (rather significant) spot. Yet the simple fact was that even with the force of Earth’s knowledge behind her, she would need an army ten times the size of the jaran army, she would need a communications network far more sophisticated, which would all have to be laid in, and she would need time and more time yet, to achieve any wholesale unalterable change in the complex web of Rhuian culture.

So how did the Chapalii do it? They did not, as far as she knew, possess a standing army with which to control their great stellar empire. They had no obvious military presence on Earth except for the Protocol Office, which was bureaucratic and not military, and the security force, which was drawn exclusively from the human population and which worked with the Protocol Office to prevent breaches of Chapalii law.

Yet they had crushed Charles’s first rebellion decisively. They had destroyed, or at least outlasted, the Mushai’s rebellion millennia ago, but in all the stories about him Tess had never once heard the name of a general or a battle; neither had she found any such stories or names or titles honored anywhere in what (presumably) little she knew of Chapalii literature, if it was even literature as humans knew it. There was one whole story cycle about the clever dealings of a probably mythical merchant house called Sashena, but nothing of the noble deeds and great sacrifices of a warrior class.

A great empire thrives on movement. But a great empire must be established somehow. It does not just spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus or from the angry frown of Brahma’s forehead.

“Mama! Look! Look!”

Torn out of her thoughts by Natalia’s shout, Tess blinked rapidly, accidentally turning her implant on and then off in quick succession. Slightly dizzy, she finally found Natalia’s arm and looked where the girl was pointing.

A clot of grim-faced young riders battled with poles and the flats of their sabers against a pack of terrified, furious
sargis
, wolves, who had struck out into the line.

Natalia looked pale. One of the young men had fallen back, his right arm hanging limp. The struggle was made more eerie still by its silence. The riders did not shout or curse except to give terse commands.

“Should we move back, Mama?” asked Natalia suddenly.

“No,” said Tess, caught up by the contest. “Those boys would rather die than let those wolves break back through the line. They won’t get to us.” Once, she had gone on such a hunt in the front ranks; once she had turned back a great cat, tawny and powerful. The memory made her heart pound fiercely. “Never run away from what frightens you, Talia.”

“Yuri once said he wished all the animals could get away free.”

“What do you wish?”

“I wish I was old enough to hunt.”

Yipping, calling out to each other, the pack of wolves broke away from the riders and turned and ran toward the center. Even now, as the day waned, Tess saw the grass move as animals were forced closer and closer together. Dark stains in the distance marked herds of grazing beasts driven against each other. This was not the greatest birbas Tess had ever ridden on. That one had started not with a circle but with a huge drive over hundreds of miles that formed only at the end into a circle, a hunt that had taken weeks and had taxed the army’s skill at working as a unit, and under unity of command, to its limit. That birbas had been led by Mother Sakhalin, with her nephew Yaroslav and with Ilya at her side. Still, even now as they closed the ring, the ground teemed with wildlife.

They camped that night, and almost everyone stayed awake. It was almost impossible not to. Lions roared, wolves howled, and the restless, terrified calls and bleats of animals drifted on the air. Tess could smell their fear and, overwhelming it, the palpable excitement of the young women and men who were proving themselves on this birbas.

Natalia had already fallen asleep, muttering about how sorry Lara would be that she hadn’t been able to go along because of her broken arm. Tess visited desultorily with Ilya’s niece Nadine Orzhekov while watching the flow of visitors into and out of the field awning set up for Mother Orzhekov.

“The fact is,” Nadine was saying, “that Lara’s arm has healed enough that she could have come along, but I wouldn’t let her. I won’t trust her on a birbas until she’s sixteen. She’ll do something idiotic. Feodor would let her do anything. He doesn’t care that she’s headstrong and won’t listen to reason because she always knows she can get him to do whatever she wants. She’ll turn out just like—”

“Dina,” said Tess abruptly, distracted by the appearance of a travel-worn old rider whom she didn’t recognize in the circle of lanternlight that illuminated Mother Orzhekov and her court. “I think it’s time for me to convince Ilya that you need to ride out with your jahar and get away from camp for a few months.”