The Novels of the Jaran (5 page)

She flushed with embarrassed anger—he was helping her down as if she were a child. But her eyes met his, and there was something in his gaze, something utterly good-natured, that made her smile slightly, at which he blushed a deeper shade of pink and lowered his gaze. At least he was as embarrassed about this as she was. She let herself be helped down. He let go of her instantly, and for a moment she stood next to him under the censorious gaze of the dark man and felt allied with the young blond against a force impatient with both of them. Without a word, the dark man reined his horse around and left them standing there together while he rode back the way he and Tess had come.

She gaped, she was so surprised at this desertion. Beside her, the young man laughed.

“Not worry,” he said in perfectly horrible Rhuian. “Ilya is always angry.”

“I beg your pardon!”

He repeated the words, slower this time, so that she caught them all. “I beg pardon for my tongue,” he added, not looking very sorry about it. “It is not so good.”

“How did you learn Rhuian?” she demanded.

He shrugged. “I study in Jeds.”

She felt herself gaping again: this young native—nondescript except for the merry cast of his face, arrayed as barbarically as any savage, living out on a trackless plain—had studied in Jeds.

Under her stare, he dropped his gaze shyly. “I apologize. Forgive me. I have not given you my name. I am Yurinya Orzhekov.” Long lashes shaded his blue eyes. “But perhaps you will call me Yuri.” He hesitated, as if this request were a liberty.

Tess began to feel dizzy again and, leaning forward, she put her hand on the first thing within reach: his horse.

“Are you well? We go to camp now. Ilya says you were walking many days.”

“Yes, I…” In a moment her head cleared. “I’m Tess. Terese Soerensen, that is. But Tess, that is what my friends call me.”

“Ah,” he said wisely. “Can you mount?”

Under his stare, not intimidating at all, she felt it possible to be truthful. “The last time I rode a horse was, oh, ten years ago.”

“Well, then, I will keep the lead, and you hold on. Can you manage that?”

By this time she had adjusted for his atrocious accent—his vocabulary was decent enough. “Yes,” she replied gratefully, “I think I can manage that.”

He helped her mount, mounted himself, and led the way forward at a sedate walk. After he saw that she could manage that much, he let his horse ease back beside hers. “You are from Jeds”

“Ah…yes.”

“It is a very long way. Many months’ journey.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.” She hesitated to question him further on geography, for fear of revealing the wrong sort of ignorance. Instead, she chose silence.

“Ah, you are tired. I will not bother you.” He lapsed into a silence of his own, but a rather companionable one, for all that.

She let it go because she was exhausted, still hungry, still dizzy on and off. When at long, long last they topped a low rise and she saw below a perfectly haphazard collection of about four dozen vividly colored tents, she felt only relief, not apprehension. A rider some hundred meters distant hailed them with a shout and a wave, and Yurinya waved back and led Tess down into a swirl of activity.

Their arrival brought a crowd of people to stare, mostly women and children, and soon after a woman whose broad, merry face bespoke a blood relationship to Yuri. She held a child in one arm, balanced on her hip, but when Yuri spoke briefly to her in their language, she handed the child over to another woman and crossed to stand next to Tess. She called out to the crowd, and it quickly dissipated, except, of course, for a score of curious, staring children.

She looked up at Tess and smiled. It was like water in the desert. Tess smiled back.

“I am Sonia Orzhekov,” said the young woman. “I am Yuri’s sister, so he has properly brought you to me.”

“You speak Rhuian.” Tess stared at her, at her blonde hair secured in four braids, her head capped by a fine headpiece of colored beads and leather; she wore a long blue tunic studded with gold trim that ended at her knees, and belled blue trousers beneath that, tucked into soft leather boots. An object shaped like a hand mirror hung from her belt. “I suppose you studied in Jeds, too.”

Sonia laughed. “Here, Yuri.” Her accent was far better than her brother’s, and she spoke with very little hesitation. “We’ll walk the rest of the way.” She lifted up her arms and helped Tess down. “There. Men can never talk to any end, sitting up so high all the time. Yuri, you may go, if you’d like.” Although couched politely, the words were plainly a command. Yuri glanced once at Tess, smiled shyly, and left with the two horses.

“But did you?” Tess persisted. “Study in Jeds, I mean.”

“You are surprised.” Sonia grinned at Tess’s discomfiture. “Is Jeds your home?”

“Yes.” The lie came easier to her, now that she realized it was the best one she had, and not entirely untrue.

“So you do not expect to see such as we studying in the university in Jeds. Well.” Sonia shrugged. The blue in her tunic was not more intense than the fine bright blue of her eyes. “You are right.
Jaran
do not normally study in Jeds. Only Yuri and I, and Dina now, because Ilya did, and he thought it would be—” Her grin was as much full of mischief as laughter.
“—good
for us. Poor Yuri. I suppose he was miserable the entire time, though he will never say so much to me, even if I am his sister. And never ever would he say it to Ilya.”

“Who is Ilya, and why was
he
studying in Jeds?”

“Ilya Bakhtiian? He is my cousin, first, and also the
dyan
of our tribe’s
jahar…
You would say in Rhuian, perhaps, the leader of our riders. Why he went to Jeds? You will have to ask him. He’s the one who found you, if Yuri did not say.”

Tess, remembering that dark, aloof, censorious man, and their ride together, flushed a furious red.

Sonia merely laid a soft but entirely reassuring hand on Tess’s arm, guiding her, supporting her. “Come, you’re tired. Eat and sleep first. Then we can talk.”

So Tess did as she was told, and was relieved to be treated both kindly and firmly. Sonia took her to a huge, round tent, gave her warm stew and hot tea to drink, chased four inquisitive children out of the curtained back alcove of the tent, and helped Tess out of her boots and clothing. Then, giving Tess a yellow silk shift to wear, she pointed to a pile of furs and left, returning once with a small bronze oven filled with hot coals. Tess lay down. The furs were soft enough, but they smelled—not bad, precisely, but musky, an exotic, overpowering scent. Outside, children laughed and called in some game. A woman chuckled. Pots chimed against each other in the breeze. More distantly, a man shouted, and animals bleated and cried in soothing unison. A bird’s looping whistle trilled over and over and over again. Tess slept.

Charles Soerensen sat at his desk, staring out at the mud flats of Odys Massif that stretched for endless miles, as far as one could see from this tower and farther yet. While his companion spoke, Soerensen sat perfectly still, engrossed in the scene beyond. But Marco Burckhardt knew that Charles Soerensen listened closely and keenly to everything he had to report.

“…and while I was in Jeds, Dr. Hierakis isolated another of the antigenic enzymes in the native population that has been puzzling her. Which reminds me, this lingering illness that the Prince of Jeds is suffering is either going to have to get better or you’re going to have to kill yourself off and let your sister take over, or some invented son, once she can be fetched back from whichever damned place overseas you supposedly sent her to study. It’s been over two years since you’ve appeared publicly in Jeds, or even been downside at all.”

Charles reached out and with one finger rotated the globe of Earth suspended to the right of his desk a quarter-turn, revealing the Pacific Ocean. “Eighteen months. And in any case, I just inherited twenty years ago. We’ve got a while before we need a new prince down there.”

“If you say so. I think I’ll sail the coast up north from Jeds next. Northeast, that is, up the inland sea.”

A soft click sounded, barely audible, but both men stilled, and Marco turned expectantly toward the tiled wall opposite the huge open balcony that looked out over the tidal flats. A seam opened. A woman dressed in an approximation of Chapalii steward’s garb appeared.

“Visitors,” she said, low, and quickly. “The
Oshaki,
in from Earth. Hao Yakii Tarimin.”

Charles nodded. He did not stand, but Marco did. The woman backed out of the room. A moment later, Hao Yakii entered and paused on the threshold. Marco gestured for him to enter, and Yakii came forward and with a precise, deep bow, presented himself to Charles.

“Tai Charles,” he said in formal Chapalii. “I am thrice honored to be allowed into your presence, and I beg leave to thank you again for your generosity in letting my ship transport cargo and passengers through your demesne.”

Charles inclined his head the merest degree. He folded his hands together, one atop the other.

Marco echoed the folded hands. “The Tai-en accepts your thanks. Is there any news to report? Have you your manifest for the Rhui cargo?”

Yakii produced a palm-thin slate and offered it to Marco, and bowed again to Charles, retreating a step.

Marco studied it, puzzling out the letters of formal merchanter’s Chapalii. “Laboratory equipment,” he said in Anglais. “The usual kit for the good doctor. Forty boxes of bound paperbooks for dissemination. Silk bolts. Iron ingots. Spices. Some luxuries from home for the personnel. Pretty sparse for a cargo, I must say.” He glanced up. Charles rubbed his chin with his left forefinger. “Nothing missing that I can see,” Marco added in Ophiuchi-Sei, the only human language they were fairly sure the Chapalii had not learned, since its structure and cadences were decidedly and pointedly egalitarian.

Charles returned his gaze to the monotonous gray-green flats and stared, as if he saw something out there Marco did not. Yakii waited with Chapaliian patience for the duke to acknowledge the manifest or dismiss him. Finally, Charles reached out and turned the globe again, and rested his right forefinger lightly in the middle of eastern Europe.

“Is there also a message,” asked Marco in his painstaking but rather rough formal Chapalii, “from the Tai-endi Terese Soerensen?”

Marco saw the faint flush, the quiet creep of blue onto Hao Yakii’s skin before it melted and blended back into white. Whether Charles could detect the color shift in the reflection of the glastic pane he could not be sure.

“I received no message,” said Hao Yakii in a colorless voice, “from the Tai-endi Terese Soerensen to convey to the duke.”

Charles’s eyes narrowed slightly, scarcely noticeable, unless one knew him as well as Marco did.

“You may go, Hao Yakii,” said Marco.

Yakii bowed to the correct degree and retreated out of the room. Charles stood up.

“Get Suzanne,” he said. “I want her to take the next ship back to Earth.”

“Aren’t you overreacting?”

“Tess sends a message by every ship that comes through here via Earth. We agreed on that when she decided to study at Prague.”

“Still, Charles.” Marco walked to the desk and laid his palms flat on the satiny surface. “Wasn’t she in the last throes of writing her thesis? Damned linguists. I’ve studied Chapalii since before she was born, and she still speaks it ten times better than I do.”

Charles had pale blue eyes, deceptively mild eyes except when their full force was turned on an adversary. “When I have every reason to suspect that Chapalii Protocol officers arranged the accident that killed my parents? I don’t think I’m overreacting.”

Marco shrugged. “I’ll go.”

Charles considered. “No. Suzanne can handle this. I’ll have her send a bullet back to us from Earth once she’s there.”

“That’s pretty damned expensive.”

Charles laid a hand on the north pole of the Earth, gently, reverently. “Why the hell do you think I accepted this honor? She’s my only heir, and you know damned well we’re the only toehold humanity’s got to the chameleons’ power structure. Now.” He removed his hand from the globe, and his tone altered, softened, as he sat down again. “Is there anyone else from the
Oshaki
I am meant to see?”

Marco pushed off the desk and went to the transparent wall. The tide was coming in, a low, steady swell that overtook islands of reeds and swallowed them. On the horizon, the towers of Odys Port winked in the light of the setting sun. “The merchant, Keinaba.”

With a soft click, a door opened in the back wall. The woman came in and walked straight up to the desk.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” she said. “Marco, haven’t I told you that turquoise blue is
not
your color?”

“You’re welcome to undress me, my love,” said Marco with a grin, “and show me something more appropriate to wear.”

“Fat chance, sweetheart. Here, Charles, this is from the
Oshaki.”
She dropped a thin slate down on the desktop. “No sooner did the captain hie himself out of here but his steward comes in with this message from the Chapalii merchant. Hao Yakii and house Keinaba’s regrets, but Hon Echido Keinaba has been unavoidably detained and will continue with the
Oshaki
to Chapal system. I can’t believe that anything in this galaxy would drag a merchant from that house off the chance we offered them to tie in with our trade and our metals foundries.”

Charles steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them. He did not look at the formal Chapalii script inscribed on the slate’s screen. The tide lapped at the wooden docks built below, stirring a rowboat and a gross of lobster cages tied to the pilings. “Let’s not take offense yet,” he said slowly. “Let’s keep channels open with the Keinaba house.” He glanced up, first at Marco and then at the woman. “Suzanne, I need you to go to Earth and find out why Tess didn’t send her usual message. What’s the next ship heading out that way? On second thought, commandeer one. Not the
Oshaki,
I think.”

Suzanne picked up the slate and keyed in a few quick commands. “Five days would be easy. But if you really want to pull rank, I can leave tomorrow.”