His Conquering Sword Read online

  “Doctor! You’d let a man’s looks sway you?”

  The doctor laughed. “I meant his fear and grief. But, yes, frankly, I would. Why not? There’s little enough joy, and far too much pain, in a world like this not to appreciate the beauty that comes your way. He has a kind heart, and kind hearts count for a great deal in my book.” She peeled off gloves so sheer that Diana hadn’t known she was wearing them. “She’ll be out for eight more hours at least. I’ve got her under deep recovery. I’d like to keep her with me for another two days, and then I think she can be moved back to her camp. How long can you stay here?”

  Diana hesitated. “I don’t know. Rehearsals… Can Kirill come in and just look at her, at least?”

  “Not today.” The doctor ran a cool towel over her face and then scrubbed her hands under the sonic decontaminant shelf. “I don’t have time to disguise the equipment, and I understand there’re mobs of wounded and more expected. I’ll tell Kirill to see to his children.” She swept out.

  Diana stood in silence, holding onto Arina’s cool hand. At the foot of the couch, projecting up, a faint three-dimensional image of Arina’s body rotated slowly in the air. Angry red pulsed around the heart and scored a half-dozen other places around her midsection. She did not stir, only breathed. Diana found a stool and sat down to watch over her.

  After a long while, bells chimed and Tess entered. “Do you want anything?” Tess asked, regarding Arina pensively. “I can send Aleksi to keep watch—oh, hell—no, I can’t. It wouldn’t be proper. There’s no one but the actors, you, and Ursula, and myself.”

  “Can you send Owen a message?”

  “Better yet, I’ll go myself and ask him to release you for two days. Will that be—?”

  “No.” Diana winced, thinking of rehearsals, thinking of the parts she had yet to master. Quinn and Oriana had divided her old parts between them, leaving an odd combination of secondary roles for Anahita to fill in, but Anahita had collapsed once onstage already so she could no longer be relied on. But this was Arina. “Yes. But could you bring my slate back, so I can study my parts? And a change of clothes?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  Tess explained about a sortie and how the trailing edge of the battle had slammed against their surveying party and then charged on.

  “Dr. Hierakis said there were lots of casualties.”

  “Many,” said Tess grimly. “And many more to come.” She left.

  Diana did not understand what Tess had meant by that final comment until three days later, when the hospital was full of jaran injured, many of them from the Veselov tribe. The Veselov jahar had been hit hard by the battle and the pursuit. The doctor designated a stretcher for Arina that morning, and Kirill arrived breathless to walk beside his wife as they carried her back to her own camp. Arina was conscious but pale and weak. Diana walked on Arina’s other side.

  They walked in silence for awhile. At last, Kirill spoke. “Arina, Bakhtiian is going to give me my own command.”

  Diana winced. Arina had already expressed her fear that Kirill would want to ride in the army; this wasn’t going to help her get better.

  But Arina got a sudden spark of light in her eyes. Her voice, when she spoke, was faint but clear. “Your own command? Not just to ride in the army?

  “My own command. My own army. We talked about it. There’s much reconnaissance yet to be done. There’s the Golden Road that runs east to be scouted, and the lands southwest from here, past the city the khaja call Parkilnous.” He had warmed to his topic, but now he faltered and looked down at his wife in concern.

  In the distance, Diana heard a rhythmic thump and whistle, thump and whistle, over and over and over and going on endlessly.

  “What is that noise?” Diana asked when it became apparent to her that Arina had nothing to say about Kirill’s good fortune—which, of course, must seem the worst of fortunes to Arina.

  Kirill answered without looking up from his wife’s face. He held her hand in his withered one, but Diana could see that the hand looked fleshier and the arm actually had some substance to it now, as if by constant exercise he meant to restore it to its former strength. “It’s a catapult.”

  “Oh. What are they doing? Lobbing stones into the city for practice?”

  “No. Heads. For a lesson.”

  It took Diana a full thirty strides to realize that he wasn’t joking. She turned her face away and shuddered. Of course, she thought of Anatoly, sent out to bring the king’s head to Bakhtiian. How did you separate a head from its shoulders? How difficult was it? Did it cause a terrible mess? Was there a lot of blood, or only if the victim was still alive? Or if the blade wasn’t sharp enough?

  “Diana, are you well? You’re looking pale.”

  She started. “No, Kirill, I’m fine. Just worried about Arina.”

  Arina, on her pallet, smiled weakly. “I’ll be well,” she said. Her voice was breathless and wheezy, but determined. “Bakhtiian has honored you, Kirill,” she said finally.

  “You’re content?”

  “Your own command? Yes, I’m content.”

  She lapsed into silence. But her words shocked Diana. It hadn’t been fear for Kirill’s life that had caused Arina to speak so before, but only fear that he’d be just another rider. But make him a general in his own right, and then all was well. Goddess, she would never understand these people.

  The whole tribe came out to meet them as the little party entered the Veselov encampment. They kept a respectful distance, but they wanted a glimpse of their etsana. At times like this, Diana was wrenched away from her view of Arina as a sweet girlfriend about her own age and forced to realize that Arina had considerable authority and extremely high status. It reminded her of Mother Sakhalin’s disappointment in the common woman—a mere entertainer with a pretty face—whom her grandson had married. Anatoly should have married someone important, someone like Galina Orzhekov or a foreign princess, someone who wanted him to ride in the army, who was proud that he commanded his own jahar and was sent by Bakhtiian to perform important and dangerous deeds. She put a hand to her face, touching the scar that branded her left cheek. What was it Sonia had said, that a woman and a man are married as long as the scar marks the woman’s face, or the man lives? And yet, on Earth, it would be a simple procedure to erase the scar forever.

  At Arina’s tent, Arina’s young sister and Karolla Arkhanov waited to place her on pillows inside the great tent. They settled her in. Diana felt superfluous. Mira shrieked, to see her mother, but knelt a handbreadth away from her as she had evidently been instructed not to disturb her. Lavrenti bawled and arched his back in anger because his uncle Anton wouldn’t put him down on his mother. At last Kirill took Lavrenti and the boy calmed, his thin face caught in a baby’s sullen pout.

  Vasil came to pay his respects. He looked battered and bruised, and he limped, but the injuries merely gave him an interesting air of nobility in the face of dangers seen and conquered. Diana edged away and backed out through the throng. It was time to go home.

  At the outskirts of the Veselov encampment, Vasil appeared suddenly, mounted, leading a saddled horse. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said, greeting her with a sidelong glance. He smiled that brilliant smile of his. “It’s a long walk back across camp, and I have to deliver these horses … Would you prefer to ride?”

  “Oh, I …” His presence flustered her. He was so intensely good-looking and so determined to make an impression on her. And it was a long walk. “That’s very kind of you. I’d be honored.”

  “Not at all. The honor is mine.” He waited while she mounted. He did not once look at her straight on, and yet she felt that he looked at her constantly. They rode, and she knew that this was all somehow improper, but she wasn’t sure she cared. “Five nights ago you sang the story of the etsana who judged her daughters poorly. Who has written this story? Or did you write it yourselves? Is it an old story of your people? And how—well, when a Singer of the jaran sings,
she tells a story in music and with her words. How did it happen that with your people you tell these stories by—by becoming the stories?”

  All the rest of the way to the Company encampment Diana explained to Vasil, as well as she could, about acting and theater. Vasil drank in every word. He asked a hundred more questions.

  At the camp, she thanked him and dismounted. He turned the horses away and paused. “You have only to ask,” he murmured, looking down at her from under lowered lids, demure and yet completely assured. He hesitated one instant longer. When she only gaped at him and did not reply, he rode away.

  Quinn jogged out. “Well. Well, well. He’s a stunner. That your latest lover, Di?”

  “No.” Diana stared at his retreating back. And a fine back it was, too, straight and even, with his golden hair lapping the collar of his scarlet shirt. “But I think he just told me that he was available to audition for the part. And I don’t think he was delivering those horses anywhere but here.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She shook her head impatiently, as if sloughing off the last three days. “I’m back. What did I miss?”

  Quinn launched into a long explication of how Ginny and Owen were disputing over whether translation hurt the text more than it helped the process of understanding, and what progress Ginny had made on crafting a telling of the jaran story about the Daughter of the Sun who came from the heavens to visit the earth and ended up falling in love with a dyan of the tribes.

  “They’re going to risk that?”

  “Oh, Di, the jaran will never suspect. How should they? It’s a wonderful story. Yomi said that Dr. Hierakis thinks that it’s Bakhtiian’s favorite story. Now they’re talking about actually doing Tamburlaine.”

  “Oh, I hope not,” said Diana with feeling. “I’ve had enough of war. What about The Tempest? Aren’t we going to do that? And the folktale about Mekhala. What about Ginny’s Cyclopean Walls?”

  “Ah, absence does make the heart grow fonder. We’ve had to listen to Anahita complain on and on about how sick she is. We’ve been working like dogs while you’ve been away.”

  “I didn’t enjoy it!”

  “I’m sorry.” Quinn backed down immediately.

  “No, I’m sorry. I just—I don’t know. Never mind. I’m glad to be back. I like this place, and willingly could waste my time in it. Is there anything interesting to eat? Something—not what I could get in the camp?”

  “You are out of sorts,” said Quinn thoughtfully.

  “‘How weary are my spirits.’”

  Quinn rested a hand on Diana’s arm. “Poor Di. Come home.”

  “Gladly,” said Diana, and went with her into camp. Gladly she fell back into the routine. She went once a day to see Arina, who slowly grew stronger, but Arina’s own people took care of her. As the days wore on, Diana noticed Vasil frequently, here and there, running across her path now and again as if by accident, usually at the Veselov camp. And often, now, she saw him loitering in the background, at the outskirts of the audience that always gathered to watch them practice, watching their rehearsals with a look of hungry intensity on his face.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DESPITE HIMSELF, JIROANNES FOUND the city of Karkand impressive. In its own foreign way, the city rivaled the Great King’s capital of Flowering Mountain in southern Vidiya. Two walls enclosed Karkand. The outermost wall ringed a huge expanse of land, fields, gardens, orchards, and suburbs watered by canals, but the Habakar had given these flats up for lost and most of the population had retreated inside the massive inner walls that fortified the twin hills of the main city.

  Eight days after the army had besieged the city, Jiroannes rode with Mitya through these environs. Peasants from the lands surrounding Hamrat and from farther south had filtered in behind the army and taken the fields and the houses and now worked them for their jaran masters. Still, the place was half deserted, and the season was turning.

  The triple arched gateway through the outer wall opened onto a broad square paved with stone. Beyond the square three tree-lined avenues thrust into the suburbs. To the right, a marketplace sprawled along the inner wall, farmers and merchants selling vegetables and grain. They stared at the fifty jaran riders, Mitya’s escort, but went about their business nonetheless. Traffic passed through the smaller of the three gateways, men trundling carts or leading donkeys laden with goods.

  To the left, a marble fountain spilled water down a series of ledges. To Jiroannes’s surprise, a woman dressed in white sat alone and unveiled and unmolested by the pool at the foot of the fountain. She sat with her hands in her lap and a ceramic beaker at her right hand. Now and again a man halted before her, and she dipped the beaker into the pool and offered him water to drink. When the jaran riders paced by, she watched them apprehensively, but she did not move from her station beside the splashing fountain. Jiroannes noted that the skin of her hands was very fine, the mark of a woman who has not been forced to engage in any heavier labor than dipping water from a font. Her complexion was not as fine, sitting out in the sun as she was, but she looked far less sun-coarsened than did the jaran women, who without exception of rank or age worked at tasks fit only for a slave.

  “She might as well be a jaran woman,” said Jiroannes. “I had not noticed that Habakar women were so immodest. But perhaps she is a prostitute.”

  Bakhtiian had elevated the Habakar general’s son up from his status as prisoner and allowed him freedom as Mitya’s interpreter, because the boy had learned khush, and because the boy was about Mitya’s age. Qushid hid a look of horror behind one hand and after a moment uncovered his face again. He was tall, taller than Mitya, dark-complexioned with close-cropped black hair, but reserved to the point of seeming stupid. Bakhtiian’s chief wife conducted a school for those so favored by her husband, and this boy attended it by Bakhtiian’s order, learning khush and the ways of the jaran.

  Mitya threw a glance back at Jiroannes. “You must learn not to speak so disrespectfully of women, Jiroannes,” he said mildly. “My Aunt Sonia still counsels Bakhtiian that you ought to be sent home in disgrace. He listens to her as closely as he would to my grandmother, who is Mother Orzhekov of our tribe.”

  “I beg your pardon,” replied Jiroannes, not wanting to offend his friend. Mitya was too much a savage to understand how civilized women behaved. The Habakar boy doubtless possessed a finer education.

  “She is a holy woman,” said Qushid haltingly. “The priests choose girls each year to serve as the Almighty God’s handmaidens. They are God’s brides and are not meant for men.”

  “Ah.” Jiroannes nodded. “I see. Such holy women may not be touched by men.”

  “Nor would any man touch one. To violate a holy woman is the worst crime any man might commit, except to forswear Almighty God Himself. They are sworn to serve Him, not man.”

  Mitya looked mystified. “Do you mean to say those poor women aren’t allowed to get married? Or even to—?” He broke off, flushing. “That’s barbaric!”

  “Don’t you have priests?” Qushid asked.

  “Of course we have priests, a few, and Singers. Both women and men. But just as the gods granted death to us, so did they also grant us love. It’s not just foolish but dangerous to turn away from that with which the gods have gifted us.”

  “It is true,” said Jiroannes thoughtfully, thinking of the captain of his guards and how he had pleaded with his master for permission to bring women into the camp, “that the Everlasting God enjoins a man not to go without a woman for more than ten days. But, of course, it is different for women.”

  “It is?” Mitya looked dumbfounded. “How can it be different for women?”

  Jiroannes felt unable to answer this question. Instead, he glanced at Qushid and had the pleasure of seeing that the Habakar boy bore a sympathetic look on his face—one sympathetic to Jiroannes. It was, quite simply, impossible to explain some things to the jaran, because they were too uncivilized to understand such sophisticated philosophica
l and spiritual concepts.

  Mitya pulled his horse aside to admire a cart stacked with ripe melons that gleamed a pale rich green in the noonday sun. At once, the old man tending the cart leapt to his feet and presented the boy with the pick of the melons.

  “Here,” said Mitya, turning to Qushid, “pay the man whatever is a fair price for these melons and tell him to deliver them to the Orzhekov camp. Aunt Tess loves melons. These look very fine.”

  “Surely, your highness,” said Qushid, “you don’t need to pay for the melons. If you wish them, they are yours.”

  Mitya blinked. The harsh summer sun of this climate had bleached his fair hair out to a coarse pale blond and tanned his skin until he was almost as dark as the Habakar natives. Over the summer, he had begun to grow a light down of hair along his chin, the first sign of his manhood. Unlike the young riders in the army, he did not follow the fashion and shave off this suggestion of a beard; doubtless, thought Jiroannes, he was hoping enough would grow that it would become noticeable from more than an arm’s length away.

  “But if we mean to rule this country fairly, and if this man has already paid his tribute—his taxes—to our army, men we must act according to the law. By that law, it is robbery to take goods without paying for them. So you will pay him.”

  At times like these, Jiroannes recalled quite clearly that Mitya was not his friend but a prince, and heir to the most powerful man in this kingdom. He was a sweet boy, charming and unspoiled, especially compared to the princes at the palace school in Vidiya, who had been uniformly conceited, hedonistic, and cruel. But he was also arrogant, as all the jaran were, and well aware of the extent of his power.