His Conquering Sword Read online

  Qushid obeyed. How could he not? Jiroannes knew that the Habakar boy held a rank equal to Jiroannes’s own and that it was only cruel fate—or the Hand of the Everlasting God Himself—that had thrown him into the hands of the enemy and forced him to act as Mitya’s servant and chamberlain. It must gall him, to handle money like any steward; to translate words as Syrannus—Jiroannes’s own bond servant—had once done for Jiroannes before the Vidiyan ambassador had learned to speak khush himself. Jiroannes suspected that Mitya knew the rudiments of the Habakar language, but he would never stoop to using it in public. Why should the jaran speak the language of their subjects? It was fitting that their subjects learn to speak the language of their masters.

  The transaction completed, their party rode on. Marble columns alternated with poplars and almond trees along the broad avenue they followed into the northwestern district. Here, villas sprawled, airy houses ringed with trees and manicured gardens, fronted by statues and elaborate fountains. Jiroannes noted that about half of the houses lay empty, stripped of their movable wealth. A few brave merchants had remained, casting their lot in with the jaran. Squatters had invaded some of the other houses, men dressed in homespun, rough clothing who looked quite out of place in these elegant homes. Or perhaps they were only slaves, left to tend their master’s possessions until such time as it was safe to return.

  Jiroannes doubted it would ever be safe for them to return if they thought that safety consisted of the absence of the jaran. He believed firmly, by now, that Bakhtiian would succeed in conquering the Habakar kingdom utterly. Clearly Bakhtiian intended Mitya to rule the Habakar lands once Mitya came of age. Why else give the boy a general’s son as his interpreter? Why else betroth him to a Habakar princess?

  Mitya pulled up his horse at a crossroads and stared down a broad avenue lined with great columns that led like an arrow’s shot to the far distant gate to the heart of the city. Behind those inner walls, Karkand’s population waited out the siege. Did they think their king was coming to relieve them? Or was it rumors of the king’s nephew riding north that comforted them as they waited, day by day, gazing from their highest towers out over the suburbs to the surrounding plain, where the jaran army invested their city?

  “Do you like this country?” Jiroannes asked, watching Mitya as the boy rode up next to a column and traced its carved surface with his right hand.

  Mitya did not answer immediately. He regarded the avenue and the distant city with a musing expression on his face. Then he reined his mount around and pulled in beside Jiroannes. “When I become king here, will you ask your king to send you as the ambassador to my court?”

  Jiroannes didn’t know what to think. At first, he felt a thrill of elation, that he should be invited to serve as an ambassador, and not just as a common ambassador but as a personal one to a powerful king. But it might mean years and years spent in exile from his own land, and even if his success as an ambassador here won him the white Companion’s Sash, and admittance to the Companion’s Circle, what use was such influence if he did not live at court in order to exercise it?

  “Well,” said Mitya, turning his horse around and starting back the way they had come, “it was just a thought. It’ll be four years yet before I’m of age. Bakhtiian won’t let any man, not even me, ride in the army before the age of twenty. It doesn’t seem fair, though, that girls can ride with the archers at sixteen. Anatoly Sakhalin’s sister Shura is only seventeen, and she’s fought in three skirmishes and one battle already. Then again, she’ll be married soon and having babies, so perhaps this is the only chance she’ll have to fight.” He considered this in silence.

  Jiroannes considered the suburbs of Karkand. What if he did return to Mitya’s court? He would receive preference, certainly. Jiroannes reflected on the struggles his own uncle went through, balancing the cutthroat politics of the imperial court with his efforts to live in a comfortable style. Living in Habakar lands, Jiroannes would be well placed to benefit from opening up greater trade between Habakar and Vidiya. These rich villas had ample space and amenities for a man to live in style. Even a Vidiyan noblewoman might live here without disgust, and the homes seemed spacious enough that the women would have ample quarters for their seclusion. Perhaps he could even benefit by several advantageous marriages.

  They passed out of the suburbs by a different gate, double-arched. The marketplace along the square here was dedicated to ironworks and blacksmiths, repairing wagons, shoeing horses. A white-clad woman sat in silence, head bowed, in the shade on a wooden bench next to a terraced fountain. A ceramic beaker painted with fantastic birds along the base and lip rested next to her.

  “She is another holy woman?” Jiroannes asked. “If I ask for water, then must she give me a drink?”

  Qushid nodded. “The Almighty God is served by these handmaidens, the Vani, who by offering each and every man water, remind us that God alone can slake our thirst.”

  “Did you say they are called Vani?” Hadn’t his concubine been wearing fine white silk when she was brought to him? A sudden foreboding seized Jiroannes. His throat grew thick with dread. “Are any of these women called Javani?”

  Qushid’s eyes widened, giving him the look of a startled hare. He sketched a warding sign in the air with his left hand. “It is ill luck to speak so of the Javani, she who is now dead and not yet at rest in our Lord’s bosom.”

  “Dead?” Jiroannes managed to choke out the word.

  “When the citadel in Hazjan burned, thrown down by Bakhtiian, who does not honor the Almighty God and his Holy Book, so did the holy temple burn. Just as common women are marked by the priests to serve the Almighty God, so is one woman of the royal house honored as the Javani, the holiest of these maidens. Usually she is a distant cousin of the king. He sanctifies her and gives her into God’s Hands, to serve Him all her days at the heart of the holy temple.” He paused. “And, of course, a princess of the royal house also then can serve as the king’s ear and mouthpiece to the priests. But it is God she serves first.”

  They crossed under the arch and came out between fields of hay drying in the sun. Beyond lay the first tents of the jaran army. Jiroannes was relieved to be free of the oppression of the walls and of Habakar habitations. In there, within the walls, in one offhand moment, he had been transformed from a common ambassador into the worst sort of criminal. He had raped the holiest woman in Habakar lands. He had offended their God mightily, and by their laws deserved to be executed.

  “Look,” said Mitya, pointing, “there is Bakhtiian out riding. Do you see his gold banner?”

  Out here, beyond the walls, he reminded himself that he was a Vidiyan nobleman, answerable only to the laws of his own Great King. Still, to his horror, remorse and fear clawed at him.

  “Qushid,” he asked slowly, sure that if he did not choose his words carefully, the whole world would know at once of his crime, “what if such a woman did not die? What if she was taken captive by the army?”

  When presented with questions that demanded thought rather than a rote answer, Qushid gained a rather slack-jawed look. Perhaps he really was a little stupid. Certainly he did not suspect a thing. “I don’t know. The Almighty God wishes no bride who is not a virgin. I suppose she might kill herself, out of shame. That would be merciful.”

  “What if she didn’t kill herself? Might she marry?”

  “What man would wish to marry a stained woman?”

  “If she is the king’s cousin—? Might there not be some advantage to such an alliance?”

  “What is a stained woman?” asked Mitya. “And anyway, I’m to marry the king’s cousin, the princess, the one they sent out to my grandmother to foster until we’re of age to marry. Bakhtiian says that if we mean to hold these lands for our children and our children’s children, then we must weave ourselves into their hearts and into their laws and into their royal families as kin.”

  “Mitya,” said Jiroannes suddenly, “I would be honored above all things to be asked by you to attend
your court as ambassador.”

  Mitya smiled, looking heartened and pleased all at once. “I’d like that,” he said, with the casual arrogance that characterized his people. Of course they expected the world to bow down to them; hadn’t the gods granted them a heavenly sword with which to conquer foreign lands? Weren’t the khaja falling before them like the wheat trampled beneath their horses’ hooves?

  They separated at the outskirts of camp, and Jiroannes rode with his two escorting guards to his own encampment. Once there, he called Lal to him.

  “Bring me the woman,” he said, and he went inside his tent to conduct the interview.

  Lal brought her. She now wore Vidiyan silks, bright-hued, brocaded with peacocks intertwined with flowering vines. She cowered in front of him, kneeling, head bent. Her hands lay folded, trembling, in her lap. Her complexion was pale and spotless. The skin of her hands was so soft that Jiroannes felt that just by rubbing it vigorously between his own hands he could chafe it and redden it. Under the silks, he knew that her body, shaved clean of all hair, was as silkily smooth as that of the finest concubine in Vidiya, where such women were raised from childhood and pampered and scented and oiled and bathed to a fine perfection fitting for a nobleman’s use. But now he knew that this woman—the Javani—bore these marks not because she was a slave bred to concubinage but because she was of noble rank.

  She did not look up at him. Stillness masked her expression. He could not read her at all, but he knew she cried a little, every night, and then wiped her tears away.

  “Syrannus,” he called, “bring ink and paper. I wish you to take a letter to my uncle.” Syrannus entered and sat on a stool, parchment laid over a board balanced on his knees. “Syrannus, how much of the Habakar tongue can you speak?”

  “A little, eminence. Perhaps Lal speaks more.”

  “Umm. Lal, ask this woman who she is.”

  “The Javani,” she answered in a stifled voice when Lal put the question to her in halting words.

  “Ask her if she escaped the burning of Hazjan.”

  At the name of the city, the Javani burst into tears, a sudden and copious weeping that surprised Jiroannes. She cast herself facedown on the carpets and blurted out a long string of sentences, groveling at Jiroannes’s feet.

  “What is she saying?” he asked Lal and Syrannus.

  The boy and the old man regarded each other. In low voices, they debated, and at last Syrannus nodded and turned to his master. The Javani lapsed into silence. Her hands lay gripped in fists and her eyes were leaden with tears. Her black hair had slipped free of its veil and now spilled onto the carpet in disarray. Jiroannes loved her hair, and he found that the sight of it here, unbound, naked, aroused him.

  “Eminence,” said Syrannus, “we cannot be sure, but we are agreed that she is lamenting that she did not die, or could not die, or was afraid to die. Perhaps that she is ashamed that she preferred to live in shame rather than die honorably. But it is difficult to understand and unlikely in any case that a woman could entertain such masculine sentiments.”

  “Yet most men would have chosen to die, rather than live in disgrace,” said Jiroannes thoughtfully, staring at the curve of her body under the soft silken fabric of her robes. “A woman might easily be weak enough to fear death more than shame. Still, I wish you to take a letter to my uncle, asking him for his permission to marry.”

  “His permission to marry?”

  “Yes. I wish to marry this woman. Once I have ascertained that she is indeed who I believe her to be: a Habakar noblewoman of the royal line. With such an alliance, Syrannus, I can bind myself both to the Habakar royalty and to the advantages we can find there through trade with Vidiya, and to the young prince, who is going to marry into their family as well. If it is true that she was once a holy woman, then I can’t in good conscience keep her as my concubine. And no one else will have her, whether as slave or concubine or wife. I think we can find both profit and blessing in this transaction. Lal, see if you can make her understand what I mean to do. Then take her away and see to her. And—” He hesitated.

  “Certainly, eminence,” said Lal, “if she is to be your wife, she cannot be expected to share a tent with a slave.”

  “Of course. Just what I was about to say. See that Samae is lodged somewhere else. Samae can act as her handmaiden for now, but I think—” He bit at his lower lip.

  “Perhaps, eminence, I can find a woman in the guards’ camp to act as her body servant. That way she may have a woman of her own people as her companion.”

  “Ah, a fine idea, Lal. But not a peasant woman. Indeed, perhaps one of the merchants left in the suburbs has a niece or daughter he would be willing to sell into our service.”

  Lal knelt beside the woman and, like a handler coaxing a spooked horse, spoke to her gently and soon enough led her out of the tent. Syrannus’s pen scratched across the parchment. Jiroannes leaned back in his chair and sipped contentedly at the cool sweet tea Lal had brought him earlier.

  “When you are done, Syrannus, we will go ask for an audience with Bakhtiian. No, with Mother Sakhalin, I think.”

  “With Mother Sakhalin, eminence?”

  “You don’t think I’m fool enough to marry her without getting permission from the jaran, do you? Or at least without advising them of the situation? Not while we live in their power. If they come to think well of me, then there will be fewer obstacles in my path four years from now.”

  “Four years from now, eminence?”

  Jiroannes felt a surge of pleasure, seeing Syrannus at a loss for once. Always, before, he had felt that Syrannus knew better than he did what was going on; now, at last, Jiroannes felt that he was beginning to control his own life, to build his own destiny. There was more to life than a Companion’s Sash. There was a greater world than that contained in Vidiya. Jiroannes intended to rise as high as he could, no matter how far it meant he had to travel. He had grown up in the Great King’s court. And now he had seen the jaran. He was no fool. He could see to whom Heaven had granted her favor.

  And what if the jaran collapsed and their conquests were scattered to the winds? What if the Habakar king or his nephew regained his lands? Well, then, Jiroannes still had possession of the Javani, “the king’s ear and mouthpiece.” Either way, he would benefit.

  “Syrannus,” he added, rising and pacing the length of the tent and back again, “we will go first to the Habakar priests. I know there are some in camp, hostages, guests, whatever they are called. They must identify her and give their blessing, and then, armed with that knowledge, we can present our petition to the old woman. Yes. Yes. This will do very well.”

  Syrannus’s pen marked the parchment with his flowing script. Jiroannes sat back down and drank his tea.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “NOW WHAT?” ASKED DAVID of the little council gathered in Charles’s tent. “By Rajiv’s calculations, the actor is 24.7 kilometers away from us, up in the hills.”

  “And,” added Maggie, “we’ve got a shuttle available for rendezvous anytime in the next three days. It might have been possible to distract Grekov, but Nadine doesn’t miss anything. I don’t see how we’re going to manage bringing down the shuttle and picking up Hyacinth, especially with her eagle eye upon us.”

  Inside the tent, there was room enough for them all to sit in the wood and canvas folding chairs that Charles favored, although Marco stood and Jo lounged on the floor. Rajiv sat hunched over the table, manipulating data on the modeler sunk within the table’s surface.

  “I’ve plotted their course,” said Rajiv, “and it’s not unreasonable to predict that they’ll move another five to ten kilometers northeast tomorrow, which, depending on our course, could put them within ten to fifteen K range of us. But our paths will begin to diverge in another two days.”

  “Landing sites?” asked Charles.

  Rajiv brought up a flat geological map that took over the entire smooth surface of the table. It was detailed to the ten-meter range, shaded to sho
w elevation and vegetation and water patterns. “I’ve marked them here. But given that it’s a Chapalii shuttle, we’ve got a fair amount of leeway. They can land with relative silence and minimal damage in most terrain.”

  “Why is the actor staying up in the hills?” asked Jo. “Wouldn’t he be safer traveling north down through this valley?”

  “Not if he’ll get executed if he’s caught,” said Marco. “What about the people with him, Charles?”

  Charles steepled his fingers together and rested his chin on his fingertips. “Difficult to know. Hyacinth and his stolen gear will have to come with us, of course. His companions can either travel on, on their own, or—No.” He shook his head.

  “We can’t give them our protection?” asked David. “It’s ridiculous that they were punished so severely for homosexuality. It isn’t even a crime. But I suppose it’s all of a piece, when you consider how primitive this planet is.”

  “Why, David,” said Marco, “you’re singing a different tune these days.”

  David shrugged.

  “If we give them our protection,” said Charles softly, “then what becomes of them once we leave? As we inevitably will. I’ve thought of that, David, but I don’t see how we can manage it. Still, they’re the least part of our problem. We need to bring in that shuttle and transfer the medical equipment for Cara onto the pack animals. Without alerting our escort.” Charles grinned suddenly. David had long since realized that Charles enjoyed himself most when he confronted a seemingly insolvable problem. “Any suggestions?”

  “Kill them all,” said Marco facetiously. “That solves the problem.”

  “Except we have to explain it to Bakhtiian once we arrive at the army. Anyone else?”

  “Well,” said Jo, “that’s not so far from the mark, though, Charles. We have to render them unconscious somehow. Drug them. I don’t know. So we can send out an expedition to bring in the actor and pick up the supplies.”