His Conquering Sword Read online

  Aleksi remembered. He wasn’t sure whether to feel honored or nervous, but Tess wished him to do this, so he would. “I’ll go,” he said, not one to hesitate once he had made a decision. He kissed her on the cheek, bade farewell to Josef Raevsky, and went on his way. Passing between his tent and Tess’s on his way to the hospital encampment, he heard Bakhtiian and Nadine arguing in Rhuian just out of sight behind Tess’s great tent. He paused to listen.

  “What right has she to interfere?” Nadine demanded, sounding quite intemperate. “I know she convinced Feodor to mark me. He would never have done it otherwise. He would never have had the nerve.”

  “Yes, and faced with the prospect of being married to you in this temper, Dina, can you blame him? In any case, you know very well what right she has to interfere. She is Mother of all the tribes.”

  “Yes, but we’ve been to Jeds. We’re not bound by useless jaran customs. You and I should know better—”

  “Listen to me, young woman. I know better, and I know that for all that I learned in Jeds, for all the knowledge that lies in these khaja universities, we jaran are stronger because of what we are and because of how we live. The khaja can’t stand against us. They will never be able to. So the gods have gifted us. Would you like to have married in Jeds, instead?”

  A fulminating silence. “You know very well how they treat women in khaja lands.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I don’t want to marry at all. I want to ride.”

  “Then ride. You are already married, Dina. The nine days have passed.”

  “I wasn’t in seclusion.”

  “That’s true. If you wish to go through the ceremony—”

  “I don’t!”

  “Then accept what you must. And you must have children. You know it as well as I do.” There was another silence, but this one had more of a despairing edge to it. “Dina, I have already been advised to remove you from command of your jahar.”

  “Who—!”

  “None of your business. Listen to me, damn you. You’re worse than I was at your age.” That brought a reluctant chuckle from her. “I won’t do it. You’re a good commander, and even if you weren’t my niece, you would deserve such a command. You will remain a dyan. But there will be times when you can’t ride.”

  “When I’m pregnant.”

  “Yes. Don’t you see, Dina? The gods never give out unmixed blessings. They gifted women with the knowledge that is also a mystery, that of bringing children into the world, but knowledge is also a burden.”

  “A heavy one, in this case.”

  “If you only had a sister to bear children while you rode, then that would be well. But you have none.”

  “I want to explore, like the prince’s man, Marco Burckhardt, does.” Said stubbornly.

  Bakhtiian sighed. “You have no choice, my niece. You will have children. I order you to. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “During such time as you can’t leave camp, you will work with Tess. Her work is every bit as important as Yaroslav Sakhalin’s.” His voice dropped into a coaxing tone. “Those maps you made together are very fine.”

  “Thank you.” Was there a slightly warmer edge to her voice? Was she melting. “Praise from Bakhtiian is as a blessing from the gods themselves—”

  “Stop that! Don’t mock me!”

  “Uncle … I didn’t mean … I only meant …” She faltered. Aleksi was amazed to hear her sound chastened.

  “Never show such disrespect for the gods. You should know better, you who only by the gods’ grace are alive today, when everyone else in our family died.”

  “My father didn’t die. You didn’t die.”

  “Go,” said Bakhtiian.

  Aleksi heard Nadine take in a breath to say something. Instead, she said nothing, and a moment later he saw her emerge from behind the tent and stride away out into camp, which he thought showed great wisdom on her part.

  “Aleksi,” said Bakhtiian, sounding no less curt. Aleksi started, and then walked around the corner to face Bakhtiian. Ilya turned from looking out after his niece to glare at Aleksi, and Aleksi wondered abruptly how many times he had been saved from a lecture—or worse—from Bakhtiian because of Tess’s implicit protection. “I don’t like it,” Ilya said, and Aleksi knew that he meant Aleksi’s habit of listening in. “Do it to others if you will. Don’t do it to me.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Aleksi. “An incurable habit from my youth. It saved my life more than once.”

  “No doubt,” replied Bakhtiian. Aleksi could not tell whether he meant the comment to express sympathy or censure. “Nevertheless, not to me.”

  “I understand and obey, Bakhtiian.” He bowed, as they did in Jeds; Tess had taught him how to do it.

  “Go,” said Bakhtiian, but the word wasn’t as terse as it had been when he had ordered Nadine to leave. He might even have been amused.

  Aleksi escaped and, whistling under his breath, he considered the world while he made his way to the doctor’s tent. He decided that the world was a strange place, stranger than any one person ever might suspect, knowing only what she knew from the narrow path she rode through it. Aleksi felt sometimes that he himself rode more than one path, that there were two, or three or four of him, each scouting a different path, each in constant communication, as though belled messengers raced between the routes carrying intelligence from one to the next. And once you saw the world from three, or five, different roads, the view was never the same. The map changed and altered, and its details became more accurate. The landmarks receded or grew, depending on the angle from which you observed them, and at once, there might be an escarpment from which the astonished traveler would rendezvous with her selves and could suddenly comprehend the land as it truly was.

  “Ah, Aleksi.” Dr. Hierakis emerged from her tent, wiping her hands on a rag. “Come in. Come in.” He followed her back inside. She had sewn tiny bells all along the entrance flap, and they tinkled as the flap fell down behind them. Aleksi understood the bells, now; just as the messengers wore bells to alert the next garrison or tribe to their coming, the doctor positioned bells around her tent so that no person might enter unannounced and surprise her at her machines. A lantern sat placed in the center of a table, but Aleksi knew this trick. Tentatively, he put out a hand toward it, touched it, and his finger passed right through it. It was only an image of a lantern, not a lantern at all, although it looked so true that he would never have known if Tess had not told him.

  “Sit down.” The doctor indicated first a chair and then a pillow, so that he might choose whatever was most comfortable. “Will you have some tea?”

  Aleksi didn’t like tea, but he was far too polite to refuse any drink offered him in a woman’s tent. He sank down onto the pillow and received the hot tea from Dr. Hierakis. He sipped at the spicy drink cautiously and regarded the doctor from under lowered lids. She reached under the table with one hand and did something there with her fingers. The lantern grew a little brighter; otherwise he saw no change.

  “Recording,” she said into the air. Then to him: “Do you have a second name, Aleksi?”

  “Soerensen,” he said promptly.

  “I meant, a jaran name, or a tribal name.”

  “Not one I remember.”

  “How old are you?” She stared at him with that gaze he recognized as impartial, measuring him against some pattern only she knew, not for any personal reason.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, in which year were you born? Eagle? Rat? Lion? Horse, perhaps?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But everyone knows that, here.”

  “I beg your pardon. I don’t know. My tribe was massacred by khaja raiders when I was very young.”

  “Tess mentioned that. How did you escape?”

  Aleksi shut his eyes and struggled to recall anything from that time. He shrugged. “All I remember is the dew on the grass, and lying half sunk in water in a litt
le hollow of swamp. I lay there so still for so long that a frog crawled right up onto my right hand. It was a blessing, you see. The gods took pity on me, because the khaja had taken my family, so they sent the frog to gift me with speed for fighting.”

  “Why a frog?”

  “Haven’t you ever seen how fast a frog jumps? He sits perfectly still, and then he’s gone.”

  She chuckled. “Yes, I suppose that’s a fair analogy. But Aleksi, were they all killed?”

  “Yes,” he repeated patiently, “all but myself and—” Here he faltered. Always he faltered. “—my sister Anastasia.” Her name came out hoarsely.

  “No, I meant, is it possible that it was a slave raid? Or was everyone killed?”

  Her question, like a blessing, allowed him to recover. His memories of the rest of his tribe were so dim that they had long since ceased to trouble him. “What is a slave raid? Oh, that they would take the people away to sell in other lands, to serve a khaja master. I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing any bodies except that of my father.”

  “Oh, Goddess. I’m sorry, Aleksi.”

  Aleksi found her sympathy interesting. He never told jaran as much as this; any respectable jaran listener would have been appalled that a child could lose his entire tribe and still go on living. The gods had cursed people for less. “It was a long time ago,” he said, to reassure her.

  “Then what happened?”

  This was harder. He managed it by breaking each word off from the next. “Then Anastasia took us away from there. She took care of me for as long as she could. Three or four years, I think.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Aleksi set the cup down and bowed his head. This one memory, he could not bear to look upon, but it flooded over him nevertheless. Anastasia had grown steadily weaker over that third—or was it fourth?—winter and then, with spring, she became feverish and unable to eat. The gods had spoken strange words through her mouth, and she had seen visions of creatures terrible to behold and creatures as sweet as flowers, and she had wept for fear of leaving him when he was still too young to take care of himself. Not that she had been so much older than he was, but her first course of woman’s blood had come on her that past autumn, so she was no longer a girl, although of course she had never received any of the rites investing her with her womanhood.

  The doctor waited patiently. Aleksi’s throat was thick with emotion, too choked to speak. Hands shaking, he lifted the cup to his lips and sipped at the tea. The gesture soothed him enough that he could force out a sentence. “The gods took her on a spirit journey, but she never came back.”

  “Ah,” said the doctor. She poured more hot tea into his cup, and by that gesture Aleksi knew he had her friendship. “You love Tess very much, don’t you?”

  He glanced up at her, astonished. She smiled warmly at him; he did not need to reply, because she already knew the answer and the reason for it. With her, he was safe. How strange to know that. How strange to be safe at all. He felt dizzy.

  “Goddess,” she said, “you must have been—what?—eight or ten years old? Well, what did you do then?”

  “I wandered. I got by. Eventually I came to the Mirsky tribe late one summer. Old Vyacheslav Mirsky’s wife was very ill, but they had no children or grandchildren to help them. It was a terrible disgrace, how the tribe treated him. Everyone knew what a great rider he was, but they thought Stalia Mirksy ought to know that her time was through and simply remain behind on the grass so that she wouldn’t slow the tribe down. Stalia kept telling Vyacheslav she ought to, but she was all he had, and he wouldn’t let her do it. So I saw—well—I saw that if a small orphan boy helped bring in fuel and water and beat carpets and built fires and gathered food and went to get their share of the meat at slaughtering time, they might let that boy sleep on the ground next to their tent without driving him away.”

  “And did they?”

  But while the memory of Anastasia always filled him with a horrible dread, a painful, dizzying fear that his heart had been torn out and dropped into a black abyss from which he could never retrieve it, the memory of Vyacheslav and Stalia always brought tears to his eyes. “No, they took me into their tent and treated me as their own grandchild. Stalia got better. They said I was their luck. Eight years I lived with them. Vyacheslav trained me in the saber. You’ve heard of him, of course.” By her expression, he saw that she hadn’t heard of Vyacheslav Mirsky. “You haven’t! Well, everyone knows he had the finest hand for the saber in all the tribes, before he grew too old to ride in jahar. The Mirskys still brag about him, though they treated him badly once they had no more use for him.”

  “And then?”

  “Then one winter they both died of lung fever. They were ancient by then. Stalia told me they both would have died far sooner if it wasn’t for me. Perhaps it’s true. But as soon as they died the Mirskys drove me out.”

  “Isn’t there something about horse-stealing in here?”

  Aleksi considered his cup. It was metal, but the heat of the tea did not burn his hands where he cupped the round surface between his palms. An etching of fronds edged the rim and the base. Steam rose from the tea, caressing his face. But he had already trusted her with so much, and Tess, with everything. “Stalia and Vyacheslav had given me things: his saber, a beautiful blanket she had woven, the tent that belonged to her only daughter, who had long since died, their komis cups and flask, some other things. I overheard the etsana—their own cousin’s daughter!—speaking to her sons and daughters, saying that if they didn’t throw me out of camp immediately I’d try to steal everything in the tent and run off with it. So that night I took what I could carry, and stole a horse, and rode away. Oh,” here he glanced up at her, “I knew it was wrong. The penalty for stealing a horse is death, of course. But I couldn’t bear to lose every little thing they’d given me, because everyone else in the Mirsky tribe was so petty and small-minded.”

  “Where did you ride to, then?”

  “There was one jahar that would take men who didn’t belong anywhere else. The arenabekh.”

  “The arenabekh. They were outlaws, weren’t they?”

  “Men who had left their tribes for one reason or another—for some crime, because they loved men more than women, because they no longer wanted to live with the tribes.”

  “Did you like it there?”

  “Not at all. How can any person love a tribe where there are no children?”

  “Wouldn’t someone like that boy who was exiled—with the actor—wouldn’t he seek out the arenabekh?”

  “He would, if he could find them. Keregin, their last dyan, led the arenabekh into a hopeless battle in order to save Bakhtiian’s life. But Tess would know about that. She was there.”

  “Was she, now? I haven’t heard this story yet.”

  “Well, but with the arenabekh gone, Yevgeni Usova has nowhere to go, if he’s even still alive.”

  “So there you were with the arenabekh.”

  “I stayed with them for almost two years, because there was nowhere else to go. Keregin was hard but fair, and he never treated me any differently from the others because I was an orphan—or a horse stealer. Then I heard about these training schools, where young men might go to train for jahar, and I thought I’d go and see if Kerchaniia Bakhalo, the man who ran one, would accept orphans. He did. When he discovered that Vyacheslav Mirsky himself had trained me—well—he never said as much, but I knew I was his favorite pupil. But then, I was a better fighter than the rest. It was the frog, you know. And after that, Bakhalo brought us to the great camp that was growing up around Bakhtiian.”

  “Where you met Tess.”

  At the mention of Tess’s name, he could not help but smile. “Yes. She trained with us. Although she was Bakhtiian’s wife, she never treated those of us who were orphans any different from the rest. Of course, she is khaja, which accounts for it.”

  “How did she come to adopt you as her brother?”

  “Every woman needs a
brother, and hers had died—that was Yuri Orzhekov, Sonia’s younger brother. She and I always got along well, and we liked each other right away. We felt—” He thought about it, two outsiders working and training together, both with quick minds and ready laughter, detached and yet involved in the jaran camp. “—linked, somehow. But then the Mirskys rode into camp. They were well within their rights to kill me, of course. In fact, they were in the process of doing just that—”

  “How, in the Lady’s Name, were they doing that?”

  “Well, there were five of them, and they caught me in the dark coming out of a woman’s tent, and then they beat me with sticks. But Tess happened to walk by and she stopped them.”

  “You’re casual about it.”

  Aleksi laughed, recalling what Bakhtiian had said to his niece. “The gods never give out unmixed blessings. So who am I to complain about bruises and a broken arm and collarbone when it brought me Tess as a sister?”

  One of the things Aleksi liked about Dr. Hierakis was that she could laugh compassionately. “Who, indeed?”

  “You see, they demanded to know what right she had to stop them meting out the justice I did, after all, deserve, for stealing one of their horses, and she said, ‘the right of a sister.’ And so she adopted me.”

  “Did she consult Bakhtiian?”

  “Why would she consult Bakhtiian? She brought me back to her tent and nursed me back to health and I became her brother and have been ever since, and always will be. Bakhtiian did take me into his jahar, then, but he might well have done so anyway—although, if Tess hadn’t adopted me the Mirskys would have killed me sooner or later, so I suppose I’ll never know if Bakhtiian took me into his jahar to give me his protection or because he admired my fighting.”

  “Perhaps both.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well, you’ve led a harrowing life, Aleksi.”

  He sipped at his tea. “I’m content.” And he was.

  “End recording,” said the doctor to the air. “Will you come with me?” she asked. She passed through into the inner chamber. Respectfully, he followed after her.