An earthly crown

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

"Damn him!" swore Diana. The tent collapsed in a heap. She burst into tears.

A moment later Anahita strode by, her dark hair caught up in a loose bun. She adjusted her duffel bag on her shoulder. "Still hasn't come back, has he?" she asked sweetly. "Do you think he's going to? Or do you suppose he's out there looting and raping with the rest of them?"

"Shut up! Leave me alone!"

Anahita smirked at her. Diana knew that in one second more she was going to hit the black-haired woman.

"Do you need help?" asked Gwyn, entering just in time to avert catastrophe. He set down a chest-Joseph's disguised oven-and surveyed the ruin of the tent. Anahita flounced away.

"These tents just aren't meant to be taken down by one person, and everyone else is busy…" And Anatoly was gone. Just ridden away sixteen days ago without saying good-bye, although he had sent a message back to her through his sister, Shura. Diana had not the least idea when he might return, or if he would return at all. She began to cry again.

Gwyn laid a steadying hand on her shoulder. "Now, Di, this won't avail you anything. Let's get that tent in order, and load it into the wagons. They don't wait for anyone, you know."

Between her sobs, she helped him fold up the tent walls and roll up the carpets and bind the poles together. The sun breasted the horizon and spilled light onto the trampled field of grain on which they had made their night's camp. On the march, she and Anatoly had done this together every morning, sometimes with one of the Veselov tribe's children to help out. They had worked out a system: this edge of the carpet to be rolled up first; the lantern to nestle in this corner of the finely carved wooden chest that had been one of the groom gifts from the Sakhalin family; Anatoly to bind up the poles and she to layer and fold up the tent. Then he would ride off, but she could be sure of seeing him once or twice during the day-indeed, Arina Veselov had once commented kindly that Anatoly was a little immodest in his public attentions toward her-and almost always at night.

"Do you think it's true?" she asked in a small voice. "About the looting and the… the raping?"

Gwyn shrugged. "I'm not about to tell you that war is pretty, Diana, and these last fourteen days we've seen how badly this land has been devastated since the news came about Bakhtiian collapsing. Still, they treat their own women with respect. I don't know."

Diana wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, sniffing. "I'm sorry."

"For what?" Gwyn demanded.

"Why did he just go off that way?" She struggled to stop the tears, and failed. "Oh, I hate this. I just hate this. I don't know what's wrong with me. I hate this army. I want to go home."

Gwyn sighed and hugged her, holding her while she sobbed noisily on his shoulder. "It's been a difficult trip," he said finally. "I think Owen is the only one not showing signs of wear and tear. It's especially hard for you."

"It wasn't," she said into the cloth of his tunic. "Not until Anatoly left again. But I wonder sometimes-" She broke off and pushed herself free of Gwyn's embrace.

"What?"

"I don't know. Here, if you hand me the tent folded over that way, up on my back like-yes, that's right-"

"You can carry that?"

"It's not that far, and it's more unwieldy than heavy."

"That's what I meant."

They trudged across to the wagons and deposited their burdens in the bed of a wagon, and then returned to fetch the rest of Diana's things. "I wonder, though," she said softly as she knelt to pick up the chest where her clothes and his nestled together, "if we really had all day to spend together, if we'd have anything to talk about. Even on the march, before the battle-it was sixty days or more, I think-still, most of what we did together was things."

"Things?"

"I mean daily things. Setting up the tent. Taking down the tent. Sleeping. Eating. Helping with the chores at the Veselov tribe. Watching the children. I'm not sure we have anything in common."

"Besides blond hair and handsome faces, you mean?" She made a face at him. He chuckled. "Can't sharing a life full of daily things be something shared in common?"

"Oh, of course they can. But…" She swung the chest into the wagon and watched as Gwyn hoisted the poles and her carry bag into the bed as well. She piled the pillows on top. "Sometimes I talk about acting, and sometimes he talks about war. We listen politely to the other one, but I don't care about strategy and how his uncle sent the right flank, or was it the left flank-you know. I don't think he cares that much about acting. I think he thinks that it's some kind of mystery he's not supposed to know the secrets of.''

One of the Telyegin sisters walked down the line of wagons, checking the harness and the beasts-Diana thought of them as oxen although they were called glariss-hitched to the tongue. Diana waved to her, and the older woman waved back but kept walking. Ahead, at the edge of the field, the first wagons started westward, the rising sun at their backs. "Do you want to ride with me?" Diana asked as she clambered up to the seat and took the reins.

"Honored, I'm sure," said Gwyn with a flamboyant bow. "This will keep Anahita off my back. She's very insistent about having an affair with me, and I'm getting tired of it."

"Oh, my. Is that an edge to your voice that I hear? I've never heard you ruffled before, Gwyn."

As he climbed up, they were hailed by Hal and Quinn. "Can we come along with you?" Quinn yelled from a distance. They broke into a run and arrived, panting and breathless, and managed to climb into the bed, scrambling on top of the pillows, just as the line lurched forward. "We're saving Hal from his dad. They got into a roaring argument."

Diana glanced back to see Quinn bright with the excitement of having witnessed the altercation. Hal looked morose and angry.

"He's so damned patronizing," muttered Hal. "He treats these people like they're experimental subjects-"

"We're all experimental subjects to Owen," said Gwyn.

"— yes, but we chose-well, at least you three chose-to participate in the experiment. I mean, look at what's going on around us. Does he even notice? People dying. Children starving. Cities destroyed. I swear he only thinks of it as a canvas for him to work on, and work against. Did you see what my mother is doing? She's recasting Lear with Lear as a jaran headwoman, and then the rest is pretty much the same, and rendering it all into khush."

"Oh." Diana felt a sudden, obliterating sense of discovery. "That's marvelous. I think it'll work, too."

Hal swore. "What gives us the right to tamper with their own tales, their sense of history? We've already performed Mekhala's story, and now we're working on the second one, which if you ask me is a damned sight risky."

"What?" demanded Quinn. "The old myth about the daughter of the sun who comes to earth? You can't imagine they'll ever suspect the truth, can you?"

"Isn't that patronizing? This is supposed to be an interdicted planet. We shouldn't be here at all!"

"They can't stay interdicted forever," said Gwyn softly.

"They haven't!" exclaimed Hal. He lapsed into a sullen silence.

The wagon bucked and heaved up over the line of earth that demarked the field from untilled earth. In the distance, a burned out village stood silent in dawn's light. A few walls thrust up into the air, blackened, skeletal. Nothing stirred in the ruins.

"And you know what else?" said Quinn in a low, confiding voice. "I think Hyacinth has a boyfriend."

Diana snorted. "According to Hyacinth, he has a thousand boyfriends, and as many girlfriends, too."

"Hyacinth does tell a good story," said Gwyn.

"Oh, come on," said Quinn. "Phillippe says that Hyacinth has slept in their tent every single night since we switched tent mates. Well, he said there were three nights that Hyacinth didn't sleep there, but he knows it was a woman Hyacinth went to because-well, anyway, he knows."

"Because he was sleeping with her himself," muttered Hal.

"Oh?" asked Quinn tartly, "and you haven't been propositioned, Hal? Are you telling me that you haven't slept with even one jaran woman since we got here?"

Hal pursed his mouth mulishly and refused the bait.

"But anyway," continued Quinn, "Phillippe thinks Hyacinth has a real boyfriend."

"Isn't that dangerous?" Diana asked.

"Well, you have one. Hell, you have a husband."

"Quinn." Diana sighed, disgusted. "Don't you use your eyes?''

"I don't want to talk about it anymore," said Quinn, seeing that her audience was not prepared to amuse her. "And anyway." Diana glanced back again to see Quinn undoing her carry. Quinn looked furtively to each side, and once behind, and then drew out her slate. "I have the first act of the recast Lear. Do you want your lines?''

So as they advanced across the countryside, they studied their lines and exclaimed over the twists Ginny had worked in to the basic plot. They passed a second burned village, and a third. In the early afternoon the walls of a city loomed in the distance. Carrion smells drifted to them on the breeze. A pall of smoke obscured the horizon. Diana had to concentrate on her driving as the wagon bumped and pitched across a succession of trampled fields.

"How are these people going to eat if all their crops are gone?" Hal mumbled.

"Oh, Goddess," Quinn gasped. "Look."

There, a stone's throw away from the path of the wagons, lay a mound of corpses. A vulture circled lazily in and settled on a dead man's chest, and began to feed. Rats scurried across the tumbled bodies. Diana wrenched her gaze away and kept her eyes on the back of the wagon in front of her. A blond child lay on the pillows in the bed, blissfully asleep. But the two women in the front glanced only once at the corpses and then away, as if the sight did not interest them.

More bodies littered the fields, in heaps, mostly, as if they had been rounded up and slaughtered en masse, although now and again a single body could be seen fallen in the midst of trampled corn, an arm outstretched-defiant or pleading, Diana could not tell. Quinn had her hands over her eyes. Hal stared with haunted eyes at the destruction.

"It's been worse," said Gwyn softly, "these last fourteen days. They must be taking revenge for that curse they say the Habakar priests put on Bakhtiian."

Ahead, the city lay lit with fire, but as they came closer, Diana could see figures on the walls. She could see a pall like smoke sheeting the air between the walls and the vast army stretched out below. This time arrows shot out from the jaran side, too. A billow of black cloud rose up from inside the city, tinged with the stench of burning.

A crowd huddled out beyond them, in a field flattened by the advance of the jaran army. "At least there are some survivors," said Diana, and then she saw what they were doing: jaran riders were slaughtering their captives. Mercifully, it was too far away for her to see what they were doing in detail, and she averted her eyes in any case. The wagons trundled on. Ahead, the jaran camp grew up out of range of missile fire from the city walls, but they did not stop. Their line of wagons went on, circling the city at a safe distance and heading on. Everywhere was devastation. The army had swept through with a scythe of utter destruction, leaving nothing in its wake. Once or twice they passed a pitiful huddle of refugees, exclusively women and small, terrified children, but mostly they saw no one, as if this fertile land were uninhabited. Once a small troop of mounted women passed, herding a great mob of bleating goats and cattle and sheep-not the kind the jaran kept, but different breeds-and once again they saw a troop of riders killing prisoners. Mostly the land was empty, and emptied.

By dusk, the city was a glow on the horizon behind them. If it did not fall tomorrow, then it would fall next week, or the week after. They made camp alongside a sweetly-flowing river. Diana went down to the river to wash, as if she could somehow wash the day's horrors from her.

A number of jaran women had flocked to the river's edge, and many of them simply stripped and waded into the water while others took clothing downstream to wash.

"Diana!" Arina beckoned to her from the shore, where she stood watching a naked Mira splash in the shallow water.

Diana stumbled over to her, catching her boots on rocks, unsure of her footing in the dim light, unsure she could face Arina with any friendship at all. Across the river stood a village. Well, what was left of a village: it was burned out, of course. A large scrap of cloth-a shirt, perhaps-fluttered in the breeze and tumbled down an empty lane as if some unseen spirit animated it. Otherwise, the village was deserted, inhabited only by ghosts- if even ghosts had the courage to haunt it.

Arina held Lavrenti. Diana could not help herself. As she came up to the young etsana, she put out her arms for the infant. Arina handed him over. Lavrenti had grown; he wasn't thriving, not that, but he was growing, and his tiny mouth puckered up and he gave Diana his sweet, open-mouthed, toothless smile. Diana cradled him against her chest and stood there, rocking him side to side and talking nonsense to him. He chuckled and made a bubble and reached up to grab for her silver earrings.

"A messenger came from Sakhalin's army," said Arina, "to his aunt. She sent her granddaughter to tell me that Anatoly sent a message to you."

"To me!" Diana flushed, feeling ecstatic and terrified at once. Lavrenti gave up on her earrings, which were out of his reach, and turned his attention to tugging on the bronze buttons at the neck of her tunic instead.

Arina frowned, looking very like a stern etsana, and then grinned, which spoiled the whole effect. "He said to say that he loves you, which was most improper of him. He should be able to wait until you are private." She paused. Diana could not help but wonder, bitterly, when that event was ever likely to take place. "He sent this to you." Arina drew a necklace out of her pouch.

Diana gasped. It was made of gold, and of jewels cunningly inlaid in an ornate geometric pattern, and it was as heavy as it was rich. Then Arina drew out and displayed to Diana a pair of earrings, and two bracelets, all done in the same alien, lush style, gold and emeralds and chalcedony.

Loot. Anatoly had sent her loot from some far palace where probably two-thirds of the inhabitants were dead by now, and the rest likely to starve when winter came. And did he have a mistress there, some khaja princess who had begged him for mercy? The spoils of war. For the first time it struck her: what if Bakhtiian died, what if the khaja army regrouped and conquered this camp? Would she become one of the spoils of war? Or would she simply be killed?

"Are you cold?" Arina asked with concern. "I hope you aren't coming down with a fever."

"No. Just tired." She did not want to say it, but she had to. "It was so horrible, today. Ever since we came down on this plain, it's been horrible."

Arina drew herself up. It was easy to forget that this pretty, petite young woman was headwoman of a tribe, an authority in her own right. "It is true that these khaja scarcely deserve as much mercy as the army has extended them. Not when their priests have witched Bakhtiian. But if he dies, I assure you that I will counsel the commanders to show no mercy at all."

At first Diana was confused because she thought Arina was rendering her an apology. Then, an instant later, she realized that it was true: Arina was apologizing, because Arina thought that what Diana thought was horrible was the mercy the army was showing. Which as far as she could tell was no mercy at all.

"But-" she began, and faltered. "Then there's still no word about Bakhtiian? He's still the same?"

"He is still there, up on the pass. Tess refuses to move him, and she is right. He will fight best when he lies closest to the heavens. Ah, Mira, are you done, then?" She called to an older girl to come dress Mira and turned back to Diana, dressing Diana with the jewelry much as Joseph helped her when she got into a particularly elaborate costume. The gold gleamed in the dusk. Lavrenti batted at the gold earrings while Arina tucked the silver earrings into Diana's belt-pouch. "You must wear these gifts often, Diana, so that everyone will know that your husband is fighting bravely and well."

"Damn him," said Diana under her breath, and she burst into tears.