Jaran

CHAPTER TWO

He waited for her just over the crest of the hill, one hand loosely grasping his horse's reins. Compared to the horses she had traveled downside with, this was a stocky animal, with no beauty whatsoever; its legs were thick, its neck short and powerful. Its thin mane straggled over a dense coat, and its muzzle had a blunt shape that gave it the look of some prehistoric creature. Against its imperfections, the man standing at its head looked faultless: His red shirt was brilliant against the dull grass, his posture utterly assured, his eyes a deep, rich brown, his face-Too hard. There was too little kindness in his face. Wind stirred Tess's hair and a bird called in the distance, a raucous cry. The man's eyes as he examined her in his turn were intelligent. She recalled her conversation with the merchant: intelligent enough to suspect her off-world origins? How could he, when Jeds itself-thousands of miles away but at least still on his planet-was likely a meaningless word to him? When Rhui was interdicted, protected from the knowledge of the space-faring civilizations that surrounded it? Without realizing she was doing it, she shook her head. The movement made her dizzy. Her hunger and thirst flooded in on her, and she stumbled.

She did not even see him move, but his hands were under her elbow, pulling her up. She jerked away from him.

"Damn it," she said, ashamed of her weakness. "I suppose it was too much to hope that you would speak Rhuian." He stood very still, watching her. "God-damned native wildlife," she added in Anglais, just to make herself feel better, but even her tone made no dent in his impassivity. He simply retreated to his horse, returning to her side a moment later with a hard, flat square of bread and a damp leather pouch filled with water.

She ate the bread, but drank only enough water to slake her thirst, and offered the pouch back to him. After he had tied it to his saddle, he mounted and held out one hand for her to swing on behind him. The strength of his pull surprised her; she had to grab at his shoulder to keep from falling over the other side. What he said under his breath did not sound like commendation.

Tess bit at her lip. She put one hand on each side of his waist, the cloth of his shirt fluid and smooth under her hands. Ahead, a wind moved in the grass. He glanced back at her, moved her arms so that they circled his waist entirely, and gave a terse command-even without knowing the language, she could translate the tone of voice. She took in a deep breath and held it, because her instinct was to tears. His legs moved against hers. The horse started forward.

His entire back was in contact with her. She turned her face to one side. Her cheek pressed against the back of his neck. The ends of his dark hair tickled her eye. His back was warm, and under her hands, held open and flat on his middle, she could feel every movement of the hard muscles in his stomach, his slow, controlled breathing. She closed her hands into fists.

They rode down onto the plain. Here, away from the hills, the sky seemed even larger, as if some giant hand had pushed the horizon down to reveal more blue. They seemed so small, the three of them alone in such an expanse, invisible, surely, to any eye looking down from above, yet his sense of purpose and direction gave them significance.

She could not judge time, but soon her thighs began to ache. After an eternity she began to believe that there had indeed been some change in the sun's position. The grass continued on around them without a break. Snow glittered in occasional patches. The man in front of her neither spoke nor moved appreciably, except for the finest shifts to adjust for the horse.

A flash of brilliance sparked on a far rise, vanished, only to appear again closer: another rider in scarlet and black. This one had a second horse on a lead line, trailing behind him. Quickly, more quickly than Tess expected, the two riders met, slowed, and halted their horses.

The newcomer was a young man with bright blond hair and a cheerful smile. The smile emerged as he met them, fading into astonishment as he looked at Tess. He spoke in a flood of words, to which the dark man replied curtly. Unabashed, the younger man swung down from his horse and came over to stand below Tess. He blushed a little-easy to see on his fair skin-and lifted his arms up to her.

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, I 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.''

Charles nodded at the flats, shimmering, stilling as the tide settled and the last glow of the sun scattered out across the dull water. "Tomorrow," he said.

Tess woke abruptly, to silence. She did not know how long she had slept. She sat up. Suddenly she heard two men arguing, fluid, foreign words, and a woman weeping, a constant undercurrent to their angry exchange. The conversation ended abruptly, but the weeping kept on, fading at last as if the woman had walked out of reach of Tess's hearing. It was utterly, unnaturally quiet.

Tess groped forward and opened the flap that led into the front half of the tent. Light streamed in here, dappling her clothing, which was neatly folded next to a pouch of food and a tin pot of water. Quickly, she dressed, drank, and ate, and then ventured outside.

The sun lay low along the far rise, but she could tell by the quality of light that it was morning. The camp was empty. Tent flaps stirred in the dawn breeze, but not one single figure moved along the trails beaten down in the grass between the tents. Movement caught her eye, up along the rise, and she saw two figures disappear over the height, edged by the glare of the rising sun. She followed them.

The tribe had gathered in the shallow valley on the other side of the rise. They stood in shadow, the sun's light creeping down toward them, and Tess stopped at the height, staring down, aware that some alien, serious ritual was taking place. To her left, she saw another solitary figure crest the rise into sunlight and then descend again into shadow. She recognized him by his walk, and the dark line of his beard: the man who had found her-Bakhtiian. The air, heavy with dew, felt soft and cold on her cheeks. She watched him descend, for a moment seduced from her other thoughts by the grace of his walk and bearing. Then she winced and went down to the right, where she could see and hear the proceedings but not be part of them.

The tribe stood silently in a rough semicircle. A baby cried and was hushed. One man, fair-haired, middle-aged, dressed in black, stood by himself beyond the crowd. He stared straight ahead-although the sun rose directly into his eyes-and his stance was stiff.

The crowd parted soundlessly to let Bakhtiian through their ranks. His stride was unhurried and smooth. Drops of dew glistened on the tops of his boots and on the hilt of his saber. He halted in front of the single figure.

The silence spread beyond them so that Tess was not aware even of the birds calling or the wind's slow breath on her cheeks. Bakhtiian spoke. What he said had a rhythmic quality, like a spell or a poem, and it wrapped around Tess like a snake so that when he ceased speaking she pulled her arms close in against her chest. A single voice, unsure and weak in the silence left by his speech, answered him, followed by several more in a set way that made her realize that this was some kind of ceremony.

Bakhtiian addressed the man standing apart. He responded with one word. A second question, another single word. A third; the same word again. He was a pale figure, this man, alone against the blank sky and the endless grass. No one spoke. A high call came from above, and a lone bird swooped low, rose into the wind, and flew toward the sun.

Bakhtiian moved slightly, drawing his saber. A sigh spread through the crowd as though strewn by the wind. The point of the blade rested on the man's forehead. The world seemed to stop, its only motion the movements of Bakhtiian. Tess could not look away. He looked to the sky and spoke a short invocation to the expanse above. Something awful was about to happen, but it was too late to run away.

In a kind of ghastly slow motion, the more terrible for the effortless beauty of his movement, he drew his saber up to his left shoulder, stepped left, and cut back to the right. Without meaning to, Tess clapped her hands over her eyes. Forced them down, only to see the man, covered with his own blood, collapse into a grotesque heap on the ground. Bakhtiian stepped forward, dropped the saber on the man's body, and turned away and walked, without a word, back toward the camp.

There was a brief, horrified hush. People moved back to let him through and stared after him, hands hiding the sudden buzz of whispering.

Not even aware of her path, Tess fled-from the camp, the crowd, the dead man. She huddled in a little hollow, unable to weep or retch or rail, unable to do anything but bury her head against her knees and shudder, over and over, her arms clenching her knees so tightly that it felt as if bone was touching bone. How long she stayed like this she did not know.

After a time she began taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly, inhaling the musty sweetness of the grass. She rocked back and forth, relaxing her clenched muscles one by one until at last she could shut away the ghastly picture of the man collapsing, of his blood staining the grass-She took another breath, let it out. Her neck ached. She lifted her head carefully, as if it were so delicate that the slightest jar would break it, and almost screamed. Bakhtiian stood not twenty paces away, watching her.