The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (100 page)

“I could have you killed,” said Barsauma. “And no doubt would save myself some trouble by doing so.”

Vasha faced him without flinching. “I have my own guards posted outside, at the doors, of course.”

“Huh. Why do you come in here each night and stare at the chronicles? I would stop you looking at the tax rolls if I could without throwing all hell into the palace. I know you’re only looking to see what you can plunder, having this
peshtiqi
interpreter count it up for you. How did you get into the palace in the first place? How did you capture my granddaughter? What do you want, Prince Vassily? I can pay you off, a hundred
filistri
of gold, if you will release my granddaughter from the betrothal.”

“She’s worth much more than one hundred
filistri
of gold your highness.”

“Two hundred, then. Bandit. I hear that one of your little pages got sick yesterday. I hope it wasn’t the food.”

“I will be certain in future to eat only from my betrothed’s plate. It is an old custom among the jaran for a husband and wife to eat from the same platter.”

“Three hundred
filistri.
”

“My children by Rusudani on the throne of Mircassia, and that is the only offer I will accept.”

Barsauma thumped his cane several times, hard, on the floor. The noise resounded in the chamber, unmuted by tapestries. “Five hundred. I want no damned barbarian seated on my throne.”

“I will not sit in your throne, your highness, as long as you are alive.” Barsauma snorted, and Vasha, seeing that he had perhaps amused the old man, went on. “Your greatgrandchildren may sit on a greater throne even than your own.”

“Barbarians can’t hold together an empire.”

“What if they can? Already Bakhtiian has conquered a greater empire than any I have read of.”

“So you can read. That is what Lord Tellarkus claimed, but I didn’t believe him.” He motioned curtly to his servants and they scooted his chair up to the lectern that held the thick chronicle. “Read to me. Something…here, this passage.”

Vasha sounded it out, and Barsauma grew impatient with the interpreter’s slowness and began correcting Vasha’s pronunciation and then, evidently, the interpreter’s translation.

“Pah. A useless man. You may keep him, but I’ll get you a better.”

With that, he got up and shuffled out of the hall, his servants carrying the chair behind him.

In the morning, Vasha went to the women’s quarters and asked to see Rusudani. He had to wait a long while, but finally he was allowed in, to the same arcade bordering the garden, the only place she ever received him.

“You are well?” he asked.

“I am well.”

“I saw your grandfather last night. He tried to buy me off.”

She looked startled. “Buy you off?”

“He thinks that because I’m a
barbarian
that I can only be a bandit, and that I’d be as happy to have the gold as you.”

“You did not accept the gold.”

“Of course not.”

She thought for a while, sipping at a cup of tea, then signed to an attendant to bring Vasha tea as well, poured from a new pot. He did not touch it. If she noticed, she said nothing. “What
do
you want, Prince Vassily?” she asked finally.

The question took him unawares. What did he want? “I…I want to be like my father.”

“You look a little like him,” she said, as if to say,
but are otherwise utterly unlike.
“What about Mircassia?”

“I wanted you before I wanted Mircassia. I swear by my own gods that that is the truth. But it is nevertheless beside the point, Princess Rusudani. You must marry me, or another man.”

“You do not treat women so in the jaran.”

“All woman marry in the jaran as well.”

“How can you claim that the women of your people are not ruled by men?”

“What does marriage have to do with that? A woman can marry and still wield the power that is rightfully hers.”

She set down her cup on the table that separated them and touched, like a reflex, the tiny knife that hung on a gold chain around her neck. “I am to meet with my grandfather this afternoon. Lady Tellarkina says that my grandfather has a Mircassian lordling in mind to marry me, a grandson of an old retainer of his, after we have gotten rid of you. But I know nothing about this man. He will be loyal to his grandfather and to my grandfather, to the council of ministers who have agreed to his elevation. He will become their tool. He will not care about me.”

“What are you suggesting, Princess Rusudani?”

She met his gaze, clearly and cleanly, for the first time. “That we marry at once.”

“The baby—”

“It is Janos’s child, no matter what your barbaric customs say. As soon as it can travel, I will send it north to Lady Jadranka. I will not suffer Janos’s child to live by me. She wants it. She may have it. But you and I will marry now, Prince Vassily. I will not become their pawn. Better that I ally with the jaran, who will give me a power base outside of this court, where
I
am the outsider, the interloper, than be isolated within the net of their intrigues.”

“Once you no longer need me, will you betray me as you did Janos?”

“He forced me to marry him. I had no choice. Now I
do
have a choice, between you and this Lord Intavio. You have no power here except through me, and if I had you killed and the jaran invaded and conquered Mircassia, if they could, they would force me to marry another jaran prince, one I didn’t know.”

“I suppose,” said Vasha bitterly, “that I needn’t have asked that question, because you betrayed me once already, to Janos, when we were first captured.”

Now she looked away from him. A flush stained her cheeks. “I did that to protect Bakhtiian.”

Embarrassed, jealous, he almost took a drink of the tea just to do something with his hands. But he caught himself in time. She saw his hesitation.

“Here, child,” she called to an attendant, “bring a new pot, and pour into both our cups from it.” She emptied her cup onto the stone paving. She smoothed a hand down over the curve of her stomach. “Once I was content to devote my life to God, to prayer, but God did not mean me to follow such a destiny. I am ambitious, too, Prince Vassily.”

Deliberately she leaned forward, having to stand up to get her abdomen over the table, and kissed him chastely on each cheek. “We will go to meet my grandfather together.”

King Barsauma heard Rusudani out in silence. Vasha could not tell if he was disgusted, infuriated, or pleased. When she was finished, he coughed. A servant hurried forward and wiped a drop of spittle from the drooping side of his mouth.

“Are you in love with him, granddaughter?” he demanded.

“No.”

He grunted. “That is good. No fit marriage was ever founded on infatuation.” He turned his head to glare at Vasha. His stare reminded Vasha of a vulture’s, waiting until the dying animal stopped thrashing. “There are two provinces in eastern Filis that by right ought to belong to Mircassia.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, your highness.”

“Hmph. When your father conquers it, and has killed that heretic Basil and that puerile half sister of his, I want those provinces returned. That is the only offer I will accept.”

“Then we have a bargain, your highness. But I will keep the pages.”

“Ah, God,” muttered Barsauma, “what has it come to, that I lose my fine sons and have to endure seeing a convent-bred child and a barbarian take my place?” He thumped his cane on the floor many times, his face getting red. Vasha wondered if he was about to collapse with a fit of apoplexy.

Rusudani reached up from where she knelt before him and took his withered hand in hers. “It is God’s will, Grandfather. You will not be disappointed in us.”

He settled down slowly, and his servant gave him a sip of spirits and wiped the sweat off his face and straightened his collar. Still breathing heavily, the old man measured first his granddaughter and second, Vasha. “Pah,” he said scornfully: “A mere girl and a bandit.” But he did not thump his cane. “Well. Qiros, come here, come here. Bring more glasses, pour all round. From the same borne.”

By that gesture, Vasha saw that he now had an alliance with the Mircassian king.

Ten days later, Rusudani was invested as the heir to the throne of Mircassia, the ceremony taking place in the great cathedral of Kavad.

Here, in the south, bordering on the heretic realm of Prince Basil, the huge windows in the church were laced with colored glass, and the afternoon sun streamed in through the windows and illuminated the interior with dazzling light.

The presbyter read the service with great flourish, and King Barsauma managed with every steely bit of will that he possessed to crown her all by himself, with one weakened and one withered arm.

Then the queen of Mircassia, her pregnancy showing through the heavy robes of state, turned to look toward her future husband. Vasha, knees trembling beneath equally heavy robes, mounted the steps and halted beside her.

So it was that Vasha came to be married in a khaja church by a khaja ceremony, to a khaja queen. He became a prince, as his mother had long ago promised him, but in the khaja manner, by right of paternity, by right of marriage to a woman, the ways that khaja measured rank. Not by jaran custom.

But he could hear the whisper of his father’s words:
You’ll do, Vassily.

He was content.

T
HE CARAVANSARY ECHOED WITH
the ghost voices of the company, long since gone back to Earth. Ilyana stretched out belly down on the bench in the courtyard, letting the sun warm her back through her silk shirt. She reveled in her solitude.

“
You have been idle for fifteen minutes
,” said her slate.
“Do you wish to close the Karnak program?”

She yawned. “Yeah, sure.” She crossed her arms over the slate and lay her head down on them. The back of her neck between the part in her braids got sun for the first time in an hour. She tucked her chin down, to expose more of her neck to the glorious warmth.

A boot scuffed the pavement at the entrance gates.

She jerked up, swinging her legs off the bench. But it was only David. He dumped a saddle and bridle just inside the gate and walked over to her, pulling grass out of his hair.

“You were out riding. What happened?”

He rubbed one shoulder. “Damned horse threw me. It got startled. The dome came down.”

“I didn’t hear—”

“It wasn’t the noise. It was the flash when the field was shut off. You didn’t notice it?”

“I had my eyes closed.” She bounced up to her feet. “But that means the dry season’s here, just like Genji promised when she made us put those weird membranes on. Now we can go live somewhere else.”

“You don’t like it here?”

She shrugged, unwilling to admit to him that the ruined caravansary still made her nervous. She never went there alone.

“You’re sure, Yana, that you don’t want to go…”

“Home?”

“Back to Earth.”

“No. I like it here, really.”

“Even after two months alone? It’s pretty quiet.”

“Don’t you like it?”

“I don’t mind it, Yana, but it’s generally accepted that adults can adapt to many circumstances for a finite period of time. Meditative retreats are considered beneficial to mental and physical health, after all. But you’re still young—”

“As you keep reminding me,” she snapped, irritated by his avuncular meddling. “I like it here just fine, thank you! It’s nice to be alone for a while. And anyway, Genji says she’s working on Duke Naroshi to invite Augustus Gopal here, to dance, so then my friend Kori could come visit.”

“Ah. That would be nice for you.”

Ilyana rolled her eyes, grabbed her slate, and stalked outside. She had been a little nervous, two months ago when the company had
finally
packed everything up and left, about staying alone here with just David. She wasn’t quite sure about what, what there was to be nervous about, or if it was something about David or something about her, but that had changed. She liked David—well, in some ways she really loved him, because he showed her more attention and affection than her parents ever had. But really, he was positively becoming as tiresome as a parent, constant questions and worrying about her and wanting to know every least thing Genji said to her during their visits and if she was going out when she was coming back. It went on and on and on, so that even though there were only two of them here—just two humans, that is—sometimes she felt crowded.

Tucking her slate in her belt, she hoisted up her saddle and saddlebags and went out to the horses. She rode Sosha past the burnt circle of ground that was all that was left of Valentin’s pyre and kept going, all the way to the rose wall and through the gate that opened for her. Armed now with a kind of a second skin, an invisible membrane that did something with the air, filtered it somehow, she forged forward, unafraid. Naroshi’s palace was huge, and she and David were just beginning to mark out a basic map of it. But some routes she knew quite well.

Naroshi’s palace lived in a jungle. The wet season lasted for five months, and the dry for six, more or less, according to human measures of time calculated by Genji. But these “monsoons” dropped as much as sixty
feet
of rain in a season, which was why Naroshi had had his steward Roki erect the dome, knowing that the humans were adapted to what Genji called a “savannah” climate.

The vegetation steamed under the sun, still drying out. The smells came so thick that they almost choked her. Animals writhed through the undergrowth, but she didn’t look closely, just stayed on the path. There were more birds than she had ever seen and trees a hundred meters high, slim towers piercing toward the great rings of the planet above. The sun stood at its apex, so that she and Sosha cast a lumpy shadow that moved along on the packed earth path beneath the horse’s hooves.

After about an hour, taking two right forks and one left, Ilyana came to Genji’s cottage. Genji sat on a bench grown out of the limb of a tree, one hand held to the bark as if she was listening to something. Seeing Ilyana, she stood.