An earthly crown

CHAPTER SEVEN

News traveled like the wind. For many reasons did the khaja fear the jaran armies, and for this reason as much as any. No matter how quickly khaja princes or khaja towns sent messages or made alliances or maneuvered troops to stem the jaran tide, more quickly still did the jaran respond. It was as if the wind itself was the ally of the nomads, a silent, swift messenger on whom the horsemen alone could rely.

At midday a jaran rider came galloping out of the north into sight of a town. The sod walls here had been too high to level; they had been breached at frequent intervals instead, and by the main gate a troop of some hundred horsemen rode drills in the flat space beyond the remains of the two wooden gate doors, which had been thrown down and partially burnt.

The harness of the messenger's horse shook with bells, and the sound, as well as the lance tipped with a gold pennant borne by the rider, alerted the garrison. Within moments, a second rider emerged from the tents of the garrison leading a saddled horse. The men met at the edge of the drilling ground.

"Vanya!"

The garrison soldier pulled up and helped the messenger swing his saddlebags onto the new mount. "Feodor Grekov! What brings you here?"

"Sibirin sent me. A message for Nadine Orzhekov."

"Oho! I'll wager I know what it concerns, and I wish you luck when you deliver it.''

"What, she is here, then?"

"No, just left with her jahar for Basille. That's the khaja town where they're to collect the barbarian ambassador and bring him back to camp."

Feodor shook his head, fair hair stirring in a breeze that curled down from the heights. "Her jahar?"

"Orzhekov's jahar."

"That's not who I meant-"

"I know who you meant." Vanya grinned, an engaging smile made no less merry by the fact that his right eye was scarred shut by an old wound. "As I said, I wish you luck. She was in a foul mood."

"Nadine?"

"Oh, Nadine, is it, now? When did you leave off addressing her as tsadra?"

Feodor blushed.

Vanya laughed again. "Still that way with you? I won't tease you, then. Why don't you just mark her and be done?"

"Would you?"

"Gods, no! She's too good with that saber. No, Orzhekov has been full of mischief since she got here. She has the khaja Elders dancing this way and then that, with her clever words. It's not her who's in the foul mood." A red-shirted man appeared, on foot, at the gate, and hallooed toward them, waving. "You'd better go on," said Vanya, sobering. "You can catch them in two spans." The transfer completed, Vanya took the reins of the blown horse.

"Gods," said Feodor. His blush had faded. "Why did Sibirin send me?"

Vanya grinned again. "Oh, he knows Orzhekov has an eye for you, that's it. He thinks it will soften the blow."

"Gods," murmured Feodor.

Nadine Orzhekov called her jahar to a halt as soon as the scouts brought word that a messenger had been sighted following them. "Look," she said to Tess Soerensen as the rider came in, flanked on either side by scouts, "it's Feodor Grekov. He must have come all the way from the main camp. I wonder what he wants."

"You know damn well what he wants," said Tess irritably. "Sibirin sent him to take me back."

"You can't know that," protested Nadine, but her eyes lit with unholy glee. "You don't suppose Bakhtiian got back already?''

"I hope so." The surge of anger that coursed through Tess at the mention of his name was so strong that it shocked her. Gods, where had it all come from?

"Tess. Tess." Nadine shook her head. "For shame." But her expression belied the words, and she chuckled. "Poor Feodor. He looks terrified."

Feodor's escorts peeled away from him and galloped off from the troop, leaving him to approach Nadine and Tess alone. The other riders, all men, watched surreptitiously but with piercing interest as Feodor drew his horse up beside the two women. Tess felt sorry for him because she knew Nadine would treat him badly. Nadine possessed her own stores of hidden anger.

"Well met, Grekov," said Nadine. "What brings you here?"

He kept his eyes lowered. "Sibirin sent me. With a message."

"Ah, a message," said Nadine wisely, drawing out the pause by fiddling with the closes on the leather pouch strung in front of her saddle. She reached inside, pulled out a rolled-up bundle of yellow parchment, examined it without opening it, and then replaced it.

Tess sighed heavily beside her and said, in Rhuian, "Oh, let the poor man out of his misery, Dina."

Feodor glanced up at her words, hearing their tone but not knowing their meaning, and looked away again as her gaze settled on him.

"You're losing your sense of humor, Tess," replied Nadine in Rhuian.

"Never that!"

Nadine grinned. She turned back to Feodor. "Well enough, Grekov," she said in khush, the language of the jaran. "I can guess what your message is. I suppose you're to return to camp with Tess?"

"Yes."

"Then you'll have to stay with us."

He was surprised enough to look straight at her, eyes widening. "But Sibirin said-"

"Yetra, Niko Sibirin does not order me."

"But Bakhtiian himself ordered-"

"Bakhtiian," said Tess viciously, before she knew she meant to say it, "can go to hell."

Feodor's expression of surprise glazed over, freezing an instant from pure shock, and then he shook it off and addressed Nadine again. As if, thought Tess wryly, what she had just said was beyond response. "Forgive me, tsadra. But Sibirin said that I was to bring your cousin-" He glanced from under lashes at Tess, who knew that her brown hair and green eyes did not resemble Nadine's black hair and eyes at all. "-back to camp before Bakhtiian returned from the coast. And not to return without her.''

"I won't force her to go back now. She doesn't intend to go back until I do. There you are. Will you come with us, then?"

"I have no choice."

Nadine dismissed him with a shrug and signaled the troop to ride. Feodor turned his horse aside to fall in with the ranks as they started forward. Tess looked back to see the young man staring at Nadine. Everyone knew he was in love with her.

Were her own feelings so transparent? With one hand, she traced the curve of her mirror. It took no great skill to see that she had married into an impossible situation, that the confrontation that was bound to come was of her own making. Mostly she was angry at herself; sometimes she felt as if she was constantly holding up that mirror and staring at her own flaws, and she was getting a little tired of it.

"Brooding?" asked Nadine, mocking her, but Tess laughed in reply because she knew Nadine showed affection by being caustic.

And abruptly, the thought triggered in Tess an upwelling of the love, of the heart's warmth, she felt for her family-for Sonia and Katerina and Ivan and Kolia, for Niko and Juli, for Irena Orzhekov, for Nadine; for Aleksi, the brother she had adopted. And, God damn him to hell, for Ilya.

"I shouldn't have done it," said Tess when Nadine halted her jahar in sight of the township of Basille. "I shouldn't have come with you."

"Losing your nerve?"

Tess chuckled. "What do you think? But perhaps the dramatic gesture wasn't the wisest one."

"It will certainly get Ilya's attention, though."

"Damn it, it was just one last thing too many. Yaroslav Sakhalin himself picked me out. He told both Bakhalo and Zvertkov that he wanted me in his jahar. You know what an honor that is! And then before I was ever consulted, Ilya goes around behind my back and tells Sakhalin that I'm to be left where I am: still in training. Still in reserve. He never lets me out of camp except if I'm with him or maybe, maybe, on a safe scouting expedition with Ilya's picked thousand and Aleksi at my right hand."

Nadine looked at Tess's scarlet shirt and black trousers, and then at her own, similar except in the stiff leather shoulder pieces and the pattern of quilting and embroidery running up the sleeves. "It's true," she mused, "that Sakhalin is not the kind of dyan to pick you out in order to curry favor with Ilya. He chose you on your merits, nothing else."

"Thank you."

"Still angry? It was an honor."

"An honor I'm never to receive the fruits of."

"Do you want to fight in battle that much?"

Tess regarded her companion with a rueful smile. Behind Nadine's left ear, where her black hair pulled away into a waist-long braid, began the scar that followed parallel to the line of the braid, all the way down. Nadine's bronze helmet hung from her saddle and her lamellar cuirass was tied on behind, although most of her men wore cuirasses or scale girdles and belts. But then, Nadine preferred to keep her reputation for being reckless.

"No, not that much," Tess admitted. "But you know as well as I do that I can't just have the privileges of my position. I have to accept the dangers as well."

"Otherwise," said Nadine, slipping easily from khush into Rhuian, "you're just a player in a masquerade. All show.''

"Yes, all show. I don't care to live that way. And I'm not jaran. So I don't have to. Ilya keeps forgetting that."

"You're wrong, Tess. He's never forgotten it. That's why he wouldn't let you go to the coast with him."

Tess went pale with anger, and her fingers clenched, and unclenched, on her reins. Zhashi shied sideways, and settled. "The business with Sakhalin was inexcusable," she said in a voice made low by fury. "But to refuse me the journey to the coast to meet Charles-!" She broke off.

Nadine watched for a few moments the interesting spectacle of Tess Soerensen too angry to speak. Then she lifted a hand to signal the jahar forward at a walk. Rather than looking at Tess, Nadine examined the timbered palisade that surrounded Basille, noting its gaps and its open gates and the sudden blur of activity at the gates when the approach of two hundred horsemen was noted by its guards.

"He's afraid," she said softly. Tess did not reply. Perhaps she had not heard her. Perhaps she did not-or could not-understand what Nadine knew to be true. "Off the fields!" she shouted at two idiot stragglers, and she led them along a dirt track that wound in toward town.

Out in the fields, workers breaking the ground in preparation for the spring ploughing raised their caps to stare, while others scattered back across the furrowed earth to find safety in hovels and behind low carts. A string of watchers appeared on what still remained of the palisade of Basille.

Nadine regarded these signs pensively. "Poor things. They hadn't a chance, you know, when they brought out their pitiful army against Veselov's ten thousand with my jahar and Mirsky's jahar in reserve. After the first day they saw it was useless and negotiated a surrender. They would have done better to close their gates and try to wait out a siege. We weren't very good at sieges that first year."

Tess chuckled. "You spent one year too many in Jeds, Dina. Are you sorry for them, now?''

Nadine shrugged. "What the gods have brought them, they will have to endure. Still, it's true enough. One year too many in Jeds marks you, just like any good jaran woman is marked for marriage."

"Like you aren't." Tess touched the scar that ran diagonally from cheekbone to jaw on her left cheek.

Nadine smiled, unmarked. "Gods, it's no wonder he married you. He would never have married a jaran woman, not after the years he spent in Jeds. Sonia and Yuri-that's why they only spent a year there. They didn't want to be changed. Or couldn't be."

"Poor Yuri. It's probably just as well he died. He would have hated this. Three years of war-one battle after the next. So much killing. He would have hated it."

Nadine examined Tess reflectively-the hair and eyes no color ever seen in jaran-born; a good rider, for a khaja; and she could fight, it was true. Nadine recalled the cousin she had last seen years before, that gentle boy Yuri. It was true he had hated fighting-could do it, but hated it. Tess was good, probably better than Yuri had ever been, but she lacked the love of the art itself, she lacked the indifference to killing: and to be a truly good fighter one must have both of those traits in moderation, or one in excess. Good timing, and a fine eye for distance: those were Tess's skills.

Tess watched her, one lip quirked up in ironic salute. ' 'Judged and found wanting?''

"Your skills aren't at issue, Tess. Just remember, there are only five women I know of in Bakhtiian's army. Before you came, not one woman rode to battle. It's no dishonor to you to choose not to ride now.''

The set of Tess's mouth tightened. "It's not such a simple choice for me. It never was."

Nadine sighed. Poor Tess, always agonizing over what was the right thing to do. She changed the subject. "Would Yurinya have hated it? I never knew him that well. We weren't of an age, and anyway, he was so quiet."

"Unlike you."

"Judged and found wanting?" retorted Nadine. Tess grinned. "The entire coast subject to his uncle's authority? Half the southern kingdoms that border the plains? We ride into a town now that gives us tribute so that we'll never again attack them. One more season of campaigning and we'll either all be dead or we'll see the other half recognize us as their kind protectors, and we'll seal alliances with the Vidiyan Great King and the Habakar king, and-gods, Tess, and then we'll be free to ride north and east along the Golden Road."

"Yuri would have hated it," muttered Tess.

"Ilya is a fool," said Nadine. "He believes what he says, that it's our duty to conquer them so that all jaran will be safe from the khaja forever. Gods, what nonsense."

"Are you going to tell him?"

"Why bother? You're the only person I know of who has the slightest chance of changing his mind-even my mother couldn't have done it. We all know what happened to Vasil Veselov when he tried. But you could, Tess. Maybe. Are you going to try?"

Tess looked away. "How can I?" she asked in a low voice. "This is what makes him what he is."

Nadine had long ago made a pact with herself not to think too deeply about her uncle. She loved him; how could she not? She hated him, because it was his fault that her mother and little brother had died. And in between, tangling it all up, the harness of duty that constrained her, her duty to her family, and the memory of her mother-the most wonderful person in all the tribes-telling her that of all men, it is to your own brothers and your mother's brothers that you owe the deepest part of your affection.

"Good," she said, mocking herself more than Tess. "I wouldn't want you to change his mind about his wild sweep of conquest. Gods, I'd be bored if I didn't have this to do." And the specter of boredom, of having too much time to think, was the worst one of all. "Look. There's a party assembling at the main gate. The ambassador must have arrived before us. He'll have had time to worry." She lifted a hand to sign for the troop to spread out, leaving them room to maneuver. The horsemen shifted position with that absolute mastery of riding that each one had, having been practically bred and raised in the saddle. Feodor looked their way, and averted his gaze when he realized she had noticed him.

"He's in love with you, you know," said Tess suddenly.

"Our ambassador? He hasn't even met me, Tess. How can he be in love with me?"

"Feodor."

"Oh, him." She did not bother to look at him. "For a sweet, modest jaran man, he's a bit too obvious about it for my taste. And the gods know, after three years in Jeds I came to appreciate sweet, modest jaran men."

"Did you?"

Even the broken, pitiful walls of Basille reminded her enough of Jeds that she was stricken with a longing to return there-now, this instant. "Of course I did. I loved that city. I could easily have forsaken the plains for Jeds, except I'm too much jaran to live in a place where only one group of women can make advances to men-women who get paid to do so. Paid! It made me heartsick. They're barbarians, these khaja. I didn't want barbarians as my lovers. It's the only reason I came back." She meant the comment to be light; the force of it surprised even her. Tess, kind Tess, made no reply.

At the gates of Basille, a party had indeed gathered. As they neared, Nadine could distinguish between two styles of dress, and she saw that a certain, delicate distance separated two groups of people-a group of men dressed in plain, dull cloth, and a smaller group arrayed in golds and purples and jade greens made the more vivid by the muted garb of their neighbors.

"It appears," said Nadine in Rhuian, "that Basille's elders can scarcely wait to pass their visitors on to us." She lifted a hand and the jahar halted, a semicircle ringing the gate out of archer's range. She glanced at her riders and smiled. Solemn, austere, with an arrogance that frightened khaja everywhere. Why, jaran riders had such contempt for all khaja that they did not even bother to touch khaja women. Was that what khaja thought? She had often wondered, but never found the opportunity to ask.

"Grekov. Yermolov." Her voice carried clearly into the silence. "Will you attend?" And softer: "Tess?"

"Assuredly."

The four of them rode forward. The crowd at the gate watched, stilled either by fear or by anticipation.

"Lord," said Tess, "look there on the steps. Is that our ambassador? From the vast and fabled empire of Vidiya?"

Nadine shifted her gaze self-consciously from the blond head of Feodor Grekov, who had come up with Yermolov on her left, to the low stairway that led up to the night portal in an intact portion of the palisade. "Gods. He's young. And is that supposed to be his retinue-what, six besides himself? Only four hands of guardsmen? He can't be very important if that's the lot. Ilya won't be pleased if he thinks he's being snubbed."

They halted equidistant between the steps and the group of elderly men marked with the heavy chains and pentangles of the town's stewards. There was silence. Nadine waited.

A young man stood on the steps, utterly and obviously foreign by his purple and green striped overtunic and huge, belled trousers of cloth of gold, by the odd sculpting of his dark beard and mustache, and by the white turban that concealed his hair. He lifted one manicured hand. An older man, less flamboyantly dressed, stood one step lower; he coughed, preparing to speak. Both their gazes stopped briefly on the two women and flicked away again as quickly, dismissing them.

After a moment the older man addressed Feodor Grekov in rough, but serviceable, Rhuian. "I am Syrannus, bond servant to the Most Honorable Jiroannes Arthebathes, ambassador from His Imperial Majesty, Honor of the People, Great King of All Vidiya, may his name be sung for a thousand years. We place ourselves and the rest of our party in your hands, sir, as you are to be our escort to the court of the Bakhtiian."

Feodor looked at Nadine and shrugged. Nadine sighed and urged her mount two paces forward. "I am Nadine Orzhekov. I am the leader of the party that will escort the Most Honorable-" She let the syllables roll off her tongue. "-Jiroannes Arthebathes and his-ah-retinue to the camp of Bakhtiian."

"But-" sputtered Syrannus. For an instant he looked like a man trapped by starving wild animals. Basille's elders whispered among themselves.

"You lead my escort?" said the ambassador suddenly, curt and doubting. "A woman? Perhaps one of these men will verify this outrageous assertion." He waved toward Grekov and Yermolov.

"Since they don't speak Rhuian, they can't." Nadine grinned, enjoying his indignation.

"You are the only one in your party who speaks Rhuian?" demanded the ambassador. "That is absurd."

"Not the only one," conceded Nadine. "This woman, Terese Soerensen, speaks not only Rhuian but Taor and, I believe, a few words of Vidyan as well."

At this unfortunate juncture, especially given the appalled looks on the faces of Jiroannes Arthebathes and his servant Syrannus, Tess started to laugh.