An earthly crown

PROLOGUE

The rider left the great sprawl of tents that marked the main camp of the nomad army just as the sun set. Dusk washed his scarlet shirt gray, and with only the gibbous moon to light him, he soon faded into the dark of night, the susurration of his horse's passage through the high grass marking his progress. Near midnight, he came to another, smaller camp, and here he changed horses and went on. By dawn, he was within sight of the low range of hills where lay the farthest outposts of the khaja, the settled people.

One hand's span after sunrise, he rode through a village. Fields spread out around the huts. Green shoots wet with dew sparkled in the soft light of morning. The khaja stopped in their tasks and stared at him, a lone jaran warrior armed with a saber and a lance, passing through their midst as if their presence was beneath his notice. None spoke, or moved against him.

A cluster of jaran tents stood in neat lines outside the leveled sod walls that had once protected the village. A single rider emerged from the encampment and rode out to meet him.

The traveler reined in his mount and waited, leaning forward over the horse's neck to whisper in its ear as it fretted at the tight rein. Then, sitting back, he lifted a hand. "Well met," he said as the young rider from the encampment pulled up beside him. "I am Aleksi Soerensen. I've come from the main camp, with a message for the Gathering of Elders. You're one of Grekov's riders, aren't you?"

"I'm Feodor Grekov. His sister's son. Soerensen?" Grekov hesitated, raising a hand to brush a lock of blond hair off of his forehead. He pronounced the name awkwardly.

"Yes," Aleksi agreed, politely but without a smile.

"You're the orphan that Bakhtiian's wife adopted," said Feodor. He examined Aleksi with what appeared to be common curiosity. ' 'It's said you have a fine hand for the saber."

Aleksi was disconcerted. He had not grown used to the respect, and the protection, his adopted sister's name granted him. "I had a fine teacher."

Feodor did not press the matter. "If you've come from the main camp, then your news must be important. I'll get you a new mount, and ride with you myself, if you need a guide."

' 'It's safe enough for the two of us from here on into the hills?"

"We have patrols running through all these hills. There are a few khaja bandits left, but nothing more. These khaja aren't real fighters. Soon they'll all be subject to us, as they should be." Feodor grinned. "And I'd like to go, anyway. It will be something to tell my children."

"Ah. You've a little one?"

Grekov flushed. "Not yet."

"But you've a woman in mind for a wife, I take it."

"I-" Feodor hesitated. "A man can't help looking," he said at last. Aleksi heard the bitterness in his voice clearly.

"I'd like to marry," Aleksi agreed, feeling suddenly and surprisingly sorry for Grekov, who ought to have had an easy life, being nephew of a tribal warleader and nephew to its headwoman. And since the unnamed young woman in question had no choice in marriage, Aleksi could only guess that the obstacles arose from Grekov's elders. "But I suppose I never will."

"Of course, as an orphan-but surely you've standing enough now, since Bakhtiian's wife has adopted you into her tent."

"Adopted me by her customs, not by ours. Or a bit by both, I suppose. Still, you may be right. I hope so."

"Gods," said Feodor, "there's enough trouble in the world without worrying about women." And that sealed their comradeship. Aleksi felt a bit overwhelmed by how easy it was, when you had a respectable name, a sister, a place in a tribe. "Come on," Feodor added, "we'll get you a new mount and something to eat, and then be on our way." He led Aleksi into camp and introduced him round as if he was just another young soldier like himself and the rest of the riders. A short time later, the two young men rode out in charity with each other.

By midday they reached the butte known to the jaran as khayan-sarmiia, Her Crown Fallen from Heaven to Earth. Once, the stories said, this range of hills was known only to the jaran tribes, but in recent generations a few khaja settlements had crept out across the plains from settled lands in the south and west to pollute the holy ground where the Sun's Crown had come to rest on the earth.

At the base of the hill, an army waited. Countless soldiers, in their tens and hundreds and thousands, gathered to acclaim the man who would lead them against their ancient enemies. Aleksi and Feodor left their horses with the army and hiked up the trail that ascended the steep hillside. The wind began to buffet them. Soon both were breathing hard, despite their youth, because they were not used to so much hard walking.

At last, the path leveled and gave out onto a plateau from whose height they could see the shifting mass of the army below, the rolling spread of hills, and a few distant wisps of smoke that marked khaja villages. Far to the south, past the flat haze of plain, a suggestion of bluer haze marked the southern mountains. To the north and east lay only the vast golden plains that blended at the horizon into the equally monotonous blue of the sky. West, though they could not see it from here, lay the sea.

They admired the view for as long as it took to get their breath back. But of far greater interest was the gathering now taking place on the plateau itself.

A single tent had been set up at the southern end of the plateau, a great tent whose sides shook in the wind that scoured the summit. Between the northern end, where the two young men stood on an escarpment of rock, and the tent lay a broad stretch of ground smoothed by generations of wind and storm. On this ground, on the earth itself, some on blankets, some on pillows, sat the assembled commanders and elders of the thousand tribes of the jaran.

At the very back sat the younger men, commanders of a hundred riders each; many now wore the scarlet shirts, brilliant with embroidery on the sleeves and collar, that had come to be the symbol of the jaran army, though a few still wore the colors of their own tribe. In front of them sat a sea of elders, some ancient and frail, some elderly but robust, female and male both.

At the very front sat the etsanas of the thousand tribes, each headwoman flanked by the dyan, the warleader, of her tribe. Most of the women were elderly, though a few were young. They wore their finest clothing, bright silk blouses beaded with gold and silver under calf-length tunics. Striped, belled trousers swelled out underneath. Jeweled headdresses and necklaces and torques and bracelets adorned them, and their hand mirrors hung free of their cases, face out in the glare so that they reflected the light of the sun. So many wore tiny bells that a faint tinkling chime could be heard, underscoring the rush of wind and the solemn proceedings.

The dyans, too, wore their finest shirts, twined animals or interlaced flora embroidered with lavish detail on the sleeves and capped with epaulets fastened on their shoulders. Each man wore sheathed at his belt a saber and most held a lance, so that the gathering resembled a sea of bright colors tipped with metal.

In a semicircle before the awning that stretched out from the tent sat ten women and eight men, the women on fine silken pillows and the men beside them on woven blankets: the etsanas and dyans of the Ten Eldest Tribes, the first tribes of the jaran. The men held their sabers, unsheathed, across their knees. Each woman gripped a staff from whose tip hung a horsetail woven with ribbons and golden harness, the symbol of their authority.

"Two dyans missing," said Feodor Grekov in a low voice to Aleksi. Aleksi glanced at him, and Grekov cocked his head toward the assembly. "Of course, Bakhtiian himself is the dyan of the Orzhekov tribe. But Sergei Veselov never arrived. I heard that he's ill."

"That's the news I brought," said Aleksi. "Sergei Veselov is dead. He died two days past."

"Who will become dyan, then? Arina Veselov's brother sits beside Bakhtiian, but everyone knows it isn't fitting for a brother and sister to act as etsana and dyan together."

"Sergei Veselov has a son, still, who could claim the position," said Aleksi slowly, not much interested in the Veselov tribe's troubles. He stared at the tent and at the small figures clustered underneath the awning.

"I don't think I've heard of him. Is he here?"

"No."

"Perhaps he doesn't know his father is dead. Perhaps he doesn't want to be dyan."

Aleksi shrugged. "I met him once, a long time ago. I don't know if he'd want the position." He added, under his breath: "Or if he did, if they would let him take it." Then he caught in his breath, because he had seen, under the awning, a woman dressed in man's clothing, the red shirt and black trousers and boots, armed with a saber.

Feodor Grekov made a tiny, strangled noise in his throat. "That's her, isn't it?" he asked. "That's Bakhtiian's niece."

Aleksi, with some disappointment, realized that the woman soldier's coloring was as dark as her uncle's. Where was Tess?

Six men and one woman, soldiers all, sat under the awning. In front of them, on a single pillow at the edge of the awning, half under the awning, half out under the open sky, sat the man on whom all attention was fixed. Ilyakoria Bakhtiian absorbed the force of their regard effortlessly. And yet, even at such a distance, Aleksi felt Bakhtiian's presence so strongly that it was as if Bakhtiian was standing right next to him.

"Come on," he said to Feodor, and he led the other man around the fringe of the assembly. No one paid them any mind. At the tent, etsanas and dyans came up in pairs to pledge their loyalty to Bakhtiian's war, and to be pledged to, his allegiance to their tribe, in return.

When they were about fifteen paces from the tent, off to the side, Aleksi stopped Feodor with a touch to the elbow, settled down on his haunches, and waited.

Ilyakoria Bakhtiian sat cross-legged on a square pillow embroidered with stylized horses intertwined, galloping, racing. His expression was composed, but intent. One open, one curled into a loose fist, his hands lay as still as if they were carved in stone, in contrast to the restless, passionate intelligence that blazed from his eyes. To his right, propped up on a little stand of wood, rested a carved wooden staff somewhat longer than a man's arm.

After an endless time, sun and wind beating down on them, only the Ten Eldest Tribes had yet to speak. There was a silence. The tinkling of bells whispered like the murmuring of the gods, watching over them. From somewhere in the middle of the assembly, Aleksi heard the soft droning chant of priests, intoning the endless cycle of the gods: Mother Sun and Father Wind, Aunt Cloud and Uncle Moon, Sister Tent and Brother Sky, Daughter Earth and Son River, Cousin Grass and Cousin Rain. Here and there in the crowd Aleksi identified the glazed stare of a man or a woman who was memorizing each word to pass on to the tribes. Even one of Bakhtiian's personal commanders, Josef Raevsky, had that vacant expression on his face, although he was a soldier and not a Singer.

Abruptly, Bakhtiian rose.

"Ah," breathed Aleksi, realizing what Bakhtiian meant to do. He glanced at Feodor, to see if his companion also appreciated the coming gesture on Bakhtiian's part. But Grekov was staring like any besotted fool straight at Bakhtiian's niece. The woman shifted slightly and glanced their way, and immediately Grekov's gaze dropped and he stared down at the ground.

Like an echo of his niece, Bakhtiian shifted his attention from the assembly and turned his head to look straight at Aleksi. Even knowing that most of the audience must have turned as well, to see what was attracting

Bakhtiian's attention, Aleksi could not feel their stares at all. Bakhtiian's overwhelmed everything else.

Aleksi stood up. He did not fear Bakhtiian, but he respected him, and he was grateful to him for never once objecting to the way in which Aleksi had become a member of his tribe. Aleksi valued Bakhtiian's protection almost as much as he valued that granted him by his new sister. Bakhtiian gestured with his left hand, and his niece jumped to her feet and walked briskly over to Aleksi. Feodor Grekov climbed hastily to his feet as well. He kept his gaze fixed on his boots.

"Aleksi," said Nadine by way of greeting, "You've come from camp."

"Sergei Veselov is dead."

"Ah," she replied. Then she grinned, and Aleksi grinned back, liking her because he knew that she had the same kind of reckless, bold heart as he did. And because she had never cared one whit that he was an orphan. "Trouble will come of that, I trust." She sounded satisfied, as if she hoped the trouble would come soon, and in an unexpected and inconvenient manner. "Well met, Feodor," she added. "I missed you."

Then she spun and strode back to the tent. She knelt beside one of the seven commanders under the awning. Anton Veselov's fair complexion flushed red first, and then he paled. Bakhtiian turned right round and considered them, but he said nothing. After a moment, Veselov rose and walked out the side of the awning and around to the semicircle. The youngest etsana shifted to let the soldier sink down beside her. He drew his saber and laid it across his knees: his authority as the new dyan of his tribe.

' 'The gods will look askance at that,'' murmured Feodor.

"There's no other man in the line to give it to," said Aleksi, but he also felt uncomfortable, seeing a sister and brother sitting together in authority over a tribe.

Bakhtiian waited for the stir to die down. Aleksi settled back into a crouch to wait, and Feodor slid his gaze back to Nadine Orzhekov. As if she felt his gaze, she looked back over her shoulder at them. A smile-or a smirk-quirked her lips up. Feodor flushed. He collapsed ungracefully beside Aleksi, looking pale and staring hard at his hands. Bakhtiian's niece sat down in her place and did not look their way again.

The wind blew. The assembly was silent. The sun's disk slid down toward the western horizon.

A flame winked. Aleksi blinked, staring at the tent, and discovered where Tess had been all along. The tent flap that covered the entrance to the interior had been tied up just enough to let an observer hidden inside watch without being seen. Now, with a lantern lit at her side, Tess Soerensen was visible to him. Her head bent, as if she was tired, or too burdened to bear up any longer. Bakhtiian's khaja wife, sitting silent in her tent as her husband declared war on all khaja people. Aleksi felt a vise grip his heart, in fear for her, and for himself. What if she left him here, to return to her brother's lands?

Then, with a grin, he relaxed. Her right arm moved, a slight movement but one he recognized. She was writing. It was a foreign word, and a khaja thing to do, recording words and events with these scrawls she called letters, as if she hadn't the memory to recall it all properly, in her heart. Which she had often, and cheerfully, admitted that she had not. She glanced up. She was staring at someone: at Ilya Bakhtiian? No.

Aleksi followed the line of her sight and he saw that she was staring at the sky, at, in fact, the only star bright enough to show yet in the twilight sky. She often stared at the heavens that way, as if they held an answer for her, as if she sought something there, like a singer who seeks the heart of a song in the gods' lands. Oh, yes, he knew she held some secret inside her, a secret that her own husband did not guess at. What it was, he had not yet divined, but Aleksi had spent most of his life watching people, interpreting their slightest action, their simplest words, because until this last four months he had only his powers of observation and his undeniable skill with the saber to keep him alive. Tess Soerensen was not like other people, not like her adopted people the jaran, certainly, but not like the khaja either. She was something altogether different, betraying herself not in obvious, grand ways, but in the subtle, tiny things that most people overlooked.

Tess's gaze fell from the star and settled on her husband. She loved him in a way that was, perhaps, a bit unseemly for a woman of the tribes. But Tess wasn't jaran; like Aleksi, she was an outsider. Suddenly she glanced to one side and spotted Aleksi, and grinned, swiftly, reassuringly. And went back to her writing.

"I will protect you," Aleksi muttered under his breath. He loved her fiercely, as only a brother can love a sister, the oldest bond between a man and a woman and the most important one. She had saved his life, had taken him into her tent, had given him the security he had not had since he was a tiny child. Perhaps her other brother, the khaja prince who lived far to the south, loved her more: Aleksi doubted it. Perhaps Bakhtiian loved her more, but it was pointless to measure oneself against Bakhtiian. Bakhtiian was not like other men. He belonged, not to himself, but to the jaran, to his people, and if his passions were greater than other men's, so, too, were his burdens and his responsibilities.

Bakhtiian moved. He walked, lithe as any predator, across the gap between his pillow and the semicircle of elders, and knelt in front of his aunt.

"With your permission, my aunt," he said. She did not speak, but simply placed her palm on his hair and withdrew it again. He rose and walked to the other end of the crescent, to kneel before the etsana of the eldest tribe, Elizaveta Sakhalin. He kept his eyes lowered, as befitted a modest man.

The elderly woman regarded him evenly.

At last, Bakhtiian spoke.

"When Mother Sun sent her daughter to the earth, she sent with her ten sisters, and gifted them each with a tent and a name. The eldest was Sakhalin, then Arkhanov, Suvorin, Velinya, Raevsky, Vershinin, Grekov, Fedoseyev, and last the twins, Veselov and Orzhekov. Each sister had ten daughters, and each daughter ten daughters in turn, and thus the tribes of the jaran were born. This summer we begin our ride against the khaja lands.'' Now he lifted his eyes to look directly at her, though she was his elder, and a woman. "Of the ten elder tribes, who will come with me?''

Sakhalin rose. She was a tiny woman, well past her childbearing years, and strength radiated from her. She examined her nephew first, then each of the other nine etsanas and their warleaders in turn. Each man went forward and laid his saber in front of Bakhtiian's pillow. Each woman unbound the horse-tail from her staff and bound it, in turn, to the staff resting beside Bakhtiian's pillow. Nine sabers, ten horse-tails. The priests' chanting droned on, a muted counterpoint. The standard atop the tent, a plain gold banner, fluttered wildly.

"Bakhtiian," Sakhalin said, which meant He-who-has-traveled-far. "All will come." She raised him up and released him, and he walked back to the pillow and sank down onto it. He took the staff into his hands and held it, weighing its strength. Then he lifted his gaze to the endless blue sky.

Sakhalin turned to survey the assembly. She stretched out her arms to the heavens. "Mother Sun and Father Wind be our witness," she said, and though she did not seem to raise her voice, it carried effortlessly across the plateau. "All will come."

A great shout rose, shattering the stillness.

"Ja-tar!" they cried. "To ride!"

Elizaveta Sakhalin sat down, and a hush fell.

Yaroslav Sakhalin rose, dyan of the eldest tribe, and he walked forward and took his saber from the ground and held it out. Its blade winked in the torchlight.

"Where will you lead us?" Sakhalin asked.

Bakhtiian did not answer. His gaze had taken on a distant cast, as if he were looking at something not there, some place, some person, some vision that only he could see.

"Leave him," said Elizaveta Sakhalin. "We must leave him here to talk to the gods." It took half the night for them all to negotiate the narrow trail down to the camp below, leaving Bakhtiian alone above.

A day passed and Bakhtiian did not come down from the height.

Neither did he the next day.

But at dawn on the third day, smoke rose from the hill, billowing up into the sky. "He's offered the tent to the gods," his aunt said approvingly. In orderly groups, elders and dyans, commanders and etsanas, gathered at the base where the path twisted up the hillside. Aleksi stuck close to Tess and so gained a vantage point right at the front.

Soon enough they saw a single figure, red shirt, black trousers, black boots, a saber swaying at his hips, walking down the path. He gripped the horse-tail staff in his left hand. Seeing the crowd, he halted. First, he sought out his wife's figure in the throng. He stared at her as if to make sure she was real and not a spirit. Aleksi could not otherwise read Bakhtiian's expression. But then, Aleksi was never entirely sure of what Bakhtiian felt about anything, as if the sheer force of the emotions welling off Bakhtiian served to hide his true feelings.

At last Bakhtiian lifted his gaze to stare at the assembly spread out, waiting for him. Here at the front, the elders, the women, the commanders, stood and watched. Farther back, many of the young men of the army had already mounted, holding their restless mounts on tight reins.

Bakhtiian's face was lit, illuminated by the gods themselves, or by some trick of the morning sunlight, Aleksi could not be sure which. He raised the horse-tail staff and, with that small gesture, brought silence. Then he drew his saber.

"West," he said. So calmly did he raise the fire that would scorch the khaja earth. "West to the sea."