An earthly crown

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

"No," said Owen. "I want more curve in the arms. Both arms. Higher. The gesture represents exultation with yet a hint of supplication. There. Hold that."

Diana thought her arms were going to drop off. She could not keep her mind on the rehearsal. Endless hours jolting along in the back of the wagons as the army moved south, and then not even the comfort of any company that she craved at the end. She was surprised, each evening, at how bitterly she missed Anatoly. She was sick of the company of the other actors, except for Gwyn, but he was usually off watching the natives. He was learning khush quickly, and making himself known and liked, and slowly but surely he incorporated bits of gesture, bits of speech, asides into his acting that blended with Owen's vision and yet always, in their impromptu and brief performances every evening, got the most reaction from the audience that gathered to watch them.

"Now, the expression. That's good, but more of a blankness, Diana."

"That shouldn't be hard," said Anahita in a stage whisper. Hyacinth giggled.

"Smooth the lines of the mouth." As always, Owen worked on, ignoring the comment. Perhaps he didn't even hear it. He fell so far into his work that Diana wondered if he ever thought or talked about anything else, but she had never had the nerve to ask Ginny if that was so.

"You're not with me, Diana," he added chidingly. She hurriedly fixed her thoughts on her mouth, on the droop of her eyelids, on the exact tilt of her chin, and on her arms, lifting toward the heavens.

"Yes! Now hold it."

Her heart bounded, uplifted by his single word of praise. It was for this, and for those moments when the ensemble work went seamlessly, when the house was gripped by the spell and the barriers between audience and players dissolved completely, that Diana worked and lived.

"Gwyn, enter. Good, but I want more movement in the shoulders. Yes, there's the gesture."

Since Diana still faced forward with her eyes lifted toward the cloudy sky, she could not watch Gwyn go into his mie. Drops of rain wet her face. Anahita sneezed and began to complain about staying out in such bad weather. If Owen noticed the onset of the drizzle, he gave no sign of it. Diana's arms ached. She shifted her gaze down from the thick clouds to her fingers, and set about memorizing the exact angle and line of each individual digit. Ten of them, one for each day they had been traveling. One for each day since her husband-the word was less strange now than it had been before-had left her.

"Phillippe," said Owen, "the drum beats. Wind demons, your entrance."

The rain fell in double time to the drumbeats. Diana stood so still that she could practically feel each point, each moment, that a drop of rain struck her bare skin. Hyacinth and Quinn, the wind demons, prowled about her and Gwyn, moving in a sinuous, threatening line.

Owen clapped his hands together twice. "Break."

Yomi said, "You have one hour. Meet back here."

"Yomi, we'll need light. Joseph, can you rig an awning over the stage?" Owen fell into an intense conversation with Joseph about shifting the placement of the various tents.

Diana shook out her arms and hopped down from the platform. At the edge of the encampment, about forty children had clustered together to watch the rehearsal. Now that it was over, they raced away into the jaran camp. Late afternoon faded toward dusk.

"I don't want to attempt Tamburlaine yet," Owen was saying to Ginny and Yomi. "We can't know if it will offend."

"And Marlowe is so damn talky," said Ginny, "especially if you don't know the language. Certainly the verbiage will lose a great deal in the translation."

"I'm thinking Caucasian Chalk Circle. But after we present the folktale."

"Owen," broke in Anahita, who like the rest of the actors had been eavesdropping, "you can't expect us to put up something this new on so little rehearsal?''

"Of course I can. If you wanted safety, Anahita, then why did you come on this trip? I asked Tess Soerensen specifically for a jaran folktale that we might render into a gest and so make it clear to our audience what we mean by our acting. I am still of two minds about the performance of Dream. Did it indeed connect? Or were they simply being polite and curious? Certainly they were closest to us for the epilogue, when we drew the parallel from the play into the actual wedding and thus linked the two. But it's by no means clear to me yet even with our impromptus and scenes that they understand what we mean to convey with our craft. What we do here is rather more ephemeral, it seems to me, than their epic singers, who perform a tale over and over again in the same fashion."

"Do you really think it's that different?" asked Gwyn. "Or just different because it's not a medium they communicate by? Anyway, once rehearsal is over, we perform a play the same way every night. That's no different than their epic tales. I like it when we take chances, like this folktale."

"Owen," said Ginny, "I'll finish the cuts on Caucasian this evening and then you can see how much physical business you want to substitute for what's left."

"I don't see why we're doing Caucasian," said Anahita, making a great physical business of showing her disgust with an overblown sigh and a toss of her curly black hair.

Gwyn winked at Diana.

"The deeply rooted feelings of mother and child, Anahita," said Owen. "Surely that will connect. Now, Yomi, about the-"

"I've got dinner for anybody who wants it," said Joseph, pitching his voice to carry over Owen's. "Hal and Oriana, could you hurry it up and then help me rig this awning?"

The company dispersed. Ginny dragged Owen along toward the big tent, where the food was, although she did not attempt to interrupt his conversation with Yomi. Diana lingered. She rubbed her hands over her arms to dispel the last of the ache but mostly to warm herself. The army had marched into the hills here, and the elevation brought cold nights.

Gwyn appeared beside her. "Going out?" he asked softly.

"Do you know," she said suddenly, "that of everyone I know, Gwyn, I admire you the most. You accomplish what I've always wanted to accomplish in acting. You present the part without any self-consciousness-not that you become it, but that you play it so seamlessly. It's because your ego is involved with the process itself, with how well you act to your own satisfaction, to the achievement of that communication, and not with how well and how much people think of you, and if they give you enough attention and praise and adulation."

He chuckled. "Thank you. If I'd only wanted adulation, I could have stayed in the interactives. I got enough of that there to last me a lifetime. I'm not interested in being noticed or lionized." Then he smiled again, an almost wolfish grin. "Only in being the best. But don't tell anyone I confessed that to you."

"You're not afraid to take risks."

"Neither are you, Diana. Don't ever lose that quality. Once a person stops pushing and growing, she is as dead in the spirit as if she were dead in the flesh."

Diana smiled in return, but pensively. "I thought I might-I was introduced by Sonia Orzhekov to the family that has agreed to act as my-well, as my and Anatoly's foster jaran family, I suppose we would say. Although it's a strange thought, having three families." When Gwyn looked puzzled, she explained. "My family at home, the Company, and now Anatoly and whatever my marriage to him has brought me. But I thought I might go there now. They said I was welcome any time."

"Do you think I might go with you? Or is it forbidden for married women to walk about with men who aren't their relatives?''

"I thought you were going to say, with unmarried men. Are you married?" She began to walk, out into the jaran camp. He walked beside her. "Or am I allowed to ask that question?"

He considered for a moment, serious. "You're allowed," he said finally. "In fact, I am married."

She felt her mouth gape open, and shut it as quickly. "But then Anahita was telling the truth when she said-"

"Anahita!" Gwyn laughed. "I don't think so. No, the woman I'm married to is someone altogether different."

Diana wanted to ask more, but his tone did not encourage questions. "Well, we'll tell them you're my cousin. Which you are, in a manner of speaking, in the craft. Their camp is in the third circle out from the center, to the northwest."

"Ah, then you've identified the pattern. It's interesting that they pitch their camp in exactly the same layout, by tribe and family, every time they set up camp."

"It does make it possible to find your way around. Of course, the main army must be way ahead of us by now. There aren't that many men around."

"Once there's a battle, there will be more."

Diana shuddered. "Here, Gwyn, teach me some more khush words. It's terrible trying to learn a language without a matrix. It's so slow."

"I can't say that I know many more words than you do, Diana. But here: Tent. Horse. Girl. Boy. Except that I'm still trying to work out the familial terms. They seem to have a lot more of them, and more specific ones, than we do. And more terms defining a woman and what stage of life she is at than for a man. There's a boy, an adolescent, and then I can't tell whether the shift to 'man' is defined by a man's getting married or becoming a fighter. Then when he's too old to fight, he becomes an Elder. If he lives that long."

"And for a female?"

"I haven't worked that out yet, but I think puberty, marriage, childbirth, first grandchild, and menopause all define shifts in a woman's status. But I'm really only guessing. It's easier for me to learn about the men."

"Do you like to travel?" she asked suddenly.

"Yes."

"I do, for now. But I can see that I'll get tired of it. Packing up every day and going on at this pace is bound to pall eventually.''

"We're moving pretty fast, for a group of this size. I can't begin to count the number of wagons, much less the people involved. How do they feed themselves?"

"You haven't seen all those dirty animals being herded alongside? I suppose once you conquer a country, you can expect it to feed you. I don't know. How they get along on a daily basis at all mystifies me. Look, there's the camp." She hesitated at the farthest rim of the circle of tents, peering into the camp to see if she could recognize anyone. A woman rose from beside the campfire and came to greet them.

It was Arina Veselov, a pretty young woman whom Diana had liked immediately. Her little daughter tagged at her heels and went to Diana for a kiss. Arina greeted Diana with a kiss on both cheeks and, haltingly, Diana introduced Gwyn as her cousin. Arina gestured for them to come in, to sit, and soon other members of the family gathered, since it was suppertime. Children brought them wooden bowls of a watery stew and leather cups filled with pungent milk. Compared to some of the other camps, the proportion of children to women was higher here, as if this tribe had sent fewer of its children out into the safety of the plains.

"Who's that?" Gwyn whispered, nodding toward a tall, golden-haired man who came into the circle of light attended by a plain woman and a beautiful young girl. The focus of the assembly altered subtly, warping to somehow pull him into the center of attention.

"That's Arina's cousin, Vasil. Isn't he gorgeous?"

"He's a natural charismatic," said Gwyn, still softly, and still in Anglais. "I'll have to make sure that Owen sees him. Owen loves to watch people like him."

"And people like Bakhtiian. It's funny, though. Charles Soerensen and Bakhtiian are in many ways the same kind of powerful leader, yet outwardly they don't seem at all the same. And this man-Vasil-has the same kind of charisma that Bakhtiian does, but I don't see him leading armies."

"Not the same kind of charisma," murmured Gwyn, thoughtful.

Vasil, noticing their attention, flashed them a smile across the gap. He had a warm smile, intent and encompassing, as if for that instant no thing and no one else was on his mind but the recipient of his smile. Diana smiled back. Gwyn bent his head in acknowledgment.

"Oh, and there's the baby. This is Kirill, Gwyn. He's Arina's husband, and this is the little baby, Lavrenti. May I hold him?" She held out her arms and Kirill, with a smile, transferred the baby to her waiting grasp.

"Goddess, it's small." Gwyn examined the infant. "Are they supposed to be that small?"

"I don't know. I don't know much about babies, and nothing about Rhuian babies."

The infant mewled and hiccuped and gave a little gasping cry and then relaxed. Arina came and knelt beside Diana, and while Diana held the child, Arina dipped a cloth in a cup of warm milk and dribbled the liquid into the baby's tiny mouth. All at once, its lips caught on the cloth and it sucked away for one minute and then sighed and let go and fell asleep.

Diana glanced up in time to see Arina and Kirill look at each other. That glance they shared was despairing. They thought their child was going to die; they knew it. Diana clutched the little bundle closer to her, as if willing Lavrenti her own strength might make the difference. Kirill sighed and moved away to speak to Vasil's wife. His left arm shifted strangely at his side, a dead weight that was only by some fluke attached to his body. Arina sighed as well and wiped a drop of rain off her face. Except the rain had stopped a little while ago. Diana settled the baby into the crook of her left elbow. His tiny head barely reached to her palm. His skin was remarkably clear and pale, stretched, almost translucent, and his tiny lips were perfectly formed, like a pale pink rosebud.

"Look," said Gwyn. "There's the doctor. Have you any idea yet of why she came with us, with the army? I can't imagine why she didn't leave with Soerensen."

"There can only be one reason, Gwyn. See, Tess is with her. She stayed to be with Tess."

Tess's arrival in the camp brought a sudden flare of life to the quiet gathering. Tess kissed the women, hugged children, and seemed to have a separate greeting for each one of the score of people around the fire. Diana watched with interest as Vasil drew himself into her orbit and promptly became her other half, sharing in her progress as if he had been part of it all along.

"Scene stealer," she muttered.

Gwyn chuckled under his breath. "Tess Soerensen?"

"You know who I mean."

"Yes, and it was subtly done, too. Very natural. Wouldn't he be awful to act with? He'd pull focus every time he came on stage even worse than Anahita does, and she's shameless."

"Diana! I'm so pleased to see you here." Tess came up to them. Her entourage now included Arina and Kirill as well as the doctor and Vasil. "Gwyn. I watched a bit of your rehearsal of-the one about the woman who saves the child from the revolution. I quite liked it, although I'm not sure the jaran will understand a man acting as Judge in such matters. I'll have to mention that to Owen. Do you think he'd be willing to change the Judge to a woman?"

"If you present the case strongly enough," said Gwyn, "and you think it would enhance the audience's understanding, I suspect he'd be willing."

"Oh, here, Cara." Tess turned and beckoned the doctor forward. Vasil had retreated back one step, watching these proceedings with a keen eye. "Here's Lavrenti." She delivered a long comment to Arina in khush, and Arina glanced at Kirill, bit her lips, and then nodded. "Diana, let Cara see the baby."

Diana handed the infant over. Dr. Hierakis handled the child briskly, for all its seeming fragility. "Clearly he's premature. I'd like to examine him, but I'll want somewhere enclosed and warmer. And you and the mother as well, to answer questions. Perhaps you can find out who attended the birth? I'd like to talk to her, too."

Now that the baby was gone, Diana realized how little its weight had been. She did not feel lightened of any burden with her arms now empty. Tess spoke in rapid khush to Arina and Kirill, and then, with a sudden, almost sly smile, turned and addressed an order to Vasil. The handsome man looked startled, but then he smiled and spun and walked swiftly away into the darkness. His golden-haired daughter ran after him, deserting her mother.

"Karolla Arkhanov and one of the Telyegin sisters attended the birth," Tess said to Cara in Anglais. "I sent Vasil to fetch Lydia Telyegin. Karolla is here. And, Cara-" She hesitated, glancing sidelong at Arina's good-looking husband. "Kirill is the one I told you about-with the injured arm. If there's anything you can do…"

"I'll have to diagnose the injury first. But if he's gone three years with it, it can wait. This baby needs my immediate attention. Come on, then."

Dr. Hierakis did not even acknowledge the two actors but merely strode away in the direction of Arina Veselov's tent. Arina walked beside her, looking anxious. Tess did not move immediately, and Kirill, strangely enough, lingered beside her. Diana noticed how close he stood to her, rather closer than mere acquaintances usually stood.

"Diana, I am truly glad you've come to this camp. I don't know-" Tess broke off. "Well, it isn't my part to give you advice, especially since you haven't asked me for any.''

"No, please. What were you going to say?"

Tess sighed. She wore, as she usually did, men's clothing-the scarlet shirt and black pants of the jaran riders-and she wore a saber at her belt. She looked to Diana as if she fit in easily with the people she had decided to live among, and somehow Diana could not see herself existing so entirely within the jaran, so unconsciously at ease. "You've brought your life with you, Diana, and however more realistic it might seem to try to keep the two things apart-that is, Anatoly and the Company-I think you have to consider finding some way to bring yourself into his circle, but also him into yours. Otherwise he will feel that you are deliberately keeping something from him." At her side, Kirill watched her intently while she spoke, although he obviously would have no reason to understand Anglais.

"But I am-we all are keeping things from them."

"Yes." Tess grimaced. "But we have to do it delicately and we have to try our best to make it seem that we are not."

"I think I understand."

"It won't be easy. Now, I really must go." She nodded at them and walked off to Arina's tent with Kirill.

"Do you think they can save the child?" Diana asked.

Gwyn blinked once, twice. "We'd better go, Diana. Rehearsal starts in eleven minutes."

"Where did you get that retinal chip implant, anyway?" she asked after they had taken their leave of the family and started back through camp. "My family was never able to afford anything like that, but one of my father's sisters got one when she qualified for the fleet navigation academy."

"Got it in prison," said Gwyn with a grin.

"Oh, I'll certainly believe that." Then she sobered. "But really, Gwyn, do you think they can save the baby?"

"I don't know. On Earth, there would be no question."

"It seems wrong, somehow, knowing how much we could improve their lives and then not doing anything about it. Hiding it from them."

"Who are we to judge what is best?"

Diana sighed. At the Company's encampment, Joseph had rigged an awning over the platform and now he and Yomi hung lanterns out to light the stage. A group of jaran children together with a steadily growing number of their elders gathered about thirty paces from the stage, waiting patiently for the spectacle to begin. Owen had decided early on that letting them watch rehearsal might help them understand the idiom. Diana recognized some of the faces-some of the children came every night-and she waved at them, and they waved back, eagerly, with smiles.

"Now." Yomi called them to order. "We'll start with a run-through, and then go back through the scenes. Anahita and Diana, your entrance."