Kate Elliott - Jaran

"It's good to be stupid now and again. It isn't healthy to be right all the time. That's why I worry about Ilya."

"Easy enough. We'll have a contest to see who can catch him out first."

"What will be the prize?"

"Satisfaction, Yuri. Pure satisfaction."

"Tess! You're wicked!"

"No, merely practical. He sets himself too high, our Bakhtiian." And then, because she had been thinking about it all morning, because she didn't want anyone to know but had to tell someone, she hesitated. "There's something else. A secret." She crouched down. Following her lead, he knelt beside her, so close their sleeves and thighs brushed. The horses grazed placidly behind them. He put his hand to her knee. "About Fedya." Her voice slipped to a murmur.

"Tess! You didn't. You did! Hah!"

"Shh! Yuri!"

He lifted one hand to yank playfully at her braid. "By the gods, we'll make you jaran yet. Sonia said we would."

"Did she? When was this?"

An approaching horse interrupted them. "We are leaving," said Bakhtiian, far above them, his face and hair framed by the sky. Tess and Yuri stood hastily, brushing off their clothing. They exchanged furtive looks, stifled giggles, and Tess went with Bakhtiian.

Much later, they paused to water the horses.

"They had a light," said Bakhtiian. "Neither a torch or a candle. Can you explain this?"

"No," said Tess truthfully, meeting his gaze.

"I think they were worshiping the stone, or its god. I couldn't make out their rituals. It was too dark." An animal rustled through the grass. "I wouldn't care to be a god confined in a rock. Do you know if that is what they worship?"

"I don't know. But I do know that people worship many strange things in many strange ways. There is a people in my land-"

"In Jeds?"

"No, in the land overseas where I studied. They worship their god by abstaining from all earthly pleasures."

"All of them?" Bakhtiian looked like a boy being told a tale he did not believe but could not disbelieve. "Wouldn't they starve, or die of thirst?"

Tess looked away to hide her smile. "They eat and drink enough to stay alive, of course."

"Of course. Undoubtedly." He looked at her, eyes widening. Tess grinned. "You don't mean to say they don't-By the gods, what insanity."

"No." She blinked, straight-faced. "They are filled with the passion of God's divinity."

"But how tedious." They both laughed and, quite suddenly, he blushed and looked away from her. They rode on, but later he demanded that she explain how such a religion could exist after one generation.

Two days and four days and six and eight, and then, to vary it, she counted in threes: three days and six days and nine and twelve. It grew warmer and windy. The Chapalii remained polite, and she left them alone, for the moment. They set up their tents every night and packed them up at dawn, all as they had done before, but now the stewards occasionally unbent so far as to gamble with the riders: they taught each other a few simple games and played for ridiculous stakes-beads, needles, necklaces, trinkets. Tess could not see that one or the other ever had the advantage. However technologically superior the Chapalii might be, in these gambling games wit and luck were all that counted. Niko learned how to say 'good morning' and 'good evening' and 'the weather is fine today' in formal Chapalii, but when Garii requested that he be allowed to give Sibirin further lessons, Ishii refused, just as he refused when Garii asked to be allowed to scout with Bakhtiian and Tess.

And all the Chapalii came to listen when, for ten evenings running, Fedya sang for them the long epic tale of the first dyan Yuri Sakhalin and his feud with the demons of the hills and his love for the sun's daughter.

Tess now spoke khush with little hesitation. To relieve the monotony, Kirill pretended to be in love with her, which made everyone laugh; even the Chapalii could appreciate the humor of frustrated passion. Tess marveled that no one suspected her and Fedya. Yuri said simply, "Why should they look? Who would care, anyway?''

Bakhtiian told her more ancient stories: the coming of the people to the plains; the birth of the moon and the sun and the clouds and the wind. How mother sun and father wind gave birth to daughter earth and brother sky, to sister tent and son river. How aunt cloud and uncle moon gave birth to cousin grass and cousin rain. And they discussed Newton's universal theory of gravitation.

Tess wondered what Charles thought he was doing. She remembered his last visit to Earth, five years ago-and wasn't it five years ago that Bakhtiian claimed to have first met the Chapalii? She had been eighteen, Charles fifty-eight, looking no older than Bakhtiian did now. She took him to her favorite outdoor cafe"; it was summer in Prague, hot, but he drank coffee so she did as well, though she had never liked its bitter taste, though she wanted something cool. He sat across from her at the little cafe table, well-groomed, neatly dressed. She tended toward a diffident, sloppy casualness, and she sat warily, nervous, wondering if anyone would recognize them, dreading that always. Charles simply held his cup and mused, looking supremely relaxed. Though she was his only sister, though her first memory was of him taking her for a flitter ride, still she could never read past his surface, know his thoughts, tell his fears or his doubts, if indeed he had any. He spoke that day of his work in the Delta Pavonis system, of his efforts to keep Rhui preserved.

"I've seen records of too many civilizations ruined because a stronger, more forceful civilization swept in and destroyed them. Sometimes inadvertently. Sometimes on purpose. It's easy enough for us to say that the Rhuian natives are primitive, that it is our duty to raise them up to our level. But without respect for what they are, we will destroy them. That's the Chapaliian way, the paternalistic way they treat all of their client states. Like us." His voice was calm and serious, never intense or passionate, but always forceful. "When the Chapalii modernized Odys, they completely wiped out the old indigenous culture. Accidentally, of course. A by-product of civilization. All of the indigenes died."

"Aren't there some onasiu left?" she asked, eager to show off her knowledge.

"In arcologies. That doesn't count."

"No. No, of course not." She flushed and took a sip of the now lukewarm coffee to cover it.

"I won't let that happen to Rhui. Odys can remain my proper ducal capital, as the Office of Protocol once reminded me was necessary to a duke-" His grin was ironic. "-of my station." His sand-colored beard, trimmed almost to a point at the chin, emphasized the hollows of his cheeks. "How can I complain?"

"You're still alive," Tess said, because she knew he liked her sardonic sense of humor.

He laughed. "Yes, and in such a beautiful, modern, expensive place. But I wonder what Odysian mythology was like. They had no moon. Imagine that. Sun for god, and only the light of the stars at night." If one looked, this close, when he sat this still and in the glaring light of the summer sun, one could see faint lines at the corners of his gray-blue eyes. "How I wonder."

Then, of course, a journalist had found them, and they had been forced to retreat from such a public stage. Or had that been the time the proprietor had hidden them in the kitchens and, when the media had been sent away on a false trail, ensconced them merrily at his tables once again? "Whatever I can do for the next rebellion, for the long haul," the proprietor had said, and he was only half joking.

"But however much I loved the learning there," Bakhtiian was saying, "I never thought to stay there."

"To stay-in Jeds?" Tess stammered, caught out by her thoughts, unsure of what Bakhtiian had been saying before, of where this conversation had come from and where it was leading. They rode slowly, following the curve of the hills.