Kate Elliott - Jaran

Three jaran men, clad in red shirts and black trousers, had been tied to the posts. All three were dead, and while one, perhaps, had died naturally of his wounds, the manner of execution of the other two was quite obvious.

"They may have been my enemies," said Bakhtiian quietly, "but I can only hope that they were dead when that was done to them."

A bird, emboldened by their stillness, settled onto the slumped head of the farthest body.

"Go away!" Tess kicked Myshla forward. The bird squawked and fluttered away. She found herself on top of the scattered and half-eaten entrails that littered the ground in front of the men. Insects swarmed over the remains. Jerking Myshla hard to the left, she pulled away, gagging, to halt in front of the solitary post that marked the descent of the trail.

"Look here," she said quickly, desperate to stop her gagging, to not have to look behind her and see the burnt-out, bloody eye sockets, the gaping abdomens- "There's writing posted here, but I can't read-here at the bottom it's a bit like Rhuian. I think that's a 'b' there and some vowel, I think an 'o' maybe, and I'm sure that's a 'c' but it would be a hard 'c' if it was related to the northern dialect that the sailors in Jeds spoke and then that must be-my God! It's your name." She put one hand over her mouth.

"It was the obvious choice," said Bakhtiian, so close behind her that her startled gasp almost made her retch. "Don't be too proud to be sick if you have to," he added, more gently.

"Not as long as I don't have to touch them. Can you read what it says?"

"A little. Evidently a jahar attacked and set fire to this settlement. I suppose their goal was to blame the attack on me, and thus make the khaja hatred for me greater than it already is. My enemies have done this before."

"Do you know who they are?"

"Oh, yes. They're Doroskayev's men. You never saw them."

"No," she said faintly.

"We'd better go." He reined his horse around. "Look. They've seen us."

"Bakhtiian!" In her outrage, turning Myshla after him, her gaze flashed past the three strung-up bodies to follow his back. "Aren't you even going to bury them?"

He kept riding. "Bury them? You'd condemn them to burial for raiding a village?"

She came up beside him as they rounded the curve of a steep hillock, the crater and the site of execution shut out by the slope. "Condemn? I don't understand."

"Let's get away from here." He urged his horse to a canter. Emerging onto the plain, rolling here toward a range of low hills, they slowed the horses to a walk.

"Forgive me if I was hasty," he said after a silence. "Burial is the worst thing that could happen to the jaran. But perhaps in other places that isn't-" he shuddered- "true."

"It isn't. Why is it so bad?"

He turned his head to stare at her, amazed. "To be trapped beneath the earth, forever separated from the sky, never again to live where the wind can touch you? That is only for the sacrilegious."

"Is it better to be torn to pieces by the animals?"

"But they are the gods' creatures, scattering our bodies back to the wind. And the wind gathers us up and pours our spirit into the womb of a woman ripe for conception, and the world receives us back again."

Tess was silent, staring out at the wide stretch of plain, that sudden sink of land lost behind them like a dream. Around them the grass seemed empty of any life but the wind's. "But I thought you burned the dead."

"That privilege is only given to those who die in battle, men in honorable war, women in childbirth. The fire releases you from all bonds to the earth, and the gods, alerted to your coming by the bitter herb ulyan, welcome you to the heavens. And your spirit is free forever from this world."

"And everyone else…"

Bakhtiian said nothing for a moment. ' 'It is also an honorable death. Many choose it."

"How can you choose to be left lying on the ground?"

"Old people, ill ones, those who can no longer keep up, often stay behind of their own choosing, knowing that their time has come."

"You abandon them?" She had such a horrible vision of sitting alone among the grass and insects, figures growing smaller, gone, finally, the sun silent above, that for one wild instant she thought all this the dream and herself still far north, lost forever in grass.

"We move, always. We cannot wait." His eyes, his whole expression, seemed remote, staring at something she could not see. "That is how I intend to die, when the time comes, not seeking to prolong it.''

"You have no intention of dying in battle?"

"None at all."

"But you carry ulyan."

Now his gaze focused on her, but it made her feel quite isolated. "But I don't. I want to come back."

They rode the rest of the way in silence. The three men, hung out like leavings for the birds, and the half-buried plate of metal ran like loops through her mind, first one, then the other, then the first again, until she wished she could simply stop thinking. Bakhtiian planning war against the khaja; his enemies trying to start that war early to disrupt his plans. Or simply trying, one way or the other, to get him killed? Or simply enamored of killing-how was she to know? The moon was up when, having been challenged by three separate sentries, she and Bakhtiian trotted over a low hill and down into the scatter of tents.

Niko jogged up to them immediately and took the reins of Ilya's horse. "So many sentries?" Bakhtiian asked.

' "Tasha spotted a scout this morning and held on, but the fellow veered east. Josef got a glimpse of him this afternoon, but he slanted off again. Josef thinks he's solo."

Bakhtiian nodded as he bent to check his mount's left foreleg. "See here. It's swollen and hot." Niko frowned with concern and examined the stallion's leg while Ilya watched. "Let's see if we can lure this scout in tonight and capture him. I wonder if Mikhailov has at last picked up our trail or even joined up with Doroskayev? Gods, I can't believe Mikhailov would stoop so low.''

"Couldn't it be one of Doroskayev's men?" Niko asked.

Bakhtiian smiled slightly and, glancing up at Tess, moved decisively to hold Myshla's bridle so that she, too, could dismount. "But we have news," he said as Tess swung down, "that will put things in quite a different light. Assemble the riders. Single sentry should be sufficient for now.'' Niko nodded and went off.

"Do I have to hear this?" Tess asked.

"No. Yuri will have put up your tent." He led the black away.

Finding herself alone in the gloom, Tess allowed the tears to come, but the force of them overwhelmed her and she shut her eyes, leaning against the comforting bulk of Myshla. The image of the three mutilated bodies flared so vividly in her mind that she gasped.

"Tess?" She put out her hand and grasped substance, an arm, the silken sleeve of a shirt, ridged with embroidery.

"Fedya." She opened her eyes.

"It will only be a short assembly."

"Yes." Her fingers slipped down his arm to grasp his hand. "Afterward."

"Past the horses is a spring and past that a copse." He squeezed her hand, so gentle a pressure that the feeling it left vanished as quickly as he did, gone after Bakhtiian.

She unsaddled Myshla, checked her hooves doubly carefully, groomed her and hobbled her and set her out with the other horses under Pavel's care. Pavel nodded at her but he was busy plastering a cold compress of herbs on the foreleg of Bakhtiian's black, the fine khuhaylan stallion that no one wanted to lose to lameness. The saddle was an easier burden than her thoughts as Tess walked through camp, past the assembly to the very edge of the tents, where Yuri had pitched hers.

As she knelt to dump the saddle on the ground, she saw four Chapalii walk out over a low rise into the darkness. Making a quick tour back through camp, she realized there were no Chapalii anywhere, unless the rest were all in their tents. Surely they could not intend to trek all the way back to the crater by night? A ship, blowing up… What if it had been a Chapalii ship? But that was impossible. Whatever impact had made that crater had occurred millennia ago. Had there been an alien empire before the Chapalii? A greater one than theirs? A hundred possibilities presented themselves. She circled around toward the spring, passing Nikita on sentry duty, and then she was alone again.