Except for Charles. Somewhere, Charles was worrying about her, searching for her. At least she was headed in the right direction. Yet at this moment, Jeds seemed like a goal too distant to agonize over. Turning over to let her back dry, she rested her chin on her laced fingers and stared at the rippling water. Light sparked off it, ever-changing, a constant, inexorable flux.
Her privacy was assured, a privilege, not a prison, conferred on her because she was female, and that was a thing she had never known on Earth, where locked doors bought privacy and privacy could be violated by crime or, for those unlucky enough to be related to the most influential human in the Chapalii Empire, by the media and the ubiquitous
Protocol Office. Only the most degraded of outcasts would assault her here and, as for the Chapalii, she outranked them. In this land, a person's fortune could be measured in sun and sweet wind and kinship with other people. Material possessions became, in the end, a burden; what you possessed of the spirit was far more valuable. Gloom was disdained: in a world of fighters it was a hindrance; to a people beside whom freedom ran like a hound, it was absurd.
Except for Fedya. But for Fedya, it had proved fatal. With a sigh, Tess sat up. She braided her hair, pinned the braid atop her head, and went swimming. The water felt cool and soft against her skin. The sun warmed her face. She did not go back to camp until evening.
In the morning she rode out with Bakhtiian. Ahead, dark stained the land, and she asked him what it was.
"Don-usbekh. The dark wood. Days of it, east and west, and south to the mountains. The khaja say it is haunted." He smiled, looking at her to see what her reaction would be.
"Haunted by what?" she asked, not quite laughing.
He shrugged. "The khaja fear many things, not least their own nightmares. I do not know."
"Do you think it is haunted?"
"I think that no khaja will live there. But there's an old road that runs through it, so once people must not have feared it as they do now."
An old road. "Will we follow this old road?"
"It's the only track through. See there-that broken pillar. We'll follow the road from there."
But despite her fears-or hopes-the old road proved to be just that-an old road. Ancient, stone paved, half grown over in spots, it looked exactly like what she guessed it must be: some relic from an old empire, thrown across the vast land.
"Perhaps the people who built this also built the great temple on the plains," she said to Bakhtiian as they waited in the first outlying tendril of the forest for the jahar to catch up with them.
"Perhaps they did."
She spotted the first ranks of the jahar in the distance, tiny figures moving closer. "Bakhtiian, if Mikhailov's men could find you on the plain, aren't you worried that they might find you more easily on a road like this? We'll be trapped on it, on a single road surrounded by trees."
"Mikhailov, whatever else he may be, is not fool enough to follow us into khaja lands. For that is what lies beyond the don-usbekh."
"Then why are we going?"
Bakhtiian's stallion shifted beneath him. Bakhtiian stroked the black's neck with affection. "For more of these horses, I would risk much more than this."
And one hundred more of these horses he would have, should they reach the end of this journey. "Well," said Tess, but nothing more. The jahar arrived then. Bakhtiian sent Josef and Tasha and Niko back to cover their rear, and he rode ahead with Tess, leaving the main group to ride at their leisure in between.
Soon enough the close ranks of trees began to seem oppressive to her even while she told herself that this forest was far more open than many. A dank, rotting scent hung in the air. So much vegetation, falling in and covering itself, and no wind to sweep the air clear. Even the colors turned somber and dense. Now and then an animal that had ventured too close to the road would flee into the forest, a trail of sound marking its path. It was never entirely still. Noise scattered out from the undergrowth, and rodents chittered and birds called from the branches above. The light bled down in patches and stripes so that day never came completely and night came without even the grace of stars.
That night a storm blew down from the mountains. The constant drumming of rain and the patter of falling leaves and twigs disturbed her sleep as she tried to make herself comfortable inside her tent. It was a relief to ride the next morning, although the trees dripped on them all that day and the day after. By the third morning, the forest had leached itself dry in the warm summer air, though the undergrowth looked greener for the drenching. They rode on, having to cut away growth in some places to clear the road, and Tess began to wonder if the forest would ever end.
"I've never seen Ilya so cheerful," said Yuri one evening as he helped Tess set up her tent. Because the trees grew up to the very edge of the road, indeed overgrew the road in many areas, the jahar set up camp on the road itself at night. ' 'He must smile once a day now, and he never smiled but once a month before. What do you two do while you're riding?"
"We talk, Yuri."
He chuckled and sat down next to her tent, fishing in his saddlebags for his spare shirt and his embroidery needles and thread. "Do you want to try again?"
"And ruin your shirt? No, thank you."
"Well, it's true women have little hand for embroidery. But you've taken to saber well enough." He threaded a needle with a thick golden thread and began to embroider golden spirals through the thick black pattern that textured his sleeves. "I thought you might take to this if you tried it again."
"Yuri, I'm sore from my saber lesson tonight. May I just lie here for a while and watch you?"
"If you think this stone is a comfortable bed, then please, lie there as long as you wish."
She laughed. It was not quite dark yet, and a fire built within a ring of stones some ten paces away gave light as well. Here, in this deserted place, game was plentiful and easy to kill, and deadwood for smoking the meat was in vast supply. Bakhtiian had decided to halt for a few days, to hunt, to graze the horses in nearby meadows, to rest. "I'm teaching him some of the songs I know,'' Tess said at last.
"Who? Oh, Ilya."
"And he's teaching me jaran songs. Only decent ones, of course."
"My dear sister," said Yuri primly, "Bakhtiian would never think to teach a woman any songs but those that it is decent for her to know.''
"Unlike some I know."
Instead of replying, he squinted at his work in the inadequate light. Kirill and Mikhal and a few of the other young men were gambling. Farther on, the conical tents of the Chapalii thrust up among the trees, like pale ghosts lost in the leaves.
"And Newton," she said.
"Newton? Who is Newton?"
"Oh, a philosopher. Not just him, but Casiara and Narronias and-and the work of many others."
"Gods. Sometimes I'm amazed that Ilya ever came back from Jeds. How he loves khaja learning."
"You're right," she said, realizing that it was true. "I hadn't thought of it that way." It had not occurred to her before that there might be some link between his relentless ambitions and the constant, restless inquisitiveness of his mind. Just as she could not resist a new language, he could not resist a new philosopher. If she mentioned a name he did not know, he demanded that she recite every scrap of writing she could remember, a feat she usually accomplished by broad paraphrasing since she had not his training in wholesale memorization. He loved to quibble over the smallest point and discuss the large ones to the finest detail. The scope of her knowledge, fostered by a decade in the schools of a stellar empire, was balanced by his experience, his impressive memory, his capacity to assimilate new information, and his astuteness; she always had to be careful of what she said. "I guess I always thought," she said, discovering that Yuri was watching her curiously, as if wondering where she had gone, "that a man with ambitions of conquest would be too single-minded to aspire to be a philosopher as well."