At Arina's tent, Anna's young sister and Karolla Arkhanov waited to place her on pillows inside the great tent. They settled her in. Diana felt superfluous. Mira shrieked, to see her mother, but knelt a handbreadth away from her as she had evidently been instructed not to disturb her. Lavrenti bawled and arched his back in anger because his uncle Anton wouldn't put him down on his mother. At last Kirill took Lavrenti and the boy calmed, his thin face caught in a baby's sullen pout.
Vasil came to pay his respects. He looked battered and bruised, and he limped, but the injuries merely gave him an interesting air of nobility in the face of dangers seen and conquered. Diana edged away and backed out through the throng. It was time to go home.
At the outskirts of the Veselov encampment, Vasil appeared suddenly, mounted, leading a saddled horse. "Oh, I beg your pardon," he said, greeting her with a sidelong glance. He smiled that brilliant smile of his. "It's a long walk back across camp, and I have to deliver these horses… Would you prefer to ride?"
"Oh, I…" His presence flustered her. He was so intensely good-looking and so determined to make an impression on her. And it was a long walk. "That's very kind of you. I'd be honored."
"Not at all. The honor is mine." He waited while she mounted. He did not once look at her straight on, and yet she felt that he looked at her constantly. They rode, and she knew that this was all somehow improper, but she wasn't sure she cared. "Five nights ago you sang the story of the etsana who judged her daughters poorly. Who has written this story? Or did you write it yourselves? Is it an old story of your people? And how-well, when a Singer of the jaran sings, she tells a story in music and with her words. How did it happen that with your people you tell these stories by-by becoming the stories?"
All the rest of the way to the Company encampment Diana explained to Vasil, as well as she could, about acting and theater. Vasil drank in every word. He asked a hundred more questions.
At the camp, she thanked him and dismounted. He turned the horses away and paused. "You have only to ask," he murmured, looking down at her from under lowered lids, demure and yet completely assured. He hesitated one instant longer. When she only gaped at him and did not reply, he rode away.
Quinn jogged out. "Well. Well, well. He's a stunner. That your latest lover, Di?"
"No." Diana stared at his retreating back. And a fine back it was, too, straight and even, with his golden hair lapping the collar of his scarlet shirt. "But I think he just told me that he was available to audition for the part. And
I don't think he was delivering those horses anywhere but here."
"What?"
"Never mind." She shook her head impatiently, as if sloughing off the last three days. "I'm back. What did I miss?"
Quinn launched into a long explication of how Ginny and Owen were disputing over whether translation hurt the text more than it helped the process of understanding, and what progress Ginny had made on crafting a telling of the jaran story about the Daughter of the Sun who came from the heavens to visit the earth and ended up falling in love with a dyan of the tribes.
"They're going to risk that?"
"Oh, Di, the jaran will never suspect. How should they? It's a wonderful story. Yomi said that Dr. Hierakis thinks that it's Bakhthan's favorite story. Now they're talking about actually doing Tamburlaine."
"Oh, I hope not," said Diana with feeling. "I've had enough of war. What about The Tempest? Aren't we going to do that? And the folktale about Mekhala. What about Ginny's Cyclopean Walls?"
"Ah, absence does make the heart grow fonder. We've had to listen to Anahita complain on and on about how sick she is. We've been working like dogs while you've been away."
"I didn't enjoy it!"
"I'm sorry." Quinn backed down immediately.
"No, I'm sorry. I just-I don't know. Never mind. I'm glad to be back. "I like this place, and willingly could waste my time in it." Is there anything interesting to eat? Something-not what I could get in the camp?"
"You are out of sorts," said Quinn thoughtfully.
" "How weary are my spirits." "
Quinn rested a hand on Diana's arm. "Poor Di. Come home."
"Gladly," said Diana, and went with her into camp. Gladly she fell back into the routine. She went once a day to see Arina, who slowly grew stronger, but Arina's own people took care of her. As the days wore on, Diana noticed Vasil frequently, here and there, running across her path now and again as if by accident, usually at the Veselov camp. And often, now, she saw him loitering in the background, at the outskirts of the audience that always gathered to watch them practice, watching their rehearsals with a look of hungry intensity on his face.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Despite himself, Jiroannes found the city of Karkand impressive. In its own foreign way, the city rivaled the Great King's capital of Flowering Mountain in southern Vidiya. Two walls enclosed Karkand. The outermost wall ringed a huge expanse of land, fields, gardens, orchards, and suburbs watered by canals, but the Habakar had given these flats up for lost and most of the population had retreated inside the massive inner walls that fortified the twin hills of the main city.
Eight days after the army had besieged the city, Jiroannes rode with Mitya through these environs. Peasants from the lands surrounding Hamrat and from farther south had filtered in behind the army and taken the fields and the houses and now worked them for their jaran masters. Still, the place was half deserted, and the season was turning.
The triple arched gateway through the outer wall opened onto a broad square paved with stone. Beyond the square three tree-lined avenues thrust into the suburbs. To the right, a marketplace sprawled along the inner wall, fanners and merchants selling vegetables and grain. They stared at the fifty jaran riders, Mitya's escort, but went about their business nonetheless. Traffic passed through the smaller of the three gateways, men trundling carts or leading donkeys laden with goods.
To the left, a marble fountain spilled water down a series of ledges. To Jiroannes's surprise, a woman dressed in white sat alone and unveiled and unmolested by the pool at the foot of the fountain. She sat with her hands in her lap and a ceramic beaker at her right hand. Now and again a man halted before her, and she dipped the beaker into the pool and offered him water to drink. When the jaran riders paced by, she watched them apprehensively, but she did not move from her station beside the splashing fountain. Jiroannes noted that the skin of her hands was very fine, the mark of a woman who has not been forced to engage in any heavier labor than dipping water from a font. Her complexion was not as fine, sitting out in the sun as she was, but she looked far less sun-coarsened than did the jaran women, who without exception of rank or age worked at tasks fit only for a slave.
"She might as well be a jaran woman," said Jiroannes. "I had not noticed that Habakar women were so immodest. But perhaps she is a prostitute."
Bakhtiian had elevated the Habakar general's son up from his status as prisoner and allowed him freedom as Mitya's interpreter, because the boy had learned khush, and because the boy was about Mitya's age. Qushid hid a look of horror behind one hand and after a moment uncovered his face again. He was tall, taller than Mitya, dark-complexioned with close-cropped black hair, but reserved to the point of seeming stupid. Bakhtiian's chief wife conducted a school for those so favored by her husband, and this boy attended it by Bakhtiian's order, learning khush and the ways of the jaran.