"It's a mess," Chaya said frankly, over their breakfast.
The house of the Judge was familiar to Aisha, but dimly, as if in an old dream. Juchi had brought her here once or twice on visits, when he was khan in Tallinn Town. Dreams: a little dark-haired girl running through rooms with high ceilings, rooms that smelled of wax and polish and herbs; a kind old lady who gave her sweets and smiled. She hadn't been able to say "Dvora" properly, and the Judge had smiled at her accent. Chaya had been a tall, gawky young woman with no time for her.
Barak and Aisha had recovered well enough after ten hours of sleep. Sannie and Karl fan Haller still looked as if they had been riding with the Wild Hunt, but they did justice to the eggs and potato pancakes.
"Mordekai not even buried yet, and the factions are out in force," Chaya continued. "Why the Law says we have to take so long for the election is a mystery to me."
"Because we enjoy arguing and dickering and intriguing so much," Barak said through a mouthful of pancakes. He reached for the loaf and hacked off a slice." Yeweh, how sick I got of flatbread. And because, ama, as you told me back when, in the old days it took cycles and cycles to get the news to all the outback folk and give them time to talk it over."
He sipped eggbush tea with goat's milk. "You haven't said it yet, ama," he added. His eyes were blue-green, a darker color than his mother's.
"And I'm not going to," she, said with the hint of a snap. "I'm Judge. I'm impartial."
"And fibbing," he said. "You do and you don't. I know why you do, but why don't you? You always told me not to dither about things."
"You don't want the job; why shouldn't I feel the same way?"
He grinned; it was a charming expression. Aisha could tell he knew it. Chaya knew he knew and he knew that, too. It was a game they played with each other, as they must have done since he was a small boy. Nostalgia had a taste like wild honeytree sap, she found—sweet, but bitter underneath.
"I do want it, and I don't," he said.
"Who's dithering now, then?"
Sannie blinked eyes still red with the exhaustion of their ride from Fort Kidmi. "Barak will be the greatest kapetein since Piet," she declared.
Barak turned the smile on her; even sodden and aching with tiredness, she blossomed into near-prettiness. "Oh, I don't know," he said, teasing.
No man dislikes seeing worship in a woman's eyes, Aisha thought sardonically.
"Maybe ama here would make the greatest kapetein since Mordekai, instead. Then I could have all the fun while she does the work."
"Just like childhood over again, nu?" Chaya shook her head. Then, more seriously: "I'm not eligible."
"Barak is," Sannie persisted. "Heber bar Non was of the blood on both sides—from Ilona and Ruth."
Chaya's face stiffened slightly; Aisha thought only she and Barak would have caught it.
"It's early days yet," Barak pointed out. "Sannie, you know what I'd really like? A good, long steam and soak in the Chukur Square baths—I've been dreaming about it since we hit the steppe. If you'll reserve us a place, I'll join you in a bit."
After Sannie left, Chaya reached over and tweaked his braid. "You should marry that girl. Three years together and nobody else for either—it'll be a scandal if you don't. And it's unfair; she'll want children."
"That's debatable, with me," Barak said.
"No, it's not. Do you love her, or not?"
"She also wants to be the kapetein's wife."
"That's not an answer. She wants to be your wife first and foremost. Do you love her?"
"I do and I don't," he said.
Chaya sighed. "A long trip, but you don't look much different," she said.
Barak chuckled and filled his cup again. "Neither do you."
"Liar. I creak; I get up in the night more often. A decade or so either way of your age, you don't seem to change. Don't believe it, son; it doesn't last, any more than youth does."
"How would you know?" Barak asked. "Being young and beautiful forever and all."
"Go!" Chaya slapped him on the shoulder. "If you won't mind your mother, go play with Sannie in the tub, and practice some of the lies you'll be telling your friends in the taverns. Don't think I didn't hear—drawing the bow of Oddheykos, indeed. Go on with you, leave an old woman in peace."
Laughing, they embraced; he dropped a kiss on Aisha's cheek, and nodded to the healer. "What a gossip you could be, if you hadn't taken the mediko's oath, eh, Oom Karl?"
Aisha waited until Barak was out of earshot; that took some time, even with the thick door between. "Why doesn't he want children?" she asked. "I heard it in his voice when you spoke about Sannie wanting them."
The others looked at her sharply. "Told you she was no fool," Karl said to Chaya, raising his eyebrows. At her nod, he continued: "Barak was married."
"She died?" Aisha said. Karl shook his head. "He put her aside?"
"She divorced him," the fan Haller said. Aisha stared at him in shock. Bandari law, she thought. Very strange.
Chaya sighed and stirred her tea. "She was an Orphan—our word for the children we took from Angband. I think at first Barak wanted her because he could embrace her without fear; our strength isn't always a blessing. But he loved her very much, and she him. They had twin daughters—beautiful children. Then the girls caught the summer-milk fever; one died, the other was left blind and lame."
"We don't know what causes it," Karl said, his fists clenching in a physician's frustration. "Someday . . ."
"The next time . . . you know the Sauron mating problem?"
Aisha nodded. Even after three hundred years of selection, Sauron-Sauron matings were risky; the purer the blood, the greater the risk of miscarriage and deformity as the recessives matched. Back on Old Sauron, the Soldier and other high castes had used an extensive technology for reproduction. Here they nursed the few children born to purebloods, outcrossed the males on as many Havener women as possible, then inbred the offspring to reconcentrate the Soldier genes, culling ruthlessly throughout. Horsebreeders used the same technique, and it was working—but very slowly. In the first generation on Haven the Saurons' population had exploded, fed by the forty thousand fertilized ova they brought and implanted in captive women. Once they were thrown back on nature's methods, it had taken all three centuries to get the population back up to the first generation's level.
"Two more pregnancies, both miscarried—the last one nearly killed her."
"I was there," Karl said somberly; his fingers made pellets of bread, odd in a man usually free from nervous habits. "We know so little, compared to the Ancients! I've read the first Allon's notes—Piet's own mediko, during the Wasting, they've been translated, the language has changed—and he complains again and again that without the machines he was used to, only his courses in medical history were of any use." He sighed. "All we could tell her was that if she had any more children by Barak, she'd likely die. Then she asked if she could have them by another man, one with no Sauron blood." A shrug. "It's our oath, we had to answer with the truth. Probably yes."
"She wanted children more than she wanted Barak," Chaya said. "It nearly killed him—he even tried to refuse to sign the get. It was a scandal. Sannie's the first woman he's taken up with for more than a day or two since. She ran away from home to be with him; I wasn't joking, if he doesn't marry her, it will be a scandal, and a bad one. But marriage means children, and he's nervous of childbearing."
"It's always a risk," Karl agreed. Old grief touched his face; Aisha remembered his wife had died in childbed. "I'd better be going—old Itzhak will want my reports on those children we rescued from the god-rotted Saurons in Nûrnen." He hesitated, then turned to Chaya. "Your Honor, may I call on your niece?"
"Why of course, old friend," she said with equal politeness. "If she's agreeable." When he was gone, she laughed. "Still a fan Haller," she said. To Aisha's questioning look: "They're very formal and conservative in that clan."
"I don't understand," Aisha said.
"You don't? Well, niece, you're a conqueror like Juchi—the heart of at least one loyal subject, at least. He was asking permission to court you."
The blush that spread up from her navel was even worse than the one she'd felt when she went to bathe in the dust.
Ruth's Day, Aisha recalled, was supposed to be a day of reconciliation. This will take more than one day, Aisha thought.
The funeral came first; out on a high place near the city, on the same ridge to the west that held the Judges' graveyard, but a little separate from it. Piet van Reenan's grave was the highest, an inclined slab of basalt, as if he lay looking out over the land he had won. A later generation had inscribed his last words on it in letters of gold:
We are the kings who die for the People.
The twenty-first grave was ready, dug down into the broken tufa of the subsoil. With endless labor, the Bandari had made this a garden, shaded by poplar trees and laced about with hardy flowers. The paths were dark with people, flowing out over the plain and down across the cultivated land to the walls of Strang.
Despite her envy, the bitterness of Juchi's fate, Aisha found herself moved. They really seemed to be mourning him as they might their own fathers.
Suddenly the shrill familiar sound of tribal keening cut through the air, through the chant of the rabbi in his white-and-blue shawl. Startled, she looked up from her thoughts.
More than a few of her own people were here, she realized. Not just Turkic nomads, from her own tribe—many from her own clan and sept. Men and women both, common herders and nobles. Numbers of them had cut their cheeks, as they would for a great khan of their own folk, including Tarik Shukkur Khan, who came as one of the pallbearers. That was a great honor, she knew—by Bandari thinking. Blood glistened on Tarik's cheeks. That might be policy, but why would the others do so? She looked again. Nobles and commons alike looked prosperous, the ordinary herders well-fed and their clothes sound; Tarik's coat fairly glowed with embossed gilt felt.
Perhaps this treaty of friendship is not so bad, she thought grudgingly. If her tribe were vassals, they were well-treated ones. She waited through the ceremony, with fear and longing.
When their turn came, the chiefs of the tribe approached Chaya. When they saw Juchi's daughter—when they recognized her, under the Bandari clothes—they checked for a moment in astonishment, their narrow slanted eyes going wide. Then they came on once more, bowing with hand to brow, lips, and heart.
"And I present your kinswoman and mine, returned after long journeying, as you may have heard," Chaya said at last, after the ritual courtesies.
She spoke the tribe's language with easy fluency. Better than I after all these years among outlanders, Aisha thought. How strange. Turkic was the common tongue of the steppes, even among those who had other languages, but the folk who had been Dede Korkut's had their own dialect of it, salted with Russki loanwords from their long association with Tallinn Valley, with the odd Americ phrase picked up from the Saurons of Angband, even a little Bandarit.
"Indeed," Tarik said smoothly, "we have heard. Praise to the Merciful, the Loving kind, that he guides her steps once more toward home." He was a broad-shouldered man, a notable archer and a great hunter in his youth. The question in his tone was very subtle. "We welcome her who returns in honor, victorious as a ghazi over the servants of Shaitan. She would be welcome among us."
I begin to see why he is still khan, Aisha thought; she had learned much of ruling, from watching Juchi and listening to him speak. Some of the others showed naked fear, but the khan's face was blandly friendly. His power did not rest on Bandari lancepoints alone.
"My niece will be staying with me, as I am her nearest kin; I am sure she thanks the khan for his graciousness." A verbal nudge; Aisha started and nodded. "Until she has a household of her own, perhaps."
That made the nomads' eyes even rounder. Who would marry the offspring of the Accursed One? Aisha blushed; so did Karl fan Haller. With the peculiar delicacy of the tribes, they went on to talk of other matters, touching on business. The nomads listened to the Judge: they listened, Aisha marveled, they actually listened to a woman who raised her voice and spoke with authority in public. It was one thing among Bandari: such was their custom. It was quite another to see hardened warriors of her own people nodding respectfully as she spoke.
"I'll see you at the ceremony, niece," Chaya said. The opening of Ruth's Day, in an hour or so. She turned briskly and walked away. Karl fan Haller left a little more reluctantly.
Aisha swallowed, fighting the urge to put her hand over her face. Her tribe did not veil—few steppe nomads did, as opposed to Muslim farmers or townsmen—but she felt naked under their stares. Soon only the khan was left, and two younger men; she recognized one as Kemal the Archer, a grand-nephew of Dede Korkut and nephew of Tarik. A handsome man, as he had been a comely youth; amber-skinned, and his slanted eyes were an unusual dark green rimmed with darker blue.
"Kemal, my son-in-law and nephew," Tarik said, confirming her memory and adding to it. "Ihsan, his adana." A blood-brother and close companion, then; both men were hard-eyed and quiet. Ihsan was missing the little finger of his right hand and a part of the next. They were a few years older than she, Aisha realized suddenly. When I thought of them at all, it was as gangling youths. They had not aged in her mind, while she and Juchi wandered the world.
"I hope all goes well for the people of our tents, excellent khan," Aisha said awkwardly.
"Well enough now, Aisha Khatun," he replied. Several nomads within earshot glanced at each other as they heard the title. "Although for many cycles after you . . . left . . . our kismet was greviously bad."
"We were fools and suffered the price of folly," Kemal said flatly. "Excellent khan. We pay it still."
Tarik smiled crookedly and ran a hand down his beard. "Civil war," he explained to Aisha. "War between brothers—I and Kaidan, Kemal's father. Though I swear by Allah and the spirits it was no wish of mine."
"Some think it the curse of Juchi," Kemal said, looking at her boldly. "Others that we earned it by casting out him and his children."
"Dagor?" Aisha said suddenly. Her belly, well-filled though it was, chilled. She had known he would never hold their father's power, but she had thought him at least safe among kindred.
"Kaidan sent him for fostering to the Kutrigurs of Jayul's clan," Tarik said gently. Aisha ground her teeth. Fosterling was another word for hostage. The khan went on: "It was one cause among many of the break between Kaidan and me. He also made alliance with the clans of Suleiman and Aydin, who rode like lords among our people and harried our subjects in Tallinn Valley."
"That was unwise," Kemal conceded.
"He felt the Bandari had gathered too much power among us."
"That was not unwise," Kemal said; his uncle and father-in-law shrugged.
"Inshallah," Tarik said. "Then the Saurons came and left their blighted weapons in the ruins of Angband. The clans of Suleiman and Aydin fell out and fought over them—after sending in our men to trip the boobytraps. So died my youngest brother Scaroglu."
Kemal spat on the pathway and swore with vicious inventiveness, grinding the spittle in with his heel. "The Saurons set us against each other," he said. "Accursed of God, sons of Iblis, they torment us as a boy might throw stones at a kermitoid by the waterhole, for sport."
"As the ancient kaphar sage said," Tarik observed dryly, "the boys throw stones in sport, but the kermitoids die in earnest. By the time I called in the Bandari—I and the men of Tallinn, what was left of them—half our people were dead, and many more of our fighting men."
Aisha looked at him, appalled. Half! she thought. Blood drained from her face. Juchi's seed is accursed indeed! She looked around, half expecting to see the ground tremble and crack beneath her feet.
Now it was Kemal's turn to shrug. "We were caught between the stobor and the tamerlanes. Better to have merciful conquerors than cruel ones."
"We are left our own laws and religion," Tarik observed judiciously. "We govern ourselves by our own custom on our own land."
"Except for our new relatives," Kemal said; Ihsan nodded abruptly. Aisha sensed that the discussion was an old one, one of those arguments that chased its own tail, like a stobor pack chasing a muskylope around a hill.
Kemal turned to her. "There were many widows and young maidens without suitors," he said. Aisha nodded—not without a sudden blush: I have a suitor. Although the law of Islam said a man could take four wives, few could afford it, especially after a costly war. "For some reason the Bandari seem to have more men than women; Allah and the spirits know, their women seem much like men to me. There were marriages, after the war."
"Should the women die childless, starve, or turn harlot?" Tarik asked.
"No," Kemal spat out. "But they live amongst us still, under Bandari law, not ours." To Aisha he added: "With so many sonless families, they inherited grazing and water rights, you see."
"A woman follows her husband's clan," the khan said.
"Well enough, if they follow him far away! Living among us, the husbands teach their daughters shameless habits, and ours visit them—visit their aunts and sisters—and grow envious. Also the commoners grow insolent to their chiefs, seeking to speak in council. And we may not make war or razziah without the Pale's permission. That lies hard upon our honor."
"But when war does come, the Pale rides at our side," Tarik said. "We have free use of Tallinn and Eden for our pregnant women and our flocks, and much trade. We grow fat."
"So do cattle," Kemal snapped. Tarik's manner grew less mild; he glared, and after a moment Kemal dropped his eyes.
"You are my heir and father of my grandson," Tarik said. And unspoken: But I am not dead yet, and heirs may be unmade. When he was satisfied that dominance had been restored, he commanded, "Escort your kinswoman."
They were dismissed; Kemal turned at once, a bit stiff, but obedient. Aisha found herself following him. They walked down toward Strang.
"It is a long time, Aisha," Kemal said.
She nodded. She did not understand why he seemed so apprehensive of this meeting. Tarik's son-in-law, possibly the next chief, married at least once to sleek women with no hint of a family curse about them. It was she who stood defeated, a beggar at her sister/aunt's ample table.
"You must have many sons," she ventured.
"Three. The eldest is a man himself, with a wife and yurts of his own. And—all dishonored by the dishonor the Sauron sons of pigs put on Juchi. We are kin, all of us, in the tribe. It shames us for one of our own to lie rotting under the Cat's Eye. Under Juchi, we had honor and respect."
You cast him out! Anger and a kind of astonished gratitude warred in Aisha and kept her silent.
"And it shames our warriors that a woman slew the Battlemaster of the Citadel—a demon-Cyborg—while we sit on our swords and watch our sheep."
That I believe, she thought. With nothing recent but a disgraceful war of brothers, the warriors of the black tents would be itching for something to restore their honor.
"Niece," Chaya said affectionately to Aisha, then turned back to a group of others: "No petitions on Ruth's Day. Oive, don't I get any time with my family at all?" They moved off, grumbling slightly.
"Hectic," Barak said.
"How should it be?" Chaya said. She did not inquire what had gone on between Aisha and her tribal kinfolk, turning again to her son. "The Edenites are raising Cain again. A lot of the fan Hallers egg them on."
Barak smiled down at her; he was a tall man. "You're the one who always says the Edenites have to be made part of the People," he teased. "The fan Hallers are friendly with them."
"Yes, but"—Chaya lowered her voice, until no one without enhanced ears could have caught what she said—"it's supposed to be us influencing them. Some of those fan Hallers might as well be farmers themselves." She sighed. "The plaatsmen are complaining about being under-represented in the voting again."
Barak shrugged. "They don't let their women vote for their council of Church Elders," he said with the resignation of someone rehashing an old argument, "so that cuts their weight in half in elections for the kapetein or Judge. Let 'em enfranchise their women, if they want more say—the clans do." To him it seemed reasonable and fair, and not the least manipulative or coercive.
"I thought they might, or at least some of the more enlightened congregations," Chaya said. "They were talking about it, but . . . Then Kosti bar Agridas fan Gimbutas, you know, Agridas of Eisenstaadt's third son, his family own those smelting furnaces—"
Barak groaned and slapped his forehead; the horse he was leading stuck its nose in his ear. "Don't tell me. A girl, right? That one . . . don't know how he manages to walk. Or why his family isn't ruined with paternity settlements." Bandari law was strict on the matter.
"Not just a girl. Daughter of Chief Elder Praise god Jenkins, promised in marriage to Elder Go forward Meeker."
Barak thought for a moment "Wait. That old goat could be her father, and he's had two wives—"
"—both worn into early graves, yes. I don't blame the girl, and it's entirely legal, and Kosti's going to marry her"—Chaya's eyes went grim with an unspoken he'd better—"which means she'll be safely in Clan Gimbutas. But the timing is rotten; every Elder in the Valley is raving about seduction and whoredom and whatnot."
"You'd think the younger Edenites would realize," Barak said dryly, "that those bloodsucking old vultures are getting their money and their potential brides."
"The Elders have God working for them, or so they claim. And then, old Kapetein Mordekai, rest his soul . . . he sure picked his moment. The Elders respected him; they like a man in authority, and one with some white in his beard. Mordekai knew how to talk to them." She shook her head. "I'm glad to see you home, son."
"They're not going to like me, much," Barak pointed out. "They'd like Oom Barak more. Though I'm popular enough with the clans."
"Yes, and a lot of Tarik's tribe do like you," she said. "Barak bahadur," she added, using the tribal term for hero.
He shrugged off her teasing. "They don't have the vote either."
"No, but they've got a legitimate interest in how the election comes out," Chaya said. "If they—and the Tallinn folk—are to be under our authority, and I don't see any alternative, then they've got to have a say in the decisions. We are not Saurons; we don't rule serfs or slaves."
Aisha broke in. "Tanta," she said—it was much more comfortable than thinking of the older woman as her sister.
—"why are there more men than women among the Bandari? That's part of it, isn't it?"
Karl bar Edgar coughed. Aisha looked up in time to see the Judge transfix the physician with a glance.
Chaya sighed. "Some secrets can't be kept forever. But this must go no further?"
At Aisha's nod, the mediko said: "What Dvora did for Chaya . . . since then, we've had spies and soldiers in disguise doing it. All over Haven."
Aisha's feet checked; she almost tripped. "You dare to, after Juchi?" she whispered.
He shook his head vehemently. "That was ignorance—ignorance born of fear of the Saurons. We keep careful records to prevent inbreeding and for genetic compatibility. There was a woman who worked in the Breedmaster's lab in Angband, she stayed here afterward—married one of my teachers—and she showed us how."
"But," Chaya said.
"But," Karl echoed. "Three boys to every girl from the culling fields. That seems to be a dominant trait, too, so many of the ones we've adopted are having mostly sons; it's fifty years now, thousands of families."
"Speaking of reports, Karl . . ."
" . . . I'd better get in the ones for the children we brought back from Nûrnen," he said, then added shyly: "There's an amateur theatrical at the Forum tomorrow, Aisha. Would you care to join me?"
Aisha stammered, then nodded. Chaya smiled.
"Now, get going before your cousin Clan Chief Hans bar Rhodevik fan Haller thinks we're trying to bribe you. Besides, young Kemal is probably prowling back and forth, dying to interrogate someone. He'd like to renegotiate the treaty, I think, with a new kapetein who doesn't have the support Mordekai had. I don't like it when any of the warriors from the tribes get that impatient. People have a way of dying."
"Of conspicuous knife wounds," the mediko agreed. "Bad for your patients."
"Apart from the damage to my patients, they cause feuds. And this near Ruth's Day, and with the election . . ."
"Definitely counterproductive." Karl and Chaya grinned at each other, allies for the moment.
Karl nodded, his face thoughtful. "Allies, they call us. Honored brothers. Right. Like Cain and Abel. I can drive that, at least, through my cousins' thick heads."
His hand went out, almost irresolute, and Chaya's grasp on Aisha's shoulder tightened.
"Aisha is my kin, remember? I'll take care of her for you."
He was out the door before Aisha could thank him.
"I think," Chaya said deliberately, "he likes you. And he's a fine man. I think we might help you build a very acceptable future. His wife has been dead long enough, and I have worried for him. He's mourned too long."
Aisha jerked away. "I have to go back. I have to avenge my father."
"He—my brother is dead," Chaya said flatly. "I left my husband Heber for others to bury and came back here where I was needed. And that was my life, and that was my honor."
"With a young son . . ."
"Barak wasn't born yet," Chaya said.
"They didn't bury my father. They dug him up! It stinks to heaven, and Allah weeps."
"God," Barak muttered, "don't let Hans fan Haller hear you say that."
"Quiet!" Chaya snapped. "Aisha, you are our blood kin. We'll do what we can. Judge's honor. My honor."
All over the Pale, books were being balanced before Ruth's Day. People who had not spoken for a Haven year, clans that had snapped at neighbors or snapped up conveniently straying livestock were talking again, hesitantly. It was not easy—whether you were Bandari or Edenite—to admit error, and no easier to accept forgiveness than to offer it. And a few people would be skimping all year after paying back their debts.
Aisha, dressed in yet another fine new set of clothes, wool and linen this time, followed Judge Chaya and Barak toward the city's meeting place. The streets of Strang were as crowded as Nûrnen, on a smaller scale, and nearly as intimidating to someone who had spent most of her life in the empty lands. She leaped as a cage on wheels rocked by with a tamerlane inside. It was an adult male, longer than a man and about as heavy, with a ruff of scales armoring its face and neck and shoulders, and long teeth that overlapped its jaws. The beast recoiled at her movement, snarling and lowering its head.
"We have some of Judge Ruth's belongings. Would you care to see them?" Chaya asked.
"Watch it," muttered Barak.
"Oh?" Chaya raised a surprisingly elegant brow. "Kemal. He's coming our way."
Aisha braced herself as Judge Chaya greeted him in the language of the tribes and smiled as he flicked fingers at heart, brow, and lips. "Khatun . . . . Judge, I must speak with you," he began, though he faced Barak.
"We are on our way to show our kinsman Judge Ruth's belongings. Come with us?" asked Chaya. She turned to lead the way.
The hall was new, taller and more airy than the older buildings of Strang; the arched doorways and windows were covered with whimsical carvings in stone, bug-eyed dwarves, clothed rabbits, an armored man carrying a huge clock. Folk stood aside respectfully as Chaya and her party came to the door, with murmurs of "shalom" and "laila tov."
The Judge's hands worked deftly, unfastening a lock. "I say," she began, "that this is Ruth's Day when debts are acknowledged, quarrels are resolved, and all books are balanced. I honor you as a good guest."
She switched into the language of the tribes, in which the name Juchi meant guest.
"The man you speak of was cast out by his tribe, but acknowledged by his blood kin, who stand here. We shall not let him suffer dishonor, nor share in it. But you must decide, guest of the Pale. Is it to your honor to join in avenging a man whom all believe to be accursed?"
Blood rose to Kemal's face. "The Saurons shame us," he said.
"Only if we let them. My kinswoman killed a Cyborg; do you think she will let her father's disgrace live?"
The nomad's eyes widened. He nodded to the Judge, then bowed to Aisha as if she were still a princess in the yurts, and strode off.
Smiling thinly, the Judge led the way into the meeting hall. The noises of the crowd died, and they stood alone in a huge room. Aisha stared about her, fascinated, for the hall had windows—not just skins stretched across openings cut into the walls, but windows wrought of precious, colored glass. All her life, she had heard stories of the wealth of the Bandari; she had eaten their food, worn their clothes, and profited from their medicines. But the luxury of those windows, with their stars and stags, their hammers, their swords, and all the other sigils of the Pale, startled her.
A table had been set up and covered with an embroidered cloth. On it rested treasure that none of the Bandari would covet, fond as they were of riches. Its value lay only in that once it had belonged to Ruth bat Boaz: the innocent vanity of frayed ribbons in pale colors, perhaps given her by Piet van Reenan; a book, encased in some shiny stuff, with letters that Aisha could not read and a picture of a frail, blonde girl in a blue robe on its cover; some simple first-aid supplies; the gleaming, well-kept menace of a handgun that had not fired in three hundred T-years.
Beside the relics of the first Judge lay a heavy chain from which hung a large enameled medallion—a springbok superimposed on a six-pointed white star and framed by flaming swords on a field of blue. It would go to the next kapetein, Aisha thought. Chaya had told her that while the office was vacant the Judge ruled and kept the insignia of office, signifying that Power was the servant of Law. Barak avoided even looking at it. So did his elder namesake, when he clumped in through the door with a horseman's rolling stride.
" 'Duty is heavier than a mountain,' " he quoted: one of the Founder's sayings. " 'So a man should have a strong back before he takes up leadership.' "
Chaya nodded. "But Piet did it," she said, and turned to Aisha: "Her father hung her on a cross for defying him when Ruth was the age you were, Aisha, when you led your father into exile. Do you understand what I am saying? If she could recover from her own father's attempt to kill her, and rise to be Judge over the Pale and the mother of healthy children, you too . . ."
I see you nod, tanta, sister, when the djinni you call Karl bar Edgar comes to my side. What future do you plan for me? Sufferance in a clan that does not want me? "There goes our kinsman and his barbarian woman?" Watched, corrected and not reminded of everyone's generosity and patience more than thrice a day? Sooner would I flee to the steppe and make my way alone to Nûrnen.
She turned to Chaya, and the reproaches died on her lips. The Judge wore Badri's face, and her mother—their mother—had always wanted the best for her daughter. That evil, not good, had come of Badri's care was not her fault. Light glinted off the book in which another woman cursed by her blood kin had found delight. Ruth bat Boaz's father was not her fault. Her care, perhaps, and a sorrow that would abide unto death: but she bore no blame.
"On Ruth's Day, we forgive," Chaya murmured. "It is no bad thing to start by forgiving yourself."
They sat in the Judge's bench, near the front. The silence of the great room gave way to a low murmur as the crowd filed in.
Tears welled in Aisha's eyes. How had Chaya known? Again, Aisha did not begrudge them. Nor was she the only one, in the crowd of clansfolk who pressed into that room and sat on the narrow benches, to weep that day. She pressed her hands over her eyes as old Barak, who still commanded the armies of the Pale, spoke of the kapetein, who had been friend and brother to him. When young Barak laid an arm across her shoulders, she did not jerk away from its comfort.
She blinked away sorrow and glanced around. Quick reassurance glinted at her from Karl's eyes. How different he was from his stolid kin! Sitting well behind him was meid Sannie, who glared at Aisha as if resenting her place near Barak.
The Bandari kept good order during the Memorial, if good order included the whispers of children, the footsteps of elders whose bladders would not let them sit still for the long speeches, the hasty, apologetic pad, pad, pad of mothers removing children who whimpered at the breast. The adults were quiet during the speeches; Aisha, schooled to the watchfulness of an untold number of camps in which she was the only guard, shivered with the tension in the air.
A General Council had been called. Members of kumpanies—Bandarit for clans—and Church Elders not already present were travelling from outlying areas. The election of a new kapetein was too important to be left to proxies; and this vote, Aisha knew, was trouble.
Who will wear the chain of office? the tension seemed to demand. One by one it focused on the leaders who sat near Aisha, at the front of the hall. You are too frail, it told some, such as the dead kapetein's brother. You? Unlikely, to another. It won't be you, to the sour-faced Haller chief who sat, master of his kin, glaring at clans he could not master. It might be you. As if aware of the scrutiny, Barak shivered.
"What an election!" he said. "The two leading candidates running against themselves, and the third watching everyone else running away from him."
"Oh, Hans bar Rhodevik?" Sannie said dismissively. "He hasn't a prayer. Why, they might as well elect Praise god Jenkins and have done with it."
"Praise god controls a quarter of the vote," Chaya pointed out. "In a three-way race, don't discount it, Sannie." She sighed. "Maybe we should have elections more frequently, for practice—we seem to have lost the knack."
Sannie watched Barak intently, as if trying to make out which part of him was Sauron and which, Bandari. She would be a difficult kinswoman, Aisha thought.
Byers' Star was westering when the service ended. A cold wind drove the clouds from the pale sky. Then the sun seemed to brighten; warmth even seemed to come from the baleful Cat's Eye: Ruth's Day came at the time of year when there was no darkness; after the first harvest of the year, before the labor of planting the next.
Barak groaned and stretched. "I can't sit for that long," he complained. "And with all those eyes on me."
"They'll be watching you at the feast, too," Chaya warned.
"I'll be too hungry to mind. Let's go!" He laughed and flung one arm about his mother, the other about Aisha, making a great show of hurrying his womenfolk along.
For all Barak's hurry, they were not the first to the feast. What seemed like hundreds of hungry Bandari and Edenites clustered about trestle tables where roast lambs lay, surrounded by kebabs, stews, roasts and more usual fare such as cheeses, flat breads and salads. On another table, guarded by women and under heavy assault by the children of every clan, rested sweets: baklava and other pastries, dried fruits and decorated eggs. Other tables were set up in the streets and squares for groups of friends and family. Distant kin circulated, babies were admired, gossip exchanged.
Already, a few red-faced men—Edenite farmers from the look of them—leaned against yet another table on which rested a veritable army of bottles—vadaka, whisky, mead, ice-wine and the treacherous liqueurs Aisha had never seen, much less sipped. Behind it stood barrels of ale.
Tarik and his nobles made their appearance, treated with careful courtesy. Nobody used the word hotnot in their presence, although some seemed to be thinking it. Kemal and his followers stayed longer, drank and ate and belched politely—and very few of them were overly scrupulous about the Koranic injunction against alcohol—but their eyes never ceased the watchful flick . . . flick . . . flick of a beast wondering whether to challenge the pack leader. One of the nomads began to sway back and forth where he sat Kemal snapped out an order, and one of his fellows led him away.
"Nipping at the whisky, I bet," muttered Barak. "I hope he's a quiet drunk. What about you, Aisha?"
I don't drink much. I don't eat much. Usually haven't had the chance. The feast would be ordeal, not celebration, for her. Watch the barbarian eat. See her do it all wrong.
"You'd drink kvass, wouldn't you?" Barak asked her.
"I prefer ale."
"We can do that. Mother, your usual?" He disappeared into the crowd.
"I take it you don't eat pork." Chaya led Aisha toward the tables. Without seeming to guide or observe her, she helped her fill a plate with more food than she had seen at once since she was a child. Barak returned with the ale. The talk and the food relaxed Aisha, and she found herself laughing, even when Oom Karl wandered by and offered, with a grin, to pay his admission to their table with a round of drinks. Not bothering to pull up a chair, he leaned an arm over hers as if he had a perfect right.
Chaya caught her eye and winked. Kemal, passing by with Josepha bat Golda and some other merchants, nodded gravely at the way her new clan seemed to accept her. Her relief at his approval didn't even annoy her as she thought it should. And when meid Sannie glared, she was able to smile and beckon her over. If Barak were to become kapetein, he would need a wife, and Sannie was smart and strong.
Sannie scowled. Ya Allah! Does she think my cousin would even look at me? There's been enough of that in this family! And turned her back.
Barak chuckled. "She gets like that. She'll be back."
Two men wearing the sigil of Gimbutas came up, one holding an extra beer, which he handed Sannie.
"She's probably trying to make Barak jealous. Hasn't worked," Karl said. "He's going to marry her—he just isn't ready to settle down yet. It's all a matter of time, time to heal. You'll see."
Two of Sannie's cousins came up beside her and wrapped arms about her, shouting that another caravan had just come in, and Sannie must come see.
Two caravan guards, a very young man and woman, strode toward Aisha's table, arms linked. The man had a long rope of blond hair, conspicuous against his dark skin and green eyes; Frystaat looks. The woman's blue eyes flashed, and her personality, though she was little more than a girl, blazed more fiercely than anyone's but Judge Chaya's. Following her, almost trotting to keep up, was a younger girl enough like her to be her sister.
"Cousin!" the elder girl said, and then at Aisha's inquiring look, "No, really—I'm Shulamit bat Miriam fan Gimbutas—Miriam bat Lizbet, Judge Dvora's younger sister. A lot younger!" She grinned irrepressibly. "So we're relatives."
A little awkwardly, Aisha exchanged the embrace and kiss on the cheek of kin. "But . . . Judge Chaya is fan Reenan?" she said.
"Ya. My mother married to a fan Gimbutas—my father, Yohann bar Rimza fan Gimbutas—so she took his clan." A brief scowl. "The Saurons killed him, lousy mamzrim. Anyway," she went on, "this big lump of gorgeous stupidity here"—she thumped the young man beside her on the shoulder; it sounded like a fist hitting hard wood—"is Karl bar Yigal fan Reenan, and the little imp of wickedness with the pimples—"
"I do not have pimples!" the younger girl burst out, then blushed.
"Yes you do—is named Erika bat Miriam fan Gimbutas. My half-sister," she added with mock distaste.
Karl bar Edgar groaned when the youngsters left. "They're back! I don't know what's worst. Having another Karl about who gets into fights, having him fight with Shulamit there or having them on good terms with each other."
"Thing is, you just don't like being called Little Karl," someone threw at the healer, and he whimpered theatrically. "Not when Big Karl is young enough to be your son."
Aisha felt the healer twitch under her hand.
"You want Shulamit and Big Karl to stay on good terms with each other," Barak said. "When they fight, they throw things. But you can't break a bedroll when you pound it."
Aisha surprised herself by flushing like a young maid, then laughing. She felt engulfed by clan, by friends, by kin-folk who did not reject her.
Let it be real. Praise Allah, let it be real.
Aisha sat on temporary bleachers under the stars, and watched the entertainment. Most of the skits were obscure to her; they were satirical, based on local gossip and relationships she didn't know. One or two did strike home. There was a tall brown-haired warrior of amazing strength, who chased away bandits and land gators (that was four men under a startlingly lifelike model of boiled leather and papier-mâché and paint), but then fainted in terror when a blonde girl pinched his buttocks. She dragged him off by an ankle, waving a club triumphantly in the air.
Aisha glanced at Barak; he was laughing almost hard enough to fall off his cushion with one arm around Sannie's waist. The next troupe showed an old warrior and a young warrior loaded with slave-shackles, flogged and dragged protesting toward an altar with a chain of office on it. When they got there, each kept trying to hand the chain to the other, while a figure in a gray, tufted chin-beard—evidently Karl bar Edgar's kinsman Hans—danced around snatching at it. Every once in a while the two men dodging the chain would turn and boot his backside.
The skits ended in a roar of laughter, loudest of all from the ones who'd taken the brunt of the jokes. Everyone trooped down off the bleachers. Barak and Sannie were arm in arm: he was reciting a particularly scurrilous set of lines, and she was giggling and poking him in the ribs.
When they stopped at the Judge's house, everyone but Aisha and Karl withdrew to a slight distance. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Karl bar Edgar kissed her lightly on the lips. She was still tingling as she walked up to her room.
The grief of the funeral, the excitement of Ruth's Day—a festival at which you had to forgive anyone who came with the proper words could be wearing—vanished in the excitement of the election. Barak and Barak took to giving speeches together; each praised the other and listed his own shortcomings. The Bandari audiences, ordinary clansmen and chiefs and proxies who held the delegated votes of those unable or unwilling to come to the valley, were entertained, but they listened closely to the speeches and asked questions. When the candidates had gone—only three were seriously considered—they spoke among themselves, in uproarious arm-waving confusion that still served to settle points and build consensus.
Summer warmed, and storms stalked huge across the horizons. The dams in the foothills to the east filled as warmth came at last to the high Afritsberg that separated Eden from Shangri-La and the glaciers gave up their moisture. Herds had been driven down to the lowlands to fatten on the stubble-fields and reaped hay meadows of first-harvest and enrich them with manure. Soon they would have to return to the high steppe, where the rested grazing and patches of warming permafrost would carry them until second harvest. The Valley would plow and plant, more lavishly since there was more water this time than for first harvest; third harvest was most abundant of all, most years. Already produce was being salted, smoked and frozen down for the long Haven winter, three T-years of it.
The Bandari made politics and in the intervals between, held feasts and games. Aisha saw with some pleasure that her tribesfolk did not do too badly at riding and shooting contests, though they seldom won at karat or foot racing. She had learned enough Bandarit to begin to appreciate the music and poetry; her head whirled when Karl took her among the scholars and showed her the fruits of their work. She almost thought him a djinni again when he showed her the drawings from the great new telescope: Cat's Eye, the sister moons, orbital debris from stations blasted to fragments by the Dol Guldur. Even more impressive, she came to realize that much of what she saw was new knowledge, not reconstructed from scraps of the Ancients but worked out from the beginnings.
"We found we couldn't use so much of what they knew," Karl explained to her; he always did that, treating her as someone who could follow his thought. "They were like grown men who knew how to run. A baby can't; he has to learn step by step, and all we have is fragments of instructions on the most advanced techniques. We've decided we have to go back to those beginnings and redo it. At least we know something of what's possible—that's a huge advantage."
She met his children by his first wife; grown men and women, mostly; the youngest had two Haven years. That was ordeal, not pleasure, but she took some pride in carrying it off. He winked at her afterwards, and she blushed as she always did, with as much pleasure as embarrassment.
"HhhhhhhhnnnggggaaaHHHH!" Barak groaned.
He and young Karl bar Yigal sat across from each other, hands locked, mouths wide as they gulped for air. The muscles stood out on their arms like bands of iron, and more writhed on their bare torsos. Power enough to snap steel or uproot young trees strained against itself. Karl was only about eighteen T-years, but already thicker-built than Chaya's son; it was bull against cliff lion. Sauron against Frystaat, Aisha thought. Still the massive dark arm bent backward, slowly, slowly. Then it slammed into the wood, hard enough to make the cups and dishes bounce.
"Ai!" Barak said, shaking his hand. "You've got a grip like a tamerlane's mouth. Have some mercy on an old man, youngk!"
Young Karl worked his own fingers. "You should talk?"
Spectators were cheering and paying up bets; Shulamit and Sannie handed their lovers towels to wipe down their sweat-slick bodies, then handed them their shirts. The two women smiled at each other in perfect accord.
It was the last of the public feasts before the election, and the air fairly crackled with tension. There had been a few fights, and one criminal case—one of Kemal's men, who kept fondling a woman after she told him to leave off. The punishment for that was booting, running down a double line of citizens and being slapped and kicked. The man had been crawling and moaning by the time he reached the end.
Serves him right, Aisha thought, shaking off the memory. No reason not to be happy, now. No reason but her father, and that matter was stored away, down in the depths of her mind. Not forgotten. Never that.
"I'll try again when you've been kapetein for a while," young Karl said, grinning; his smile looked very white against his dark face. "Sitting on a cushion, eating latkkes and worrying about paying for an irrigation canal in Tallinn—your muscles will turn to muskylope lard. Shulamit and I'll be out with the caravans, living hard. It'll be a pushover."
Barak made a sign against ill luck and reached for his stein. "You'll have to be more respectful then, you young sklem," he said.
"Maybe," Karl said. "But Shulamit won't."
The girl stuck out her tongue at both of them. "Come on, Sannie," she said. "Let's go look at the cloth merchants' stalls again."
Karl fan Haller looked up from peeling a clownfruit; he had been popping segments into Aisha's mouth. "It's an even split," he said. "A third for you, a third for Barak, about a quarter for my stiff-necked cousin, the rest undecided."
"How do you know?" Chaya asked, watching the two young women saunter off arm-in-arm. Her sister, Miriam, farther down the table, was looking too, shaking her head, with an expression almost identical to that of young Karl's mother's beside her. None of us is going to get the ideal child-in-law, she thought. But what mother does?
"Medikos hear things," Karl bar Edgar said. "Also, we gossip." He frowned. "The worst thing I've heard is a rumor about Barak—that he's some sort of front for a plot by the Orphans and the cull-children to take over and make this a second Citadel, if you please." He shrugged, not noticing that Chaya had stiffened. "Nobody's buying that, of course—except some Edenites and a few paranoiacs. Everyone knows about Heber; and besides, most of the Orphans are for Oom Barak."
One or two tribesmen wove by—Kemal couldn't keep a watch on all of them, apparently. They eyed her owlishly as she sat holding Karl's hand. Aisha started to look down, then met their eyes with what was not boldness for a woman of the Bandari. This was her clan now.
The long, long feast went on. Later in it, an old man with light eyes strode toward the table.
"Ho, aluf!" called Karl. He released Aisha's hand, almost surprised to find himself holding it.
"What's wrong with him?" Aisha asked. For all the kvass she had drunk, she was instantly sober, instantly alert. The man was Avi bar Shimon fan Allon, the oldest healer in the Valley, so much respected that he never accompanied warriors or caravans, but worked with the women's doctors, helping to birth the next generation. Chief of Kumpanie Allan, Karl bar Edgar's teacher.
"Dammit, I'm not on call," muttered Karl. "All we need . . ."
The newcomer's face was sweaty. His hands shook visibly, not with age, but with anger. Seeing him, Karl Haller rose so fast he almost overset his chair.
"Oom Avi," he said. "What's happened? Has there been an accident?"
"There certainly has been," said the old mediko. Aisha rose and tried to give him her chair.
"Thank you," he said to her with absent courtesy. "I haven't seen you before. First time in the valley? First child?"
He doesn't know me. He thinks I'm someone's wife. I could pass for normal here. I could. I could.
"My niece," Chaya told him firmly. "Aisha."
Now was the time for him to recoil at the outcast. Instead he looked at her with close interest for a second, then shook his head, dismissing the subject. "Hold on, Karl. I said there was an accident."
"I'll have to get my kit unless . . ." But the elder healer's hands were empty.
"No one's hurt. But some pork-eater broke into the archives next to the Strang infirmary, the genetics section. No, no drugs or knives are missing. And you don't know how relieved I am about that."
"We can station guards," Barak suggested. "But what was taken?"
The fire began to cool in Avi's eyes. When Barak slid a drink across the table, he picked it up in hands that no longer shook with rage. "Medical records. All my files have been rifled, Brigit's work, the personal files. Pawed through by some mamzrim in a hurry."
Avi bar Shimon had married a woman from Angband Base, one whom he met while poring over what medical technology had survived the nomad sack. Being Soldier-born herself, she had worked in the infirmary there in a menial capacity, helping the Breedmaster's assistant. Afterwards she had helped Avi set up a simpler system for the Pale, guarding against excessive inbreeding in the Sauron children.
The Judge had to have been standing ten meters away in a crowd that made about as much noise as a tamerlane balked of its dinner. But she heard. Almost at once she was at her son's side, listening, her eyes flicking across the tables of feasters, trying to pick out who was and who was not there. Naturally, Kemal stood at her side: the watcher at the feast. It was as important for him to ferret out signs of trouble as it was for him to see a show of Bandari strength. Alliances could rise and fall for less.
"Who would be interested in medical records?" Barak asked.
"Should I know?" Alton snapped, giving the distinctive haBandari shrug; hands flipped palm up and shoulders hunched. "You maybe. Your mother. Your own doctor. Your records were one of the set that's gone missing."
Barak looked at the old healer, puzzled. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
"For what?" he asked. "The arm I broke when I tried to shoot Kapetein Mordekai's rifle when I was eight? Every scratch I took in training? Obviously, someone's pouring from a bad barrel of beer! Why don't we get a new one and forget all this?"
"I need those records, bar Heber!" snapped Allon. "There's other things in them than broken arms!"
"Shaysse!" hissed Karl bar Edgar . . . fan Haller. "The old man just lost it. Yes, my esteemed cousin Hans. Watch out, here he comes."
Hans bar Rhodevik fan Haller stalked in. He was angry; rumor had it he had been furious with Kapetein Mordekai for two decades at the old man's stubborn refusal to die at a reasonable age. Not a popular man, Hans bar Rhodevik, even with his own fan Hallers—although most of them would vote for him out of clan loyalty, and they were numerous.
"You're not going to be a candidate, of course," he announced to Barak. He had never been noted for good manners, but that was impolite in the extreme.
Barak was still chuckling from his exchange with Avi. "I haven't decided yet, aluf," he said politely; the man was a clan chief, after all. "You can be sure I'll tell you when I do."
Hans had clipped his beard to a chin-tuft, a style more common among Edenites than Bandari. It jutted forward as his face tightened with anger, and someone at another table went baaaaa in imitation of a billygoat.
Maybe it was the kvass and ale. Aisha blinked at him and smothered a giggle. Barak laughed, and even Judge Chaya grinned.
"I'm waiting to see if you die in a fit, Sauron!" shouted Hans fan Haller. "Sauron blood and cull blood—maybe they didn't throw your worthless mamma on the scrap heap for nothing!"
"You fucking bastard!" Barak leaped for the older man's throat. Three men hurled themselves forward to stop the fight. Barak tossed them aside like rag dolls, then stopped himself, drew himself up and spat at Hans' feet.
"Out of respect for your years, I'll ignore that—once," he grated. The words fell into a pool of tense silence. "Speak like that about my mother—and the Judge—again, and you can meet me north of Burg Kidmi." Outside the Pale, whose law forbade dueling. He turned on his heel and stalked away.
Judge Chaya stood, as frozen as Aisha herself, watching Karl. They must know what was in those records—another curse? Please Allah it would not bring ruin down upon this last of her kin: Chaya blind, Chaya cast out to wander . . . hardened as Aisha thought herself to be, she cringed until the screams alerted her once more.
Aisha had heard tribesmen scream in rage. She had heard outraged Bandari before. But she had never imagined the sheer volume of outrage and curses that she heard now.
"I don't give a damn, fan Haller," the old healer spat. "Confidential be damned. Sealed files be damned. Those are medical records, and we need them. Make up your mind, man. Are you a mediko or a politician?"
"I'm trying to keep the damn Pale from splintering!" the younger man shouted. "I suggest you do the same."
She reached for her beltknife. They all had beltknives, even Kemal and his men, who backed toward each other. Their eyes flicked around the infuriated Bandari. Abruptly, Aisha's own blood cooled. Time, as she thought of it, slowed, and her thoughts clicked past like beads on an abacus, adding into a sum she didn't like.
Something about those looks. They meant more than concern that the brawl turn into a riot and from there deteriorate to a feud in which not even honored guests were safe. They were more than apprehension; call it satisfaction, perhaps? Aisha didn't like the look of them.
She took Chaya aside as the disturbance was quelled; old Hans fan Haller stalked away, muttering loudly about Sauron instability and assault. Men and women looked at each other dubiously; violence before the elections was a bad omen.
"Tanta, I must know," she said. "How did Kemal's father die?"
"In the war," Chaya said, seeming surprised.
"No, exactly how?"
The Judge dropped her voice with apparent reluctance. "We don't speak of it much. He wouldn't break with the Aydin, even after all the rest did—even Kemal, he didn't come over but he took his sworn men and pulled up into the hills, wouldn't fight with his father against the tribe."
"Who killed him?"
"Hammer-of-God Jackson," Chaya whispered. "Killed him and the Aydin Khan both, and threw their heads into a meeting of the Aydin chiefs." Then more sharply: "Why now?"
"Because I sense something," Aisha said. A peripheral flick of her own memory, and she recalled that meid Sannie had left with cousins.
Cousins? Cousins who called themselves Gimbutas—and she a fan Haller, of an almost Edenite kumpanie? Fan Haller were tricksy . . . like nomads. Cousins from an outlying territory, perhaps cousins who lived outside the Pale altogether.
The murmurs were turning to shouts again in the street.
"SHUT IT DOWN!" bellowed Judge Chaya with all the power in her Sauron-bred body.
Aisha smelled blood in the air, the result of some lucky punches. Its hot-copper scent made her adrenaline spike up, to be subsumed in that readiness that was the mark of the Sauron-born.
Kemal and his men froze, hands falling away from their beltknives. Carefully, as if setting up an ambush, they began to back out of the crowd. Aisha followed them with her eyes, aware that the Judge was administering a tongue-lashing such as she hoped never to deserve: something about "reasonable concern for future health" turned into a blistering attack on lack of respect for Bandari customs: "disgrace before important guests" and "indecent breach of mourning for our kapetein" The Sauron part of Aisha's memory would "store" that lecture for when she had time to retrieve it from memory. Maybe in a hundred years.
For now, however, she concentrated on being inconspicuous, on passing unnoticed in a storm of reproaches and accusing glares. Like Kemal, she backed away from the center of the fight into the shadows, where she could hide and think and plan. She had never been good at thinking and planning more than a day ahead. No practice at it. One thing, though, she knew.
This was not a time to warn Judge Chaya that the Pale was filled with spies. Perhaps, if she could bring proof, none of those stares would touch her. She would have brought honor to the Bandari—and perhaps they could help her restore her own.
Gradually the shouting subsided—into sullenness on the part of some of the Edenites, mutters broken by Karl bar Edgar's earnest, persuasive voice; and into loud, even drunken self-blame on the part of the Bandari, who began to stage a reconciliation that would have made a wedding festival staid.
Aisha prowled, her senses alert to catch the warmth of the spies that she always sensed but no one else save but her father (and the Judge or another Sauron) could, her nostrils flaring to catch the scent of the men she suspected. Her boots squeaked with newness, so she shed them and walked about the town in felt slippers, then barefoot out past the walls into the sprawling tent-city of those in for festival and election. She wanted silence for her thoughts and her own concealment.
Could she be certain Kemal had set spies? How could she find out? And even if she did, how could she bring proof against them, exile that she was? This was a problem Judge Chaya might have been able to handle with all the resources of the Pale behind her. And why? What revenge? Ah. Hans bar Rhodevik would make a rotten kapetein. And he was a strong man physically, middle-aged, likely to live another four or five Haven years. If the Pale was torn with internal dissension, the tribe of Tarik—of Kemal, by then—would stand some chance of restoring its independence and driving out the new-found and unwelcome kinsfolk. Even of retaking Tallinn, although she had heard that many Bandari were settled there on the devastated lands.
The Cat's Eye jeered down at her. You had a girl's training and then a refugee's. What do you think you can do?
Not trip over the child who wandered into her path, surely. "Meid? Tanta," the girl corrected herself. Her eyes held an unchildlike curiosity that reminded Aisha of Karl bar Edgar, but without the sorrow at the back of the eyes. She wished she could bring this problem to him. That was the problem when a wild thing was tamed; it looked to the tamer for protection and aid. "Why aren't you at the feast?"
Aisha put out a hand to tip up the girl's chin. Like all children in the Pale, she was respectful but utterly at ease with adults: in the Pale, all adults were protectors of children, or else painfully dead.
"I had eaten and drunk enough," she answered with the first words that came to mind. "And you? Why aren't you there, little cousin?"
"I followed my sister Shulamit and her friend Karl . . ." Her eyes creased into merriment, and Aisha revised upward her estimate of the child's age. "No, not like that. They said they went on a new hunt. Not for stobor or even tamerlanes, but for men. I heard them say it. For spies."
Aisha stared at the girl. Allah, do you send a child to aid me? She would have sworn those two youngsters had eyes only for each other. Everyone is the hero in her own story, she reminded herself, though she may be but a servant in yours.
"I like you," Erika confided. "You don't laugh at me for what I said. Shulamit said people would laugh if I told them."
"You are Bandari," Aisha said. "Even young as you are, you would not say . . ."
"They go to find proof now, Shulamit and Karl do. But they make noise when they hunt!" Outrage quivered in the girl's soft voice. "You don't make noise when you walk." She pointed at Aisha's bare feet.
"Why do you tell me?"
"Because you are kin to us, and to Barak and the Judge. You know . . ." She glanced around before mouthing the name of the nomad chieftain, not daring even a breath of sound. "I watched you."
Had Aisha been all that much older than this Erika when she left Tallinn? That seemed as long ago now as the time when Haven turned cold.
Aisha squatted down beside the girl. "What makes you think . . .?" she whispered.
"Shulamit travels much. She says she never saw the cousins who call themselves Gimbutas before, and when she greeted them, they watched her as if she were a nafkeh, a whore," she translated. "Our clan would not do so. Some fan Hallers might, or plaatsmen."
Aisha cocked her head at the girl. Where? Wide-eyed, Erika pointed. That way. Aisha glanced down at her feet and grinned in appreciation: not having Sauron blood, the girl couldn't risk losing toes or worse by going barefoot. But she had worn soft slippers rather than boots. A clever child. Allah send she have a better fate than Aisha.
Silently they prowled, past yurt, wagon and house. Lamps, torches and fires confused the senses Aisha had learned to rely on in her years of wandering the steppes; the night sounds of a town, sinking to rest after the emotions of a feast, a binge and a near-riot, blocked her hearing.
"This isn't going to work," she whispered to Erika. "Go find your sister and go home."
"They said it would be someplace private." Her eyes danced with sudden, wholly unmalicious humor. "They know a lot of places to go. That's why they thought they could find the spies."
A boy and a girl, scarcely adult, more intent on each other than on caution; Aisha wanted to groan.
"Do you know of such places?" she asked the girl.
Erika promptly raised a hand and began to tick off a list on her fingers; there seemed to be a lot of them, all well-known. Nobody would want to chance a really unknown spot—too dangerous if something went wrong.
Privacy, Aisha thought. It was scarcer than the ruby that glittered on her hand, either in the tribes or among the Bandari. And yet, if reports had been stolen and were to be passed to the men who wanted them, it must be done in private. Assuming the spies were Kemal's men, she didn't think an exchange could be made in Kemal's yurts—too closely watched, among haBandari herdsfolk with even more distrust of outsiders than the valley dwellers. Assuming—which she didn't—that the spies were Gimbutas, she couldn't imagine any privacy at all in that clan; and, again, if they masqueraded as Gimbutas, they wouldn't risk exposure.
The Bandari of Eden . . . memories clicked and flashed into place: the bunker where Ruth had been held, where Judge Chaya had hidden as a child. Honored now, but little used, and far enough away that no one might watch it. It was a wild guess, but it was better than the nothing she had turned up in a long night of searching.
You know, Aisha told herself, you could be making all this up, you and a little, left-out meid who wants attention. Can't you see it now? "Oh, that's our crazy cousin." Really a great political asset, just when you mean to help.
She recognized that voice; it was the inner killer you heard when the winds lashed you, you hadn't eaten for days, you had a fever, and all you thought you wanted was to lie down and sleep forever. She had practice in ignoring it, and she hadn't lived this long by distrusting her hunches.
First, get the child away.
"Erika, do you know where Judge Chaya lives?" A quick nod. She is this child's aunt, of course she knows, Juchi's daughter reminded herself. "I want you to get her, please. And tell her that her niece, Aisha bat Juchi—can you remember that?—thinks she's found some answers." Even now she could not feel easy with the Bandari custom of girls' taking their mothers' rather than their fathers' names; it seemed disrespectful. "You can say you helped; you did. Ask her if she can come to the bunker"—Erika's eyes widened—"as soon as she can. Armed. Then, you go home, do you hear me? And if you meet your sister and Big Karl, tell them to go home, too."
"Ja, tanta." Erika nodded and padded off so fast that Aisha would have taken hot iron in her hand and sworn that the girl would obey all her instructions. Except, perhaps the last one.
The Judge was half Sauron. And Barak wouldn't let her go alone. Three half-breeds ought to be enough to take out a nest of spies. At a Sauron's best pace the journey to the bunker was barely an hour, in the thick, oxygen-rich air of Eden.
Aisha ran.