Jaran

'That would depend on where you were standing.' She grinned. 'Rather like a man's reputation, don't you think?'

'So awesome from a distance, so meager up close?'

'I thought it was the other way around. Small and insignificant from far off, but massive at its base.'

'Weighed down by its own importance.'

'A heavy burden,' said Tess.

'Only to the man who has had it forced on him,' said Bakhtiian, suddenly serious. 'Fame is a light and welcome burden to the man who picks it up of his own will.'

'I don't agree. Fame becomes a heavy burden either way.''

Bakhtiian raised one hand, like a teacher making a point. 'But by choosing to carry it- Dismount!' She dismounted almost as quickly as he did. 'Damn,' he said to himself, and then to Tess, 'Follow.' A spur of rock jutted up, a solitary sentinel of the ridges that fell away behind it. Bushes and clinging grass patched the dark surface. They halted at its base. 'Stir up the ground.'

He took the horses around the rock while Tess trampled grass and scuffed dirt. 'Good enough,' he said, returning without the horses. He studied the spur for a moment and, choosing a path, began to climb.

Tess scrambled after him, her feet slipping on loose pebbles, her hands grabbing bare knobs of stone and long, sinuous roots. He halted at a small ledge, screened by bushes, and pulled Tess up after him, leaving his hand on her arm when she stood beside him. She could feel every point of pressure, however light, where his fingers touched her skin.

'You may as well sit, if you wish,' he said. 'They may not have seen us, but I know they saw the horses. This rock is the only cover, unless we wanted to risk breaking our necks by running down into the rough. Two against-I'd guess forty-two. We should go to ground.'

She took the hint and sat. His hand released her, leaving a lingering tingle on her arm where he had held her. He remained standing.

'Who?' Tess asked. 'Another jahar? I didn't see them.'

'Another jahar, yes-' He hesitated, absently staring at his hand. 'And no.'

'If you thought these men really wanted to kill you, we wouldn't be sitting here.'

Bakhtiian transferred his attention from his hand to the plateau. Grass and mountains, nothing else. 'I just want to look at them before we exchange pleasantries.'

'The weather is fine today, and my what a lovely horse that is?'

He looked down at her and smiled, a smile that lit the corners of his eyes. 'The jaran have a tale of a woman who brought misfortune to her tribe because she was too curious.'

She tilted her head. 'Is that so? We have a story something like that.'

'If two old moral tales won't teach you, I'll never be able to. What was the woman's name?'

'Pandora.'

'Pandora. That's prettier than the woman's name in our story: Vlatagrebi.'

'Poor thing, saddled with a bad reputation and a name like that.'

'Then you'd rather be called Pandora than Vlatagrebi?'

'By whom?'

Bakhtiian leaned back against the rock face. A spray of dirt skidded down the face to settle behind his boots. He folded his arms over his chest. 'By me. It's only fitting.'

'We have a saying in our land: 'the pot calling the kettle black.' '

'The pot calls- Shameless woman. If I were a brave man I'd-' He checked himself.

'You'd what?'

'I take it back. I wouldn't.'

'Who are they, Ilya?'

It took him a moment to answer because the smile that crept onto his face was the kind that arrives slowly and leaves reluctantly. 'I surrender.' He put his hands against the rock by his shoulders, palms up and open. 'Arenabekh. The black riders.'

'I saw nothing.'

'You weren't looking. You were staring at the mountains.'

'How could you tell they were these-arenabekh?'

'All in black.'

'Is this a particular tribe?'

The wind rolled a single wilted leaf past his boot. 'They have no tribe.'

'No tribe? And they're riding, so they must all be men.'

'They have renounced tribe, kin, women, any ties to order or custom or family.'

'I thought my abstainers were severe.'

'They don't necessarily abstain.'

'They take lovers amongst themselves?'

He colored slightly. ' 'This is not a fit subject for a man and a woman to discuss.'

'But I'm khaja. And fully as curious as you are.'

He smiled. 'So you are. Well, then, some do. Not all. Some believe that our life now is not the life the gods gave us to live, so they live as it is said jaran lived in the early days.'

'Without women? How could there be jaran now if that was so?'

'Exactly. And how are we to know how the jaran lived in the early days, having only old stories to tell us, which may have been changed in the telling? Do you see them now? Don't shift forward. They're sharp-eyed, these demons.'

The screen of bushes and hedge concealed them, but eventually she got a view of the approaching riders through a gap in the shrubbery. Bakhtiian hummed something under his breath, fingering the hilt of his saber. She felt his excitement, and it made her nervous; she had seen that same excitement in him before-for battle.

She wished now that she was not sitting because it made her feel vulnerable, unable to move quickly, but she could not stand up now. The black riders rode straight for the spur of rock.

'God,' whispered Tess as they neared. 'They look grimmer than you ever did.' Because she had not meant to say it aloud, she looked up. He glanced down, a glint of amusement in his eyes, and put two fingers to his lips.

They pulled up a stone's toss away, suspicious and watchful. The dull coats of their horses, the dourness of their expressions and, most of all, the unvarying black of their dress made them cheerless and forbidding. No embroidery decorated their shirts. None wore jewelry.

'A quick night's camp,' said one in a strong dialect.

If Tess had thought the jaran men of her acquaintance hard, she had no word for these. One had no right arm, only a loose, empty sleeve that stirred restlessly in the breeze. Next to him a younger man, beardless and rosy-cheeked, examined the rock with one clear eye; his other eye was scarred shut, puckered and white. These men hunted, they had their quarry trapped, and they knew it. She bit her lip to stop herself breathing through her mouth, as if even that faint sound might alert them to her presence.

'The fox has gone to the hill,' said a bearded fellow with a haughty forehead and cruel eyes. His blond hair fell in a long braid to his waist.

'Patience, Sergi,' said the one with the dialect, a black-haired man who had possibly been given a frown at birth and had been unable to remove it. A tic, almost hidden in his rough beard, disturbed his right cheek. 'You three check around the rock.''

The three brought back the two horses. Tess saw how all the riders stared at the stallion and the mare, two creatures so obviously superior in line and breeding to their own animals that it was rather like standing a man of the jaran dressed in all his finery next to an ape dressed in skins. Bakhtiian stood utterly still, his eyes narrowed, his expression more anticipatory than apprehensive. How easily he could blend into the group of men below. Then, startling her with the suddenness of his movement, he stepped out from behind the screen of bushes to stand in full view of the jahar below, but he glanced once swiftly back at her as he did so.

'They are beautiful, aren't they?' he asked. He froze, almost as if he were posing for the benefit of his audience, with one hand on his saber hilt and the other resting on the hilt of his dagger. He looked dangerous.

'By the gods, Bakhtiian!' said the bearded Sergi. 'Come here, you ill-favored son of the cold winds, and I'll show you the special trick I've learned with the saber just for you.'