'Ah, Aleksi.' Dr. Hierakis emerged from her tent, wiping her hands on a rag. 'Come in. Come in.' He followed her back inside. She had sewn tiny bells all along the entrance flap, and they tinkled as the flap fell down behind them. Aleksi understood the bells, now; just as the messengers wore bells to alert the next garrison or tribe to their coming, the doctor positioned bells around her tent so that no person might enter unannounced and surprise her at her machines. A lantern sat placed in the center of a table, but Aleksi knew this trick. Tentatively, he put out a hand toward it, touched it, and his finger passed right through it. It was only an image of a lantern, not a lantern at all, although it looked so true that he would never have known if Tess had not told him.
'Sit down.' The doctor indicated first a chair and then a pillow, so that he might choose whatever was most comfortable. 'Will you have some tea?'
Aleksi didn't like tea, but he was far too polite to refuse any drink offered him in a woman's tent. He sank down onto the pillow and received the hot tea from Dr. Hierakis. He sipped at the spicy drink cautiously and regarded the doctor from under lowered lids. She reached under the table with one hand and did something there with her fingers. The lantern grew a little brighter; otherwise he saw no change.
'Recording,' she said into the air. Then to him: 'Do you have a second name, Aleksi?'
'Soerensen,' he said promptly.
'I meant, a jaran name, or a tribal name.'
'Not one I remember.'
'How old are you?' She stared at him with that gaze he recognized as impartial, measuring him against some pattern only she knew, not for any personal reason.
'I don't know.'
'I mean, in which year were you born? Eagle? Rat? Lion? Horse, perhaps?'
'I don't know.'
'But everyone knows that, here.'
'I beg your pardon. I don't know. My tribe was massacred by khaja raiders when I was very young.'
'Tess mentioned that. How did you escape?'
Aleksi shut his eyes and struggled to recall anything from that time. He shrugged. 'All I remember is the dew on the grass, and lying half sunk in water in a little hollow of swamp. I lay there so still for so long that a frog crawled right up onto my right hand. It was a blessing, you see. The gods took pity on me, because the khaja had taken my family, so they sent the frog to gift me with speed for fighting.'
'Why a frog?'
'Haven't you ever seen how fast a frog jumps? He sits perfectly still, and then he's gone.'
She chuckled. 'Yes, I suppose that's a fair analogy. But Aleksi, were they all killed?'
'Yes,' he repeated patiently, 'all but myself and-' Here he faltered. Always he faltered. '-my sister Anastasia.' Her name came out hoarsely.
'No, I meant, is it possible that it was a slave raid? Or was everyone killed?'
Her question, like a blessing, allowed him to recover. His memories of the rest of his tribe were so dim that they had long since ceased to trouble him. 'What is a slave raid? Oh, that they would take the people away to sell in other lands, to serve a khaja master. I don't know. I don't remember seeing any bodies except that of my father.'
'Oh, Goddess. I'm sorry, Aleksi.'
Aleksi found her sympathy interesting. He never told jaran as much as this; any respectable jaran listener would have been appalled that a child could lose his entire tribe and still go on living. The gods had cursed people for less. 'It was a long time ago,' he said, to reassure her.
'Then what happened?'
This was harder. He managed it by breaking each word off from the next. 'Then Anastasia took us away from there. She took care of me for as long as she could. Three or four years, I think.'
'What happened to her?'
Aleksi set the cup down and bowed his head. This one memory, he could not bear to look upon, but it flooded over him nevertheless. Anastasia had grown steadily weaker over that third-or was it fourth? — winter and then, with spring, she became feverish and unable to eat. The gods had spoken strange words through her mouth, and she had seen visions of creatures terrible to behold and creatures as sweet as flowers, and she had wept for fear of leaving him when he was still too young to take care of himself. Not that she had been so much older than he was, but her first course of woman's blood had come on her mat past autumn, so she was no longer a girl, although of course she had never received any of the rites investing her with her womanhood.
The doctor waited patiently. Aleksi's throat was thick with emotion, too choked to speak. Hands shaking, he lifted the cup to his lips and sipped at the tea. The gesture soothed him enough that he could force out a sentence. 'The gods took her on a spirit journey, but she never came back.'
'Ah,' said the doctor. She poured more hot tea into his cup, and by that gesture Aleksi knew he had her friendship. 'You love Tess very much, don't you?'
He glanced up at her, astonished. She smiled warmly at him; he did not need to reply, because she already knew the answer and the reason for it. With her, he was safe. How strange to know that. How strange to be safe at all. He felt dizzy.
'Goddess,' she said, 'you must have been-what? — eight or ten years old? Well, what did you do then?'
'I wandered. I got by. Eventually I came to the Mirsky tribe late one summer. Old Vyacheslav Mirsky's wife was very ill, but they had no children or grandchildren to help them. It was a terrible disgrace, how the tribe treated him. Everyone knew what a great rider he was, but they thought Stalia Mirksy ought to know that her time was through and simply remain behind on the grass so that she wouldn't slow the tribe down. Stalia kept telling Vyacheslav she ought to, but she was all he had, and he wouldn't let her do it. So I saw-well-I saw that if a small orphan boy helped bring in fuel and water and beat carpets and built fires and gathered food and went to get their share of the meat at slaughtering time, they might let that boy sleep on the ground next to their tent without driving him away.'
'And did they?'
But while the memory of Anastasia always filled him with a horrible dread, a painful, dizzying fear that his heart had been torn out and dropped into a black abyss from which he could never retrieve it, the memory of Vyacheslav and Stalia always brought tears to his eyes. 'No, they took me into their tent and treated me as their own grandchild. Stalia got better. They said I was their luck. Eight years I lived with them. Vyacheslav trained me in the saber. You've heard of him, of course.' By her expression, he saw that she hadn't heard of Vyacheslav Mirsky. 'You haven't! Well, everyone knows he had the finest hand for the saber in all the tribes, before he grew too old to ride in jahar. The Mirskys still brag about him, though they treated him badly once they had no more use for him.'
'And then?'
'Then one winter they both died of lung fever. They were ancient by then. Stalia told me they both would have died far sooner if it wasn't for me. Perhaps it's true. But as soon as they died the Mirskys drove me out.'
'Isn't there something about horse-stealing in here?'
Aleksi considered his cup. It was metal, but the heat of the tea did not burn his hands where he cupped the round surface between his palms. An etching of fronds edged the rim and the base. Steam rose from the tea, caressing his face. But he had already trusted her with so much, and Tess, with everything. 'Stalia and Vyacheslav had given me things: his saber, a beautiful blanket she had woven, the tent that belonged to her only daughter, who had long since died, their komis cups and flask, some other things. I overheard the etsana-their own cousin's daughter! — speaking to her sons and daughters, saying that if they didn't throw me out of camp immediately I'd try to steal everything in the tent and run off with it. So that night I took what I could carry, and stole a horse, and rode away. Oh,' here he glanced up at her, 'I knew it was wrong. The penalty for stealing a horse is death, of course. But I couldn't bear to lose every little thing they'd given me, because everyone else in the Mirsky tribe was so petty and small-minded.'
'Where did you ride to, then?'
'There was one jahar that would take men who didn't belong anywhere else. The arenabekh.'
'The arenabekh. They were outlaws, weren't they?'
'Men who had left their tribes for one reason or another-for some crime, because they loved men more than women, because they no longer wanted to live with the tribes.'
