colonnades and gentle silk banners. Even the play, in its own way, seemed ironically appropriate: During a revolt in feudal Georgia, Grusha, a servant girl, flees to the mountains with the Governor's small son, who has been abandoned in the panic by his mother; in the second act, a drunken village clerk named Azdak is made a judge by the rebel soldiers and tries the case to determine which of the women is the child's true mother.
From the beginning, they attracted a hard-core audience off to the left who stayed in place for the entire play. But other than that group, and the jaran riders who patrolled the square with half an eye on the Habakar natives and half on the play, the audience shifted and grew and shrank according to some tidal schedule that Diana could not interpret. It was frustrating, and yet, it was in part for this experiment that she had come, to see what would play, what could communicate, across such a gulf of space and culture, to touch those who were open to being touched. And, inspired by the setting, by the city, by the bright colored silks or the clear blue of the afternoon sky, the acting fell into place and they worked off each other in that seamless fiction that can never be achieved except by grace, fortune, and sheer, hard repetitious work brought by a fortuitous combination of events to its fruition in transcendent art.
It worked. Diana knew it worked. They all knew it had worked. At the end, sweating and exhausted and for once sated, she took Gwyn's hand-he had played the soldier and lover Simon-and, with the lifelike doll that represented the child tucked in the crook of her other arm, she, and he, and the others, took a single bow, which was all that they needed to take, or that the audience understood. Straightening, she flashed a grin at Gwyn and he smiled back, wiping sweat from his forehead. She turned to look toward Arina, who had watched it all from a wagon over to one side, and discovered that Vasil had dismounted to stand next to his cousin and was regarding Diana, and the stage, with uncomfortably intent interest.
'You've made a conquest, Di,' said Gwyn in an undertone as he turned to go back to the dressing room and strip his makeup off.
'I hope not. Wait for me.' Veselov bothered her. One of the things she so liked about Gwyn was that when he was offstage, he was off; he did not drag the one world into the other. She knew she emoted offstage, at times, but it wasn't a habit she wanted to foster in herself, and she usually only did it when the person she was with seemed to expect it of her. A professional knew how to separate work and life. But Veselov was always on, always aware, always projecting. The Goddess knew, it ought to be tiring, going on like that all day and presumably all night. She went with Gwyn back to the awning and wiped her face clean. They took down the stage. By the time they got the wagons loaded, the afternoon had mostly passed, and the marketplace lay quiet and almost empty. They started back.
'I liked that story,' said Arina. 'It was true, what the judge did, knowing which woman was the true mother. But I can tell it's a khaja story.'
'How?'
'Well, it isn't a man's part to make such a judgment. That is women's business.'
'But we changed it,' protested Diana, 'when we did it at the camp. We made Azdak into an etsana.'
'I didn't see that.' Arina smiled, looking ahead, and lifted a hand to greet a rider. 'Here is Vasil.'
Vasil reined his horse in beside them, on Diana's side of the wagon. 'Why is it I've seen none of these songs of yours before?' he asked.
'I don't know. We've-sung-them many times, and we-practice-every night, in our encampment.' She could think of no words for 'perform' and 'rehearse' in khush.
Veselov did not look at her directly, and yet Diana felt his attention on her as much as if he had been staring soulfully into her eyes like a besotted lover. She shifted on the hard wooden seat. He sat a horse well, and his hands were light and casual and yet masterful on the reins. For an instant, she wondered what he would be like in bed. His lips twitched up into a bare, confiding smile, as if he had read her thoughts and promised as much as she could wish for, and more.
'I would like to see more,' he said, but did he mean more plays or more of her? 'You become the woman in the song, yet you remain yourself.'
'Yes,' said Diana, surprised, because Anatoly had yet to grasp the concept of acting.
A rider called to Vasil from farther down the line, and Veselov excused himself and rode away.
Arina coughed into one hand. 'Although he is my cousin,' she said, 'and I love him dearly, I would recommend to you, Diana, that you be wary of him.'
'I'm married, after all!'
'What has that to do with anything?'
Diana changed the subject, and they discussed other things until they got back to camp at dusk. Where Kirill waited. He came up to them immediately, Lavrenti nestled on his good arm, his other arm hanging free for once. Diana could see the fingers on his withered hand twitching and curling, but without much force or coordination.
'I beg your pardon,' said Diana to Kirill as Arina climbed down, 'I must return to our camp and I just wanted to know… is there any word of my husband?'
'He wasn't with his uncle,' Kirill assured her.
'Oh, then he's at the besieged city?' Karkand, it was called, the seat of the Habakar kings.
Kirill shook his head. 'No. Bakhtiian sent him to capture the Habakar king, who fled on beyond his city.'
'I don't understand. Anatoly went after him?'
'Yes, with a picked troop of five thousand riders.'
'But where did the king flee to?'
Kirill shrugged. He glanced at his wife, as if for help. 'To the lands beyond, I suppose.'
'Out ahead of his uncle's army?' Diana demanded. 'All by himself?'
'Well,' replied Kirill apologetically, 'he did promise Bakhtiian to bring back the king's crown, coat, and head, for the offense the king gave to Bakhtiian's personal envoys.'
'Thank you.' Diana stuttered over the words and started the oxen up as quickly as she could, to get away. She felt sick. The wagon jolted over the uneven ground toward the Company's encampment, and all she wanted to do was to throw up. The day's triumph turned to ashes in her mouth. Anatoly had ridden out into hostile enemy territory in pursuit of a king. Was he mad? Was he suicidal? Had he had the slightest thought for her before driving forward into unknown lands without his uncle and his uncle's army in order to avenge Bakhtiian's honor? Already she pictured Hyacinth lying twisted and dead on the ground, slain by arrows or knives, lying alone, left to rot. Now a second image rose unbidden to meld with Hyacinth's, that of Anatoly tumbled from his horse, lying half-dead with a spear through his left breast, swarmed by rank upon rank of enemy soldiers rabid for jaran blood.
Would she ever see him again? She would have cried, but she had already wept enough tears to bring life to the trampled, parched fields over which she now drove her wagon. She had a horrible, wrenching premonition that she had done crying for him. Like a little shield, the first layer of bricks had gone up, sheltering her. She couldn't go on, hurting and hurting, never knowing, always wondering: would he come back? when? would he still love her? and when would he leave her again?
The Company encampment loomed before her, sturdy, plain, with its practical square tents and the little canvas cubicle that housed the necessary off to one side. Entrance flaps lay askew, revealing the friendly beacons of lights burning inside the tents. A single fire smoldered into ashes between the tents, but the actors had left it and gone inside to spend their time with the comforts of the technological luxuries they had smuggled along on this barbarian year.
CHAPTER FIVE
After Yaroslav Sakhalin left at dawn, to return to his siege of the royal city of Karkand, the council dragged on for the rest of the day. In the morning, they all sat out under the open sky. By noon, with the sun overhead, they moved onto carpets rolled out under a vast awning. Bakhtiian sat on a pillow at one end, and the council fanned out in a rough semicircle in front of him.
Aleksi swallowed a yawn. The talk had been going on since yesterday and, as usual, the discussion had reached that point where the councellors were talking at each other, not to Bakhtiian. Ilya often ran his councils this way: The councillors talked for so long over the greatest and least choice at issue that in the end they reached a
