Sitting up in the bed that had once been Grima's, Badri said, not for the first time, "I am too old for you. Soon you will see some maiden you fancy, and tire of me." She kept her tone light, as always when she spoke of such things, but the fear was there, underneath.
Juchi reached out to caress her breast. "You are you, and I am happy," he said, also not for the first time. Then, smiling wickedly, he went on, "And what with Sauron technology and Sauron plunder, you lived better than we did out on the plains. I would never have guessed the age you claim, not within ten T-years."
"You flatter me outrageously." Badri pressed his hand to her. "Don't stop." Half a T-year before, she never could have been so fluent in Russki. Love was a strong incentive.
He grinned at her. "I hadn't planned to." He stretched luxuriously; he was not used to sleeping (or rather, at the moment, resting) so soft. But his wits were still alert. "We are a good pair for a whole flock of reasons. This for one—" He squeezed gently; she shivered a little. "And for another, a different son, what better match to link the clan and Tallinn Valley?"
"None better," she nodded. "But matches made for that sort of reason are more often endured than enjoyed." She leaned toward him. His left hand came up to join his right; he held her breasts as if they were the two balanced pans of a scale.
She might have picked the odd image from his mind, for he said, "I think they're heavier than they were. Are you pregnant?"
She considered that. "We'll have a pretty good idea somewhere around the end of first cycle." Then she threw herself on him. "I hope I am!" She'd never said anything like that before, not even with Dagor. And with Grima, the idea of children had been a nightmare.
"I'm not sure I do," he said. She frowned at him, surprised and hurt, till he went on. "It would mean I'd have to stay away from you for a while, and I don't want to do that."
He rolled her over, pinned her with his greater weight. He was, she thought as he slid into her, rutty as any Sauron she'd ever heard of. Of course, he was also very young. For her part, she knew only joy that their first joining had been followed by so many more.
She knew only joy . . . . Her arms went round his neck, pulling him even closer to her.
This once, Badri wished the Saurons still held Angband Base. She was used to the attentions of a Breedmaster or his aide, not a nomad midwife dressed in furs and muttering charms. The midwife, though, said, "Eee, from the speed of your labor, you've done this a time or three. Have trouble with any of your others?"
"The—" Badri stopped as a contraction washed over her. "The first time was twins. The others, no."
"You probably won't this time either, then. All I'll need do is catch the baby as it falls out, I expect." With the small part of her mind not engaged in birthing her child, Badri hoped the plainswoman was right.
So it proved. After what seemed forever but was less than six hours, the midwife said in satisfied tones, "A fine girl—four kilos, I'd guess. Here, you hold her and I'll go tell Juchi."
Badri took the baby and set it on her breast. "He's not in the fortress. His mother still stays in her yurt, and she's very ill. Otherwise he'd be here with me."
"Of course he would." The midwife shook her head, annoyed at herself "Yes. Kisirja. How could I have forgotten?" She shook her head again, not in the same way. "Very ill, aye. May Allah and the spirits be merciful to her, in this world and the next."
Fever wasted Kisirja's face. It had only grown worse through the three days that made up two cycles—two orbits of Haven round Cat's Eye. A hundred thirty hours of fever were plenty to ravage anyone. Juchi held her hand, sponged her brow, did all the other things that made Kisirja more comfortable but did no other good, no real good.
"Juchi," she whispered.
"I'm here, my mother," he said.
She smiled. "Good." She still knew him, then. For the past little while, he had not been sure. But now her hands tightened on his, with more strength than she'd shown in most of a day. "You're a good boy, a fine man, Juchi."
"Thank you, my mother."
"A good boy," Kisirja repeated. "As fine as if I'd borne you myself. A fine man." Her wits were wandering after all, Juchi thought. He took the folded cloth from her forehead, dipped it once more into the bowl of cool water beside her. As the fever grew, he'd had to do that ever more often.
Some time not much later, Kisirja drew in a long, deep breath, as if she were about to say something. Her eyes opened wide, held Juchi's. He watched awareness fade in them. When it was gone, he reached down and eased them shut.
He drew his dagger, slashed each cheek in nomad mourning. The cuts stopped bleeding almost at once. The grief took longer.
In the five T-years since the fall of Angband Base, a good deal had changed in the lands it ruled. A wall of mud-brick surrounded Tallinn Town now, and the folk had learned much. Self-defense was one of those things; Juchi Khan kept his promise, and ruled the settled folk as part of his own people, not conquered subjects. That meant that they must bear their part in defending the combined territories of tribe and valley; which meant learning to fight, something new to them except for the merchants whose business took them travelling. These past many years, the Saurons had defended Tallinn Valley, scorning any help from cattle. Now the Saurons were gone from this part of Haven, and the clan that had been Dede Korkut's and was now Juchi's needed their bows and swords and sinews.
"Cover drill," Juchi shouted. The townsmen dove into foxholes, and emerged aiming crossbows, muskets and the odd Sauron rifle. Juchi shook his head. "Too slow, too slow. Half of you would have been shot, the rest ridden over, by a charge of mounted archers. Get out and try it again."
His pupils groaned. The khan grinned without sympathy. "Suleiman's men won't have pity on you. Don't expect me to, either."
"Suleiman's men won't know the way through the minefield," one of the bolder men said.
"Mines are like sentries," Juchi told him. "They warn, they slow. They don't stop. We have to have warriors for that. Fear kept people out of this valley, fear of the Saurons. Now that the clan and town hold it instead, folk will test us to see if we are strong enough to keep it. I'm surprised the challenge has taken this long to come."
"But—" The townsman was still not cowed, not quite. Juchi grinned at him.
"Enough words." He tossed aside his weapons belt. "If you want to argue, come do it with hands and feet."
The man from Tallinn Town gulped and shook his head. His folk had not taken long to learn what the nomads already knew: no one bested Juchi in single combat.
"All right, then. You've wasted enough time complaining to catch your breath. So—cover drill!" The raw recruits sprang for their holes again.
Juchi worked them a while longer before he let them go. He walked back to the fortress his warriors now occupied. Badri and their daughter Aisha stood not far outside the bullet-scarred barracks hall. Aisha squealed and sprinted toward her father. He picked her up, flung her high in the air, caught her, flung her again, spun round and round like a top. When he set the little girl down, she took a couple of lurching steps and fell on her bottom, gurgling with laughter.
Badri came up more slowly: she was far along with their second child. He leaned forward over her protruding belly to kiss her. "How does it look?" she asked him.
He shrugged. "About as before. The latest scout in says Suleiman's warriors, and maybe another clan's with his, are gathered a few hours' ride north of the mouth of the valley. They have no herds with them; they can't be there for any reason but fighting."
Before the clan took Tallinn, that would have meant immediate combat; now he could move the flocks and noncombatants into the safety of the valley, and keep them there longer than Suleiman could wait. The enemy would have to come to him, and fight him on his own terms near his secure base.
"No, they mean to take all we have." She took his arm. "Come with me. I have something to show you, something of the fortress you have not seen yet."
"Can I come too?" Aisha asked. She was able to stand again.
"No, you play out here for a while," Badri said. Aisha stamped her foot. Badri swatted her on the bottom, just hard enough to let the little girl know she meant what she said. Aisha started throwing pebbles at the wall.
"What is this thing you have to show me?" Juchi asked. He heard the nervousness in his own voice. He sometimes was forced to remember that Badri had lived most of her life at Angband Base, that she took for granted the technology which—where it survived—he still found unnerving.
She did not answer him until they were inside the chamber next to the one they shared. Dust lay thick here; it was not a bedroom, and perhaps had not been entered since the Base fell. The fluorescent ceiling panels came on, though, when Badri flicked a switch; their unwavering light cast patterns of shade on the rough-finished stone of the walls, the crinkled edges of the papers abandoned on desks and shelves. The dangling loops of cable threw shadows across Badri's face as she walked to the keyboard and the dark screen. Juchi stared with superstitious awe at the machine on the dusty desk. "A—computer?" he whispered.
"A computer," Badri said briskly. She felt around behind it, clicked another switch. The screen lit. She went on, "Grima used it, and all the Brigade Leaders before him. He let me watch sometimes, never thinking I would see how to make it work myself. Most of what I sent to your clan, most of what I did on the night you attacked, I learned here."
Juchi imagined vengeful Saurons somehow stored inside. "You mean—it can work for us?"
But Badri said, "Why not? We hold the Base now. Grima spent a lot of time feeding it information, but he said it could extrapolate, too—and that it watched and listened even when the terminal was off. Watch." She typed the first command she had seen Grima use so often:
THREATS TO ANGBAND BASE: RANK ORDER.
Juchi stared as the Americ letters appeared one by one on the screen. He stared again, and had to hold himself in place by force of will, when more letters appeared without anyone having typed them: THREATS TO ANGBAND BASE:
1. CLANS OF SULEIMAN AND AYDIN
2. CLAN LEADER, CLAN OF JUCHI
3. MOTHER OF CLAN LEADER, CLAN OF JUCHI
4. THE CITADEL
OTHERS TOO LOW A PROBABILITY TO BE EVALUATED.
When Badri read the words, Juchi laughed, as anyone will when magic is clearly seen to be fraud. "No wonder Grima lost, if he put his faith in this thing. My mother has been dead as long as Aisha's been alive." He touched the faded scar on each cheek.
But Badri stared at the screen in some perplexity. "It was always right before. I had to order it not to put me on any of its lists, or Grima would have caught on to me." She tapped a fingernail against her teeth. "Let me try something else."
She typed again: THREATS TO CO, ANGBAND BASE, RANK ORDER. "I hope it thinks that's you," she said.
He gestured harshly. "Hush!" The answer showed below the question.
THREATS TO CO, ANGBAND BASE, the TAC wrote:
1. CLAN LEADER, CLAN OF JUCHI
2. MOTHER OF CLAN LEADER, CLAN OF JUCHI
OTHERS TOO LOW A PROBABILITY TO BE EVALUATED.
"Just read that to me," Juchi said.
Badri did, then typed END in disgust. "I'm sorry," she said, touching Juchi's hand. "I thought it would help. But then, Grima always worried about how long the machine would keep working. I suppose it's finally dead."
"Senile, anyhow." Juchi laughed again. "If the steppe clans had known this was what Angband Base used for brains, they would have attacked a hundred T-years ago."
"It really did come up with right answers," Badri insisted. But even she had to admit: "It isn't coming up with them now."
"It certainly isn't." Juchi gave her another cantilevered kiss. "I thank you for showing it to me. Were it what it once was"—What you say it once was, he thought—"it could have been valuable."
Badri shrugged, still puzzled. "If we need wisdom beyond our own," she said, "we can always go visit the Pale and ask Judge Dvora."
"Off to bed with you," Chaya said.
Her son pouted for a second, then sighed at the tone of command in his mother's voice. She lifted him for a hug, feeling the strength that was already in his arms—strength like hers, from the same source.
"Good sleep, Grandmother," he said politely, when Chaya set him down. He leaned over the coverlet to kiss the older woman's cheek.
The room seemed larger without his active presence. The muskylope-oil lamps showed plastered, painted walls and a wool hanging woven to show the Three—Piet, Ruth and Ilona, the Founders. A small tile stove kept the room warm and boiled a pot of herbs. The medicinal smell mingled with the sachet's scent of musky-sweet wildflowers; under that was a faint odor of age and sickness. Dvora's hands plucked at the coverlet, gnarled and wasted thin. So was her face, fallen in on the strong bones, but her eyes held calm intelligence beneath a feverish glitter.
"A good boy," she said, looking after him. "A strong boy; as he'll need to be."
Chaya nodded. The boy's birth, a little more than two Haven years ago, had been hard; but the babe had been bigger than most, stronger, almost preternaturally aware. The Sauron admixture. She could not remember what his father looked like. His father was Heber, she insisted to herself, and knew it for a lie. There had been no hiding what Chaya was, but Barak . . . people would accept that Heber had been his father, and put his abilities down to his mother's blood. At least most would, and those who knew better would keep silent. It was a little less conspicuous now, with all the orphans from Angband growing up Bandari.
"So." Dvora smiled, "A Judge you will be, after all. Our lives run in circles, bringing us back where we'd never thought to be, nu?"
"It's a living," Chaya said, looking away from the affectionate irony. "Apart from making swords and killing Saurons, about the only thing I've shown any talent for."
It was lucky much of the Pale's Law was tradition, inherited not just from the long-destroyed settlements at Degania and New Vilnius, but from the other strains as well. Balt and Litvak, exiled Israeli kibbutznik and mutant hell-planet Boer had long since melded into the People . . . and then there were the forming folk of Eden, Americ by race, Christians of a forbidding dourness by faith, still not wholly reconciled to inclusion in the Pale of Settlement after all these generations.
With Barak and his protégé at her side, Chaya had made very sure that no Saurons lingered near the ruins of Angband, disguised as tribal folk or bandits until they could warn their fellows. Increasingly, she'd taken over her mother's duties as Judge; and the folk of Tallinn had asked her to come there, as well. Juchi had not begrudged it; the families were close, and he felt in her debt, for Heber. She thought she'd repaid Dvora for her earlier unhappiness. And she thought she was fulfilling her father's and her husband's dream of joining Pale and Tallinn valleys into one people. Just as, three hundred T-years before, Boer and sabra, Balt and neo-Hassid had been joined to make the Bandari; and as Bandari and Edenite had been . . . more or less . . .joined.
There was plenty of work, and you could find forgetfulness in work. Five hundred Sauron children from Angband, and as many again of their women—some tribute maidens, some Sauron-born; all to be integrated into the clans, with incomprehension and prejudice in plenty on both sides. That had been her special charge, and a success.
"Oh, power is a strong lover," Dvora said. "But you'll find he's a cold, demanding one as well, and fickle."
Chaya shook her head, half in negation, half in rueful acknowledgement. "Besides," she said, "I'm not the Judge. Yet. Considering my heritage . . ."
"Which can't be officially acknowledged." Dvora chuckled at the legalism, then wheezed; her daughter held her head up and helped her drink the extract of timurgaunt—Tamerlane's Gauntlet—that strengthened the heart. It helped, but not as much as it had. Fluid was building up, pressing on the heart and on the lungs. Heart failure was a great killer on Haven, for those lucky enough to live past middle age: constant cold and air thinner than humans had been bred to bear. "You are my daughter."
"Miriam's your sister; she'd be a better choice."
"Miriam is busy smithing, when she isn't making babies," Dvora said. "You're it, my girl; Judge after me."
The office was not officially hereditary, but if the child was qualified, the parent counted for a good deal; the People were careful of such things. "Hush, rest a while," Chaya said.
"This came to me the night of the battle," Dvora said when her breathing had eased a little. She slipped from her withered hand the ruby that Chaya had once used as a signal. "It is time to give it back to you."
She closed her eyes and lay quietly until her daughter thought that she was sleeping; Chaya smoothed the coverlet and brown linen sheets, preparing to leave.
But Dvora rose. Her voice was wild, and her eyes seemed to look beyond the room—beyond Strang, or the waking world. "Awake, awake, Dvora!" she cried, more shaman than Judge in that moment. "Did you think that I did not know?"
"Know what?"
"As I did with you, giving a dead man the name of father to a Sauron child. Lightning was never Heber's child." The old, filmy eyes flashed with their former cunning.
"A life for a life," Chaya said, stony calm.
Dvora nodded. "I do not fault you, though I shudder, perhaps, at what you did. But the time when I needed to pass judgment on anything is long gone. Now, I merely know; and you must know too. Do you recall, daughter, the night before Heber asked for you, I told you how I found you on the steppe?" Chaya nodded.
"We've never spoken of that since, yet, seeing Lightning, I have thought about it often." Her ringless hands reached out to clasp her adopted daughter's.
"There were two babies left to die, you recall. You, and a boy. A brother." Dvora fell back, exhausted by her words. "Good . . . bye," she said.
Chaya stared for a moment, then sprang to the door. "Mediko, mediko!" she shouted, her voice raw with fear.
The man rushed in, blinking with sleep, then paused by the bedside, folding the twisted hands on the sheet. Chaya stopped him with a gesture, then closed her mother's eyes herself.
"The Lord gives, and the Lord takes—" she began, but her voice choked.
"—blessed be the name of the Lord," the mediko finished for her.
Numbness descended; she was hardly aware of friendly hands urging her out of the room.
Dvora bat Lizabet was buried by the side of her husband, who had also been a Judge among the People, on a hillside outside Strang. An ancient rusted cross in the shape of an X stood on the hill, where Boaz the Prophet had hung his daughter Ruth for rebellion. That had been in the time when van Reenan's band came to the Eden Valley, refugees from the Wasting the Dol Guldur brought to Haven. Captain Piet van Reenan had taken Ruth down from the cross of iron, and together they had overthrown Boaz; from him and Ilona ben Zvi and Ruth Boazdaughter flowed the blood that still ruled as kapeteins of the People . . . as often as Judges, too. The ruler's conscience, living proof that Power must be subject to Law.
Ruth lay here beneath a marble slab carved with the last power tool in Eden Valley. All her successors lay here too—ragged piles of stone from the terrible years of the People's beginnings, then others carved with increasing skill, until the latest bore chisel-work as fine as the pre-Wasting machines could have made. Lapidoth's carried his name, and a single sentence: Greater lave than this has no man. Ruth's stone held her dying words. As Dvora's child, Chaya must now recite that ancient farewell to the crowd that covered the hill slope and the fields beyond, nearly to the high stone walls of Strang:
" . . . Let your grief be light," she went on, "it's only when a parent buries a child that grief is heavy; this is the way of nature. But remember me, remember all of us. Remember that you can see farther if you stand on our shoulders . . . . From my sister Ilona's heritage, remember that we are nothing without the Law that binds us one to another. From mine, remember that the Law was made for us, not we for the Law; love is the final commandment. From Piet: be strong, for without strength and courage there can be no Law, nor love, nor peace. Together we are the People."
More and more voices joined hers, a thousand fold whisper across the plain, through the ruddy darkness of dimday. Any of the People could recite it; this was spoken every year at the Ruth's Day service, and at most funerals. All of them joined her on the final:
"Good-bye."
Tears flowed down her face, drying quickly; beside her Barak wept—and his tears too, glistened only for a second beneath Cat's Eye. Many of the crowd were in tears. All Judges were respected, but Dvora had been loved. Dvora's sister Miriam stood by the graveside, with her infant daughter in her arms; the baby cried thinly as her mother's tears dripped on her face.
Juchi and his family were present as well; he had cut his face in his own people's gesture of mourning, used only for a great leader or the closest of kin.
"Your grief is mine, Chaya Khatun," he said quietly, in good Bandarit "Judge Dvora was a strong ally and a good friend." Beside him, Badri had covered her face with her shawl, head bowed in sadness; Aisha buried her face in her mother's skirts, against the swollen belly of her pregnancy.
A few cycles later, Suleiman and his allies attacked—although not so many allies as there might have been, if the Pale had not thrown the weight of its diplomacy behind its friends. Juchi's clan and the men of Tallinn Town threw them back. Among the prisoners they took was a fair-sized contingent from the clan of Aydin.
Juchi wondered about that, a little. He tried to remember whether the scouts had known just who Suleiman's main partner was. He didn't think so. Even clan shamans made lucky guesses every so often.
And when the triumphant warriors came back to the fortress, he found that Badri had presented him with a son. That drove all thoughts of the ancient computer from his head.
She wanted to call the boy Dagor. It was a likely enough sounding name. He didn't argue with her.
The clan, Juchi thought, was fat. For some of his men, that was literally true: he watched a couple of middle-aged warriors walking into Tallinn Town to buy something or other, and their bellies hung over their belts. In the old days, out on the steppe, a fat nomad, save maybe a shaman, would have been hard to imagine. Life was too harsh. Juchi shrugged; the younger men were with the flocks, and training hard.
The old days . . . Juchi laughed a little, and shook his head. Hard to believe more than a dozen T-years had slipped by since Angband Base fell. His own body belied them. It was as firm, hard, and tireless now as then. Just the other day, though, Badri had plucked a white hair from his beard. He shook his head again. Nothing, he thought, lasted forever.
Even that little philosophizing, far from profound, was unlike him. He left off as a horseman rode up. The messenger dismounted and bowed. "Khan, I brought your words to Suleiman. He agrees that they hold wisdom."
"Good," Juchi said. "He will meet with me, then?"
"Aye, khan, in two cycles' time. He asks if you would meet with him here or out on the steppe."
"On the steppe," Juchi said at once. "He and his men would only spy if we invited them into the valley—into our valley."
"Aye," the messenger said again.
"You need not tell him I said that, though. Tell him . . . hmm . . . tell him that, as we are plainsmen too, the plains are the fitting place to discuss our differences and to settle once and for all the boundaries of our clans' grazing lands."
The messenger nodded, mumbling to himself as he memorized the words. Then he grinned. "Shall I also tell him that we'll run his men into the Northern Sea if he doesn't keep within the bounds we set him?"
Juchi grinned back. "He knows that already. If he didn't, he'd still be fighting instead of talking. He's stubborn as a stone."
"He's jealous, is what he is," the messenger said.
"I suppose so. Every nomad khan dreams of taking a valley for himself."
"But you didn't dream—you did it. We did it. And every time Suleiman comes sniffing around, we send him away with a bloody nose."
"I told you—that's why he's finally willing to talk."
"No doubt you're right, khan." The messenger sketched a salute, climbed back on his horse, and headed north at a trot.
Juchi walked into the courtyard of the fortress, and almost got trampled by a mob of boys playing football. That was what his clan called the game, anyhow. To the children from Tallinn Town, it was soccer. He'd never met the odd-sounding word till his people conquered Angband Base; he wondered idly if the locals had borrowed it from Saurons.
His own son was at the head of the yelling pack, running and dodging as fast and lithe as the rest of the boys, though they were anywhere from two to four T-years older. Juchi remembered his own childhood. He'd been more than a match for children his age, too.
As he watched, Dagor booted the ball past the other team's goalie and into the makeshift net. "Good shot, Dagor, lad!" he called, waving to his son. Soon the boy would be old enough for warrior's sports, tent-pegging with a lance and buzkashi.
Dagor's grin, already enormous, grew even wider as he waved back. The boy's comrades swarmed over him, lifted him onto their shoulders. Again Juchi thought of his own youth, of the day he'd been named warleader. Seeing Dagor get such acclaim so young made him want to burst with pride.
When he found Badri, he spoke of the football game before he mentioned the talks Suleiman had agreed to. "Why meet him on the steppe?" Badri asked.
As he had for the messenger, he explained his reasons. Badri nodded when he was done. "That makes sense," she agreed. "But remember—and never let Suleiman forget—that you are not just of the plains. You hold Tallinn Valley, too. Go out to the steppe, then, but go with all the trappings, all the ceremonial, that shows you to be a lord as well as a khan, if you know what I'm saying."
"Yes, I do." He kissed her. "Your advice is always good. That's one reason I've never looked—well, never more than looked—at anyone else." By law he was entitled to four wives, and by custom and wealth a chief could have many women. He kissed her again. "But it's only one reason. There are others."
"Let me shut the door first," she said.
When the time came for Juchi to ride out to meet Suleiman, he remembered what Badri had suggested. He put on a linen tunic instead of the wool and leather he usually wore, to remind the other khan he ruled farmers as well as plainsmen.
And he decided to be lavish when he armed himself. He did not just sling his assault rifle on his back and have done. He put on crisscrossing belts of shiny brass cartridges, too, one over each shoulder—let Suleiman see that Angband Base's machine shop could still turn out cartridge cases.
A sword and a knife hung from the left side of his belt. He started to put another knife on the right, then had a better idea. He rummaged through a leather sack he did not remember opening since he came to the fortress. Sure enough, the pistol he had taken from that arrogant robber on the steppe was inside.
He buckled it on. Since he got his rifle, he'd had no need for the lesser firearm. He was not even sure the rounds would still fire. Today, though, he did not care. He only needed it as one more thing with which to overawe Suleiman.
Feeling quite the fearsome warrior, he swaggered out to Badri. "How do I look?" he asked.
Her lips quirked. " 'Overwhelming' is the word that comes to mind."
He smiled too, but answered, "Good. That's the word I want to come to mind."
Then Badri noticed the pistol. "You've never worn that before."
"Why bother, when I have the assault rifle?" He reached over his shoulder and patted the Kalashnikov's barrel.
"No reason at all," Badri said. "I just didn't know you had it, that's all. May I see it?"
"Of course." Juchi saw nothing odd in the request. Before she was a plainsman's woman, Badri had been a Sauron's woman. He would have been more surprised were she not interested in weapons. He took the pistol from its holster and showed it to her.
"Where did you get this?"
Juchi blinked. The words tumbled out in a harsh whisper, unlike anything he'd ever heard Badri use before. She was staring from him to the pistol and back again. She had gone pale. That alarmed him. In all the time he'd known her, he'd never seen her show fear.
"I took it from a bandit I killed, out on the steppe a couple of T-years before we won Tallinn Valley. He was going to steal my muskylope, but he took me up when I said I'd fight him for it. I broke his neck."
The pride the memory put into his voice faltered as he looked at her face. "What's wrong? Tell me, Badri, please."
"This pistol belonged to a Soldier once. A couple of T-years before Angband Base fell, he went out to the plains to scout a clan that the computer—the computer you don't believe in—said was growing dangerous. It was the clan of Dede Korkut. He never came back."
Badri spoke mechanically, as if by keeping all emotion from her words she could keep it from her heart as well. Then, at last, her voice broke. She looked down at the floor as she went on, "His—his name was Dagor."
"The name you gave our son." Now Juchi's voice too was empty and cold.
"The name I gave my son. Dagor and I had three sons, three sons and a daughter. None of them lived. The girl and one boy were twins, Sauron culls, set out for stobor. I was just a girl myself, then. The other two, later, had accidents. It happens. He was far from a bad man, Juchi—I've known a bad man. His name, at least, deserved—deserves—to go on."
"As you say." After a moment, Juchi found he could bear to have a son named for Badri's onetime consort. After all, the man—the Sauron—was fifteen T-years dead and gone, while he and Badri were very much together. He found he could not even blame her for not saying where young Dagor's name came from. The quiet had kept the peace, and with any luck both quiet and peace might have lasted forever.
"You—broke his neck, you said?" Badri asked. Juchi nodded. "How could that be? Dagor was a Soldier, a Sauron."
Juchi understood what she meant. No one, not even a man with Frystaat blood, could match reflexes with a Sauron in unarmed combat. He said slowly, "Maybe I took the pistol from a bandit, one of a band, say, that had ambushed Dagor."
"That must be it!" Badri brightened a little. She had long since known, long since accepted, that Dagor was dead. Thinking the man she loved now was the one who had slain him was something else again. "What did he look like, this bandit you killed?"
"I'll never forget him," Juchi said. "He gave me maybe the toughest fight I ever had. He was a few centimeters taller than I am. He had more reach, too, and knew what to do with it. He was Caucasoid, more or less—dark eyes, but fair-skin and light brown hair, a little lighter than mine. He had a short white scar, just below one eye—the left one, I think."
"You have painted me Dagor's image in words." Badri shook her head, over and over. "How could that be?" she repeated. Then, fierce as a tamerlane, she burst out, "Who—what—was your mother, Juchi? Why did the computer call her such a threat to the Base? Why did the computer call you such a threat to the Base?"
"Because it's daft," Juchi growled. "Because it's old and mad. I wish someone had put a bullet through it when we took Angband Base. Then it wouldn't be here to worry you."
To his relief, Badri changed the subject. "How old are you, Juchi? Exactly how old, I mean."
He needed to think. "As near as I can reckon it, a bit over four Haven years—say, about thirty-one T-years." He had no idea why she wanted to know, nor did he care. Talking of anything but Dagor—Dagor the elder, he amended—suited him fine. "I hope that satisfies you. Whether or not, though, I have to leave. Suleiman is waiting."
He walked to the door. Behind him, very softly, Badri whispered, "Who was your mother, Juchi? Oh, who?" He did not turn back.
"It is agreed, then." Suleiman's wrinkles arranged themselves into a smile. "We shall not graze our herds southwest of a line drawn straight north from the fifth ridge to the west of your valley, nor shall your herds graze north or east of that same line."
"It is agreed, aye." Juchi's voice was hollow. He knew he should have been able to claim grazing lands stretching two or three ridges farther northeast, but his heart was not in the dickering, not today.
He still had no truck with the flashing words Badri had read him from the computer screen. They were too far outside his experience for him to take them seriously. But what his mother had said while she was dying came back now to trouble his thoughts. What if her wits had not been caught in fever's grip? What then?
What indeed? he thought. How could he hope to find out? Kisirja was dead. Whom else could he hope to ask? He pounded a fist into his thigh. Who better than his wet nurse? He'd had little to do with Nilufer since the clan came to Tallinn Valley; her family grazed their herds on the far limits of the tribe's territories and visited seldom. Now with her sons' sons married, she had come to live in the softer climate near the town.
As fast as politeness allowed, or maybe a little faster, he took leave of Suleiman. The old khan did not seem offended. Compared to grazing land, manners were a trifle.
On the ride back to the valley, Juchi wondered if he shouldn't let the whole thing drop. But no, he couldn't, not now, not with Badri so upset. And his own curiosity was roused. He'd always been sure of who he was. Now, suddenly, he doubted. Allah and the spirits willing, Nilufer would set his mind at ease.
Nilufer was a widow these days. She lived in a small yurt close by the larger one that belonged to her eldest son. She poked her head through the door-curtain in surprise when Juchi called from the outside, asking leave to enter.
"Honor to the khan! Of course you are welcome!" She held the curtain wide. "Come, come! Will you take tea?"
"Thank you. You are gracious." The rituals of hospitality let Juchi adapt to the gloom inside the black-felt yurt. He sat cross-legged on a threadbare rug, sipped Nilufer's tea, nibbled a strip of jerked mutton.
After the polite and pointless small talk that accompanied meat and drink, Nilufer asked, "How may I serve the khan?" Her eyes twinkled. "I fear my breasts are too old to please him now."
Juchi laughed. After so much strain, that felt strange and good. He said, "As a matter of fact, your breasts are the very reason I came." That made Nilufer giggle, but Juchi went on, "No, no, I speak the truth. I want you to tell me why I needed a wet nurse when I was a baby."
"Why does any baby need a wet nurse?" Nilufer said. "Your mother had no milk to give you." But the sparkle was gone from her face and voice. Something else replaced it—caution, Juchi judged. She was not telling all she knew.
"That I gathered," he said. "Why was it so?"
"I couldn't rightly tell you, khan, not for certain," Nilufer said. She could not meet his eyes, either.
"Why not?" he persisted. "My mother must have given you some reason. Was I perhaps an unusually difficult birth?"
He watched her seize the pretext. "Yes, that's it, that's just what she said, poor thing," she said eagerly.
"You're lying." His voice was a whiplash. Nilufer flinched away from it. "What is it you don't want to tell me? How can it matter, after so long?"
"You won't be angry with me?" she quavered.
"No, not for the truth, by Allah and the spirits. I swear it." He realized he had got up on one knee, had moved toward her as if in threat. No, not as if. He eased himself back to the rug. "I will not be angry at you."
"All right. All right." A little spirit returned to her voice. "As you say, it was long ago, and the Saurons are gone from Angband Base now—all of them but you."
"What? Me? You're mad, old woman." Juchi laughed harshly. "Do you say my mother slipped away from the tents to sleep with a Sauron Soldier?"
"She slipped away from the tents, aye, but not to sleep with the Saurons—rather, to rob them. They cast out infants that did not suit them. Most the beasts took, or the cold, but not all. You were one of the lucky few."
"I don't believe you." I don't want to believe you, he thought. He found a question that had to make a liar of her: "If what you say is true, why has no one ever told me this fable before?"
"At first, khan, it was for fear that if you knew you were of Sauron blood, you might flee the clan and go back to Angband Base. After a while, I suppose, folk had got into the habit of silence. But now that the Saurons are long gone, I don't see what difference it makes whether you know. And if you doubt me, Juchi Khan, think on the meaning of your name."
"Guest," Juchi whispered. His world tottered round him. "Juchi."
"The same word," Nilufer nodded. "You've been a cherished guest, an honored guest, and now a great and mighty guest. But always, as I told you, you were a lucky guest. Both babes the Saurons set out that night were lucky."
"Both babes?" Juchi stared at her. "What new tale is this?"
"One not everyone knows. But your mother—Kisirja, I mean, Allah and the spirits give her peace—your mother told me that two babies, both newborn, lay exposed by Angband Base then. Just as she picked up the one that was you, a Bandari woman took the other."
His world had tottered. Now it crashed down. "That would have been a girl," he said in a dead voice.
"I really couldn't tell you one way or the other. Your mother never said."
"Yes, she did. Just a few hours ago. My mother."
Nilufer scratched her head. "What's that?"
Juchi did not answer. Instead he turned and leaped out through the door-curtain. Nilufer stared after him. He sped toward the fortress, swift and straight as an arrow from a compound bow.
"Allah," Nilufer exclaimed. He'd left his horse behind. "I wonder what the poor fellow's trouble is. I hope it's not something I said."
Juchi ran.
His father, dead under his hands. His wife, his mother; his daughter, his sister; his son, his brother.
"What have I done?" he cried. "Allah, what have we done?"
The fortress where he lived—the fortress where he'd been born—was a couple of kilometers away. He ran through fields of ripening barley. As he ran, he thought only of his own field, his field of double sowing, the field in which he'd grown and where he'd sown his children. He groaned, and ran on.
Men were working in the fields. They shouted as he trampled the grain. When he did not swerve, they chased him. He outran them. That had always been easy. Now he knew why.
The fortress drew nearer, nearer. He ran through the gates. Men waved, called out to ask how the parley with Suleiman had gone or simply to greet him. He answered none of them, but sped to the barracks hall.
There at last his way was blocked. The clan's shaman stood in the doorway. Tireshyas had been plump on the steppe. Now he was so fat that any doorway he stood in, he filled. When he saw Juchi, he went white. "Lord khan, your wife-"
"My wife," Juchi's voice, his eyes, were so terrible that Tireshyas fell back a pace. "My wife! You are one of those who knew I sprang not from the clan but from a Sauron's woman, not so?"
Already agitated and now frightened and confused, the shaman stuttered, "Well, well, yes, lord khan, yes, but—"
"And you knew I took a Sauron's woman to wife." Juchi stepped forward, filling the space from which Tireshyas had retreated. "And you never thought to wonder if the two might be the same. My mother. My wife. Badri."
Horror filled Tireshyas' face. "Lord khan, she is—" Again Juchi interrupted, this time with a kick that sank deep into the soft flab of Tireshyas' belly. The shaman flew backward and crashed to the floor.
Juchi sprang over him. "Badri! Where are you? I'm coming for you!" In his own ears, the words sounded more like stobor's howl than speech.
He heard people behind him. Behind did not matter. They could never catch him. Then someone came out into the hall, right in front of him. He did not know if the man would try to stop him. He did not care. He hammered him down and ran on.
The door to the chamber where he and Badri slept, the door to the chamber where their children had begun, the door to the chamber where, for all he knew, he had begun—that door was open. Juchi went in. "Badri!"
No reply. She was not there. He unslung his assault rifle. He'd find her soon, and then . . . half a burst for her and the rest, as much as he could fire before finger slipped from trigger, for him. And even that was not enough. How could one quick instant of pain make amends for—for the twisted thing their lives had proved to be?
"Badri." Cradling the rifle, he went out to the hall again. The doorway next to his was also ajar, unlocked, as it had not been in a Haven year and more. Through it he saw the dusty glow of the computer screen. He growled, deep in his throat. The cursed computer had been his doom. He would drag it down to hell with him.
He wanted to shoot it in the belly at close range as if it were a human enemy, and watch it die. He darted into its—its lair, he thought.
He did not fire. The light from the screen let him see a tiny motion, off to one side. He whirled toward it. "Badri," he whispered. He had found her.
She was dead. Hanging by a rope fastened to one of the wrought-iron hooks that held the cables, her face dark and distorted. She wore a wool cape, held in place by a heavy golden brooch, steppe work that he had given her. A chair lay overturned behind her.
Juchi let the rifle fail. "Ah, Badri," he cried, half in anguish, half in envy. "You found the truth before me!"
He drew his knife and cut her down. How long he held her, lost and alone in his worse than grief, he never knew. When he looked up, the doorway was full of staring, silent faces.
"Let me by," someone said, her voice small but insistent "Let me by. I must see."
"No!" Juchi groaned wildly to the unheeding faces. "Not her! Not my—" He choked, could not go on. What word ought he to use? Daughter? Sister?
Aisha pushed through the crowd. Juchi watched the color drain from her cheeks. Her eyes, black and enormous and staring, were Badri's eyes. And his own. "Father?" she whispered. "Mother?"
Seeing her, the sweet child-woman who never should have been, Juchi knew he could never face her, not now, not ever again.
He undid Badri's brooch, weighed it long in his hand. With a great shout of pain and fury, he plunged the pin first into one eye, then the other, again and again and again. The last sound he heard before he fainted was Aisha's scream.
Screams came from the ruined fortress. Chaya's son stiffened. He did not think of it as a place of danger; they had been coming here on visits all his life, and he had called the khatun Badri "aunt" from almost the day he learned the word. With the rapid movements that had made the people of the Pale and Tallinn Valley nickname him Lightning, he was up and running toward the gate.
Her son came running back. "It's Tantie Badri, Mother!" he cried. "She is dead, hanged, and Khan Juchi has blinded himself. They are calling for you."
His face was pale around the eyes and mouth, and his throat worked. She rose more slowly from her seat beside the camel, sorrow dulling her. Now the truth was revealed, it hurt even worse than she had feared that it might. Juchi. In all ways but one, her match. And in that one way . . . he belonged to Badri.
Belonged in two ways, God help them all. Was this God's curse upon them? What had they done? What had any of them done?
Of all the secrets that she had heard as a Judge, this was the hardest to bear; even harder than the secret of her own son's birth. And she kept it, for the good of the folk she served.
They were waiting for her outside her home, the people of town and tribe. "My son has told me," she said, waving aside their explanations and exclamations of horror. "Bring me to them."
"Aisha found her own mother, hanging . . ."
"The poor girl, brought up a princess, and who will wed her now?"
"Son and daughter, accursed, accursed . . ."
"Who will guard us now?"
I must protect my . . . my niece. And my nephew too, if we are to salvage anything from this disaster.
"Quiet!" Chaya snapped. "The girl is guiltless. And it will be a wonder if she is not scared witless." But she will not be. She comes of good stock.
Just as Chaya quickened her pace, two of the elder men came up to her. "Judge," they said, "surely incest is a crime."
"And will you try the dead and blind for what they did not know?"
"You have always said ignorance is no escape from the Law."
Chaya slipped past the drillbit-gnawed fragments of retaining wall. Hearing the shrill mourning of the women and Juchi's pleas for death, she shivered and quickened her pace.
"Who is it now?" cried Juchi. "Who has come to look upon the monster?"
His head was wrapped in bloody bandages, but it snapped toward her with the keen hearing they shared. "The Judge? Chaya Khatun? You have courage beyond the lot of most women . . . all but one, Allah grant her pity! I beg you, kill me."
It would be a mercy. It would be the kindest thing that Chaya could do for her brother. It would be fratricide, the oldest crime. She dared not. And, if she were to save anything at all from this tragedy, she must not even explain why.
"I have told him," the tribe's shaman Tireshyas said, "that, accursed as he is, anyone who slays him will take on an immense burden of ill luck. Do you agree with me that he must leave this place?"
To wander lost? Better he had died the night he had been set out. Then Angband Base would still stand; Chaya's child would never have been born; and another generation would have grown up in slavery. She could not wish his life—and hers—undone. They had wrought too long and too well together, even though their lives had been built upon a lie.
Now, because of that lie and the concealments that went with it, their work might easily lie in ruins by tonight. If they had only known—and spoken—the truth! She was at fault there too, having known (or at least suspected) and kept silent all these years.
Yet Juchi was her brother, her ally, too, for more than half her life. She could not condemn him to death wandering the steppe.
"In all I did, I sought for good," he mourned.
Tireshyas turned to him. "And in all you did, you were confounded." He picked up a stick and handed it to him. "If still you strive for good, you will do as I have asked, and leave us."
Juchi bowed his mutilated head. "I will. Maybe among strangers I can find the end I seek."
"Father, oh, Father!" That was Aisha's voice, and it broke the former khan, who sobbed dryly, without eyes or tears.
"Care for my children," he said. "Their part in this was innocent."
Did Chaya imagine that his sightless eyes turned toward her? "I promise," she said, even as the shaman gravely agreed. He looked at her over Juchi's head and nodded. Perhaps away from the tribe, they would have a chance at some kind of decent life.
"Would you let them see you one last time?" the shaman asked Juchi. "Aisha begs for nothing else."
No! Chaya did not know how she kept from screaming.
"If you have any pity," Juchi begged, "spare me that!"
Tireshyas opened a door and admitted a young man whom Chaya had seen before: Juchi's escort past the valley's minefields. It was a hard mercy, not to waste even a mine on an outcast, but Chaya understood. Who knew how Juchi's death might curse the tribe?
Juchi shuffled out the door leaning on a stick, one hand on the young man's shoulder. Behind him, Tireshyas made a sign against evil.
A scream went up among the women. Chaya ran forward. Aisha had broken free of the women who held her and was running toward her father and her guide.
"No!" Juchi cried, but she flung herself at his feet, the scarf falling from her dark, disheveled braids. Tears sparkled on her high cheekbones, so like her parents'—or Chaya's own; and she sobbed, forgetting calm, forgetting dignity, forgetting the modesty of an unwed girl and all else but that her father (and brother) was vanishing from her life.
Again he shook his head, and gestured at his guide. The young man bent to raise her. Aisha jerked away, and rose on her own. She wiped hands across her face and drew herself up, abruptly cold and dignified.
"Can you deny you love me? Will you add that to what you have cost me?" she asked. Her eyes were wild with guilt as Juchi flinched under her words, weakening as he had not weakened when she had wept and flung herself at his feet.
"I can see through the minefields as well as you," she told the young man who might, had life been gentler, have offered Juchi riches for the right to wed her. "You may go back now."
Juchi embraced his daughter, hiding his ruined face against her slender shoulder. Head up, she glared at the watchers as she comforted her father. Then she led him away. Their path turned twice, and they were out of sight.
Chaya's eyes filmed with tears, then cleared.
"If this is anyone's fault," she said, "it lies on the heads of the Saurons and their accursed breeding program."
Cursing your own, are you, girl? she asked wryly. Nevertheless, that brought mutters of agreement. You could always blame a misfortune on the Evil Eye or the Saurons, anywhere on Haven—and as far as the Saurons were concerned, she thought, it was no less than the truth.
"I say we must have the truth," she declared to the shaman. "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. And," she took a deep breath, "I shall begin."
She pulled off her glove and worked her ruby ring free.
Beckoning to her son, she handed him the ring.
"Take this . . ." She drew a deep breath. "Take it and give it to your cousin."
She turned to face the town and tribe she had judged for all these years. It was time that they judge her as they had already judged her family. More than the fate of a few people hung on their decision. They could separate; they could even swear a blood feud. Or they could all spend their lives trying to repair what had been done.
"But for you!" she cried out, turning eastward. Toward the Citadel, toward the Saurons. "For you, monsters, destroyers, accursed of God—for the Saurons there will never be forgiveness. Eye for eye, tooth for a tooth; limb for limb, stripe for stripe—and for a life, a life!"