The Novels of the Jaran: Jaran, An Earthly Crown, His Conquering Sword, and The Law of Becoming by Elliott Kate

Author:Elliott, Kate [Elliott, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480435223
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DESPITE HIMSELF, JIROANNES FOUND the city of Karkand impressive. In its own foreign way, the city rivaled the Great King’s capital of Flowering Mountain in southern Vidiya. Two walls enclosed Karkand. The outermost wall ringed a huge expanse of land, fields, gardens, orchards, and suburbs watered by canals, but the Habakar had given these flats up for lost and most of the population had retreated inside the massive inner walls that fortified the twin hills of the main city.

Eight days after the army had besieged the city, Jiroannes rode with Mitya through these environs. Peasants from the lands surrounding Hamrat and from farther south had filtered in behind the army and taken the fields and the houses and now worked them for their jaran masters. Still, the place was half deserted, and the season was turning.

The triple arched gateway through the outer wall opened onto a broad square paved with stone. Beyond the square three tree-lined avenues thrust into the suburbs. To the right, a marketplace sprawled along the inner wall, farmers and merchants selling vegetables and grain. They stared at the fifty jaran riders, Mitya’s escort, but went about their business nonetheless. Traffic passed through the smaller of the three gateways, men trundling carts or leading donkeys laden with goods.

To the left, a marble fountain spilled water down a series of ledges. To Jiroannes’s surprise, a woman dressed in white sat alone and unveiled and unmolested by the pool at the foot of the fountain. She sat with her hands in her lap and a ceramic beaker at her right hand. Now and again a man halted before her, and she dipped the beaker into the pool and offered him water to drink. When the jaran riders paced by, she watched them apprehensively, but she did not move from her station beside the splashing fountain. Jiroannes noted that the skin of her hands was very fine, the mark of a woman who has not been forced to engage in any heavier labor than dipping water from a font. Her complexion was not as fine, sitting out in the sun as she was, but she looked far less sun-coarsened than did the jaran women, who without exception of rank or age worked at tasks fit only for a slave.

“She might as well be a jaran woman,” said Jiroannes. “I had not noticed that Habakar women were so immodest. But perhaps she is a prostitute.”

Bakhtiian had elevated the Habakar general’s son up from his status as prisoner and allowed him freedom as Mitya’s interpreter, because the boy had learned khush, and because the boy was about Mitya’s age. Qushid hid a look of horror behind one hand and after a moment uncovered his face again. He was tall, taller than Mitya, dark-complexioned with close-cropped black hair, but reserved to the point of seeming stupid. Bakhtiian’s chief wife conducted a school for those so favored by her husband, and this boy attended it by Bakhtiian’s order, learning khush and the ways of the jaran.

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