The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) by Kate Elliott Page B

camp.
    Other tents sprawled out on two sides, and occasionally a person moved between the tents. Beyond the tents, herds of animals grazed. On the other two sides, instead of looking at the street below or at the blank wash of wall, you looked out at an endless horizon of grass and hill, and the wind brushed the grass in wave upon wave upon wave, sweeping layers of bright and dark across the plains in a pattern that never repeated itself. The distance was so real, so four dimensional, that even knowing better Ilyana still caught herself at times on the verge of walking out into it.
    The carpet she stood on had been handwoven of grass. It gave beneath her feet just as a mat of trampled grass would, and its dry scent stirred in her nostrils. The ceiling lofted above, disguised by an infinite projection of sky, sometimes cloudy, sometimes bright, and always with a sun different than Earth’s sun, and with a moon larger than Earth’s moon.
    Vasil’s patrons and flunkies loved this flat. It was part of his reputation. Even Valentin, entering, relaxed, but Ilyana tensed. She hated it. She despised her mother for hiding here. Because of the fire codes, one old-fashioned latched window had been left in the streetside wall. A seamless holo projection covered it, but now and again, when everyone else was asleep or out, Ilyana would sneak it open, as if to let in a whiff of London—the curved, supple roofs, the unearthly lights, the breath of here and now.
    “Your mother is resting,” said Vasil as the door shut behind them. He ducked inside one of the small tents; Ilyana shared the other small tent with Valentin. By the fire pit, little Evdokia crouched next to a pot of water in which she washed vegetables with four-year-old solemnity. Anton stood by the corral, the stretch of wall that disguised the door into the bathroom, beating on a pillow with a piece of wood shaved to look like a saber. One of the flunkies was here, in the corner where the big carpet loom was tacked down on the ground; she was an aspiring actress who had decided instead that she had been given a mystical calling to apprentice at traditional weaving with the great actor’s wife. Ilyana thought the sloe-eyed young woman looked ridiculous dressed in cast-off jaran clothing, but her presence meant that Ilyana didn’t have to spend hours every night weaving and spinning.
    “Here,” said Ilyana, giving her duffel to Valentin. Then she went into the great tent. The projection walls were fantastic, of course; it was practically impossible not to believe in the illusion. But inside the tent even Ilyana could forget for an instant that she had ever left the tribes.
    Weavings curtained the interior. Embroidered pillows were piled neatly in one corner. The bronze warming stove sat on its stag-headed legs next to a carved wooden chest inlaid with bone and gold. Leather flasks hung from the ceiling poles, and the great leather vessel used for fermented milk sat on a metal trivet, surrounded by its attendant dishes and a wooden scoop. Ilyana opened the chest and got out wooden bowls and spoons. She set them on the rugs, which were layered three deep in the outer chamber of the tent, and then pushed past the curtain, stepping up onto the six deep carpets of the inner chamber of the tent.
    Karolla Arkhanov reclined on a raised wooden bed. Sitting on a stool by her feet was another flunky, this one a producer’s daughter who had recently managed the transition into being allowed into the intimacy of the family quarters of the tent by virtue of having accidentally been in the flat when the new baby had come five days ago. She had made herself useful by boiling water and pounding the birth rhythms on the drum, and had thus been granted a status which she evidently deemed glorious but which Ilyana knew was the equivalent of a favored servant. Right now she was spinning, and rocking the baby’s cradle with rhythmic pushes of one foot while Karolla gave her a desultory