THE (tlpq-4) (17 page)

"What about when you see things that aren't there?" Small Kae said.

"Dreams, you mean?" Eiah asked.

Maati leaned forward on the podium. The classroom was larger than they

required, all six of his students sitting in the first row. The high,

narrow windows that had never known glass let the evening breeze disturb

their lanterns. He had ended his remarks early. He found there was less

need to fill the time with his knowledge than there had once been. Now a

few remarks and comments would spur conversation and analysis that often

led far from where he had intended. But it was rarely unproductive and

never dull.

"Dreams," Small Kae said. "Or when you mistake things for other things."

"My brother had a fever once," Ashti Beg said. "Saw rats coming through

the walls for three days."

"I don't think that applies," Eiah said. "The definitions we've based

the draft on are all physicians' texts. They have to do with the actual

function of the eye."

"But if you see a thing without your eyes," Small Kae began.

"Then you're imagining them," Vanjit said, her voice calm and certain.

"And the passages on clarity would prevent the contradiction."

"What contradiction?" Large Kae asked.

"Who can answer that?" Maati said, leaping into the fray. "It's a good

question, but any of you should be able to think it through. Ashti-cha?

Would you care to?"

The older woman sucked her teeth for a moment. A sparrow flew in through

one window, its wings fluttering like a pennant in the wind, and then

out again.

"Clarity," Ashti Beg said slowly. "The sense of clarity implies that

it's reflecting the world as it is, ne? And if you see something that's

not there to be seen, it's not the world as it is. Even if imagining

something is like sight, it isn't like clarity."

"Very good," Maati said, and the woman smiled. Maati smiled back.

The binding had progressed more quickly than Maati had thought possible.

For the greatest part, the advances had been made in moments like these.

Seven minds prodding at the same thought, debating the nuances and

structures, challenging one another to understand the issues at hand

more deeply. Someone-anyone-would find a phrase or a thought that struck

sparks, and Vanjit would pull pages from her sleeve and mark down

whatever had pushed her one step nearer the edge.

It was happening less and less often. The binding, Maati knew, was

coming near its final form. The certainty in Vanjit's voice and the

angle of her shoulders told him as much about her chances of success as

looking over the details of her binding.

As they ended the evening's session, reluctant despite yawns and

heavy-lidded eyes, Maati realized that the work they were doing was less

like his own training before the Dai-kvo and more like the long, arduous

hours he had spent with Cehmai. Somehow, during his absence, they had

all become equals. Not in knowledge-he was still far and away the best

informed-but in status. Where he had once had a body of students, he was

working now with a group of novice poets. A lizard scampered along

before him and then up the rough wall and into the darkness. A

nightingale sang.

He was exhausted, his body heavy, his mind beginning to spark and slip.

And he was also elated. The wide night sky above him seemed rich with

promise, the ground he walked upon eager to bear him up.

His bed, however, didn't invite sleep. Small pains in his knees and

spine prodded him, and his mind failed to calm. The light of the

halfmoon cast shadows on the walls that seemed to move of their own

accord. The restlessness of age, as opposed, he thought with weary

amusement, to the restlessness of youth. As he lay there, small doubts

began to arise, gnawing at him. Perhaps Vanjit wasn't ready yet to take

on the role of poet. Perhaps he and Eiah in their need and optimism were

sending the girl to her death.

There was no way to know another person's heart. No way to judge. It

might be that Vanjit herself was as afraid of this as he was, but held

by her despair and anger and sense of obligation to the others to move

forward as if she weren't.

Every poet that bound an andat came face-to-face with their own flaws,

their own failures. Maati's first master, Heshai-kvo, had made Seedless

the embodiment of his own self-hatred, but that was only one extreme

example. Kiai Jut three generations earlier had bound Flatness only to

find the andat bent on destroying the family the poet secretly hated.

Magar Inarit had famously bound Unwoven only to discover his own

shameful desires made manifest in his creation. The work of binding the

andat was of such depth and complexity, the poet's true self was

difficult if not impossible to hide within it. And what, he wondered,

would Vanjit discover about herself if she succeeded? With all the hours

they had spent on the mechanics of the binding, was it not also his

responsibility to prepare the girl to face her imperfections?

His mind worried at the questions like a dog at a bone. As the moon

vanished from his window and left him with only the night candle, Maati

rose. A walk might work the kinks from his muscles.

The school was a different place at night. The ravages of war and time

were less obvious, the shapes of the looming walls and hallways familiar

and prone to stir the ancient memories of the boy Maati had been. Here,

for instance, was the rough stone floor of the main hall. He had cleaned

these very stones when his hands had been smooth and strong and free

from the dark, liver-colored spots. He stood at the place where

Milah-kvo had first offered him the black robes. He remembered both the

pride of the moment and the sense, hardly noticed at the time, that it

was an honor he didn't wholly deserve.

"Would you have done it differently, Milah-kvo?" he asked the dead man

and the empty air. "If you had known what I was going to do, would you

still have made the offer?"

The air said nothing. Maati felt himself smile without knowing precisely

why.

"Maati-kvo?"

He turned. In the dim light of his candle, Eiah seemed like a ghost.

Something conjured from his memory. He took a pose of greeting.

"You're awake," she said, falling into step beside him.

"Sometimes sleep abandons old men," he said with a chuckle. "It's the

way of things. And you? I can't think you make a practice of wandering

the halls in the middle of the night."

"I've just left Vanjit. She sits up after the lecture is done and goes

over everything we said. Everything anyone said. I agreed to sit with

her and compare my memory to hers."

"She's a good girl," Maati said.

"Her dreams are getting worse," Eiah said. "If the situation were

different, I'd be giving her a sleeping powder. I'm afraid it will dull

her, though."

"They're bad then?" Maati said.

Eiah shrugged. In the dim light, her face seemed older.

"They're no worse than anyone who watched her family die before her

eyes. She has told you, hasn't she?"

"She was a child," Maati said. "The only one to live."

"She said no more than that?"

"No," Maati said. They passed through a stone archway and into the

courtyard. Eiah looked up at the stars.

"It's as much as I know too," Eiah said. "I try to coax her. To get her

to speak about it. But she won't."

"Why try?" Maati said. "Talking won't undo it. Let her be who and where

she is now. It's better that way."

Eiah took a pose that accepted his advice, but her face didn't entirely

match it. He put a hand on her shoulder.

"It will be fine," he said.

"Will it?" Eiah said. "I tell myself the same thing, but I don't always

believe it."

Maati stopped at a stone bench, flicked a snail from the seat, and

rested. Eiah sat at his side, hunched over, her elbows on her knees.

"You think we should stop this?" he asked. "Call off the binding?"

"What reason could we give?"

"That Vanjit isn't ready."

"It isn't true, though. Her mind is as good as any of ours will ever be.

If I called this to a halt, I'd be saying I didn't trust her to be a

poet. Because of what she's been through. That the Galts had taken that

from her too. And if I say that of her, who won't it be true of? Ashti

Beg lost her husband. Irit's father burned with his farm. Large Kae only

had her womb turned sick and saw the Khai Utani slaughtered with his

family. If we're looking for a woman who's never known pain, we may as

well pack up our things now, because there isn't one."

Maati let the silence stretch, in part to leave Eiah room to think. In

part because he didn't know what wisdom he could offer.

"No, Uncle Maati, I don't want to stop. I only ... I only hope this

brings her some peace," Eiah said.

"It won't," Maati said, gently. "It may heal some part of her. It may

bring good to the world, but the andat have never brought peace to poets."

"No. I suppose not," Eiah said. Then, a moment later, "I'm going into

Pathai. I'll just need a cart and one of the horses."

"Is there need?"

"We aren't starving, if that's what you mean. But buying at the markets

there attracts less notice than going straight to the low towns. It

would be better if no one knows there are people living out here. And

there might be news."

"And if there's news, there will be some idea of how soon Vanjit-cha

will need to make her attempt."

"I was thinking more of how much time I have," Eiah said. She turned to

look at him. The warm light of the candle and the cool glow of the moon

made her seem like two different women at once. "This doesn't rest on

Vanjit. It doesn't rest on any of them. Binding an andat isn't enough to

... fix things. It has to be the right one."

"And Clarity-of-Sight isn't the right one?" he asked.

"It won't give any of these women babies. It won't put them back in the

arms of the men who used to be their husbands or stop men like my father

from trading in women's flesh like we were sheep. None of it. All the

binding will do is prove that it can be done. That a solution exists. It

doesn't even mean I'll be strong enough when my turn comes."

Maati took her hand. He had known her for so many years. Her hand had

been so small that first time he had seen her. He remembered her deep

brown eyes, and the way she had gurgled and burrowed into her mother's

cradling arms. He could still see the shape of that young face in the

shape of her cheeks and the set of her jaw. He leaned over and kissed

her hair. She looked up at him, amused to see him so easily moved.

"I was only thinking," he said, "how many of us there are carrying this

whole burden alone."

"I know I'm not alone, Maati-kya. It only feels like it some nights."

"It does. It certainly does," he said. Then, "Do you think she'll manage

it?"

Eiah rose silently, took a pose that marked parting with nuances as

intimate as family, and walked back into the buildings of the school.

Maati sighed and lay back on the stone, looking up into the night sky. A

shooting star blazed from the eastern sky toward the north and vanished

like an ember gone cold.

He wondered if Otah-kvo still looked at the sky, or if he had grown too

busy being the Emperor. The days and nights of power and feasting and

admiration might rob him of simple beauties like a night sky or a fear

grown less by being shared. Might, in fact, cut Otah-kvo off from all

the things that gave meaning to people lower than himself. He was, after

all, planning his new empire by denying all the women injured by the

last war any hope of those simple, human pleasures. A babe. A family.

Tens of thousands of women, cut free from the lives they were entitled

to, now to be forgotten.

He wondered if a man who could do that still had enough humanity left to

enjoy a falling star or the song of a nightingale.

He hoped not.

Eiah left the next morning. The high road was still in good repair, and

travel along it was an order of magnitude faster than the tracking Maati

had done between the low towns. When Maati and the others saw her off,

she was wearing simple robes and the leather satchel hung at her side.

She could have been mistaken for any traveling physician. Maati might

have imagined it, but he thought that Vanjit held her parting stance