THE (tlpq-4) (6 page)

them. Every lecture he gave, he had to half-invent. Every question he

answered, he had to solve in his mind to be sure. On one hand, it was as

awkward as using a grand palace as a lesson on how to build scaffolding.

And on the other, it was making him a better poet and a better teacher

than he would ever have been otherwise.

He sat up, the canvas cot groaning as his weight shifted. The room was

tiny and quiet; the stone walls wept and smelled of fungus. Halfaware of

his surroundings and half in the fine points of ancient grammars, Maati

rose and trundled up the short flight of stairs. The warehouse stood

empty, the muted daylight and the sound of light rain making their way

through the high, narrow windows. His footsteps echoed as he crossed to

the makeshift lecture hall.

Benches of old, splintering wood squatted near a length of wall smooth

enough to take chalk. The markings of the previous evening still shone

white against the stone. Maati squinted at them.

Age was a thief. It took his wind, it made his heart race at odd times,

and it stole his sleep. But the worst of all the little indignities was

his sight. He hadn't thought about the blessing that decent vision was

until his eyes started to fail. It made his head ache a bit, but he

found the diagram he'd been thinking of, traced it with his fingertips,

considered, and then took a rag from the pail of water beside his little

podium and washed the marks away. He could start there tonight, with the

four categories of being and their relationships. It was a subtle point,

but without it, the girls would never build a decent binding.

There were five of them now: Irit, Ashti Beg, Vanjit, Small Kae, and

Large Kae. Half a year ago, there had been seven, but Umnit had tried

her binding, failed, and perished. Lisat had given up and left him. Just

as well, really. Lisat had been a good-hearted girl, but slow-witted as

a cow. And so, five. Or six, if he counted Eiah.

Eiah had been a gift from the gods. She spent her days in the palaces of

Utani, playing the daughter of Empire. He knew it was a life she

disliked, but she saw to it that food and money found their way to

Maati. And being part of the court let her keep an ear out for gossip

that would serve them, like a dispute over the ownership of a low-town

warehouse that left both claimants barred from visiting the building

until judgment was passed. The warehouse had been Maati's for two months

now. It was beginning to feel like his own. He dropped the rag back into

its pail, found the thick cube of chalk, and started drawing the charts

for the evening's lecture. He wondered whether Eiah would be able to

join them. She was a good student, when she could slip away from her

life at the palace. She asked good questions.

The crude iron bolt turned with a sound like a dropped hammer, and the

small, human-size door beside the great sliding walls intended for carts

and wagons opened. A woman's figure was silhouetted against the soft

gray light. It was neither of the Kaes, but his eyes weren't strong

enough to make out features. When she came in, closing the door behind

her, he recognized Vanjit by her gait.

"You're early, Vanjit-cha," Maati said, turning back to the wall and chalk.

"I thought I might be able to help," she said. "Are you well, Maaticha?"

Vanjit had been with him for almost a year now. She had come to his

covert school, as all the others had, through a series of happy

accidents. Another of his students-Umnit-had fallen into conversation

with her, and something had sparked between them. Umnit had presented

Vanjit as a candidate to join in their work. Reluctantly, Maati had

accepted her.

The girl had a brilliant mind, no question. But she had been a child in

Udun, the only one of her family to survive when the Galts had come, and

the memory of that slaughter still touched her eyes from time to time.

She might laugh and talk and make music, but she bore scars on her body

and in her mind. In the months he had spent working with her, Maati had

come to realize what had first unnerved him about the girl: of all the

students he had taught, she was most like him.

He had lost his family in the war as well-his almost-son Nayiit, his

lover Liat, and the man he had once thought his dearest friend. Otah,

Emperor of the Khaiem. Otah, favored of the gods, who couldn't fall down

without landing on rose petals. They had not all died, but they were all

lost to him.

"Maati-cha?" Vanjit said. "Did I say something wrong?"

Maati blinked and took a pose of query.

"You looked angry," she said.

"Nothing," Maati said, shifting the chalk to his other hand and shaking

the ache from his fingers. "Nothing, Vanjit-kya, my mind was just

wandering. Come, sit. There's nothing that you need to do, but you can

keep me company while I get ready."

She sat on the bench, one leg tucked under her. He noticed that her hair

and robe were wet from the rain. There was mud on her boots. She'd been

walking out in the weather. Maati hesitated, chalk halfway back to the

stone.

"Or," he said slowly, "perhaps I should ask if you've been well?"

She smiled and took a pose that dismissed his concerns.

"Bad dream again," she said. "That's all."

"About the baby," Maati said.

"I could feel him inside of me," she said. "I could feel his heartbeat.

It's strange. I hate dreaming about him. The nightmares that I'm back in

the war-I may scream myself awake, but at least I'm pleased that the

dream's ended. When I dream about him, I'm happy. I'm at peace. And then

..."

She gestured at the childless world around them.

"It's worse, wishing I could sleep and dream and never awake."

Maati's heart rang in sympathy, like a crystal bowl taking up the

ringing of a great bell. How many times had he dreamed that Nayiit

lived? That the world had not been broken, or, if it had, not by him?

"We'll bring him," Maati said. "Have faith. Every week, we come closer.

Once the grammar is built solidly enough, anything will be possible."

"Are we coming closer?" she asked. "Be honest, Maati-cha. Every week we

spend on this, I think we're on the edge, and every week, there's more

after it."

He tucked the chalk into his sleeve and sat at the girl's side. She

leaned forward, and he thought there was something in her expressionnot

despair and not shame, but something related to both.

"We are coming near, and we are close," he said. "I know it isn't

something you can see, but each of you knows more about the andat and

the bindings right now than I did after a year with the Dai-kvo. You're

smart and dedicated and talented. And together, we can make this work.

It sounds terrible, I know, but as soon as Siimat failed her binding and

paid the price ... I won't say I was pleased. I can't say that. She was

a brave woman, and she had a wonderful mind. I miss her. But that she

and all the others died means we are very close."

Ten bindings, ending in ten failures and ten corpses. His fallen

soldiers, Maati thought. His girls who had sacrificed themselves. And

here, wet as a canal rat and sad to her bones, Vanjit impatient to make

her own try, risk her own life. Maati took her small hand in his own.

The girl smiled at the wall.

"This will happen," he said.

"I know it," she said, her voice soft. "It's just so hard to wait when

the dream keeps coming."

Maati sat with her for a moment, only the tapping of raindrops and the

songs of birds between them. He stood, fished the chalk from his sleeve,

and went back to the wall.

"If you'd like, you could light a fire in the office grate," Maati said.

"We could surprise the others with some fresh tea."

It wasn't called for, but it gave the girl something to do. He squinted

at the figure he'd drawn until the lines came into focus. Ah, yes. Four

categories of being.

The rain slackened as the others arrived. Large Kae checked the

coverings over the windows, careful that no stray light betray their

presence, as Irit fluttered sparrowlike lighting the lanterns. Small Kae

and Ashti Beg adjusted the seats and benches, the younger woman's light

voice contrasting with her elder's dry one.

The scents of wood smoke and tea made their warehouse classroom seem

less furtive. Vanjit poured bowls for each of his students as they took

their places. The soft light darkened the stone so that the chalk marks

almost seemed written on air. Maati took a moment to himself to think of

his teachers, of their lectures. He willed himself to become one of

their number.

"The world," Maati began, "has two essential structures. There's the

physical"-he slapped the stone wall behind him-"and there's the

abstract. Two and two are always four, regardless of whether you're

talking about grains of sand or racing camels. Twelve could always be

broken into two sets of six or three sets of four long before anybody

noticed the fact. Abstract structure, you see?"

They bent toward him like flowers toward the sun. Maati saw the hunger

in their faces and the set of their shoulders.

"Now," Maati said. "Does the physical require the abstract? Come on.

Think! Can you have something physical that doesn't have abstract

structure?"

There was a moment's silence.

"Water?" Small Kae asked. "Because if you put two drops of water

together with two drops of water, you just get one big drop."

"You're ahead of yourself," Maati said. "That's called the doctrine of

least similarity. You're not ready for that. What I mean is this: is

there anything real that can't be described by its abstract structure?

Any of you? No one has a thought about this? I answered that one

correctly before I'd seen ten summers."

"No?" suggested Irit.

"No. How many of you think she's right? Go on! Take a stand about it one

way or the other! Good. Yes. Irit's right," Maati said and spat at the

floor by his feet. "Everything physical has abstract structure, but not

everything abstract need be physical. That's what we're doing here.

That's the asymmetry that lets the andat exist."

In all their faces, turned to his, there was the same expression.

Hunger, he thought, or desperation. Or longing halfway forged into

something stronger. It gave him hope.

After the lecture, he made them run through grammar exercises, and then,

as the moon rose and the lanterns smoked and the rats came out to chuff

and chitter at them from the shadows, they considered the failed

bindings of the women who had gone before them. Slowly, they were

developing a sense of what it was to capture an andat, to take a thought

and translate it into a different form. To give it volition and a human

shape. To keep the binding present in your mind for the rest of your

life, holding the spirit back from its natural state of nothingness like

holding a stone over a well: slip once, and it is gone. Maati could see

the knowledge growing in the set of their poses and hear it in the

questions they asked. He had almost reached the end of his night's plan

when the small door to the street flew open again.

Eiah strode in, her breath labored. She wore a drab cloak over a silk

robe rich with all the colors of sunset. The others fell silent. Maati,

standing before a wall now covered in white, ghostly notations and

graphs, took a pose that expressed his alarm and asked the cause of hers.

"Uncle Maati," she said between gasps, "there's news from Galt. My father."

Maati shifted toward several poses at once, managing none of them.

Eiah's expression was grim.

"That's all for tonight," he said. "Come back tomorrow."

He had intended to assign exercises, translation puzzles for them to

work in their time away from class. He abandoned the idea and shooed

them out the door. All of them left except Eiah, sitting on a low chair

in the warehouse office, her face lit by the shifting flames in the grate.

The letters had arrived by fast courier. Against all expectation, the

Emperor's benighted mission to Galt had borne fruit. Danat was to be

married to a daughter of the Galtic High Council. Terms were being

arranged for the transport of a thousand Galtic women of childbearing

age to the cities of the Khaiem. Applications would be taken for a

thousand men to leave their lives among the cities of the Khaiem and

move to Galt. It was, Eiah said, intended to be the first exchange of many.