THE (tlpq-4) (7 page)

There were protests and anger in only a few cities. Nantani and

Yalakeht, hit hard by the war, were sending petitions of condemnation.

In the low towns, the anger burned brighter. Galt was still the enemy,

and there were rumors of plots to kill whomever of them dared set foot

on Khaiate soil: talk and rumor, drunken rhetoric likely to come to nothing.

The greater mass of the utkhaiem were already gathering their best robes

and most garish jewelry in preparation for the journey south to

Saraykeht to greet the returning fleet and see this Galtic girl who

would one day be Empress. Maati listened to it all, his frown deepening

until his mouth began to ache.

"It doesn't change anything," he said. "Otah can sell us to our enemies

if he wants. It doesn't affect our work here. Once we have the grammar

worked through and the andat back in the world-"

"It changes everything," Eiah said. "Danat is marrying a Galt. The

utkhaiem are either going to line up like sailors at a comfort house to

follow the example or resist and restart a war we'll never win. Or

worse, both. Perhaps he'll divide the utkhaiem so deeply that we turn on

each other."

Maati took the tea from the fire and filled his bowl. It was bitter and

overbrewed and scalded his tongue. He drank it anyway. Eiah was looking

at him, waiting for him to speak. The fire danced over the graying lumps

of coal.

"The women's grammar won't matter if the world's already passed us by,"

Eiah said softly. "If it takes us five more years to capture an andat,

there will already be a half-Galt child on its way to becoming Emperor.

There will already be half-Galt children born to every family with any

power, anywhere in the cities. Will an andat undo that? Will an andat

unmake the love these fathers feel for their new children?"

If it's the right one, yes, Maati thought but didn't say. He only stared

down into his bowl of tea, watching the dark leaves staining its depth.

"He is remaking the world without us," Eiah went on. "He's giving his

official seal to the thought that if a woman can't bear a child, she

doesn't matter. He's doing the wrong thing, and once a wound has healed

badly, Uncle, it's twice as hard to put right."

Everything she said made sense. The longer it took to bring back the

andat, the harder it would be to repair the damage he'd done. And if the

world had changed past recognition before his work was complete, he

wasn't sure what meaning the effort would have. His jaw ached, and he

realized he'd been clenching it.

"So what then?" Maati said, taking a pose that made his words a

challenge. "What do you want me to do I'm not doing already?"

Eiah sat back, her head in her hands. She looked like Otah when she did

it. It was always unnerving when he caught a glimpse of her father in

her. He knew what she would say before she spoke. It was, after all,

what she'd been steering him toward from the conversation's start. It

was the subject they had been arguing for months.

"Let me try my binding," Eiah said. "You've seen my outlines. You know

the structure's sound. If I can capture Returning-to-NaturalEquilibrium ..."

She let the words trail away. Returning-to-Natural-Equilibrium, called

Healing.

"I don't know that," Maati said, half-ashamed by the peevishness in his

voice. "I only said that I didn't see a flaw in them. I never said there

wasn't one, only that I couldn't see it. And besides which, it might be

too near something that's been done before. I won't lose you because

some minor poet in the Second Empire bound Making-Things-Right or

Fix-the-Broken or some idiotically broad concept like that."

"Even if they did, they hadn't trained as physicians. I know how flesh

works in ways they wouldn't have. I can bring things back the way

they're meant to be. The women that Sterile broke, I can make whole

again. If we could only-"

"You're too important."

Eiah went silent. When she spoke again, her voice was heavy and bitter.

"You know you've just called all the others unimportant," Eiah said.

"Not unimportant," Maati said. "They're all important. They only aren't

all irreplaceable. Wait, Eiah-kya. Be patient. Once we have a grammar

that we know can work, I won't stop you. But let someone else be first."

"There isn't time," Eiah said. "We have a handful of months before the

trade starts in earnest. Maybe a year."

"Then we'll find a way to move them faster," Maati said.

The question of how that might be done, however, haunted him the rest of

the night. He lay on his cot, the night candle hissing almost inaudibly

and casting its misty light on the stone ceiling. The women, his

students, had all retired to what quarters Eiah had quietly arranged for

them. Eiah herself had gone back to the palaces of the Emperor, the

great structures dedicated to Otah, while Maati lay in the near-dark

under a warehouse, sleep eluding him and his mind gnawing at questions

of time.

Maati's father had died younger than he was now. Maati had been an

aspiring poet at the village of the Dai-kvo at the time. When the word

came, he had not seen the man in something near a decade. The news had

stung less than he would have anticipated, not a fresh loss so much as

the reminder of one already suffered. A slowing of blood had taken the

man, the message said, and Maati had never looked into the matter more

deeply. Lately he'd found himself wondering whether his father had done

all that he'd wished, if the son he'd given over to the poets had made

him proud, what regrets had marked that last illness.

The candle had almost burned itself to nothing when he gave up any hope

of sleep. Outside, songbirds were greeting the still-invisible dawn, but

Maati took no joy in them. He lit a fresh candle and sat on the

smooth-worn stone steps and considered the small wooden box that carried

the only two irreplaceable things he owned. One was a painting he had

done from memory of Nayiit Chokavi, the son he should have had, the

child he had helped, however briefly, to raise, the boy whom Otah- Otah

to whom no rules applied-had brought into the world in Saraykeht and

taken out of it in Machi. The other was a book bound in black leather.

He opened the cover and considered the first page, squinting to bring

the letters clear. He could not help but think of another book-that one

brown-which had been his gift from Heshai-kvo and Seedless. Heshai's

handwriting had been clearer than Maati's own, his gift for language

more profound.

I, Maati Vaupathai, am one of the two men remaining in the

world who has wielded the power of the andat. As the

references from which I myself learned are lost, I shall

endeavor to record here what I know Q f grammar and of the

forms of thought by which the andat may be bound and the

abstract made physical. And, with that, my own profound

error from which the world is still suffering.

Half-reading, he flipped through the pages, caught occasionally by a

particular turn of phrase of which he was fond or tripped by a diagram

or metaphor that was still not to his best liking. Though his eyes

strained, he could still read what he'd written, and when the ink seemed

to blur, he had the memory of what he had put there. He reached the

blank pages sooner than he expected, and sat on his stairs, fingertips

moving over the smooth paper with a sound like skin against skin. There

was so much to say, so many things he'd thought and considered. Often,

he would come back from a particularly good lecture to his students full

of fire and intentions, prepared to write a fresh section. Sometimes his

energy lasted long enough to do so. Sometimes not.

It will be a sad legacy to die with this half-finished, he thought as he

let the cover close.

He needed a real school, the school needed a teacher, and he himself

could manage only so much. There wasn't time to lecture all his students

and write his manual and slink like a criminal through the dark corners

of the Empire. If he'd been younger, perhaps-fifty, or better yet forty

years old-he might have made the attempt, but not now. And with this mad

scheme of Otah's, time had grown even dearer.

"Maati-cha?"

Maati blinked. Vanjit came toward him, her steps tentative. He tucked

his book into its box and took a pose of welcome.

"The door wasn't bolted," she said. "I was afraid something had happened?"

"No," Maati said, rising and hoisting himself up the stairs. "I forgot

it last night. An old man getting older is all."

The girl took a pose that was both an acceptance and a denial. She

looked exhausted, and Maati suspected there were dark smudges under his

own eyes to match hers. The scent of eggs and beef caught his attention.

A small lacquer box hung at Vanjit's side.

"Ah," Maati said. "It that what I hope it is?"

She smiled at that. The girl did have a pleasant smile, when she used

it. The eggs were fresh; whipped and steamed in bright orange blocks.

The beef was rich and moist. Vanjit sat beside him in the echoing, empty

space of the warehouse as the morning light pressed in at the high,

narrow windows, blue then yellow then gold. They talked about nothing

important: the wayhouse where she was staying, his annoyance with his

failing eyes, the merits of their present warehouse as compared to the

half-dozen other places where Maati had taken up his chalk. Vanjit asked

him questions that built on what they'd discussed the night before: How

did the different forms of being relate to time? How did a number exist

differently than an apple or a man? Or a child?

Maati found himself holding forth on matters of the andat and the poets,

his time with the Dai-kvo, and even before that at the school. Vanjit

sat still, her gaze on him, and drank his words like water.

She had lost her family when she was barely six years old. Her mother,

father, younger sister, and two older brothers cut down by the gale of

Galtic blades. The pain of it had faded, perhaps. It had never gone.

Maati felt, as they sat together, that perhaps she had begun, however

imperfectly, to build a new family. Perhaps she would have sat at her

true father's knee, listening to him with this same intensity. Perhaps

Nayiit would have treated him with the same attention that Vanjit did

now. Or perhaps their shared hunger belonged to people who had lost the

first object of their love.

By the time Eiah and the others arrived in the late morning, Maati had

reached the decision that he'd fought against the whole night. He took

Eiah aside as soon as she came in.

"I have need of you," Maati said. "How much can you spirit away without

our being noticed? We'll need food and clothing and tools. Lots of

tools. And if there's a servant or slave you can trust ..."

"There isn't," Eiah said. "But things are in disarray right now. Half

the court in Nantani would chew their tongues out before offering

hospitality to a Galt. The other half are whipped to a froth trying to

get to Saraykeht before the rest. A few wagonloads here and there would

be easy to overlook."

Maati nodded, more than half to himself. Eiah took a pose of query.

"You're going to build me a school. I know where there's one to be had,

and with the others helping, it shouldn't take terribly long to have it

in order. And we need a teacher."

"We have a teacher, Maati-kya," Eiah said.

Maati didn't answer, and after a moment, Eiah looked down.

"Cehmai?" she asked.

"He's the only other living poet. The only one who's truly held one of

the andat. He could do more, I suspect, than I can manage."

"I thought you two had fallen out?"

"I don't like his wife," Maati said sourly. "But I have to try. The two

of us agreed on a way to find one another, if the need arose. I can hope

he's kept to it better than I have."

"I'll come with you."

"No," Maati said, putting a hand on Eiah's shoulder. "I need you to

prepare things for us. There's a place-I'll draw you a map to it. The

Galts attacked it in the war, killed everyone, but even if they dropped

bodies down the well, the water'll be fresh again by now. It's off the

high road between Pathai and Nantani...."

"That school?" Eiah said. "The place they sent the boys to train as

poets? That's where you want to go?"

"Yes," Maati said. "It's out of the way, it's built for itinerant poets,

and there may be something there-some book or scroll or engravings on