THE (tlpq-4) (25 page)

working from is new."

There was frustration in her voice. Perhaps fear.

"There is another way," Maati said. Eiah shifted, her gaze on his. Maati

scratched his arm.

"We have Clarity-of-Sight," he said. "It proves that we can do this

thing, and that alone gives us a certain power. If we send word to

Otahkvo, tell him what we've done and that he must turn away from his

scheme with the Galts, he would do it. He would have to. We could take

as much time as you care to take, consult as many scholars as we can

unearth. Even Cehmai would have to come. He couldn't refuse the Emperor."

It wasn't something he'd spoken aloud before. It was hardly something

he'd allowed himself to think. Before Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, the

idea of returning to the courts of the Khaiem-to Otah-in triumph would

have been only a sort of torture of the soul. It would have been like

wishing for his son to be alive, or Liat at his side, or any of the

thousand regrets of his past to be unmade.

Now it was not only possible but perhaps even wise. Another letter, sent

by fast courier, announcing that Maati had succeeded and made himself

the new Dai-kvo, and Otah would have no choice but to honor him. He

could almost hear the apology now, sweeter for coming from the lips of

an emperor.

"It's a kind thought, but no," Eiah said. "It's too big a risk."

"I don't see how," Maati said, frowning.

"Vanjit's one woman, and binding an andat doesn't mean that a good man

and a sharp knife can't end you," Eiah said. "And she may slip, at which

point half the world will want our heads on sticks, just to be sure it

doesn't happen again. Once we've managed a few more, it will be safe.

And Wounded can't wait."

"If you heal all the women of the cities, they'll know we've bound an

andat," Maati said. "It will be just as clear a message as sending a

letter. And by your argument, just as dangerous."

"If they wait until after I've given back the chance of bearing

children, the Galts can kill me," Eiah said. "It will be too late to

matter."

"You don't believe that," Maati said, aghast. Eiah smiled and shrugged.

"Perhaps not," she agreed. "Say rather, if I'm going to die, I'd rather

it was after I'd finished this."

Maati put a hand on her shoulder, then let his arm fall to his side.

Eiah described the issues of the binding that troubled her most. To pull

a thought from abstraction into concrete form required a deep

understanding of the idea's limits and consequences. To bind Wounded,

Eiah needed to find the common features of a cut finger and a burned

foot, the difference between a tattooing quill and a rose thorn, the

definitions that kept the thought small enough for a single mind to

encompass.

"Take Vanjit's work," Eiah said. "Your eyes were never burned. No one

cut them or bruised them. But they didn't see as well as when you were

young. So there must have been some damage to them. So are the changes

of age wounds? White hair? Baldness? When a woman loses her monthly

flow, is it because she's broken?"

"You can't consider age," Maati said. "For one thing, it muddies the

water, and for another, I will swear to you that more than one poet has

reached for Youth-Regained or some such."

"But how can I make that fit?" Eiah said. "What makes an old man's

failing hip different from a young girl's bruised one? The speed of the

injury?"

"The intention," Maati said, and touched a line of symbols. His finger

traced the strokes of ink, pausing from time to time. He could feel

Eiah's attention on him. "Here. Change ki to toyaki. Wounds are either

intentional or accident. Toyaki includes both senses."

"I don't see what difference it makes," Eiah said.

"Ki also includes a nuance of proper function. Behavior that isn't

misadventure or conscious intention, but a product of design," Maati

said. "If you remove that ..."

He licked his lips, his fingers closing in the air above the page. Once,

many years before, he had been asked to explain why the poets were

called poets. He remembered his answer vaguely. That the bindings were

the careful shaping of meaning and intention, that makers or

thought-weavers were just as apt. It had been a true answer for as far

as it went.

And also, sometimes, the grammar of a binding would say something

unexpected. Something half-known, or half-acknowledged. A profound

melancholy touched him.

"You see, Eiah-cha," he said, softly, "time is meant to pass. The world

is meant to change. When people fade and die, it isn't a deviation. It's

the way the world is made."

He tapped the symbol ki.

"And that," he said, "is where you make that distinction."

Eiah was silent for a moment, then drew a pen from her sleeve and a

small silver ink box. With a soft pressure, gentler than rain on leaves,

she added the strokes that remade the binding.

"You accept my argument, then?" Maati asked.

"I have to," Eiah said. "It's why we're here, isn't it? Sterile didn't

add anything to the world, it only broke the way humanity renews itself.

I've seen enough decline and death to recognize its proper place. I'm

not here to stop time or death. Just to put back the balance so that new

generations can come up fresh."

Maati nodded. When Eiah spoke, her voice sounded tired.

"I miss him," she said. He knew that she meant her father. "The last

time I saw him, he looked so old. I still picture him with dark hair. It

hasn't been like that in years, but it's what's in my mind."

"We're doing the right thing," Maati said. His voice was little more

than a whisper.

"I don't doubt it," Eiah said. "He's turned his back on a generation of

women as if their suffering were insignificant. Sexual indenture used to

be restricted to bed slaves, and he would make an industry of it if he

could. He would haul women across like bales of cotton. I hate

everything about the scheme, but I miss him."

"I do too," Maati said.

"You also hate him," she said. There was no place in this room for

half-truths.

"That too," Maati agreed.

Dinner that night was a brace of quail Large Kae had trapped. The flesh

was soft and rich. Maati sat at the head of the long table, Vanjit and

Clarity-of-Sight at the far end, and plucked the delicate bones. The

bright chattering voices of Small Kae and Irit seemed distant, the dry

wit of Ashti Beg grim. Eiah also seemed subdued, but it might only have

been that she was thinking of the binding. The meal seemed to last

forever, and yet he found himself surprised when Ashti Beg gathered up

the bowls and the talk shifted to cleanup chores.

"I don't think I can," Vanjit said, her voice apologetic. "I assumed

that we had changed the rotation."

"We skipped you last time, if that's what you mean," Ashti Beg said. "I

don't know if that's the same as agreeing to wait on you."

There was laughter in the older woman's voice, but it had teeth. Small

Kae was smiling a fixed smile and staring at the table. If he hadn't

been so distracted, Maati would have seen this coming before it arrived.

"I don't think I can, though," Vanjit said, still firmly in her seat.

The thing on her lap shifted its gaze from the poet to Ashti Beg and

back as if fascinated.

"I seem to recall my mother keeping the house even when she had a babe

on her hip," Ashti Beg said. "But she always was unusually talented."

"I have the andat. That's more work than washing dishes," Vanjit said.

"At court, poets are forgiven other duties, aren't they, Maati-kvo?"

"The smallest brat of the utkhaiem is forgiven their duties," Ashti Beg

said before Maati could frame a reply. "That's why it's court. Because

some people set themselves above others."

The air was suddenly heavy. Maati stood, unsure what he was about to

say. Irit's sudden chirp saved him.

"Oh, it isn't much. No need to fuss about it. I'll be happy to do the

thing. No, Vanjit-cha, don't get up. If you don't feel up to doing it,

you ought not strain yourself."

The last words rose at the end as if they were a question. Maati nodded

as if something had been decided, then walked out of the hall. Vanjit

followed without speaking, and took herself and her small burden down a

side hall and out to the gardens. Maati could hear the voices of the

others as they cleaned away the remnants of the small, fallen birds.

They met as they always did, sitting in a rough circle and discussing

the fine points of binding the andat. There was no sign of the earlier

conflict; Vanjit and Ashti Beg treated each other with their customary

kindness and respect. Eiah explained the difference between accident,

intention, and consequence of design to Irit and Small Kae and, Maati

thought, learned by the experience. By the warm, soft light of the

lanterns, they might have been talking of anything. By the end, there

was even real laughter.

It should have been a good evening, but as he went back toward his bed,

Maati was troubled and couldn't quite say why. It had to do with

Otah-kvo and Eiah, Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight. The Galts and his own

unsettling if unsurprising insight into the nature of time and decay.

He opened his book, reading his own handwriting by the light of the

night candle. Even the quality of his script had changed since Vanjit

had sharpened his vision. The older entries had been ... not sloppy,

never that. But not so crisp as he was capable of now. It had been an

old man's handwriting. Now it was something different. He picked up his

pen, touched nib to ink, but found nothing coherent to say.

He wiped the pen clean and put the book aside. Somewhere far to the

south, Otah was dining with the men who had destroyed the Khaiem. He was

sleeping on a bed of silk and drinking wine from bowls of beaten gold,

while here in the dry plains his own daughter prepared to risk her life

to make right what he had done.

What they had done together. Otah, Cehmai, and Maati himself. One was

crawling into bed with the enemy, another turning away and hiding his

face. Only Maati had even tried to make things whole again. Vanjit's

success meant it had not been wasted effort. Eiah's fear reminded him

that it was not yet finished.

He made his way down the corridors in the near darkness. Only candles

and a half-moon lit his way. He was unsurprised to see Vanjit sitting

alone in the gardens. Unlike the courtyard where they had spoken before,

the gardens were bleak and bare. They had come too late to plant this

season. Eiah's occasional journeys to Pathai provided food enough, and

they didn't have the surplus of spare hands that had once held up the

school. The wilderness encroached on the high stone walls here, young

trees growing green and bold in plots where Maati had sown peas and

harvested pods.

She heard him approaching and glanced back over her shoulder. She

shifted, adjusting her robes, and Maati saw the small, black eyes of the

andat appear from among the folds of cotton. She had been nursing it. It

shocked him for a moment, though on reflection it shouldn't have. The

andat had no need of milk, of course, but it was a product of Vanjit's

conceptions. Stone-Made-Soft had been involved with the game of stones.

Three-Bound-as-One had been fascinated by knots. The relationship of

poet and andat was modeled on mother and child as it had never been

before in all of history. The nursing was, Maati supposed, the physical

emblem of it.

"Maati-kvo," she said. "I didn't expect anyone to be here."

He took a pose of apology, and she waved it away. In the cold light, she

looked ghostly. The andat's eyes and mouth seemed to eat the light, its

skin to glow. Maati came nearer.

"I was worried, I suppose," he said. "It seemed ... uncomfortable at

dinner this evening."

"I'd been thinking about that," Vanjit said. "It's hard for them. Ashti

Beg and the others. I think it must be very hard for them."

"How do you mean?"

She shrugged. The andat in her lap gurgled to itself, considering its

own short, pale fingers with fascination.

"They have all put in so much time, so much work. Then to see another

woman complete a binding and gain a child, all at once. I imagine it

must gnaw at her. It isn't that she intends to be rude or cruel. Ashti

is in pain, and she lashes out. I knew a dog like that once. A cart had