THE (tlpq-4) (9 page)

remembered Kiyan warning him that some women-not all, but somewho could

not bear children went mad from longing. She told stories of babies

being stolen, and of pregnant women killed and the babes taken from

their dying wombs.

Wanting could be a sickness, his wife had said. He remembered the night

she'd said it, where the lantern had been, how the air had smelled of

burning oil and pine boughs. He remembered his daughter's expression at

hearing the phrase, like she'd found expression for something she'd

always known, and his own sense of dread. Kiyan had tried to warn him of

something, and it had to do with the backs of the people now at the

rails, turned away from the Galts and the negotiated future forming

behind them. Eiah had known. Otah felt he had still only half-grasped

it. Fatter Dasin, he thought, might see it more clearly.

"It appears to be going quite well, wouldn't you say, Most High?"

Balasar Gice stood beside the dais, his hands in a pose of greeting. The

cool night air or else the wine had touched his cheeks with red.

"Does it? I hope so," Otah said, smoothing away his darker thoughts. "I

think there are more trade agreements than wars brewing tonight. It's

hard to know"

"There's hope," Balasar said. And then, his voice growing reflective,

"There's hope, and that's actually quite new. I hadn't realized it had

become quite such a rare thing, these last few years."

"How nice," Otah said more sharply than he'd intended. Balasar looked at

him more closely, and Otah waved the concern away. "I'm old and tired.

And I've eaten more Galtic food than I could have wanted in a lifetime.

It's astounding you people ever got up from your tables."

"You aren't expected to finish every dish," Balasar said. "Ah, I think

the entertainment has begun."

Otah looked up. Servants and sailors were silently moving across the

deck like a wind over the water. The glow of candles lessened and the

scent of spent wicks filled the air as a stage appeared as if conjured

across the deck from Otah's dais. The singers that had hung from the

rigging had apparently made their way down, because they rose now,

taking their places. Servants placed three more chairs on the dais at

Otah's side, and Councilman Dasin and his family took their seats.

Fatter smelled prodigiously of distilled wine and sat the farthest from

him, his wife close at his side, leaving Ana nearest to Otah.

The singers bowed their heads for a moment, then the low sounds of their

voices began to swell. Otah closed his eyes. It was a song he knewa

court dance from the Second Empire. The harmonies were perfect and rich,

sorrowful and joyous. This, he understood, was a gift. Galtic voices

raised in a song of an empire that was not their own. He let himself be

carried by it, and when the voices fell again, the last throbbing notes

fading to silence, he was among the first to applaud. Otah was surprised

to find tears in his eyes.

Ana Dasin, at his side, was also weeping. When he met her eyes, she

looked down, said something he couldn't hear, and walked briskly away.

He watched her descend the stairs below decks as the singers began

another, more boisterous song. Otah's gaze flickered to Issandra. In the

dim light, the subtle signs of age were softened. He saw for a moment

who she had been as a younger woman. She met his eyes with a profound

weariness. Fatter had his hand on her arm, holding her gently to him,

though the man's face remained turned away. Otah wondered, not for the

first time, what brokering this agreement had cost Issandra Dasin.

He glanced at the stairs down which her daughter had vanished, and then

back, his hands shifting into a pose that made an implicit offer.

Issandra raised an eyebrow, a half-smile making a dimple in one cheek.

Otah tugged at his robes, straightening the lines, and stepped carefully

down from the dais. The girl Ana would be his daughter too, soon enough.

If her true mother and father weren't placed to speak with her in her

distress, perhaps it was time that Otah did.

Below decks, the Galtic ship was as cramped and close and ripe with the

scent of tightly quartered humanity as any ship Otah had sailed with.

Under normal circumstances, the deck now peopled with the guests of the

Dasin family would have given room to a full watch of sailors. Instead,

most were lurking in the tiny rooms, waiting for the songs to end and

their own turn with fresh air to come. Still, Otah, Emperor of the

Khaiem, found a way cleared for him, conversations stopping when he came

in view. He made his way forward, squinting into the darkness for a

glimpse of the rabbit-faced girl.

Galtic design divided the cargo hold in sections, and it was in one of

these dark chambers that he heard the girl's voice. Crates and boxes

loomed above him to either side, the binding ropes creaking gently with

the rolling ship. Rats chattered and complained. And there, hunched over

as if she were protecting something pressed to her belly, sat Ana Dasin.

"Excuse me," Otah said. "I don't mean to intrude, but ... may I sit?"

Ana looked up at him. Her dark eyes shone in the dim light. Her nod was

so faint it might almost have been the movement of the ship. Otah

stepped carefully over the rough board, hitched his robes up to his

shins, and sat at the girl's side. They were silent. Above them, the

singers struck a complex rhythm, like jugglers tossing pins between

them. Otah sighed.

"I know this isn't easy for you," he said.

"What isn't, Most High?"

"Otah. Please, my name is Otah. You can call me that. I mean all of

this. Being uprooted, married off to a man you've never met in a city

you've never been to."

"It's what's expected of me," she said.

"Yes, I know, but ... it isn't really fair."

"No," she said, her voice suddenly hard. "It isn't."

Otah clasped his hands, fingers laced together.

"He isn't a bad man, my son," Otah said. "He's clever and he's strong,

and he cares about people. He feels deeply. He's probably a better man

than I was at his age."

"Forgive me, Most High," Ana Dasin said. "I don't know what you want me

to say."

"Nothing. Nothing in particular. Only know that this life that we've

forced on you ... it might have some redeeming qualities. The gods all

know the life I've had wasn't the one I expected, either. We do what we

have to do. In my ways, I'm as constrained by it as you are."

She looked at him as if he were speaking a language she hadn't heard

before. Otah shook his head.

"It's nothing, Ana-cha," he said. "Only know that I know how hard this

time is, and it will get better. If you allow room for it, this new life

might even surprise you."

The girl was quiet for a moment, her brow furrowed. She shook her head.

"Thank you?" she said.

Otah chuckled ruefully.

"I'm not doing a particularly good job of this, am I?" he said.

"I don't know," Ana Dasin said after a pause. Her tone carried the

shielded contempt of an adolescent for her elders. "I don't know what

you're doing."

Making his way back through the crowded belly of the ship, Otah wondered

what he had thought he would say to a Galtic girl who had seen

forty-five fewer summers than himself. He had expected to offer some

kind of wisdom, some variety of comfort, and instead it had been like

trying to hold a conversation with a cat. Who would have thought a man

could be as old as he was, wield the power of empire, and still be so

naive as to think his heart would be explicable to an eighteen-year-old

girl?

And, of course, as he reached the plank stairway that led up, he found

what he wished he had said. He should have said that he knew what

courage it took to face sacrifice. He should have said that he knew her

suffering was real, and that it was in a noble cause. It made them

alike, the Emperor and the Empress-to-be, that they compromised in order

to make the lives of uncountable strangers better.

More than that, he should have encouraged her to speak, and he should

have listened.

An approving roar came from the deck above him. A reed organ hummed and

sang, flute and drum following a heartbeat later. Otah hesitated and

turned back. He would try again. At worst, the girl would think he was

ridiculous, and she likely already did that.

As he drew near the hold, he heard her weeping again, her voice

straining at words he couldn't make out. A man's voice answered, not her

father's. Otah hesitated, then quietly stepped forward.

In the gloom, Ana Dasin knelt, her arms around a young man. The boy,

whoever he was, wore the work clothes of a sailor, but his arms were

thin and his skin was as pale as the girl's. He returned her embrace,

his arms finding their way around her as if through long acquaintance;

his tear-streaked face nuzzled her hair. Ana Dasin stroked the boy's

head, murmuring reassurances.

Ah, Otah thought as he stepped back, unnoticed. That's how it is.

Above deck, he smiled and nodded at Issandra and pretended to turn his

attention back to the music. He wondered how many other sacrifices he

had demanded in order to remake the world according to his vision, how

many other lovers would be parted to further his little scheme to save

two empires. He would likely never know the full price of it. As if in

answer, the candles guttered in the breeze, the reed organ took a

mournful turn, and the sea through which they sailed grew darker.

4

The midday sun beat down on the lush green; gnats and flies filled the

air. The river-not the Qiit proper but one of its tributariesthreaded

its way south like a snake. Maati tied his mule under the wide leaves of

a catalpa and squatted down on a likely-looking boulder. Pulling a pouch

of raisins and seeds from his sleeve, he looked out over the summer. The

wild trees, the rough wagon track he'd followed from the farmers' low

town to the northwest, the cultivated fields to the south.

A cluster of small farms made a loose community here, raising goats and

millet and, near the water, rice. The land between the cities was dotted

with low communities like this one: the rural roots that fed the great,

blossoming cities of the Khaiem. The accents were rougher here, the

effete taint of a high court as foreign as another language. Men might

be born, grow, love, marry, and die without ever traveling more than a

day's walk, birthing bed and grave marker no more distant than a thrown

pebble.

And one of those fields with its ripe green grasses had been plowed by

the only other man in all the world who knew how to bind the andat.

Maati took a mouthful of raisins and chewed slowly, thinking.

Leaving the warehouse outside Utani had proven harder than he had

expected. For over a decade, he had been rootless, moving from one city

or town to another, living in the shadows. One more journey-and this one

heading south into the summer cities-hadn't seemed to signify anything

more than a few weeks' time and, of course, the errand itself. But

somewhere in the years since the Galtic invasion, Maati had grown

accustomed to traveling with companions, and as he and his swaybacked

pack mule had made their slow way down the tracks and low-town roads, he

had felt their absence.

The world had changed in the years he had been walking through it.

Having no one there to talk with forced his mind back in on itself, and

the nature of the changes he saw were more disturbing than he'd thought

they would be.

Many were things he had expected. The cities and towns had grown

quieter, undisturbed by the laughter and games of children. The people

were older, grayer. The streets felt too big, like the robes of a

once-hale man who had grown thin with illness or age. And the scars of

the war itself-the burned towns already half-reclaimed by foxes and

saplings, the bright green swath from Utani all the way down to ruined

Nantani on the southern coast where once an army had passed-had faded,

but they had not disappeared.

The distrust of the foreign was driven deep into the flesh here. He had

heard stories of Westlands women coming to marry among the low towns,

thinking their wombs would make them of greater value here than in their

own lands. Instead, they were recognized as a slower kind of invasion.

Driven out with threats or stones. The men who had had the temerity to

marry outside their own kind punished in ways to rival the prices paid