He felt an odd relaxation in her body, as if by saying the thing, he’d freed her from some secret effort she’d been making.
“And if he can’t?” she asked. “If it’s all going to fall apart anyway, can we run? You and me and the children? If I take them and go, are you going to come with us, or stay here and fight?”
He kissed her again. She rested her hands against his shoulders, leaning into him. Otah didn’t answer, and he knew from the sound of her breath that she understood.
“IF WE take the nuance of movement-away in nurat and the symbol set you worked up for the senses of continuance,” Maati said, “I think then we’ll have something we can work with.”
Cehmai’s eyes were bloodshot, his hair wild from another long evening of combing frustrated fingers through it. Around them, the lamplight shone on a bedlam of paper. The library would have seemed a rat’s nest to any but the two of them: books laid open; scrolls unfurled and weighted by other scrolls which were themselves unfurled; loose pages of a dozen codices stacked together. The mass of information and inference, grammar and poetry and history would have been overwhelming, Maati thought, to anyone who didn’t know how profoundly little it was. Cehmai ran his fingertips down the notes Maati had made and shook his head.
“It’s still the same,” he said. “Nurat is modified by the fourth case of adat, and then it’s exactly the same logical structure as the one Heshai used.”
“No, it isn’t,” Maati said, slapping the table with an open palm. “It’s different.”
Cehmai took a long, slow breath, raising his hands palms-out. It wasn’t a formal gesture, but Maati understood it all the same. They were both worn raw. He sat back in his chair, feeling the knots in his back and neck. The brazier in the corner made the wide room smell warm without seeming to actually heat it.
“Look,” Maati said. “Let’s put it aside for the day. We need to move the library underground soon anyway. It’s going to be too cold up here to do more than watch our fingers turn blue.”
Cehmai nodded, then looked around at the disarray. Maati could read the despair in his face.
“I’ll put it back together,” Maati said. “Then a dozen slaves with strong backs, and I’ll put it all together in the winter quarters in two days’ time.”
“I should move the poet’s house down too,” Cehmai said. “I feel like I haven’t been there in weeks.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. The place seems too big without Stone-Made-Soft anyway. Too quiet. It reminds me of…well, of everything.”
Maati rose, his knees aching. His feet tingled with the pins and needles that long motionlessness brought him these days. He clapped his hand on Cehmai’s shoulder.
“Meet me in three days,” he said. “I’ll have the books in order. We’ll start again fresh.”
Cehmai took a pose of agreement, but he looked exhausted. Worn thin. The younger poet began snuffing the lanterns as Maati walked back toward his apartments, placing his feet carefully until normal feeling returned to them. Stepping the wrong way and breaking his ankle would be just the thing to make the winter even more miserable than it already promised tobe.
The rooms in which he spent his summers were already bare. The fire grate was empty of everything but old soot. The tapestries were gone, the couches, the tables, the cabinets. Everything had been moved to the lower city. Winter ate the middle of things in the North. The snows would come soon, blocking the doors and windows. The second-story snow doors would open out for anyone who needed to travel into the world. Below, in the warmth of the ground, all the citizens of Machi, and now of Cetani too, would huddle and talk and fight and sing and play at tiles and stones until winter lost its grip and the snows turned to meltwater and washed the black-cobbled streets. Only the metalworkers remained at the ground level, the green copper roofs of the forges free of snow and ice, the plumes of coal smoke rising almost as high as the towers all through the winter.
At least all through this winter. This one last winter before the Galts came and butchered them all.
If only there was some other way to phrase the idea of removing. Seedless’s true name would have been better translated as Removing-the-Part-That-Continues. Continuity was a fairly simple problem. The old grammars had several ways to conceptualize continuance. It was removal…
Maati reached the thin red doorway at the back of the rooms, and started down the stairs. It was dark as night. Darker. He would need to talk with the palace servant masters about seeing that lanterns were lit here. With as many people as there were filling every available niche in the tunnels and, from what he heard, the mines as well, it seemed unlikely that no one could be spared to be sure there was a little light on his path.
Or they might be rationing lamp oil already. There was a depressing thought.
He descended, one hand on the smooth, cool stone of the wall to keep him steady. He moved slowly because going quickly would get him winded, and it was dark enough that he wanted to stay sure of his footing. His mind was only half concerned with walking anyway. Cehmai was right. The logical structure was the same whether he used nurat or something else. So that was another dead end.
Removal.
It was a concept of relative motion. Taking something enclosed and producing a distance between it and its—now previous—enclosure. Plucking out a seed, or a baby. A gemstone from its setting. A man from his bed or his home. Removing. Heshai’s work in framing Seedless was so elegant, so simple, that it seemed inevitable. That was the curse of second and third bindings of the same andat. Finding something equally graceful, but utterly different. It made his jaw ache just thinking about it.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and the wide upper chamber of his winter quarters. The night candle burning there was hardly to its first quarter mark, which given the lengthening nights of autumn meant the city beneath him would likely still be awake and active. Rest for him, though. His day had been full already. He took up the candle, passed down a short, close corridor, and reached the second stairway, which led down to the bedchambers.
The air was noticeably warmer here than in the library—in part from the heat of ten thousand people in the earth below him rising up, and in part from its stillness. Servants had prepared his bed with blankets and furs. A light meal of rice and spiced pork in one of the bowls of hand-thick iron that could hold the heat for the better part of a day waited on his writing table. Maati sat, ate slowly, not tasting the food, drinking rice wine as if it were water. Even as he sucked the pepper sauce off the last bit of pork, his feet and fingers were still cold. Removing-the-Chill-From-the-Old-Man’s-Flesh. There was an andat.
Maati closed the lid of the great iron bowl, slipped out of his robes, hefted himself into his bed, and willed himself to sleep. For a time, he lay watching the candle burn, smelling the wax as it melted and dripped, and could not get comfortable. He couldn’t get the cold out of his toes and knuckles, couldn’t make his mind stop moving. He couldn’t avoid the growing fear that when he closed his eyes, the nightmares that had begun plaguing him would return.
The images his mind held when his eyes were closed had become more violent, more anxious. Fathers weeping for sons who were also sacks of bloodied grain and dead mice; long, sleepless hours spent searching through bodies in a charnel house hoping to find his child still living and only finding Otah’s children again and again and again; the recurring dream of a tunnel that led down past the city, deeper than the mines, and into the earth until the stone itself grew fleshy and angry and bled. And the cry that woke him—a man’s voice shouting from a great distance that demanded to know whose child this was. Whose child?
With this mind, Maati thought as he watched the single flame of the night candle, I’m intended to bind an andat. It’s like driving nails with rotten meat.
The night candle had burned through three of its smallest marks when he abandoned his bed, pulled on his robes, and left his private chambers for the wide, arched galler
ies of the tunnels below the palaces. The bathhouses were at least warm. If he wasn’t to sleep, he could at least be miserable in comfort.
The public spaces were surprisingly full with men and women in the glorious robes of the utkhaiem. It made sense, he supposed. Cetani had not only brought its merchants and craftsmen. There would be two courts living under the palaces this winter. And so twice the social intrigue. Who precisely was sleeping with whom would be even more complex, and even the threat of their death at the hands of a Galtic army wouldn’t stop the courtiers playing for rank.
As he passed, the utkhaiem took poses of respect and welcome, the servants and slaves ones of abasement. Maati repressed a swelling hatred of all of them. It wasn’t their fault, after all, that he had to save them. And himself. And Liat and Nayiit and Otah and all the people he had ever known, all the cities he had ever seen. His world, and everything in it.
It was the Galts who deserved his anger. And they would feel it, by all the gods. Failed crops, gelded men, and barren women until they rebuilt everything they’d broken and given back everything they took. If he could only think of a better way to say removing.
He brooded his way along the dim galleries and through the great chambers until the air began to thicken with the first presentiment of steam, and the prospect of hot water, and of finally warming his chilled feet, intruded on him.
He found his way into the men’s changing rooms, where he shrugged off his robes and boots and let the servant offer him a bowl of clear, cold water to drink before he went into the public baths and sweated it all out again. When he passed through the inner door, Maati shivered at the warmth. Voices filled the dim, gray space—conversations between people made invisible by the steam rising from the water. There had been a time, Maati considered as he stepped gingerly down the submerged stairs and waded toward a low bench, when the idea of strangers wandering naked in the baths—men and women together—had held some erotic frisson. Truth often disappoints.
He lowered himself to the thick, water-logged wood of the bench, the hot water rising past his belly, past his chest, until the small warm waves danced against the hollow of his throat. At last, his feet felt warm, and he leaned back against the warm stone, sighing with a purely physical contentment. He resolved to move down toward the warmer end before he went back to his rooms. If he boiled himself thoroughly enough, he might even carry the heat back to his bed.
Across the bath, hidden in the mist, two men talked of grain supplies and how best to address the problem of rats. Far away toward the hotter end of the bath, someone shouted, and there was a sound of splashing. Children, Maati supposed, and then fell into a long, gnawing plan for how best to move the volumes in the library. His concentration was so profound he didn’t notice when the children approached.
“Uncle Maati?”
Eiah was practically at his side, crouched low in the water to preserve her modesty. A gaggle of children of the utkhaiem behind her at what Maati supposed must be a respectful distance. He raised hands from the water and took a pose of greeting, somewhat cramped by being held high enough to be seen.
“I haven’t seen you in ages, Eiah-kya,” he said. “What’s been keeping you?”
The girl shrugged, sending ripples.
“There are a lot of new people from Cetani,” she said. “There’s a whole other Radaani family here now. And I’ve been studying with Loya-cha about how to fix broken bones. And…and Mama-kya said you were busy and that I shouldn’t bother you.”
“You should always bother me,” Maati said with a grin.
“Is it going well?”
“It’s a complicated thing,” Maati said. “But it’s a long wait until spring. We’ll have time.”
“Complicated’s hard,” Eiah said. “Loya-cha says it’s always easy to fix things when there’s only one thing wrong. It’s when there’s two or three things at once that it’s hardest.”
“Smart man, Loya-cha,” Maati said.
Eiah shrugged again.
“He’s a servant,” she said. “If you can’t recapture Seedless, we can’t beat the Galts can we?”
“Your father did once,” Maati said. “He’s a very clever man.”
“But we might not.”
“We might not,” Maati allowed.
Eiah nodded to herself, her forehead crinkling as she came to some decision. When she spoke, her voice had a seriousness that seemed out of place from a girl still so young, hardly half-grown.
“If we’re all going to die, I wanted you to know that I think you were a very good father to Nayiit-cha.”
Maati almost coughed from surprise, and then he understood. She knew. A warm sorrow filled him. She knew that Nayiit was Otah’s son. That Maati loved the boy. That it mattered to him deeply that Nayiit love him back. And the worst of it, she knew that he hadn’t been a very good father.
“You’re kind, love,” he said, his voice thick.
She nodded sharply, embarrassed, perhaps, to have completed her task. One of her companions yelped and dropped under the water only to come back up spitting and shaking his head. Eiah turned toward them.
“Leave him be!” Eiah shouted, then turned to Maati with an apologetic pose. He smiled and waved her away. She went back to her group with the squared shoulders of an overseer facing a recalcitrant band of laborers. Maati let his smile fade.
A good father to Nayiit. And to be told so by Otah’s daughter. Perhaps binding the andat wasn’t so complex after all. Not when compared with other things. Fathers and sons, lovers and mother and daughters. And the war. Saraykeht and Seedless. All of it touched one edge against another, like tilework. None of it existed alone. And how could anyone expect him to solve the thing when half of everything seemed to be broken, and half of what was broken was still beautiful.
The physician was right. It would be easy to fix one thing, if there were only one thing wrong. But there were so many ways to break something so delicate and so complex. Even the act of making one thing right seemed destined to undo something else. And he was too tired and too confused to say whether one way of being wounded was better than another.
There were so many ways to be wrong.
There were so many ways to break things.
Maati felt the thought fall into place as if it were something physical. It was the moment he was supposed to shout, to stand up and wave his hands about, possessed by insight as if by a demon. But instead, he sat with it quietly, as if it was a gem only he of all mankind had ever seen.
He’d spent too much time with Heshai’s binding. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues had been made for the cotton trade—pulling seeds from the fiber and speeding it on its way to the spinners and the weavers and feeding all of the needle trades. But there was no reason for Maati to be restricted by that. He only needed a way to break Galt. To starve them. To see that no other generation of Galtic children ever saw the world.
It wasn’t Seedless he needed. It was only Sterile. And there were any number of ways to say that.
He sank lower into the water as the sense of relief and peace consumed him. Destroying-the-Part-That-Continues, he thought as the little waves touched his lips. Shattering-the-Part-That-Continues. Crushing it. Rotting it. Corroding it.
Corrupting it.
In his mind, Galt died. And he, Maati Vaupathai, killed it. What, he asked himself, was victory in a single battle compared with that? Otah had saved the city. Maati saw now how he could save everything.
Sinja woke, stiff with cold, to the sound of chopping. Outside the tent, someone with a hand axe was breaking the ice at the top of the barrels. It was still dark, but morning was always dark these days. He kicked off his blankets and rose. The undyed wool of his inner robes held a bit of the heat as he pulled on first one outer robe and then another with a wide leather cloak over the top that creaked when he fastened the wide bone brooch work.
Outside his tent, the army was already breaking camp. Columns of smoke and steam rose from the wagons. Horses s
norted, their breath pluming white in the light of a falling moon. In the southeast, the dawn was still only a lighter shade of black. Sinja walked to the cook fire and squatted down beside it, a bowl of barley gruel sweetened with wine-packed prunes in his hands. The heat of it was better than the taste. Wine could do strange things to prunes.
The army had been marching for two and a half weeks. At a guess, there were another three before they reached Machi. If there was no storm, Sinja guessed they would lose a thousand men to frostbite, most of those in the last ten days. He squinted into the dark, implacable sky and watched the faintest stars begin to fade. There would still be over nine thousand men. And every man among them would know that this battle wasn’t for money or glory. Or even for love of the general. If by some miracle Otah turned the Galts back from the city, they would die scattered in the frozen plains of the North.
This battle would be the only time in the whole benighted war that the Galts would go in knowing they were fighting for their lives.
“You want more?” the cook asked, and Sinja shook his head. Around him, the members of his personal guard were moving at last. Sinja didn’t help them break down the camp. He’d left most of the company behind in Tan-Sadar. They were, after all, on a deadly stupid march that, with luck, would end with them sacking their own homes. It wasn’t duty that could be asked of a green recruit of his first campaign. Sinja had taken time handpicking this dozen to accompany him. There wasn’t a man among them he liked.
The last tent was folded, poles bound together with their leather thongs, and put on the steam wagon. The fires were all stamped out, and the sun made its tardy appearance. Sinja wrapped the leather cloak closer around his shoulders and sighed. This was a younger man’s game. If he’d been as wise as the average rat, he’d be someplace warm and close now, with a good mulled wine and a plate of venison in mint sauce. The call sounded, and he began the walk north. Cold numbed his face and made his ears ache. The air smelled of dust and smoke and horse dung—the miasma of the moving army. Sinja kept his eyes to the horizon, but the only clouds were the high white lace that did little but leach blue from the sky; there was no storm coming today. And still the dusting of snow that had fallen in the last weeks hadn’t melted and wouldn’t before spring. The world was pale except where a stone or patch of ground stood free of snow. There it was black.
An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet) Page 34