Danat paused. The reflection of his father’s rage warmed the boy’s face, but not more than that.
“I didn’t think an alliance with Galt would please you.”
“I didn’t either,” Maati said, “but I have enough experience with losing to your father that I’m learning to be generous about it.”
Danat almost started. Maati wondered what nerve he had touched, but before he could ask, a flock of birds a more violent blue than anything Maati had seen burst from a treetop down the avenue. They wheeled around one another, black beaks and wet eyes and tiny tongues pink as a fingertip. Maati closed his eyes, disturbed, and when he opened them, Danat was kneeling before him. The boy’s face was a webwork of tiny lines like the cracked mud in a desert riverbed. Fine, dark whiskers rose from Danat’s pores. His eyelashes crashed together when he blinked, interweaving or pressing one another apart like trees in a mudslide. Maati closed his eyes again, pressing his palms to them. He could see the tiny vessels in each eyelid, layer upon layer almost out to the skin.
“Maati-cha?”
“She’s seen us,” Maati said. “She knows I’m here.”
In spite of the knowledge, it took Maati half a hand to find her. He swept the horizon and from east to west and back again. He could see half-a-hundred rooftops. He found her at last near the top of the palaces of the Khai Udun on a balcony of bricks enameled the color of gold. At this distance, she was smaller than a grain of sand, and he saw her perfectly. Her hair was loose, her robe ripped at the sleeve. The andat was on her hip, its black, hungry eyes on his own. Vanjit nodded and put the andat down. Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, she took a pose of greeting. Maati returned it.
“Where? Where is she?” Danat asked. Maati ignored him.
Vanjit shifted her hands and her body into a pose that was both a rebuke and an accusation. Maati hesitated. He had imagined a thousand scenarios for this meeting, but they had all involved the words he would speak, and what she would say in return. His first impulse now was toward apology, but something in the back of his mind resisted. Her face was a mask of self-righteous anger, and, to his surprise, he recognized the expression as one he himself had worn in a thousand fantasies. In his dreams, he had been facing Otah, and Otah had been the one to beg forgiveness.
Like a voice speaking in his ear, he knew why his hands would not take an apologetic pose. She is here to see you abased. Do it now, and you have nothing left to offer her. Maati pulled his shoulders back, lifted his chin, and took a pose that requested an audience. Its nuances didn’t claim his superiority as a teacher to a student but neither did they cede it. Vanjit’s eyes narrowed. Maati waited, his breath short and anxiety plucking at him.
Vanjit took a pose appropriate to a superior granting a servant or slave an indulgence. Maati didn’t correct her, but neither did he respond. Vanjit looked down as if the andat had cried out or perhaps spoken, then shifted her hands and her body to a pose of formal invitation appropriate for an evening’s meal. Only then did Maati accept, shifting afterward to a pose of query. Vanjit indicated the balcony on which she stood, and then made a gesture that implied either intimacy or solitude.
Meet me here. In my territory and on my terms. Come alone.
Maati moved to an accepting pose, smiling to himself as much as to the girl in the palaces. With a physical sensation like that of a gnat flying into his eye, Maati’s vision blurred back to merely human acuity. He turned his attention back to Danat.
The boy looked half-frantic. He held his blade as if prepared for an attack, his gaze darting from tree to wall as if he could see the things that Maati had seen. The moons that passed around the wandering stars, the infinitesimal animals that made their home in a drop of rain, or the girl on her high balcony halfway across the city. Maati had no doubt she was still watching them.
“Come along, then,” he said. “We’re done here.”
“You saw her,” Danat said.
“I did.”
“Where is she? What did she want?”
“She’s at the palaces, and there’s no point in rushing over there like a man on fire. She can see everything, and she knows to watch. We could no more take her by surprise than fly.”
Maati took a deep breath and turned back along the path they’d just come. There was no reason to follow Otah’s route now, and Maati wanted to sit down for a while, perhaps drink a bowl of wine, perhaps speak to Eiah for a time. He wanted to understand better why the dread in his breast was mixed with elation, the fear with pleasure.
“What does she want?” Danat asked, trotting to catch up to Maati.
“I suppose that depends upon how you look at things,” Maati said. “In the greater scheme, she wants what any of us do. Love, a family, respect. In the smaller, I believe she wants to see me beg before I die. The odd thing is that even if she had that, it wouldn’t bring her any lasting peace.”
“I don’t understand.”
Maati stopped. It occurred to him that if he had taken the wrong pose, made the wrong decision just now, he and the boy would be trying to find their way back to camp by smell. He put a hand on Danat’s shoulder.
“I’ve asked Vanjit to meet with me tonight. She’s agreed, but it can only be the two of us,” Maati said. “I believe that once it’s done I’ll be able to tell you whether the world is still doomed.”
29
“No,” Otah said. “Absolutely not.”
“All respect,” Maati said. “You may be the Emperor, but this isn’t your call to make. I don’t particularly need your permission, and Vanjit’s got no use for it at all.”
“I can have you kept here.”
“You won’t,” Maati said. The poet was sure of himself, Otah thought, because he was right.
When Danat and Maati had returned early, he had known that something had happened. The quay they had adopted as the center of the search had been quiet since the end of the afternoon meal. Ana and Eiah sat in the shadow of a low stone wall, sleeping or talking when Eiah wasn’t going through the shards of her ruined binding, arranging the shattered wax in an approximation of the broken tablets. The boatman and his second had taken apart the complex mechanism connecting boiler to wheel and were cleaning each piece, the brass and bronze, iron and steel laid out on gray tarps and shining like jewelry. The voices of the remaining armsmen joined with the low, constant lapping of the river and the songs of the birds. At another time, it might have been soothing. Otah, sitting at his field table, fought the urge to pace or shout or throw stones into the water. Sitting, racking his brain for details of a place he’d lived three decades ago, and pushing down his own fears both exhausted him and made him tense. He felt like a Galtic boiler with too hot a fire and no release; he could feel the solder melting at his seams.
If they had followed his plan, Danat and Maati would have returned to the quay from a path that ran south along the river. They came from the west, down the broad stone steps. Danat held a naked blade forgotten in his hand, his expression set and unnerved. Maati, walking more slowly, seemed on the verge of collapse, but also pleased. Otah put down his pen.
“You’ve found her?”
“She’s found us,” Maati said. “I think she’s been watching us since we stepped off the boat.”
The armsmen clustered around them. Eiah and Ana rose to their feet, touching each other for support. Maati lumbered into the center of the quay as if it were a stage and he was declaiming a part. He told them of the encounter, of Vanjit’s appearance, of the andat at her side. He took the poses he’d adopted and mimicked Vanjit’s. In the end, he explained that Vanjit would see him—would see only him—and that it was to happen that evening.
“She doesn’t know you,” Maati continued, “and what little she does know, she doesn’t have a use for. To her, you’re the man who turned against his own people. And I am the teacher who gave her the power of a small god.”
“And then plotted to kill her,” Otah said, but he knew this battle was lost. Maati was r
ight: neither of them had the power here. The poet and her andat were their masters whether he liked it or not. She could dictate any terms she wished, and Maati was important to her in a way that Otah himself was not.
It was a meeting with the potential to end the world or save it. He would have given it to a stranger before he trusted it to Maati.
“What are you going to tell her?” Ana asked. Her voice sounded hungry. Weeks—months now—Ana had been living in shadows, and here was the chance to make herself whole.
“I’ll apologize,” Maati said. “I’ll explain that the andat manipulated us, playing on our fears. Then, if Vanjit will allow it, I’ll have Eiah brought so that she can offer her apologies as well.”
Eiah, standing where Otah could see her face, lifted her chin as if something had caught her attention. Something ghosted across her face—alarm or incredulity—and then was gone. She became a statue of herself, a mask. She had no more faith in Maati than he did. And, to judge from her silence, no better idea of what to do either.
“She has killed thousands of innocent people,” Otah said. “She’s crippled women she had numbered among her friends. Are you sure that apologizing is entirely appropriate?”
“What would you have me do?” Maati asked, his hands taking a pose that was both query and challenge. “Should I go to her swinging accusations? Should I tell her she’s not safe and never will be?”
The voice that answered was Idaan’s.
“There’s nothing you can say to her. She’s gone mad, and you talk about her as if she weren’t. Whatever words you use, she’s going to hear what she wants. You might just as well send her a puppet and let her speak both parts.”
“You don’t know her,” Maati said, his face flushing. “You’ve never met her.”
“I’ve been her,” Idaan said dismissively as she walked down the steps to the now-crowded quay. “Give her what she wants if you’d like. It’s never made her well before, and it won’t make her well now.”
“What would you advise?” Otah asked.
“She’ll be distracted,” Idaan said. “Go in with a bowman. Put an arrow in the back of her head just where the spine touches it.”
“No,” Maati shouted.
“No,” Eiah said. “Even if killing her is the right thing, think of the risk. If she suspects, she can always lash out, and we haven’t got any protection against her.”
“There doesn’t need to be anyone there for her to be suspicious,” Idaan said. “If she’s frightened by shadows, the end is just as bloody.”
“So we’re giving up on Galt,” Ana said. Her voice was flat. “I listen to all of you, and the one thing I never hear mentioned is all the people who’ve died because they happened to be like me.”
Maati stepped forward, taking the girl’s hand. Otah, watching her, didn’t believe she needed comfort. It wasn’t pain or sorrow in her expression. It was resolve.
“They don’t think they can move her to mercy,” Maati said. “I will do everything I can, Ana-cha. I’ll swear to anything you like that I will—”
“Take me with you,” Ana said. “I’m no threat to her, and I can speak for Galt. I’m the only one here who can do that.”
Her orders were met by silence until Idaan made a sound that was equally laughter and cough.
“She told me to come alone,” Maati said. “If she sees me leading a blind Galt to her—”
“Vanjit has the right to see her mistakes,” Otah said. “She’s done this. She should look at it. We all should look at what we’ve done to come here.”
Maati looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. There was a deep confusion in the old poet’s face. Otah took a pose that asked a favor between equals. As a friend to a friend.
“Take Ana,” Otah said.
Maati’s jaw worked as if he were chewing possible replies.
“No,” he said.
Otah took a pose that was at once a query and an opportunity for Maati to recant. Maati shook his head.
“I have trusted you, Otah-kvo. Since we were boys, I have had to come to you with everything, and when you weren’t there, I tried to imagine what you might have done. And this time, you are wrong. I know it.”
“Maati—”
“Trust me,” Maati hissed. “For once in your life trust me. Ana-cha must not go.”
Otah’s mouth opened, but no words came forth. Maati stood before him, his breath fast as a boy’s who had just run a race or jumped from a high cliff into the sea. Maati had defied Otah. He had betrayed him. He had never in their long history refused him.
For a moment, Otah felt as if they were boys again. He saw in Maati the balled fists and jutting chin of a small child standing against an older one, the bone-deep fear mixed with a sudden, surprising pride in his own unexpected courage. And in Otah’s own breast, an answering sorrow and even shame.
He took a pose that acknowledged Maati’s decision. The poet hesitated, nodded, and walked to the riverside. Idaan leaned close to Ana, whispering all that had happened which the girl could not see.
Kiyan-kya—
Sunset isn’t on us yet, but it will be soon. Maati is sulking, I think. Everyone’s frightened, but none of us has the courage to say it. I take that back. Idaan isn’t afraid. Just after Maati refused to take Ana Dasin with him to this thrice-damned meeting, Idaan came to me and said that she was fairly certain that if Vanjit kills us all, she’ll die of starvation herself within the year. Vanjit’s hunting ability hasn’t impressed her, and Idaan has a way of finding comfort in strange places.
Nothing has ever come out the way I expected, love. It seemed so simple. We had men who could sire a child, they had women who could bear. And instead, I am sending the least reliable man I know to save everything and everyone by talking a madwoman into sanity. If I could find any way not to do this, I’d take it. I appealed to what Maati and I once were to each other when I tried to convince him to accept Ana’s company. It was more than half a lie. In truth I can’t say I know this man. The boy I knew in Saraykeht and the man we knew in Machi has become a stew of bitterness and blind optimism. He wants the past back, and no sacrifice is too high. I wonder if he never saw the weakness and injustice and rot at the heart of the old ways, or if he’s only forgotten them.
If I had it all to do again, I’d have done it differently. I’d have married you sooner. I’d never have gone north, and Idaan and Adrah could have taken Machi and had all this on their heads instead of my own. Only then we’d have been in Udun, you and I, and I would have had your company for an even shorter time. There is no winning this game. I suppose it’s best that we can only play it through once.
You wouldn’t like what’s become of Udun. I don’t like it. I remember Sinja saying that he kept your wayhouse safe during the sack, but I haven’t had the heart to go and look. The river still has its beauty. The birds still have their song. They’ll still be here when the rest of us are gone. I miss Sinja.
There’s something I’m trying to tell you, love. It’s taking me more time than I’d expected to work up the courage. We all know it. Even Maati, even Ana, even Eiah. None of us can speak the words; not even me. You’re the only one I can say this to, because, I suppose, you’ve already died and so you’re safe from it.
Love. Oh, love. This meeting is all we can do, and it isn’t going to work.
Maati left in twilight. The stars shone in the east, the darkness rising up like a black dawn as the western sky fell from blue to gold, from gold to gray. Birdsong changed from the trills and complaints of the day to the low cooing and complexities of the night. The river seemed to exhale, and its breath was green and rotting and cold. Maati had a small pack at his side. In the light of the failing day and the flickering orange of the torches, he looked older than Otah felt, and Otah felt ancient.
He tried to see something familiar in Maati’s eyes. He tried to see the boy he’d gone drinking with in dark, lush Saraykeht, but that child was gone. Both of those children.
/> “I will do my best, Otah-kvo,” Maati said.
Otah bit back his first reply, and then his second.
“Tomorrow’s going to be a very different day, Maati-cha,” Otah said. Maati nodded. After so much and so long, there should have been more. Sinja appeared for a moment in the back of Otah’s mind. There had been no last good-bye for him. If this was to be the ending between the two of them, Otah thought he should say something. He should make this parting unlike the others that had come before. “I’m sorry it’s come to this.”
Maati took a pose that agreed but kept the meaning as imprecise as Otah had. One of the armsmen called out, pointing at the looming threat of the Khai Udun’s palaces. In a wide window precisely above the river, a light had appeared, glittering like gold. Like a fallen star.
Ana and Danat were in a corner of the quay, their arms wrapped around each other. Idaan stood among the armsmen, her expression grim. Eiah sat alone by the water, listening. Otah saw Maati’s gaze linger on her with something like sorrow.
With a lantern in his unsteady hand, Maati walked off along the ruined streets that ran beside the river. Otah guessed it would take him half a hand to reach the palaces.
“All right,” Idaan said. “He’s gone.”
Otah turned to look at her, some pale attempt at wit on his lips, and saw that the comment hadn’t been meant for him. Idaan crouched beside Eiah. His daughter’s face was turned toward nothing, but her hands were digging through the physician’s satchel. Danat glanced at Otah, confusion in his eyes. Eiah started drawing flat stones from her bag and laying them gently on the flagstones before her.
No, he was wrong. Not stones, but triangles of broken wax. The contents of old, broken tablets with symbols and words inscribed on them in Eiah’s hand.
“You could try being of help,” Idaan said and gestured toward the shards at his daughter’s knees. “There’s a piece that goes right here I haven’t been able to find.”
“You did enough,” Eiah said, her hands shifting quickly, fitting the breaks together. Already the wax was taking the shape of five separate squares, the characters coming together. “Just going to the campsite and bringing back the bits you did was more than I could have asked.”
The Price of Spring (The Long Price Quartet Book 4) Page 37