Shadow and Betrayal

by Abraham Daniel

  ‘I did spend one evening with a group of the utkhaiem. They were from the west . . . from Pathai. I lived there before I went to the school.’

  ‘And you thought they might have news of your family.’

  It wasn’t an accusation, though it could have been. Maati pressed his lips thinner, embarrassed, and repeated the pose of confirmation. The smile it brought seemed sympathetic.

  ‘And what did you learn in your productive, studious days with Saraykeht’s books?’

  ‘I studied the history of the city and its andat.’

  The elegant fingers made a motion that both approved and invited him to continue. The dark eyes held an interest that told Maati he had done well.

  ‘I learned, for example, that the Dai-kvo - the last one - sent you here when Iana-kvo failed to hold Petals-Falling-Away after the old poet, Miat-kvo, died.’

  ‘And tell me, why do you think he did that?’

  ‘Because Petals-Falling-Away had been used to speed cotton harvests for the previous fifty years,’ Maati said, pleased to know the answer. ‘It could make the plant . . . open, I guess. It made it easier to get the fibers. With the loss, the city needed another way to make the process - bringing in the raw cotton and turning it to cloth - better and faster than they could in Galt or the Westlands, or else the traders might go elsewhere, and the whole city would have to change. You had captured Removing-The-Part-That-Continues. Called Sterile in the north, or Seedless in the summer cities. With it, the merchant houses can contract with the Khai, and they won’t have to comb the seeds out of the cotton. Even if it took twice as long to harvest, the cotton can still get to the spinners more quickly here than anywhere else. Now the other nations and cities actually send their raw cotton here. Then the weavers come here, because the raw cotton is here. And the dyers and the tailors because of the weavers. All the needle trades.’

  ‘Yes. And so Saraykeht holds its place, with only a few more pricked fingers and some blood on the cotton,’ the man said, taking a pose of confirmation with a softness to the wrists that confused Maati. ‘But then, blood’s only blood, ne?’

  The silence went on until Maati, uncomfortable, grasped for something to break it.

  ‘You also rid the summer cities of rats and snakes.’

  The man came out of his reverie with something like a smile. When he spoke, his voice was amused and self-deprecating.

  ‘Yes. At the price of drawing Galts and Westermen.’

  Maati took a pose of agreement less formal than before, and his teacher seemed not to mind. In fact, he seemed almost pleased.

  ‘I also learned a lot about the particular needle trades,’ Maati said. ‘I wasn’t sure how much you needed to know about what happens with the cotton once you’re done with it. And sailing. I read a book about sailing.’

  ‘But you didn’t actually go to the seafront, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  The teacher took a pose of acceptance that wasn’t approval or disapproval, but something of both.

  ‘All this from one little test,’ he said. ‘But then, you came through the school very young, so you must have a talent for seeing tests. Tell me. How did you see through the Dai-kvo’s little guessing games?’

  ‘You . . . I’m sorry, Heshai-kvo. It’s . . . you really want to know that?’

  ‘It can be telling. Especially since you don’t want to say. Do you?’

  Maati took a pose of apology. He kept his eyes down while he spoke, but he didn’t lie.

  ‘When I got to the school - I was still among the younger cohorts - there was an older boy who said something to me. We’d been set to turn the soil in the gardens, and my hands were too soft. I couldn’t do the work. And the black robe who was tending us - Otah-kvo, his name was - was very upset with me. But then, when I told him why I hadn’t been able to do as he asked, he tried to comfort me. And he told me that if I had worked harder, it wouldn’t have helped. That was just before he left the school.’

  ‘So? You mean someone told you? That hardly seems fair.’

  ‘He didn’t though. He didn’t tell me, exactly. He only said some things about the school. That it wasn’t what it looked like. And the things he said made me start thinking. And then . . .’

  ‘And once you knew to look, it wasn’t hard to see. I understand.’

  ‘It wasn’t quite like that.’

  ‘Do you ever wonder if you would have made it on your own? I mean if your Otah-kvo hadn’t given the game away?’

  Maati blushed. The secret he’d held for years with the Dai-kvo pried open in a single conversation. Heshai-kvo was a subtle man. He took a pose of acknowledgment. The teacher, however, was looking elsewhere, an expression passing over him that might have been annoyance or pain.

  ‘Heshai-kvo?’

  ‘I’ve just remembered something I’m to do. Walk with me.’

  Maati rose and followed. The palaces spread out, larger than the village that surrounded the Dai-kvo, each individual structure larger than the whole of the school. Together, they walked down the wide marble staircase, into a vaulted hall. The wide, bright air was touched by the scents of sandalwood and vanilla.

  ‘Tell me, Maati. What do you think of slaves?’

  The question was an odd one, and his first response - I don’t - seemed too glib for the occasion. Instead, he took a pose requesting clarification as best he could while still walking more quickly than his usual pace.

  ‘Permanent indenture. What’s your opinion of it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then think for a moment.’

  They passed through the hall and onto a wide, flower-strewn path that led down and to the south. Gardens rich with exotic flowers and fountains spread out before them. Singing slaves, hidden from view by hedges or cloth screens, filled the air with wordless melodies. The sun blared heat like a trumpet, and the thick air made Maati feel almost as if he were swimming. It seemed they’d hardly started walking before Maati’s inner robe was sticky with sweat. He found himself struggling to keep up.

  As Maati considered the question, servants and utkhaiem passed, pausing to take poses of respect. His teacher took little notice of them or of the heat; where Maati’s robes stuck, his flowed like water over stone and no sweat dampened his temples. Maati cleared his throat.

  ‘People who have entered into permanent indenture have either chosen to do so, in return for the protection of the holders of their contracts, or lost their freedoms as punishment for some crime,’ Maati said, carefully keeping any judgment out of the statement.

  ‘Is that what the Dai-kvo taught you?’

  ‘No. It’s just . . . it’s just the way it is. I’ve always known that.’

  ‘And the third case? The andat?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The teacher’s dark eyebrows rose on the perfect skin of his forehead. His lips took the slightest of all possible smiles.

  ‘The andat aren’t criminals. Before they’re bound, they have no thought, no will, no form. They’re only ideas. How can an idea enter into a contract?’

  ‘How can one refuse?’ Maati countered.

  ‘There are names, my boy, for men who take silence as consent.’

  They passed into the middle gardens. The low halls spread before them, and wider paths almost like streets. The temple rose off to their right, wide and high; its sloping lines reminded Maati of a seagull in flight. At one of the low halls, carts had gathered. Laborers milled around, speaking with one another. Maati caught a glimpse of a bale of cotton being carried in. With a thrill of excitement he realized what was happening. For the first time, he was going to see Heshai-kvo wield the power of the andat.

  ‘Ah, well. Never mind,’ his teacher said, as if he had been waiting for some answer. ‘Only Maati? Later on, I’d like you to think about this conversation.’

  Maati took a pose appropriate to a student accepting an assignment. As they drew nearer, the laborers and merchants moved aside to make room for
them. Members of the utkhaiem were also there in fine robes and expensive jewelry. Maati caught sight of an older woman in a robe the color of the sky at dawn - the personal attendant of the Khai Saraykeht.

  ‘The Khai is here?’ Maati asked, his voice smaller than he would have liked.

  ‘He attends sometimes. It makes the merchants feel he’s paying attention to them. Silly trick, but it seems to work.’

  Maati swallowed, half at the prospect of seeing the Khai, half at the indifference in his teacher’s voice. They passed through the arches and into the shade of the low hall. Warehouse-large, the hall was filled with bale upon bale of raw cotton stacked to the high ceiling. The only space was a narrow gap at the very top, thinner than a bale, and another of perhaps a hand’s width at the bottom where metal frames held the cotton off the floor. What little space remained was peopled by the representatives of the merchant houses whose laborers waited outside and, on a dais, the Khai Saraykeht - a man in his middle years, his hair shot with gray, his eyes heavy-lidded. His attendants stood around him, following commands so subtle they approached invisibility. Maati felt the weight of the silence as they entered. Then a murmur moved through the hall, voices too low to make out words or even sentiments. The Khai raised an eyebrow and took a pose of query with an almost inhuman grace.

  At his side stood a thick-bodied man, his wide frog-like mouth gaping open in what might have been horror or astonishment. He also wore the robe of a poet. Maati felt his teacher’s hand on his shoulder, solid, firm, and cold.

  ‘Maati,’ the lovely, careful voice said so quietly that only the two of them could hear, ‘there’s something you should know. I’m not Heshai-kvo. ’

  Maati looked up. The dark eyes were on his, something like amusement in their depths.

  ‘Wh-who are you, then?’

  ‘A slave, my dear. The slave you hope to own.’

  Then the man who was not his teacher turned to the Khai Saraykeht and the spluttering, enraged poet. He took a pose of greeting more appropriate to acquaintances chanced upon at a teahouse than to the two most powerful men of the city. Maati, his hands trembling, took a much more formal stance.

  ‘What is this?’ the poet - the frog-mouthed Heshai-kvo, he had to be - demanded.

  ‘This?’ the man said, turning and considering Maati as if he were a sculpture pointed out at a fair. ‘It seems to be a boy. Or perhaps a young man. Fifteen summers? Maybe sixteen? It’s so hard to know what to call it at that age. I found it abandoned in the upper halls. Apparently it’s been wandering around there for days. No one else seems to have any use for it. May I keep it?’

  ‘Heshai,’ the Khai said. His voice was powerful. He seemed to speak in a conversational tone, but his voice carried like an actor’s. The displeasure in the syllables stung.

  ‘Oh,’ the man at Maati’s side said. ‘Have I displeased? Well, master, you’ve no one to blame but yourself.’

  ‘Silence!’ the poet snapped. Maati sensed as much as saw the man beside him go stiff. He chanced a glimpse at the perfect face. The features were fixed in pain, and slowly, as if fighting each movement, the elegant hands took forms of apology and self-surrender, the spine twisted into a pose of abject obeisance.

  ‘I come to do your bidding, Khai Saraykeht,’ the man - no, the andat, Seedless - said, his voice honey and ashes. ‘Command me as you will.’

  The Khai took a pose of acknowledgment, its nuances barely civil. The frog-mouthed poet looked at Maati and gestured pointedly to his own side. Maati scurried to the dais. The andat moved more slowly, but followed.

  ‘You should have waited,’ Heshai-kvo hissed. ‘This is a very busy time of year. I would have thought the Dai-kvo would teach you more patience.’

  Maati fell into a pose of abject apology.

  ‘Heshai-kvo, I was misled. I thought that he . . . that it . . . I am shamed by my error.’

  ‘As you should be,’ the poet snapped. ‘Just arriving like this, unintroduced and—’

  ‘Good and glorious Heshai,’ the Khai Saraykeht said, voice envenomed by sarcasm, ‘I understand that adding another pet to your collection must be trying. And indeed, I regret to interrupt, but . . .’

  The Khai gestured grandly at the bales of cotton. His hands were perfect, and his motion the most elegant Maati had ever seen, smooth and controlled and eloquent.

  Heshai-kvo briefly adopted a pose of regret, then turned to the beautiful man - Seedless, Sterile, andat. For a moment the two considered each other, some private, silent conversation passing between them. The andat curled his lip in something half sneer, half sorrow. Sweat dampened the teacher’s back, and he began trembling as if with a great effort. Then the andat turned and raised his arms theatrically to the cotton.

  A moment later, Maati heard a faint tick, like a single raindrop. And then more and more, until an invisible downpour filled the hall. From his position behind the Khai and the poet, he lowered himself, looking under the raised platform on which the bales lay. The parquet floor was covered with small black dots skittering and jumping as they struck one another. Cotton seed.

  ‘It is done,’ Heshai-kvo said, and Maati stood hurriedly.

  The Khai clapped his hands and rose, his movement like a dancer’s. His robes flowed through the air like something alive. For a moment Maati forgot himself and merely stood in awe.

  A pair of servants pulled wide the great doors, and began a low wail, calling the merchants and their laborers to come and take what was theirs. The utkhaiem took stations by the doors, prepared to collect the fees and taxes for each bale that left. The Khai stood on his dais, grave and beautiful, seeming more a ghost or god than Seedless, who more nearly was.

  ‘You should have waited,’ Heshai-kvo said again over the voices of the laborers and the din of the merchants at their business. ‘This is a very bad start for your training. A very bad start.’

  Once again, Maati took a pose of regret, but the poet - his teacher, his new master - turned away, leaving the pose unanswered. Maati stood slowly, his face hot with a blush equally embarrassment and anger, his hands at his sides. At the edge of the dais, the andat sat, his bone-pale hands in his lap. He met Maati’s gaze, shrugged, and took a pose of profound apology that might have been genuine or deeply insincere; Maati had no way to tell.

  Before he could choose how to respond, Seedless smiled, lowered his hands and looked away.

  Amat Kyaan sat at the second-floor window of her apartments, looking out over the city. The setting sun behind her reddened the walls of the soft quarter. Some comfort houses were already hanging out streamers and lamps, the glitter of the lights and the shimmering cloth competing with the glow of fireflies. A fruit seller rang her bell and sang her wares in a gentle melody. Amat Kyaan rubbed stinging salve into her knee and ankle, as she did every evening, to keep the pain at bay. It had been a long day, made longer by the nagging disquiet of her meeting with Marchat Wilsin. And even now, it wasn’t finished. There was one more unpleasant task still to be done.

  This would be her fifty-eighth summer in the world, and every one had been spent in Saraykeht. Her earliest memories were of her father spinning cured cotton into fine, tough thread, humming to himself as he worked. He was many years dead now, as was her mother. Her sister, Sikhet, had vanished into the comfort houses of the soft quarter when she was only sixteen. Amat Kyaan liked to think she caught glimpses of her still - older, wiser, safe. More likely it was her own desire that her sister be well. Her better mind knew it was only wishes. There had been too many years for the two of them not to have come upon each other.

  She felt some nights that she had lived her life as an apology for letting her sister vanish into the soft world. And perhaps it had started that way: her decision to work for a trading house, her rise through the invisible levels of power and wealth, had been meant to balance her sister’s assumed fall. But she was an older woman now, and everyone she might have apologized to was gone or dead. She had the status and the respect she needed to d
o as she pleased. She was no one’s sister, no one’s daughter, no one’s wife or mother. By standing still, she had come almost loose from the world, and she found the solitude suited her.

  A grass tick shuffled across her arm, preparing to tap her skin. She caught it, cracked it between her thumbnails, and flicked the corpse out into the street. There were more lanterns lit now, and the callers of different establishments were setting out singers and flute players to tempt men - and occasionally even women - to their doors. A patrol of eight frowning thugs swaggered down the streets, their robes the colors of the great comfort houses. It was too early for there to be many people drunk on the streets - the patrol walked and grimaced only to let the patrons coming in see that they were there.