by failed poets. Joints broken, drowned in night pots, necks snapped,
and bodies thrown into creeks to drown in half a hand's depth of water.
And yet, the stories might only be stories. The more Maati traveled, the
less certain he was.
Twice, great belching steam wagons had passed him on the trail. The men
at the controls had been locals, but the machines themselves were
Galtic, remnants of the war. Once he had seen plumes of smoke and steam
rising from the river itself, a flat barge sitting low to the water and
driven by the same chuffing, tarnished bulb as the wagons. Even the
fields below him now were cultivated in a pattern he had never seen
before the Galts came. Perhaps Otah's betrayal of the cities colored all
of Maati's perceptions now, but it felt as if the Galts were invading
again, only slowly this time, burrowing under the ground and changing
all they touched in small, insidious ways.
Something tickled his arm. Maati plucked out the tick and cracked it
between his thumbnails. He was wasting time. His feet ached from walking
and his robe stuck to his back and legs, but the sooner this meeting
happened, the sooner he would know where he stood. He emptied the last
of the seeds into his hand, ate them, then put the pouch back in his
sleeve and untied his mule.
Seven years before, he and Cehmai had parted for the last time at a
wayhouse three days' walk northwest of the farms and the river and
catalpa-shaded hill. It had not been an entirely friendly parting, but
they had agreed to leave letters of their whereabouts at that house,
should the need ever arise to find each other.
Maati had found the place easily. In the intervening years, the kitchens
had burned, and the two huge trees in the courtyard. The boy who stabled
the horses had grown to be a man. The bricks that had been brown and
yellow had been painted white and blue. And the box they had paid the
keeper to hold for them had a letter in it, sewn and sealed, with
ciphered directions that would lead to the farmhouse Cehmai had taken
under his new false name. Jadit Noygu.
Jadit Noygu, and his wife Sian.
Maati took the letter out again, consulting the deciphered text he'd
marked in between the lines written in Cehmai's clean, clear hand.
Forward down the track until he passed the ruin of an old mill, then the
first east-turning pathway, and half a hand's walk to a low
mud-and-straw farmhouse with a brick cistern in front. Maati clucked at
the mule and resumed his walk.
He arrived in the heat of the afternoon; even the shade beneath the
trees sweltered. Maati helped himself to a bowl of water from the
cistern, and then another bowl for the mule. No one came out to greet
him, but the shutters on the windows looked recently painted and the
track that led around the side of the house was well-tended. There was
no sense that the farm stood empty. Maati made his way toward the back.
A small herd of goats bleated at him from their pen, the disturbing,
clever eyes considering him with as little joy as he had for them. The
low sound of whistling came to him from a tall, narrow building set
apart from both house and pen. A slaughterhouse.
He stepped into the doorway, blocking the light. The air was thick with
smoke to drive the flies away. The body of the sacrificed goat hung from
a hook, buckets of blood and entrails at the butcher's feet. The butcher
turned. Her hands were crimson, her leather apron sodden with blood. A
hooked knife flashed in her hand.
She was not the only reason that Maati and Cehmai had parted company,
but she would have been sufficient. Idaan Machi, outcast sister to the
Emperor. As a girl no older than Vanjit was now, Idaan had plotted the
slaughter of her own family in a bloody-minded attempt to win Machi for
herself and her husband. Otah had come near to being executed for her
crimes, Cehmai had been seduced and used by her, and Maati still had a
thick scar on his belly where her assassin had tried to gut him. Otah,
for reasons that passed beyond Maati's understanding, had spared the
murderess. Even less comprehensible, Cehmai had found her, and in their
shared exile, they had once again become lovers. Only Maati still saw
her for what she was.
Age had thickened her. Her hair, tied back in a ferocious knot, was more
gray than black. Her long, northern face showed curiosity, then
surprise, then for less than a heartbeat something like contempt.
"You'll want to see him, then," said Otah's exiled sister: the woman who
had once set an assassin to kill Maati. Who had blamed Otah for the
murders she and her ambitious lover had committed.
She sank the gory knife into the dead animal's side, setting the corpse
swinging, and walked forward.
"Follow me," she said.
"Tell me where to find him," Maati said. "I can just as well. . ."
"The dogs don't know you," Idaan said. "Follow me."
Once Maati saw the dogs-five wide-jawed beasts as big as ponies, lazing
in the rich dirt at the back of the house-he was glad she was there to
guide him. She walked with a strong gait, leading him past the house,
past a low barn where chickens scattered and complained, to a wide, low
field of grass, its black soil under half an inch of water. At the far
side of the field, a thin figure stood. He wore the canvas trousers of a
workman and a rag the color of old blood around his head. By the time
the man's face had ceased to be a leather-colored blur, they were almost
upon him. There were the bright, boyish eyes, the serious mouth. The sun
had coarsened his skin and complicated the corners of his eyes. He
smiled and took a pose of greeting appropriate for one master of their
arcane trade to another. Idaan snorted, turned, and walked back toward
the slaughterhouse, leaving them alone.
"It's a dry year," Cehmai said. "You wouldn't know it, but it's a dry
year. The last two crops, I was afraid that they'd mold in the field.
This one, I'm out here every other week, opening the ditch gates."
"I need your help, Cehmai-cha," Maati said.
The man nodded, squinted out over the field as if judging something
Maati couldn't see, and sighed.
"Of course you do," Cehmai said. "Come on, then. Walk with me."
The fields were not the largest Maati had seen, and reminded him of the
gardens he'd worked as a child in the school. The dark soil of the
riverfed lowlands was unlike the dry, pale soil of the high plains
outside Pathai, but the scent of wet earth, the buzzing of small
insects, the warmth of the high sun, and the subtle cool rising from the
water all echoed moments of his childhood. Not all those memories were
harsh. For a moment, he imagined slipping off his sandals and sinking
his toes into the mud.
As they walked, he told Cehmai all he'd been doing in the years since
they'd met. The idea of a women's grammar was one they had discussed
before, so it required little more than to remind him of it. He outlined
the progress he had made, the insights that had taken the project far
enough to begin the experimental bindings. They paused under the broad
shade of a catalpa and Cehmai shared a light meal of dried cherries and
dense honey bread while Maati recounted his losses.
He did not mention Eiah or the school. Not yet. Not until he knew better
which way his old colleague's opinions fell.
Cehmai listened, nodding on occasion. He asked few questions, but those
he did were to the point and well-considered. Maati felt himself falling
into familiar habits of conversation. When, three hands later, Cehmai
rose and led the way back to the river gate, it was almost as if the
years had not passed. They were the only two people in the world who
shared the knowledge of the andat and the Dai-kvo. They had suffered
through the long, painful nights of the war, working to fashion a
binding that might save them. They had lived through the long, bitter
winter of their failure in the caves north of Machi. If it had not made
them friends, they were at least intimates. Maati found himself
outlining the binding of Returning-to-Natural-Equilibrium as Cehmai
turned the rough iron mechanism that would slow the water.
"That won't work," Cehmai said with a grunt. "Logic's wrong."
"I don't know about that," Maati said. "The girl's trained as a
physician. She says that healing flesh is mostly a matter of letting it
go back into the shape it tends toward anyway. The body actually helps
the process that way, and-"
"But the logic, Maati-kvo," Cehmai said, using the honorific for a
teacher as if by reflex. "It's a paradox. The natural balance of the
andat is not to exist, and she wants to bind something whose essence is
the return to its natural state? It's the same problem as
Freedom-FromBondage. She should reverse it."
"How do you mean?"
The river gates creaked as they closed. The flow thinned and then
stopped. Cehmai squatted, elbows resting on his knees, and pointed
toward the water with his chin.
"Water-Moving-Down didn't only make water move down. She also stopped
it. She withdrew her influence, ne? So she could make rain fall or she
could keep it in the sky. She could stop a river from flowing as easily
as making it run fast. Your physician can't bind Returning-to-Balance or
however she planned to phrase it. But if she bound something like
Wounded or Scarred-by-Illness, she could withdraw that from someone. She
negates the opposite, achieves the same effect, and has something that
isn't so slippery to hold."
Maati considered, then nodded.
"That's good," he said. "That's very good. And it's why I need you."
Cehmai smiled out at the waving green field, then glanced at the house
and looked down.
"You'll stay the night?" Cehmai said.
Maati took a pose that accepted the invitation. He kept his trepidation
at the thought of sleeping under Idaan's roof out of his stance and
expression. It would have been too much to hope for that Cehmai would
drop everything in his life and take to the road at once. And still,
Maati had hoped for it....
Inside the thick stone walls of the farmhouse, the air was cooler and
rich with the scent of dog and old curry. The afternoon faded slowly,
the sun lingering in the treetops to the west, its light thick and
golden and softened by Maati's failing eyes. Cicadas set up a choir. He
sat on a low stone porch, watching everything and nothing.
Maati had known quite well that Idaan and Cehmai had been lovers once,
even while Idaan had been married to another man and arranging the
deaths of her family. Cehmai's betrayal of her had been the key that
brought her down, that lifted Otah into the role of Khai Machi, and from
there to Emperor. Cehmai had, in his fashion, created the world as it
was with the decision to expose his lover's crimes.
Maati had thought the man mad for still harboring feelings for the
woman; she was a murderer and a traitor to her city and her family. He'd
thought him mad twice over for wanting to find her again after the andat
had vanished from the world and the poets had fallen from grace. She
would, he had expected, kill Cehmai on sight.
And yet.
As a boy, Maati had taken another man's lover as his own, and Otah had
forgiven it. In gratitude or something like it, Maati had devoted
himself to proving Otah's innocence and helped to bring Idaan's crimes
to light. Seedless, the first andat Maati had known, had betrayed both
the poet Heshai who had bound him and the Galtic house that had backed
the andat's cruel scheme. And the woman-what had her name been?whose
child died. Seedless had betrayed everyone, but had asked only Maati to
forgive him.
The accrued weight of decades pressed upon him as the sun caught in the
western branches. Dead children, war, betrayal, loss. And here, in this
small nameless farm days' travel from even a low town of notable size,
two lovers who had become enemies were lovers again. It made him angry,
and his anger made him sad.
As the first stars appeared, pale ghost lights in the deepening blue
before sunset, Idaan emerged from the house. With her leather gear gone,
she looked less like a thing from a monster tale. She was a woman, only
a woman. And growing old. It was only when she met his gaze that he felt
a chill. He had seen her eyes set in a younger face, and the darkness in
them had shifted, but it had not been unmade.
"There's food," she said.
The table was small and somehow more frail than Maati had expected.