Three bowls were set out, each with rice and strips of browned meat.
Cehmai was also pouring out small measures of rice wine from a bone
carafe. It was, Maati supposed, an acknowledgment of the occasion and
likely as much extravagance as Cehmai's resources would allow. Maati
took a pose that offered thanks and requested permission to join the
table. Cehmai responded with one of acceptance and welcome, but his
movements were slow. Maati couldn't tell if it was from exhaustion or
thought. Idaan added neither word nor pose to the conversation; her
expression was unreadable.
"I've been thinking," Cehmai said. "Your plan. I have a few questions
about it."
"Anything," Maati said.
"Would your scheme to undo what Sterile did include restoring the Galts?"
Maati took a strip of the meat from his bowl. The flesh was pleasantly
rich and well-salted. He chewed slowly to give himself time to think,
but his hesitation was answer enough.
"I don't think I can join you," Cehmai said. "This battle I've ... I've
lost my taste for it."
Maati felt his own frown like an ache.
"Reconsider," he said, but Cehmai shook his head.
"I've given too much of my life to the world already. I'd like to keep
the rest of my years for myself. No more great struggles, no more cities
or nations or worlds resting on what I do or don't do. What I have here
is enough."
Maati wiped his fingers on his sleeve and took a pose of query that
bordered on accusation. Cehmai's eyes narrowed.
"Enough for what?" Maati demanded. "Enough for the pair of you? It'll be
more than enough before many years have passed. It'll be too much. How
much do you work in a day? Raising your own food, tending your crop and
your animals, making food and washing your robes and gathering wood for
your fires? Does it give you any time at all to think? To rest?"
"It isn't as easy as living in the courts, that's truth," Cehmai said.
His smile was the same as ever, even set in this worn face. "There are
nights it would be good to leave the washing to a servant."
"It won't get easier," Maati said. "You'll get older. Both of you. The
work will stay just as difficult, and you'll get tired faster. When you
take sick, you'll recover slowly. One or the other of you will strain
something or break an old bone or catch fever, and your children won't
be there to care for you. The next farm over? His children won't be
there for you either. Or the next. Or the next."
"He's not wrong, love," Idaan said. Maati blinked. Of all the people in
the world, Idaan was the last he'd expected support from.
"I know all that," Cehmai said. "It doesn't mean that I should go back
to being a poet."
"What else would you do?" Maati said. "Sell the land rights? Who is
there to buy them? Take up some new trade? Who will there be to teach
you? Binding the andat is the thing you've trained for. Your mind is
built for the work. These girls ... you should see them. The dedication,
the engagement, the drive. If this thing can be done, they will do it.
We can remake the world."
"We've done that once already," Cehmai said. "It didn't go well."
"We didn't have time. The Galts were at our door. We did what we had to
do. And now we can correct our errors."
"Does my brother know about this?" Idaan asked.
"He refused me," Maati said.
"Is that why you hate him?"
The air around the table seemed to clench. Maati stared at the woman.
Idaan met his gaze with a level calm.
"He is selling us," Maati said. "He is turning away from a generation of
women whose injuries are as much his fault as ours."
"And is that why you hate him?" Idaan asked again. "You can't tell me
that you don't, Maati-cha. I know quite a lot about hatred."
He let my son die to save his, Maati thought but did not say. There were
a thousand arguments against the statement: Otah hadn't been there when
Nayiit died; it wasn't Danat's fault that his protector failed to fend
off the soldiers; Nayiit wasn't truly his son. He knew them all, and
that none of them mattered. Nayiit had died, Maati had been sent into
the wilderness, and Otah had risen like a star in the sky.
"What I feel toward your brother doesn't change what needs to be done,"
Maati said, "or the help I'll need to do it."
"Who's backing you?" Idaan said.
Maati felt a flash of surprise and even fear. An image of Eiah flickered
in his mind and was banished.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Someone's feeding you," she said. "Someone's hiding you and your
students. If the word got out that you'd been found, half the world
would send armsmen to cut you down for fear you'd do exactly what you're
doing now. And half of the rest would kick you to death for petty
vengeance. If it's not Otah protecting you, who is it? One of the high
families of the utkhaiem? A trading house? Who?"
"I have strong backing," Maati said. "But I won't tell you more than that."
"Every danger you face, my husband faces too," Idaan said. "If you want
him to take your risks, you have to tell him what protection you can offer."
"I have an ear in the palaces anytime I need it. Otah won't be able to
mount any kind of action against me without warning finding me. You can
trust to that."
"You have to tell us more," Idaan said.
"He doesn't," Cehmai said, sharply. "He doesn't have to offer me
protection because I'm not going to do the work. I'm done, love. I'm
finished. I want a few more years with you and a quiet death, and I'll
be quite pleased with that."
"The world needs you," Maati said.
"It doesn't," Cehmai said. "You've come a long way, Maati-kvo, and I've
disappointed you. I'm sorry for that, but you have my answer. I used to
be a poet, but I'm not anymore. I can reconsider as long as we both keep
breathing, and we'll come to the same place."
"We can't stay on here," Idaan said. Her voice was soft. "I've loved it
here too. This place, these years ... we've been lucky to have them. But
Maati-cha's right. This season, and perhaps five or ten after it, we'll
make do. But eventually the work will pass us. We're not getting
younger, and we can't hire on hands to help us. There aren't any."
"Then we'll leave," Cehmai said. "We'll do something else, only not that."
"Why not?" Maati asked.
"Because I don't want to kill any more people," Cehmai said. "Not the
girls you're encouraging to try this, not the foreigners who would try
to stop us, not whatever army came in the next autumn's war."
"It doesn't have to be like that," Maati said.
"It does," Cehmai said. "We held the power of gods, and the world envied
us and turned against us, and they always will again. I can't say I
think much of where we stand now, but I remember what happened to bring
us here, and I don't see how making poets of women instead of men will
make a world any different or better than the one we had then."
"It may not," Maati said, "but it will be better than the one we have
now. If you won't help me, then I'll do without you, but I'd thought
better of you, Cehmai. I'd thought you had more spine."
"Rice is getting cold," Idaan said. Her voice was controlled rage.
"Perhaps we should eat it before it goes bad."
They finished the meal alternating between artificially polite
conversation and strained silence. After, Cehmai took the bowls away to
clean and didn't return. Idaan led Maati to a small room near the back
with a straw pallet and a night candle already burning. Maati slept
poorly and found himself still upset when he woke. He left in the dark
of the morning without speaking again to either of his hosts, one from
disappointment and shame and the other, though he would never have said
it, from fear.
Nantani was the nearest port to the lands of Galt, but the scars of war
were too fresh there and too deep. Instead, the gods had conspired to
return Otah to the city of his childhood: Saraykeht.
The fastest ships arrived several days before the great mass of the
fleet. They stood out half a hand's travel from the seafront, and Otah
took in the whole city. He could see the masts at the farthest end of
the seafront, berthed in order to leave the greatest space for the
incoming traffic. Bright cloth hung from every window Otah could see,
starting with the dock master's offices nearest the water to the towers
of the palaces, high and to the north where the vibrant colors were
grayed by humidity.
Crowds filled the docks, and he heard a roar of voices and snatches of
drum and flute carried by the breeze. The air itself smelled different:
rank and green and familiar in a way he hadn't expected.
The Emperor of the Khaiem had been away from his cities for eight
months, almost nine, and his return with the high families of Galt in
tow was the kind of event seen once in history and never again. This was
the day that every man and woman at the seafront or watching from the
windows above the streets would recall until death's long fingers
touched them. The day that the new empress, the Galtic empress, arrived
for the first time.
There were stories Otah had read in books that had been ashes for almost
as long as this new Empress had been alive, about an emperor's life
mirroring the state of his empire. An emperor with many children meant
rich, fertile land; one without heir spoke of poor crops and thin
cattle. An emperor who drank himself to sleep meant an empire of
libertines; one who studied and prayed, a somber land of great wisdom.
He had halfbelieved the stories then. He had no faith in them now.
"You would think they would have made some allowance for our arrival," a
man's peevish voice said from behind him. Otah looked back at Balasar
Gice, dressed in formal brocade armor and shining with sweat. Otah took
a pose of powerlessness before the gods.
"The wind does what the wind does," he said. "We'll be on land by
nightfall."
"We will," Balasar said. "But the others will be docking and unloading
all night."
It was true. Saraykeht would likely add something near a tenth of its
population in the next day, Galts filling the guest quarters and
wayhouses and likely half the beds in the soft quarter. It was the
second time in Otah's life that a pale-skinned, round-eyed neighborhood
without buildings had appeared in his city. Only now, it would happen
without drawn blades and blood.
"They're sending tow galleys out for us," Otah said. "It will all be fine."
The galleys, with their flashing banks of white oars and ornamental
ironwork rails, reached the great ship just after midday. With a great
clamor of voices-protests, laughter, orders, counterorders-thick cables
of hemp were made fast to the ship's deck. The sails were already down,
and with the sound of a bell clanging like an alarm, Otah's ship
lurched, shifted directly into the wind, and began the last, shortest
leg of his journey home.
A welcoming platform had been erected especially for the occasion. The
broad beams were white as snow, and a ceremonial guard waited by a
litter while a somewhat less ceremonial one kept the press of the crowds
at a distance. Balasar and six of the Galtic High Council had made their
way to Otah's ship in order to disembark with him. The Avenger with Ana
and her parents would likely come next, after which the roar of
competing etiquette masters would likely drown out the ocean. Otah was
more than willing to leave the fighting for position and status for the
dock master to settle out.
The crowd's voice rose when the ship pulled in, and again when the walk
bridged the shifting gap between ship and land. His servants preceded
him in the proper array and sequence, and then Otah left the sea. The
noise was something physical, a wind built of sound. The ceremonial
guard adopted poses of obeisance, and Otah took his ritual reply. The
first of the guard to stand, grinning, was Sinja.
"You've shaved your whiskers," Otah shouted.
"I was starting to look like an otter," Sinja agreed. His expression
became opaque and he bowed to Otah's right. "Balasar-cha."
"Sinja," Balasar said.
The past intruded. Once Sinja had played the part of Balasar's man,
expert on the cities of the Khaiem and mercenary leader of war. He had
spied on the Galts, betrayed Balasar, and killed the man Balasar held