"What about when you see things that aren't there?" Small Kae said.
"Dreams, you mean?" Eiah asked.
Maati leaned forward on the podium. The classroom was larger than they
required, all six of his students sitting in the first row. The high,
narrow windows that had never known glass let the evening breeze disturb
their lanterns. He had ended his remarks early. He found there was less
need to fill the time with his knowledge than there had once been. Now a
few remarks and comments would spur conversation and analysis that often
led far from where he had intended. But it was rarely unproductive and
never dull.
"Dreams," Small Kae said. "Or when you mistake things for other things."
"My brother had a fever once," Ashti Beg said. "Saw rats coming through
the walls for three days."
"I don't think that applies," Eiah said. "The definitions we've based
the draft on are all physicians' texts. They have to do with the actual
function of the eye."
"But if you see a thing without your eyes," Small Kae began.
"Then you're imagining them," Vanjit said, her voice calm and certain.
"And the passages on clarity would prevent the contradiction."
"What contradiction?" Large Kae asked.
"Who can answer that?" Maati said, leaping into the fray. "It's a good
question, but any of you should be able to think it through. Ashti-cha?
Would you care to?"
The older woman sucked her teeth for a moment. A sparrow flew in through
one window, its wings fluttering like a pennant in the wind, and then
out again.
"Clarity," Ashti Beg said slowly. "The sense of clarity implies that
it's reflecting the world as it is, ne? And if you see something that's
not there to be seen, it's not the world as it is. Even if imagining
something is like sight, it isn't like clarity."
"Very good," Maati said, and the woman smiled. Maati smiled back.
The binding had progressed more quickly than Maati had thought possible.
For the greatest part, the advances had been made in moments like these.
Seven minds prodding at the same thought, debating the nuances and
structures, challenging one another to understand the issues at hand
more deeply. Someone-anyone-would find a phrase or a thought that struck
sparks, and Vanjit would pull pages from her sleeve and mark down
whatever had pushed her one step nearer the edge.
It was happening less and less often. The binding, Maati knew, was
coming near its final form. The certainty in Vanjit's voice and the
angle of her shoulders told him as much about her chances of success as
looking over the details of her binding.
As they ended the evening's session, reluctant despite yawns and
heavy-lidded eyes, Maati realized that the work they were doing was less
like his own training before the Dai-kvo and more like the long, arduous
hours he had spent with Cehmai. Somehow, during his absence, they had
all become equals. Not in knowledge-he was still far and away the best
informed-but in status. Where he had once had a body of students, he was
working now with a group of novice poets. A lizard scampered along
before him and then up the rough wall and into the darkness. A
nightingale sang.
He was exhausted, his body heavy, his mind beginning to spark and slip.
And he was also elated. The wide night sky above him seemed rich with
promise, the ground he walked upon eager to bear him up.
His bed, however, didn't invite sleep. Small pains in his knees and
spine prodded him, and his mind failed to calm. The light of the
halfmoon cast shadows on the walls that seemed to move of their own
accord. The restlessness of age, as opposed, he thought with weary
amusement, to the restlessness of youth. As he lay there, small doubts
began to arise, gnawing at him. Perhaps Vanjit wasn't ready yet to take
on the role of poet. Perhaps he and Eiah in their need and optimism were
sending the girl to her death.
There was no way to know another person's heart. No way to judge. It
might be that Vanjit herself was as afraid of this as he was, but held
by her despair and anger and sense of obligation to the others to move
forward as if she weren't.
Every poet that bound an andat came face-to-face with their own flaws,
their own failures. Maati's first master, Heshai-kvo, had made Seedless
the embodiment of his own self-hatred, but that was only one extreme
example. Kiai Jut three generations earlier had bound Flatness only to
find the andat bent on destroying the family the poet secretly hated.
Magar Inarit had famously bound Unwoven only to discover his own
shameful desires made manifest in his creation. The work of binding the
andat was of such depth and complexity, the poet's true self was
difficult if not impossible to hide within it. And what, he wondered,
would Vanjit discover about herself if she succeeded? With all the hours
they had spent on the mechanics of the binding, was it not also his
responsibility to prepare the girl to face her imperfections?
His mind worried at the questions like a dog at a bone. As the moon
vanished from his window and left him with only the night candle, Maati
rose. A walk might work the kinks from his muscles.
The school was a different place at night. The ravages of war and time
were less obvious, the shapes of the looming walls and hallways familiar
and prone to stir the ancient memories of the boy Maati had been. Here,
for instance, was the rough stone floor of the main hall. He had cleaned
these very stones when his hands had been smooth and strong and free
from the dark, liver-colored spots. He stood at the place where
Milah-kvo had first offered him the black robes. He remembered both the
pride of the moment and the sense, hardly noticed at the time, that it
was an honor he didn't wholly deserve.
"Would you have done it differently, Milah-kvo?" he asked the dead man
and the empty air. "If you had known what I was going to do, would you
still have made the offer?"
The air said nothing. Maati felt himself smile without knowing precisely
why.
"Maati-kvo?"
He turned. In the dim light of his candle, Eiah seemed like a ghost.
Something conjured from his memory. He took a pose of greeting.
"You're awake," she said, falling into step beside him.
"Sometimes sleep abandons old men," he said with a chuckle. "It's the
way of things. And you? I can't think you make a practice of wandering
the halls in the middle of the night."
"I've just left Vanjit. She sits up after the lecture is done and goes
over everything we said. Everything anyone said. I agreed to sit with
her and compare my memory to hers."
"She's a good girl," Maati said.
"Her dreams are getting worse," Eiah said. "If the situation were
different, I'd be giving her a sleeping powder. I'm afraid it will dull
her, though."
"They're bad then?" Maati said.
Eiah shrugged. In the dim light, her face seemed older.
"They're no worse than anyone who watched her family die before her
eyes. She has told you, hasn't she?"
"She was a child," Maati said. "The only one to live."
"She said no more than that?"
"No," Maati said. They passed through a stone archway and into the
courtyard. Eiah looked up at the stars.
"It's as much as I know too," Eiah said. "I try to coax her. To get her
to speak about it. But she won't."
"Why try?" Maati said. "Talking won't undo it. Let her be who and where
she is now. It's better that way."
Eiah took a pose that accepted his advice, but her face didn't entirely
match it. He put a hand on her shoulder.
"It will be fine," he said.
"Will it?" Eiah said. "I tell myself the same thing, but I don't always
believe it."
Maati stopped at a stone bench, flicked a snail from the seat, and
rested. Eiah sat at his side, hunched over, her elbows on her knees.
"You think we should stop this?" he asked. "Call off the binding?"
"What reason could we give?"
"That Vanjit isn't ready."
"It isn't true, though. Her mind is as good as any of ours will ever be.
If I called this to a halt, I'd be saying I didn't trust her to be a
poet. Because of what she's been through. That the Galts had taken that
from her too. And if I say that of her, who won't it be true of? Ashti
Beg lost her husband. Irit's father burned with his farm. Large Kae only
had her womb turned sick and saw the Khai Utani slaughtered with his
family. If we're looking for a woman who's never known pain, we may as
well pack up our things now, because there isn't one."
Maati let the silence stretch, in part to leave Eiah room to think. In
part because he didn't know what wisdom he could offer.
"No, Uncle Maati, I don't want to stop. I only ... I only hope this
brings her some peace," Eiah said.
"It won't," Maati said, gently. "It may heal some part of her. It may
bring good to the world, but the andat have never brought peace to poets."
"No. I suppose not," Eiah said. Then, a moment later, "I'm going into
Pathai. I'll just need a cart and one of the horses."
"Is there need?"
"We aren't starving, if that's what you mean. But buying at the markets
there attracts less notice than going straight to the low towns. It
would be better if no one knows there are people living out here. And
there might be news."
"And if there's news, there will be some idea of how soon Vanjit-cha
will need to make her attempt."
"I was thinking more of how much time I have," Eiah said. She turned to
look at him. The warm light of the candle and the cool glow of the moon
made her seem like two different women at once. "This doesn't rest on
Vanjit. It doesn't rest on any of them. Binding an andat isn't enough to
... fix things. It has to be the right one."
"And Clarity-of-Sight isn't the right one?" he asked.
"It won't give any of these women babies. It won't put them back in the
arms of the men who used to be their husbands or stop men like my father
from trading in women's flesh like we were sheep. None of it. All the
binding will do is prove that it can be done. That a solution exists. It
doesn't even mean I'll be strong enough when my turn comes."
Maati took her hand. He had known her for so many years. Her hand had
been so small that first time he had seen her. He remembered her deep
brown eyes, and the way she had gurgled and burrowed into her mother's
cradling arms. He could still see the shape of that young face in the
shape of her cheeks and the set of her jaw. He leaned over and kissed
her hair. She looked up at him, amused to see him so easily moved.
"I was only thinking," he said, "how many of us there are carrying this
whole burden alone."
"I know I'm not alone, Maati-kya. It only feels like it some nights."
"It does. It certainly does," he said. Then, "Do you think she'll manage
it?"
Eiah rose silently, took a pose that marked parting with nuances as
intimate as family, and walked back into the buildings of the school.
Maati sighed and lay back on the stone, looking up into the night sky. A
shooting star blazed from the eastern sky toward the north and vanished
like an ember gone cold.
He wondered if Otah-kvo still looked at the sky, or if he had grown too
busy being the Emperor. The days and nights of power and feasting and
admiration might rob him of simple beauties like a night sky or a fear
grown less by being shared. Might, in fact, cut Otah-kvo off from all
the things that gave meaning to people lower than himself. He was, after
all, planning his new empire by denying all the women injured by the
last war any hope of those simple, human pleasures. A babe. A family.
Tens of thousands of women, cut free from the lives they were entitled
to, now to be forgotten.
He wondered if a man who could do that still had enough humanity left to
enjoy a falling star or the song of a nightingale.
He hoped not.
Eiah left the next morning. The high road was still in good repair, and
travel along it was an order of magnitude faster than the tracking Maati
had done between the low towns. When Maati and the others saw her off,
she was wearing simple robes and the leather satchel hung at her side.
She could have been mistaken for any traveling physician. Maati might
have imagined it, but he thought that Vanjit held her parting stance