them. Every lecture he gave, he had to half-invent. Every question he
answered, he had to solve in his mind to be sure. On one hand, it was as
awkward as using a grand palace as a lesson on how to build scaffolding.
And on the other, it was making him a better poet and a better teacher
than he would ever have been otherwise.
He sat up, the canvas cot groaning as his weight shifted. The room was
tiny and quiet; the stone walls wept and smelled of fungus. Halfaware of
his surroundings and half in the fine points of ancient grammars, Maati
rose and trundled up the short flight of stairs. The warehouse stood
empty, the muted daylight and the sound of light rain making their way
through the high, narrow windows. His footsteps echoed as he crossed to
the makeshift lecture hall.
Benches of old, splintering wood squatted near a length of wall smooth
enough to take chalk. The markings of the previous evening still shone
white against the stone. Maati squinted at them.
Age was a thief. It took his wind, it made his heart race at odd times,
and it stole his sleep. But the worst of all the little indignities was
his sight. He hadn't thought about the blessing that decent vision was
until his eyes started to fail. It made his head ache a bit, but he
found the diagram he'd been thinking of, traced it with his fingertips,
considered, and then took a rag from the pail of water beside his little
podium and washed the marks away. He could start there tonight, with the
four categories of being and their relationships. It was a subtle point,
but without it, the girls would never build a decent binding.
There were five of them now: Irit, Ashti Beg, Vanjit, Small Kae, and
Large Kae. Half a year ago, there had been seven, but Umnit had tried
her binding, failed, and perished. Lisat had given up and left him. Just
as well, really. Lisat had been a good-hearted girl, but slow-witted as
a cow. And so, five. Or six, if he counted Eiah.
Eiah had been a gift from the gods. She spent her days in the palaces of
Utani, playing the daughter of Empire. He knew it was a life she
disliked, but she saw to it that food and money found their way to
Maati. And being part of the court let her keep an ear out for gossip
that would serve them, like a dispute over the ownership of a low-town
warehouse that left both claimants barred from visiting the building
until judgment was passed. The warehouse had been Maati's for two months
now. It was beginning to feel like his own. He dropped the rag back into
its pail, found the thick cube of chalk, and started drawing the charts
for the evening's lecture. He wondered whether Eiah would be able to
join them. She was a good student, when she could slip away from her
life at the palace. She asked good questions.
The crude iron bolt turned with a sound like a dropped hammer, and the
small, human-size door beside the great sliding walls intended for carts
and wagons opened. A woman's figure was silhouetted against the soft
gray light. It was neither of the Kaes, but his eyes weren't strong
enough to make out features. When she came in, closing the door behind
her, he recognized Vanjit by her gait.
"You're early, Vanjit-cha," Maati said, turning back to the wall and chalk.
"I thought I might be able to help," she said. "Are you well, Maaticha?"
Vanjit had been with him for almost a year now. She had come to his
covert school, as all the others had, through a series of happy
accidents. Another of his students-Umnit-had fallen into conversation
with her, and something had sparked between them. Umnit had presented
Vanjit as a candidate to join in their work. Reluctantly, Maati had
accepted her.
The girl had a brilliant mind, no question. But she had been a child in
Udun, the only one of her family to survive when the Galts had come, and
the memory of that slaughter still touched her eyes from time to time.
She might laugh and talk and make music, but she bore scars on her body
and in her mind. In the months he had spent working with her, Maati had
come to realize what had first unnerved him about the girl: of all the
students he had taught, she was most like him.
He had lost his family in the war as well-his almost-son Nayiit, his
lover Liat, and the man he had once thought his dearest friend. Otah,
Emperor of the Khaiem. Otah, favored of the gods, who couldn't fall down
without landing on rose petals. They had not all died, but they were all
lost to him.
"Maati-cha?" Vanjit said. "Did I say something wrong?"
Maati blinked and took a pose of query.
"You looked angry," she said.
"Nothing," Maati said, shifting the chalk to his other hand and shaking
the ache from his fingers. "Nothing, Vanjit-kya, my mind was just
wandering. Come, sit. There's nothing that you need to do, but you can
keep me company while I get ready."
She sat on the bench, one leg tucked under her. He noticed that her hair
and robe were wet from the rain. There was mud on her boots. She'd been
walking out in the weather. Maati hesitated, chalk halfway back to the
stone.
"Or," he said slowly, "perhaps I should ask if you've been well?"
She smiled and took a pose that dismissed his concerns.
"Bad dream again," she said. "That's all."
"About the baby," Maati said.
"I could feel him inside of me," she said. "I could feel his heartbeat.
It's strange. I hate dreaming about him. The nightmares that I'm back in
the war-I may scream myself awake, but at least I'm pleased that the
dream's ended. When I dream about him, I'm happy. I'm at peace. And then
..."
She gestured at the childless world around them.
"It's worse, wishing I could sleep and dream and never awake."
Maati's heart rang in sympathy, like a crystal bowl taking up the
ringing of a great bell. How many times had he dreamed that Nayiit
lived? That the world had not been broken, or, if it had, not by him?
"We'll bring him," Maati said. "Have faith. Every week, we come closer.
Once the grammar is built solidly enough, anything will be possible."
"Are we coming closer?" she asked. "Be honest, Maati-cha. Every week we
spend on this, I think we're on the edge, and every week, there's more
after it."
He tucked the chalk into his sleeve and sat at the girl's side. She
leaned forward, and he thought there was something in her expressionnot
despair and not shame, but something related to both.
"We are coming near, and we are close," he said. "I know it isn't
something you can see, but each of you knows more about the andat and
the bindings right now than I did after a year with the Dai-kvo. You're
smart and dedicated and talented. And together, we can make this work.
It sounds terrible, I know, but as soon as Siimat failed her binding and
paid the price ... I won't say I was pleased. I can't say that. She was
a brave woman, and she had a wonderful mind. I miss her. But that she
and all the others died means we are very close."
Ten bindings, ending in ten failures and ten corpses. His fallen
soldiers, Maati thought. His girls who had sacrificed themselves. And
here, wet as a canal rat and sad to her bones, Vanjit impatient to make
her own try, risk her own life. Maati took her small hand in his own.
The girl smiled at the wall.
"This will happen," he said.
"I know it," she said, her voice soft. "It's just so hard to wait when
the dream keeps coming."
Maati sat with her for a moment, only the tapping of raindrops and the
songs of birds between them. He stood, fished the chalk from his sleeve,
and went back to the wall.
"If you'd like, you could light a fire in the office grate," Maati said.
"We could surprise the others with some fresh tea."
It wasn't called for, but it gave the girl something to do. He squinted
at the figure he'd drawn until the lines came into focus. Ah, yes. Four
categories of being.
The rain slackened as the others arrived. Large Kae checked the
coverings over the windows, careful that no stray light betray their
presence, as Irit fluttered sparrowlike lighting the lanterns. Small Kae
and Ashti Beg adjusted the seats and benches, the younger woman's light
voice contrasting with her elder's dry one.
The scents of wood smoke and tea made their warehouse classroom seem
less furtive. Vanjit poured bowls for each of his students as they took
their places. The soft light darkened the stone so that the chalk marks
almost seemed written on air. Maati took a moment to himself to think of
his teachers, of their lectures. He willed himself to become one of
their number.
"The world," Maati began, "has two essential structures. There's the
physical"-he slapped the stone wall behind him-"and there's the
abstract. Two and two are always four, regardless of whether you're
talking about grains of sand or racing camels. Twelve could always be
broken into two sets of six or three sets of four long before anybody
noticed the fact. Abstract structure, you see?"
They bent toward him like flowers toward the sun. Maati saw the hunger
in their faces and the set of their shoulders.
"Now," Maati said. "Does the physical require the abstract? Come on.
Think! Can you have something physical that doesn't have abstract
structure?"
There was a moment's silence.
"Water?" Small Kae asked. "Because if you put two drops of water
together with two drops of water, you just get one big drop."
"You're ahead of yourself," Maati said. "That's called the doctrine of
least similarity. You're not ready for that. What I mean is this: is
there anything real that can't be described by its abstract structure?
Any of you? No one has a thought about this? I answered that one
correctly before I'd seen ten summers."
"No?" suggested Irit.
"No. How many of you think she's right? Go on! Take a stand about it one
way or the other! Good. Yes. Irit's right," Maati said and spat at the
floor by his feet. "Everything physical has abstract structure, but not
everything abstract need be physical. That's what we're doing here.
That's the asymmetry that lets the andat exist."
In all their faces, turned to his, there was the same expression.
Hunger, he thought, or desperation. Or longing halfway forged into
something stronger. It gave him hope.
After the lecture, he made them run through grammar exercises, and then,
as the moon rose and the lanterns smoked and the rats came out to chuff
and chitter at them from the shadows, they considered the failed
bindings of the women who had gone before them. Slowly, they were
developing a sense of what it was to capture an andat, to take a thought
and translate it into a different form. To give it volition and a human
shape. To keep the binding present in your mind for the rest of your
life, holding the spirit back from its natural state of nothingness like
holding a stone over a well: slip once, and it is gone. Maati could see
the knowledge growing in the set of their poses and hear it in the
questions they asked. He had almost reached the end of his night's plan
when the small door to the street flew open again.
Eiah strode in, her breath labored. She wore a drab cloak over a silk
robe rich with all the colors of sunset. The others fell silent. Maati,
standing before a wall now covered in white, ghostly notations and
graphs, took a pose that expressed his alarm and asked the cause of hers.
"Uncle Maati," she said between gasps, "there's news from Galt. My father."
Maati shifted toward several poses at once, managing none of them.
Eiah's expression was grim.
"That's all for tonight," he said. "Come back tomorrow."
He had intended to assign exercises, translation puzzles for them to
work in their time away from class. He abandoned the idea and shooed
them out the door. All of them left except Eiah, sitting on a low chair
in the warehouse office, her face lit by the shifting flames in the grate.
The letters had arrived by fast courier. Against all expectation, the
Emperor's benighted mission to Galt had borne fruit. Danat was to be
married to a daughter of the Galtic High Council. Terms were being
arranged for the transport of a thousand Galtic women of childbearing
age to the cities of the Khaiem. Applications would be taken for a
thousand men to leave their lives among the cities of the Khaiem and
move to Galt. It was, Eiah said, intended to be the first exchange of many.