THE (tlpq-4) (10 page)

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.