‘I suppose so. It wasn’t quite dawn when I got there. You should have seen Seedless stalking back and forth like a cat. He tried to get me to say where I’d been, but I wouldn’t talk. Not me. I wonder where Heshai-kvo goes all night.’
‘The way Seedless wonders about you,’ Otah said. ‘You should start drinking water. You’ll be worse for it if you don’t.’
Maati took a pose of acceptance, but didn’t rise or go in for water. The sleeping man snored. Otah closed his eyes for a moment, testing how it felt. It was like falling backwards. He was too tired. He’d never make it though his shift with Muhatia-cha.
‘I don’t know how Heshai-kvo does it,’ Maati said, clearly thinking similar thoughts. ‘He’s got a full day coming. I don’t think I’ll be able to do any more today than I did yesterday. I mean today. I don’t know what I mean. It’s easier to keep track when I sleep at night. What about you?’
‘They can do without me,’ Otah said. ‘Muhatia-cha knows my indenture’s almost over. He more than half expects me to ignore my duties. It isn’t uncommon for someone who isn’t renewing their contract.’
‘And aren’t you?’ Maati asked.
‘I don’t know.’
Otah shifted his weight, turning to look at the young poet in the brown robes of his office. The moonlight made them seem black.
‘I envy you,’ Maati said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘You want to be directionless and unsure what you’ll be doing to earn food in a half-year’s time?’
‘Yes,’ Maati said. ‘Yes, I think I do. You’ve friends. You’ve a place. You’ve possibilities. And . . .’
‘And?’
Even in the darkness, Otah could see Maati blush. He took a pose of apology as he spoke.
‘You have Liat,’ Maati said. ‘She’s beautiful.’
‘She is lovely. But there are any number of women at court. And you’re the poet’s student. There must be girls who’d take you for a lover.’
‘There are, I think. Maybe. I don’t know, but . . . I don’t understand them. I’ve never known any - not at the school, and then not with the Dai-kvo. They’re different.’
‘Yes,’ Otah said. ‘I suppose they are.’
Liat. He’d seen her a handful of nights since the audience before the Khai. Since his discovery by Maati. She was busy enough preparing the woman Maj for the sad trade that she hadn’t made an issue of his absence, but he had seen something growing in her questions and in her silence.
‘Things aren’t going so well with Liat,’ Otah said, surprised that he would admit it even as he spoke. Maati sat straight, pulling himself to some blurry attention. His look of concern was almost a parody of the emotion. He took a pose of query. Otah responded with one that begged ignorance, but let it fall away. ‘It isn’t her. I’ve been . . . I’ve been pulling away from her, I think.’
‘Why?’ Maati asked. His incredulity was clear.
Otah wondered how he’d been drawn into this conversation. Maati seemed to have a talent for it, bringing him to say things he’d hardly had the courage to think through fully. It was having someone at last who might understand him. Someone who knew him for what he was, and who had suffered some of the same flavors of loss.
‘I’ve never told Liat. About who I am. Do you think . . . Maati, can you love someone and not trust them?’
‘We’re born to odd lives, Otah-kvo,’ Maati said, sounding suddenly older and more sorrowful. ‘If we waited for people we trusted, I think we might never love anyone.’
They were silent for a long moment, then Maati rose.
‘I’m going to get some water from the keep, and then find some place to leave him a little of my own,’ he said, breaking the somber mood. Otah smiled.
‘Then we should go.’
Maati took a pose that was both regret and agreement, then walked off with a gait for the most part steady. Otah stood, stretching his back and his legs, pulling his blood into action. He tossed a single length of silver onto the bench where they’d sat. It would more than cover their drinks and the bread and cheese they’d eaten. When Maati returned, they struck out for the north, toward the palaces. The streets of the city were moonlit, pale blue light except where a lantern burned at the entrance to a compound or a firekeeper’s kiln added a ruddy touch. The calls of night birds, the chirping of crickets, the occasional voice of some other city dweller awake long after the day had ended accompanied them as they walked.
It was all as familiar as his own cot or the scent of the seafront, but the boy at his side also changed it. For almost a third of his life, Otah had been in Saraykeht. He knew the shapes of its streets. He knew which firekeepers could be trusted and which could be bought, which teahouses served equally to all their clientele and which saved the better goods for the higher classes. And he knew his place in it. He would no more have thought about it than about breathing. Except for Maati.
The boy made him look at everything again, as if he were seeing it for the first time. The city, the streets, Liat, himself. Especially himself. Now the thing that he had measured his greatest success - the fact that he knew the city deeply and it did not know him - was harder and emptier than it had once been. And odd that it hadn’t seemed so before.
And the memories curled and shifted deep in his mind; the unconnected impressions of a childhood he had thought forgotten, of a time before he’d been sent to the school. There was a face with dark hair and beard that might have been his father. A woman he remembered singing and bathing him when his body had been small enough for her to lift with one arm. He didn’t know whether she was his mother or a nurse or a sister. But there had been a fire in the grate, and the tub had been worked copper, and he had been young and amazed by it.
And over the days and nights, other half-formed things had joined together in his mind. He remembered his mother handing him a cloth rabbit, sneaking it into his things so that his father wouldn’t see it. He remembered an older boy shouting - his brother, perhaps - that it wasn’t fair that Otah be sent away, and that he had felt guilty for causing so much anger. He remembered the name Oyin Frey, and an old man with a long white beard playing a drum and singing, but not who the man was or how he had known him.
He couldn’t say which of the memories were truth, which were dreams he’d constructed himself. He wondered, if he were to travel back there, far in the north, whether these ghost memories would let him retrace paths he hadn’t walked in years - know the ways from nursery to kitchen to the tunnels beneath Machi - or if they would lead him astray, false as bog-lights.
And the school - Tahi-kvo glowering at him, and the whirr of the lacquer rod. He had pushed those things away, pushed away the boy who had suffered those losses and humiliations, and now it was like being haunted. Haunted by who he might be and might have been.
‘I think I’ve upset you, Otah-kvo,’ Maati said quietly.
Otah turned, taking a questioning pose. Maati’s brow furrowed and he looked down.
‘You haven’t spoken since we left the teahouse,’ Maati said. ‘If I’ve given offense . . .’
Otah laughed, and the sound seemed to reassure Maati. On impulse, Otah put his arm around Maati’s shoulder as he might have around a dear friend or a brother.
‘I’m sorry. I seem to be doing this to everyone around me these days. No, Maati-kya, I’m not upset. You just make me think about things, and I must be out of practice. I get lost in them. And gods, but I’m tired.’
‘You could stay at the poet’s house if you don’t care to walk back to your quarters. There’s a perfectly good couch on the lower floor.’
‘No,’ Otah said. ‘If I don’t let Muhatia-cha scold me in the morning, he’ll get himself into a rage by midday.’
Maati took a pose of understanding that also spoke of regret, and put his own arm around Otah’s shoulder. They walked together, talking now the same mixture of seriousness and jokes that they’d made yet another evening of. Maati was getting better at navigating the streets, and even when the route he chose wasn’t the fastest, Otah let him lead. He wondered, as they approached the monument of the Emperor Atami where three wide streets met, what it would have been like to grow up with a brother.
‘Otah?’ Maati said, his stride suddenly slowing. ‘That man there. The one in the cloak.’
Otah glanced over. The man was walking away from them, heading to the east, and alone. Maati was right, though. It was the same man who’d been sleeping at the teahouse, or pretending to. Otah stepped away from Maati, freeing his arms in case he needed to fight. It wouldn’t have been the first time that someone from the palaces had been followed from a teahouse and assaulted for the copper they carried.
‘Come with me,’ Otah said and walked out to the middle of the wide area where the streets converged. Emperor Atami loomed above them, sad-eyed in the darkness. Otah turned slowly, considering each street, each building.
‘Otah-kvo?’ Maati said, his voice uncertain. ‘Was he following us?’
There was no one there, only the too-familiar man retreating to the east. Otah counted twenty breaths, but no one appeared. No shadows moved. The night was empty.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, answering the question. ‘Probably. I don’t know. Let’s keep going. And if you see anything, tell me.’
The rest of the distance to the palaces, Otah kept them on wide streets where they would see men coming. He would send Maati running for help and buy what time he could. A fine plan unless there were several of them or they had knives. But nothing happened, and Maati safely wished him good night.
By the time Otah reached his own quarters, the fear he’d felt was gone, the bone-weariness taken back over. He fell onto his cot and pulled the netting closed. Exhaustion pressed him to the rough canvas of the cot. The snores and sleeping murmurs of his cohort should have lulled him to sleep. But tired as he was, sleep wouldn’t come. In the darkness, his mind turned from problem to problem - they’d been followed by someone who might still be tracking Maati; his indenture was almost over and he would be too weary to work when the dawn came; he had never told Liat of his past. As he turned his mind to one, another distracted him, until he was only chasing his thoughts and being chased by them. He didn’t notice when he slipped into dream.
Liat left Marchat Wilsin’s offices with her spine straight and rage brewing. She walked through the compound to her cell without looking down and without catching anyone’s gaze. She closed the door behind her, fastened the shutters so that no one could happen to look in, then sat at her desk and wept.
It was profoundly unfair. She had done everything she could - she’d studied the etiquette, she’d taken the island girl to all the appointments at their appointed times, she’d negotiated with the poet even when he’d made it perfectly clear that he’d be as pleased to have her out of the room - and it was Itani that defeated her. Itani!
She stripped off her outer robe, flinging it to the bed. She wrenched open her wardrobe and looked for another, a better one. One more expressive of wrath.
It’s not entirely appropriate, Wilsin-cha still said in her mind. So close to a formal trade it might give the impression that the house was still seeking some advantage after the agreements had been made.
It might, she knew he’d meant, make her look like an idiot sending her lover to try to win favor. And worse, Itani - sweet, gentle, smiling Itani - hadn’t even told her. The nights she’d spent working, imagining him with his cohort or in his quarters, waiting for her to complete her task with the sad trade, he’d been out spoiling things for her. Out with the student poet. He hadn’t thought of what it would look like, what it would imply about her.
And he hadn’t even told her.
She plucked a formal robe, red shot with black, pulled it on over her inner robes, and tied it fast. She braided her hair, pulling it back severely. When she was done, she lifted her chin as she imagined Amat Kyaan would have and stalked out into the city.
The streets were still bustling, the business day far from ended. The sun, still eight or nine hands above the horizon, pressed down and the air was wet and stifling and still, and it reeked of the sea. Itani would still be with his cohort, but she wasn’t going to wait and risk letting her anger mellow. She would find out what Itani meant by this. She’d have an explanation for Wilsin-cha, and she’d have it now, before the trade was finished. Tomorrow was the only day left to make things right.
At his quarters, she found that he hadn’t gone out with the others after all - he’d been out too late and pled illness when Muhatia-cha came to gather them. The club-foot boy who watched the quarters during the working hours assured her with obvious pleasure that Muhatia-cha had been viciously angry.
So whatever it was that Itani was up to, it was worth risking his indenture as well as her standing with Wilsin-cha. Liat thanked the club-foot boy and asked, with a formal pose, where she might find Itani-cha since he was not presently in his quarters. The boy shrugged and rattled off teahouses, bathhouses, and places of ease along the seafront. It was nearly two full hands before Liat tracked him down at a cheap bathhouse near the river, and her temper hadn’t calmed.
She stalked into the bath without bothering to remove her robes. The great tiled walls echoed with conversations that quieted as she passed. The men and women in the public baths considered her, but Liat only moved on, ignoring them. Pretending to ignore them. Acting as Amat would have. Itani had taken a private room to one side. She strode down the short corridor of rough, wet stone, paused, breathed deeply twice as if there was something in the thick, salt-scented air that might fortify her, and pushed her way in.