Itani sat in the pool as if at a table, bent slightly forward, his eyes on the surface of the water like a man lost in thought. He looked up as she slammed the door closed behind her, and his eyes spoke of weariness and preparedness. Liat took a pose of query that bordered on accusation.
‘I meant to come look for you, love,’ he said.
‘Oh really?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
His eyes returned to the shifting surface of the water. His bare shoulders hunched forward. Liat stepped to the edge of the pool and stared down at him, willing his gaze up to hers. He didn’t look.
‘There’s a conversation we need to have, love,’ he said. ‘We should have done before, I suppose, but . . .’
‘What are you thinking? Itani? What are you doing? Wilsin-cha just spent half a hand very quietly telling me that you’ve been making a fool of me before the utkhaiem. What are you doing with the poet’s student?’
‘Maati,’ Itani said, distantly. ‘He’s named Maati.’
If Liat had had anything to throw, she’d have launched it at Itani’s bowed head. Instead, she let out an exasperated cry and stamped her foot. Itani looked up, his vision swimming into focus as if he was waking from a dream. He smiled his charming, open, warm smile.
‘Itani. I’m humiliated before the whole court, and you—’
‘How?’
‘What?’
‘How? How is my drinking at a teahouse with Maati humiliating to you?’
‘It makes it look as if I were trying to leverage some advantage after the agreements are complete,’ she snapped.
Itani took a pose that requested clarification.
‘Isn’t that most of what goes on between the harvest and completing the contracts? I thought Amat Kyaan was always sending you with letters arguing over interpretations of language.’
It was true, but it hadn’t occurred to her when Wilsin-cha had been sitting across his table from her with that terrible expression of pity. Playing for advantage had never stopped because a contract had been signed.
‘It’s not the same,’ she said. ‘This is with the Khai. You don’t do that with the Khai.’
‘I’m sorry, then,’ Itani said. ‘I didn’t know. But I wasn’t trying to change your negotiation.’
‘So what were you doing?’
Itani scooped up a double handful of water and poured it over his head. His long, northern face took on a look of utter calm, and he breathed deeply twice. He nodded to himself, coming to some private decision. When he spoke, his voice was almost conversational.
‘I knew Maati when we were boys. We were at the school together.’
‘What school?’
‘The school where the courts send their disowned sons. Where they choose the poets.’
Liat frowned. Itani looked up.
‘What were you doing there?’ Liat asked. ‘You were a servant? You never told me you were a servant as a child.’
‘I was the son of the Khai Machi. The sixth son. My name was Otah Machi then. I only started calling myself Itani after I left, so that my family couldn’t find me. I left without taking the brand, so it would have been dangerous to go by my true name.’
His smile faltered, his gaze shifted. Liat didn’t move - couldn’t move. It was ridiculous. It was laughable. And yet she wasn’t laughing. Her anger was gone like a candle snuffed by a strong wind, and she was only fighting to take in breath. It couldn’t be true, but it was. She knew he wasn’t lying. Before her and below her, Itani’s eyes were brimming with tears. He coughed out something like mirth and wiped his eyes with the back of his bare hand.
‘I’ve never told anyone,’ he said, ‘until now. Until you.’
‘You . . .’ Liat began, then had to stop, swallow, begin again. ‘You’re the son of the Khai Machi?’
‘I didn’t tell you at first because I didn’t know you. And then later because I hadn’t before. But I love you. And I trust you. I do. And I want you to be with me. Will you forgive me?’
‘Is this . . . are you lying to me, ’Tani?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s truth. You can ask Maati if you’d like. He knows as well.’
Liat’s throat was too tight to speak. Itani rose and lifted his arms up to her in supplication, the water flowing down his naked chest, fear in his eyes - fear that she would turn away from him. She melted down into the water, into his arms. Her robes, drinking in the water, were heavy as weights, but she didn’t care. She pulled him to her, pulled him close, pressed her face against his. There were tears on their cheeks, but she didn’t know whether they were hers or his. His arms surrounded her, lifted her, safe and strong and amazing.
‘I knew,’ she said. ‘I knew you were something. I knew there was something about you. I always knew.’
He kissed her then. It was unreal - like something out of an old epic story. She, Liat Chokavi, was the lover of the hidden child of the Khai Machi. He was hers. She pulled back from him, framing his face with her hands, staring at him as if seeing him for the first time.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ he said.
‘Am I hurt?’ she asked. ‘I could fly, love. I could fly.’
He held her fiercely then, like a drowning man holding the plank that might save him. And she matched him before pulling off her ruined robes and letting them sink into the bath like water plants at their ankles. Skin to skin they stood, the bath cool around their hips, and Liat let her heart sing with the thought that one day, her lover might take his father’s seat and power. One day, he might be Khai.
9
M
aati started awake when Heshai-kvo’s hand touched his shoulder. The poet drew back, his wide frog-mouth quirking up at the ends. Maati sat up and pushed the netting aside. His head felt stuffed with cotton.
‘I have to leave soon,’ Heshai-kvo said, his voice low and amused. ‘I didn’t want to leave you to sleep through the whole day. Waking at sundown only makes the next day worse.’
Maati took a pose of query. It didn’t specify a question, but Heshai-kvo took the sense of it.
‘It’s just past midday,’ he said.
‘Gods,’ Maati said and pulled himself up. ‘I apologize, Heshai-kvo. I will be ready in . . .’
Heshai-kvo lumbered to the doorway, waving his protests away. He was already wearing the brown formal robes and his sandals were strapped on.
‘Don’t. There’s nothing going on you need to know. I just didn’t want you to feel ill longer than you needed to. There’s fruit downstairs, and fresh bread. Sausage if you can stomach it, but I’d start slow if I were you.’
Maati took a pose of apology.
‘I have failed in my duties, Heshai-kvo. I should not have stayed in the city so long nor slept so late.’
Heshai-kvo clapped his hands in mock anger and pointed an accusing hand at Maati.
‘Are you the teacher here?’
‘No, Heshai-kvo.’
‘Then I’ll decide when you’re failing your duties,’ he said and winked.
When he was gone, Maati lay back on his cot and pressed his palm to his forehead. With his eyes closed, he felt as if the cot was moving, floating down some silent river. He forced his eyes back open, aware as he did that he’d already fallen halfway back to sleep. With a sigh, he forced himself up, stripped off his robes in trade for clean ones, and went down to the breakfast Heshai-kvo had promised.
The afternoon stretched out hot and thick and sultry before him. Maati bathed himself and straightened his belongings - something he hadn’t done in days. When the servant came to take away the plates and leavings, Maati asked that a pitcher of limed water be sent up.
By the time it arrived, he’d found the book he wanted, and went out to sit under the shade of trees by the pond. The world smelled rich and green as fresh-cut grass as he arranged himself. With only the buzzing of insects and the occasional wet plop of koi striking the surface, Maati opened the brown leather book and read. The first page began:
Not since the days of the First Empire have poets worked more than one binding in a lifetime. We may look back at the prodigality of those years with longing now, knowing as they did not that the andat unbound would likely not be recovered. But the price of our frugality is this: we as poets have made our first work our last like a carpenter whose apprentice chair must also be the masterwork for which he is remembered. As such it becomes our duty to examine our work closely so that later generations may gain from our subtle failures. It is in this spirit that I, Heshai Antaburi, record the binding I performed as a child of the andat Removing-The-Part-That-Would-Continue along with my notes on how I would have avoided error had I known my heart better.
Heshai-kvo’s handwriting was surprisingly beautiful, and the structure of the volume as compelling as an epic. He began with the background of the andat and what he hoped to accomplish by it. Then, in great detail, the work of translating the thought, moving it from abstract to concrete, giving it form and flesh. Then, when the story of the binding was told, Heshai-kvo turned back on it, showing the faults where an ancient grammar allowed an ambiguity, where form clashed with intent. Discords that Maati would never, he thought, have noticed were spread before him with a candor that embarrassed him. Beauty that edged to arrogance, strength that fed willfulness, confidence that was also contempt. And with that, how each error had its root in Heshai’s own soul. And while reading these confessions embarrassed him, they also fed a small but growing respect for his teacher and the courage it took to put such things to paper.
The sun had fallen behind the treetops and the cicadas begun their chorus when Maati reached the third section of the book, what Heshai called his corrected version. Maati looked up and found the andat on the bridge, looking back at him. The perfect planes of his cheeks, the amused intelligence in his eyes. Maati’s mind was still half within the work that had formed them.
Seedless took a pose of greeting formal and beautiful, and strode across the rest of the span towards him. Maati closed the book.
‘You’re being studious,’ Seedless said as he drew near. ‘Fascinating, isn’t it? Useless, but fascinating.’
‘I don’t see why it would be useless.’
‘His corrected version is too near what he did before. I can’t be bound the same way twice. You know that. So writing a variation on a complete work makes about as much sense as apologizing to someone you’ve just killed. You don’t mind that I join you.’
The andat stretched out on the grass, his dark eyes turned to the south and the palaces and, invisible beyond them, the city. The perfect fingers plucked at the grass.
‘It lets others see the mistakes he made,’ Maati said.
‘If it showed them the mistakes
they
were making, it would be useful,’ Seedless said. ‘Some errors you can only see once you’ve committed them.’
Maati took a pose that could be taken as agreement or mere politeness. Seedless smiled and pitched a blade of grass toward the water.
‘Where’s Heshai-kvo?’
‘Who knows? The soft quarter, most likely. Or some teahouse that rents out rooms by the ships. He’s not looking to tomorrow with glee in his heart. And what about you, my boy? You’ve turned out to be a better study than I’d have guessed. You’ve already mastered staying out, consorting with men below your station, and missing meetings. It took Heshai years to really get the hang of that.’
‘Bitter?’ Maati said. Seedless laughed and shifted to look at him directly. The beautiful face was rueful and amused.
‘I had a bad day,’ the andat said. ‘I found something I’d lost, and it turned out not to have been worth finding. And you? Feeling ready for the grand ceremony tomorrow?’
Maati took a pose of affirmation. The andat grinned, and then like a candle melting, his expression turned to something else, something conflicted that Maati couldn’t entirely read. The cicadas in their trees went silent suddenly as if they were a single voice. A moment later, they began again.
‘Is there . . .’ the andat said, and trailed off, taking a pose that asked for silence while Seedless reconsidered his words. Then, ‘Maati-kya. If there was something you wanted of me. Some favor you would ask of me, even now. Something that I might do or . . . or forbear. Ask, and I’ll do it. Whatever it is. For you, I’ll do it.’
Maati looked at the pale face, the skin that seemed to glow like porcelain in the failing light.
‘Why?’ Maati asked. ‘Why would you offer that to me?’
Seedless smiled and shifted with the sound of fine cloth against grass.
‘To see what you’d ask,’ Seedless said.
‘What if I asked for something you didn’t want to give me?’
‘It would be worth it,’ Seedless said. ‘It would tell me something about your heart, and knowing that would justify some very high prices. Anything you want to have started, or anything you want to stop.’
Maati felt the beginning of a blush and shifted forward, considering the surface of the pond and the fish - pale and golden - beneath it. When he spoke, his voice was low.