‘When I was very young,’ she said, ‘my sister pushed me off a rooftop. A high one. I have never been more certain that I was going to die. And I didn’t scream. Because I knew it wouldn’t help.’
‘And your point?’
‘What I’m doing now may be harder than I’d wish. But I’m going to do it. Worrying about whether I can manage won’t help.’
He laughed. It was a low sound, and strangely shallow - like an axe on wood.
‘You are a tough bitch,’ he said, making it a compliment.
No, I’m not
, she thought, smiling,
but it’s good that you’ve misunderstood me.
13
T
he ship passed the great island with its white watchtower and into the bay of Yalakeht on a cool, hazy morning. Otah stood at the railing and watched the land turn from outlines of pale hills to the green-gray of pine trees in autumn. The tall, gray buildings of Yalakeht nestled at the edge of the calmest of waters. The noise of their bayfront carried over the water, but muffled by the thick air like a conversation in a nearby room.
They reached land - signaled in by the dock master’s torches - just as the sun reached its peak in the sky. Otah had hardly put his feet to the cobbled streets before he heard the news. The bayfront seemed to buzz with it.
The third son of the Khai Udun had killed his remaining brother. They had found each other in Chaburi-Tan, and faced each other in a seafront street with knives. Or else the second son - whom Otah had seen in the court of the Khai Saraykeht - had been poisoned after all. Or he had ambushed his younger brother, only to have the fight slip from him. On the docks, on the streets, in the teahouses, the stories ran together and meshed with older, better-known tales, last year’s news, and wild imaginings newly formed of what might have happened. Otah found a seat in the back of a teahouse near the bayfront and listened as the stories unfolded. The youngest son would take his father’s place - a good sign. When a youngest son took power, it meant the line was vigorous. People said it meant the next Khai Udun would be especially talented and brave.
To Otah, it meant that he had killed two of his brothers, and that the others, younger even than he was, had been cast out. They were wearing brands somewhere even now. Unless they were poets. Unless they were lucky enough to be poets like Heshai of Saraykeht.
‘Well, you’re looking sour,’ a familiar voice said.
‘Orai,’ Otah said, taking a pose of welcome. The courier sat down across from him, and raised a hand to the serving man. Moments later, two bowls of fish and rice appeared before them along with a pot of smoked tea and two ceramic teabowls of delicate green. Otah took a pose of correction to the serving man, but Orai stopped him.
‘It’s a tradition of my house. After a journey, we buy our travelling companions a meal.’
‘Really?’
‘No,’ the courier said, ‘but I think I have more money than you do, and as it happens the fish here is really quite good.’
The serving man hovered, looking uncomfortable, until Otah laughed.
‘At least let me pay my half,’ Otah said, but Orai took a pose of deferment:
next time.
‘So, Itani,’ he said. ‘This is the end? Or how far upriver is your sister?’
‘A day or so by boat,’ Otah lied. ‘Two days walking. Or so she tells me. I’ve never been.’
‘A few days more, and you could see the poet’s village. You’ve never been there, have you?’
‘No,’ Otah said.
‘It’s worth the extra travel, if you can spare it. The houses of the Dai-kvo are actually built into the living rock. They say it’s based on the school of the ancients in the old Empire, though I don’t suppose there’s much left of those ruins to compare. It’s a good story.’
‘I suppose.’
The fish was very good - bright with lemon, hot with pepper. Otah realized after a few mouthfuls that he had really been very hungry.
‘And now that you’re at the end of your first journey over water, what do you think of it?’
‘It’s strange,’ Otah said. ‘The world still feels like it’s moving.’
‘Yes. It does stop after a while. More than that, though. There was a saying when I was young that sea journeys are like women - they change you. And none so much as the first.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Otah said. ‘I seem to be more or less the same man I was in Saraykeht. Ten fingers, ten toes. No flippers.’
‘Perhaps it’s just a saying, then.’
Orai poured himself another bowl of tea and held it in his hands, blowing across it to cool it. Otah finished the last of the rice and leaned back to find the courier’s gaze on him, considering. He replied with a pose of query that seemed to pull Orai out of a half-dream.
‘I have to confess, Itani, it isn’t precisely chance that I found you here. The fish really is very good, but I found you by asking after you. I’ve been working for House Siyanti for eight years, and traveling for five of those. I think it’s taught me a few things and I’ll flatter myself to say I think I’m a good judge of character. These last weeks, on the ship, you’ve struck me as an interesting man. You’re smart, but you hide the fact. You’re driven, but I don’t think you know yet what you’re driven toward. And you like travel. You have a gift for it.’
‘You’re just saying that because I didn’t get sick the way you did,’ Otah said, trying to lighten the mood.
‘Being able to eat your first day on ship is a gift. Don’t underestimate it. But all this time, it’s occurred to me that you have the makings of a good courier. And I hold enough influence in the house now, that if you wanted a letter of introduction, I think I might be able to help you with it. You wouldn’t be trusted with important work at the start, but that doesn’t make seeing the cities any less fascinating. It’s not an easy life, but it’s an interesting one. And it might suit you.’
Otah cocked his head and felt a flush rising in him equally gratification and embarrassment. The courier sipped his tea, letting the moment stretch until Otah took a pose that encompassed both gratitude and refusal.
‘I belong in Saraykeht,’ he said. ‘There are things there I need to see through.’
‘Your indenture. I understand. But that’s going to end before much longer.’
‘There’s more than that, though. I have friends there.’
‘And the girl,’ Orai said.
‘Yes. Liat. I . . . I don’t think she’d enjoy having a lover who was always elsewhere.’
Orai took a pose of understanding that seemed to include a reservation, a question on the verge of being formed. When he did speak, it was in fact a question, though perhaps not the one he’d wanted to ask.
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty summers.’
‘And she’s . . .?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘And you love her,’ Orai said. Otah could hear the almost-covered disappointment in the words. ‘She’s your heartmate.’
‘I don’t know that. But I have to find out, don’t I?’
Orai grinned and took a pose that conceded the point, then, hesitating, he plucked something from his sleeve. It was a letter sewn closed and sealed with hard green wax stamped with an ornate seal.
‘I took the chance that you’d accept my suggestion,’ the courier said, passing the letter across the table. ‘If it turns out this amazing young woman doesn’t own your heart after all, consider the offer open.’
Otah dropped it into his own sleeve and took a pose of thanks. He felt an unreasonable trust for this man, and an ease that three weeks’ acquaintance - even in the close quarters of a ship - couldn’t explain. Perhaps, he thought, it was only the change of his first sea voyage.
‘Orai,’ he said, ‘have you ever been in love?’
‘Yes. Several times, and with some very good women.’
‘Can you love someone you don’t trust?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘I have a sister I wouldn’t lend two copper lengths if I wanted them back. The problem with loving someone you don’t trust is finding the right distance.’
‘The right distance.’
‘With my sister, we love each other best from different cities. If we had to share a house, it wouldn’t go so gracefully.’
‘But a lover. A heartmate.’
Orai shook his head.
‘In my experience, you can bed a woman and mistrust her or you can love a woman and mistrust her, but not all three at once.’
Otah sipped his tea. It had gone tepid. Orai waited, his boyish face with its graying beard serious. Two men left from another table, and the cold draft from the briefly opened door made Otah shiver. He put down the green bowl and set his hands together on the table. His head felt thick, his mind stuffed with wool.
‘Before I left Saraykeht,’ he said slowly, ‘I told Liat some things. About my family.’
‘But not because you trust her?’
‘Because I love her and I thought I
ought
to trust her.’
He looked up, his gaze meeting Orai’s. The courier took a pose of understanding and sympathy. Otah replied with one that surrendered to greater forces - gods or fate or weight of circumstances. There seemed little more to say. Orai rose.
‘Keep hold of that letter,’ he said. ‘And whatever happens, good luck to you. You’ve been a good man to travel with, and that’s a rare thing.’
‘Thank you,’ Otah said.
The courier pulled his robes closed about him and left. Otah finished his bowl of tea before he also quit the teahouse. The bay of Yalakeht was wide and calm and still before him; the port that ended his first journey over the sea. His mind unquiet, he turned to the north and west, walking through the wet, narrow streets to the river gate, and some days beyond that, the Dai-kvo.
‘This is shit!’ the one-eyed man shouted and threw the papers on the floor. His face was flushed, and the scarring that webbed his cheeks shone white. Amat could feel the others in the room agreeing, though she never took her gaze from his - Ovi Niit’s unappointed spokesman. ‘He would never have done this.’
The front room of the comfort house was crowded, though none of the people there were patrons. It was far too early for one thing. The soft quarter wasn’t awake in the day. And the watch had closed the house at her request. They were with her still. Big scowling men wearing the colors of the great comfort houses as a symbol of their loyalty to no one house, but the soft quarter itself. The protecting soldiery of vice.
Behind Amat, where she couldn’t see them, Torish Wite and his men stood, waiting. And arrayed before her, leaning against walls or sitting on the tables and chairs, were the guards and gambling chiefs and whores of Ovi Niit’s house. Amat caught herself, and couldn’t entirely stop the smile. Her house. It was a mistake to think of it as the dead man’s.
‘He did,’ she said. ‘If he didn’t tell you, perhaps you weren’t as close as you’d thought. And you can burn those papers and eat the ashes if you like. It won’t change anything.’
The one-eyed man turned to the watch captain, taking a pose of imprecation. The captain - a dark-eyed man with a thin, braided beard - took no answering pose.
‘They’re forged,’ the one-eyed man said. ‘They’re forged and you know it. If Niit-cha was going to sell out, it wouldn’t be to a high-town cunt like her.’
‘I’ve spoken to the firekeeper that signed witness,’ the captain said.
‘Who was it?’ a thin, gray-haired man asked. One of the tiles men.
‘Marat Golu. Firekeeper for the weavers’ quarter.’
A murmur ran through the room. Amat felt her belly go tight. That was a detail she would have preferred to leave quiet. The tiles man was clever.
‘Gods!’ the one-eyed man said. ‘Him? We have girls that are more expensive.’
Amat took a pose that asked clarification. Her hands were steady as stone, her voice pleasant.
‘Are you suggesting that one of the utkhaiem is engaging in fraud?’
‘Yes I am!’ the one-eyed man roared. The tiles man pursed his lips, but stayed silent. ‘Bhadat Coll was Niit-cha’s second now Black Rathvi’s gone, and if Niit-cha’s dead, the house should be his.’
‘Niit-cha isn’t dead,’ Amat said. ‘This house and everyone in it have been bought and paid for. You can read the contracts yourselves, if you can read.’
‘You can roll your contracts up and fuck them,’ the one-eyed man shouted. There was a fleck of white at the corner of his mouth. The violence in him was just this side of breaking out. Amat rubbed her thumb and finger together, a dry sound. Part of her mind was wrapped in panic, in visceral, animal fear. The other parts of her mind were what had made her the overseer of a great house.
‘Gentlemen of the watch,’ she said. ‘I’m releasing this man from his indenture. Would you see him to the street.’
It had the effect she’d hoped for. The one-eyed man shouted something that might have had words in it, or might only have been rage. A blade appeared in his hand, plucked from his sleeve, and he leaped for her. She forced herself not to flinch as the watchmen cut him down.