So he told the truth to a caretaker-servant, instead.
And was angry at Banichi, who probably, justifiably, was angry with the paidhi. But the paidhi saw things slipping away from him, and atevi he’d trusted turning strange and distant and withholding answers from him at moments of crisis they might have foreseen.
He’d puzzled Djinana, that was certain. Djinana simply gathered up the dessert dish and, when he couldn’t find the scroll-case, brought him an antique one from the estate, and pen and paper and sealing-wax.
He wrote, in his best hand, Accepting the aiji-dowager’s most gracious invitation for breakfast at the first of the clock, the paidhi-aiji, Bren Cameron, with profound respect …
It was the form—laying it on, perhaps, but not by much. And he trusted that the dowager wouldn’t have her mail censored. He passed the text by Djinana’s doubtless impeccable protocol-sense, then sealed it with his seal-ring and dismissed him to give it to Cenedi, who was probably growing very annoyed with waiting.
After that, with Djinana handling those courtesies, he composed another letter, to Tabini.
I am uneasy, aiji-ma. I feel that there must be duties in the City which go wanting, as there were several matters pending. I hope that your staff will provide me necessary briefings, as I would be distressed to fall out of current with events. As you may know, Malguri is not computerized, and phone calls appear out of the question.
Please accept my warm regards for auspicious days and fortunate outcome. Baji-naji be both in your favor. The paidhi-aiji Bren Cameron with profound respect and devotion to the Association and to Tabini-aiji in the continuance of his office, the …
He had to stop and count up the date on his fingers, figuring he had lost a day. Or two. He became confused—decided it was only one, then wrote it down and sealed the letter with only a ribbon seal, but with the wax directly on the paper.
That one was for Banichi to take on his next trip to the airport, and, one presumed, to the post.
Then, in the case that one never made it, he wrote a copy.
Djinana came back through the room, reporting he’d delivered the scroll, and asking would the paidhi need the wax-jack further.
“I’ve a little correspondence to take care of,” he said to Djinana. “I’ll blow out the wick and read awhile after, thank you, nadi. I don’t think I’ll need anything. Is the dowager’s gentleman out?”
“The door is locked for the night, nand’ paidhi, yes.”
“Banichi has a key.”
“He does, yes. So does nadi Jago. But they’ll most probably use the kitchen entry.”
The kitchen entry. Of course there was one. The food arrived, not from the stairs, but from the back halls, through the servants’ quarters, his bedroom, and the sitting room, before it reached his dining table.
“I’ll be fine, then. Good night, nadi Djinana. Thank you. You’ve been extremely helpful.”
“Good night, nand’ paidhi.”
Djinana went on back to his quarters, then. He finished his paraphrase of the note, and added:
If this is found, and no note of similar wording has reached you before this, Tabini-ji, suspect the hand that should have delivered the first message. After one poisoned cup, from the dowager, I am not reassured of anyone in Malguri, even my own staff.
He put it in the guest book, figuring that the next occupant would find it, if he didn’t remove it himself. It wasn’t a book Banichi would necessarily read.
And, as he had just written, he was far from certain of anything or anyone in Malguri, tonight.
Thunder rumbled outside, and lightning lit rain-drops on the night-dark window glass, flared brief color from the stained glass borders.
Bren read, late, in no mood to sleep, or to share a bed with his morbid thoughts. He looked at pictures, when the words began to challenge his focus or his acceptance of atevi attitudes. He read about old wars. Betrayals. Poisonings.
Banichi arrived on a peal of thunder, walked in and stood by the fire. A fine mist glistened on his black, silver-trimmed uniform, and he seemed not pleased. “Nadi Bren, I wish you’d consult before decisions.”
The silence hung there. He looked at Banichi without speaking, without an expression on his face, and thought of saying, Nadi, I wish you’d consult before leaving.
But Banichi, for what he cared, could guess what he was thinking, the way he was left to guess what Banichi was thinking, or where Jago was, or why the so-called servants they’d brought for him from the City were absent or unavailable.
And maybe it wasn’t justified that he be angry, and maybe Banichi’s business at the airport or wherever he’d just been was entirely justified and too secret to tell him, but, damn, he was angry, a peculiar, stinging kind of anger that, while Banichi was standing there, added up to a hurt he hadn’t realized he felt so keenly, a thoroughly unprofessional and foolish and human hurt, which began with Tabini and extended to the two atevi besides Tabini that he’d thought he understood.
Heaving up his insides on a regular basis probably had something to do with it. Mineral balance. Vitamins. Unaccustomed foods that could leach nutrients out of you instead of putting them in, or chemically bind what you needed … he could think of a dozen absolutely plausible excuses for calculatedly self-destructive behavior, half of them dietary and the other half because, dammit, his own hard-wiring or his own culture wanted to like some single one of the people he’d devoted his life to helping.
“I don’t have to be the paidhi,” he said, finally, since Banichi persisted in saying nothing. “I don’t have to leave my family and my people and live where I’m not welcome with nine tenths of the population.”
“How do they choose you?” Banichi asked.
“It’s a study. It’s something you specialize in. If you’re the best, and the paidhi quits, you take the job. That’s how. It’s something you do so there’ll be peace.”
“You’re the best at what you do.”
“I try to be,” he retorted. “I do try, Banichi. Evidently I’ve done something amiss. Possibly I’ve offended the aiji-dowager. Possibly I’ve gotten myself into a dangerous situation. I don’t know. That’s an admission of failure, Banichi. I don’t know. But you weren’t here to ask. Jago wasn’t here. I couldn’t raise Algini. Tano wasn’t on duty. So I asked Djinana, who didn’t know what maybe you could have told me. If you’d been here.”
Banichi frowned, darkly.
“Where were you, Banichi? Or should I ask? If you intended to answer my questions, you’d have told me you were leaving, and if you didn’t intend me to worry you wouldn’t trail the evidence past me and refuse my reasonable questions, when I rely on you for protection the Treaty doesn’t let me provide for myself.”
Banichi said nothing, nor moved for the moment. Then he removed his elbow from the fireplace stonework and stalked off toward the bedroom.
Bren snapped the book shut. Banichi looked back in startlement, he had that satisfaction. Banichi’s nerves were that tightly strung.
“Where’s Jago?” Bren asked.
“Outside. Refusing your reasonable questions, too.”
“Banichi, dammit!” He stood up, little good it did—he still had to look up to Banichi’s face, even at a distance. “If I’m under arrest and confined here, —tell me. And where’s my mail? Don’t regular planes come to Maidingi? It looked like an airport to me.”
“From Shejidan, once a week. Most of the country, nadi, runs at a different speed. Be calm. Enjoy the lake. Enjoy the slower pace.”
“Slower pace? I want a solar recharge, Banichi. I want to make a phone call. Don’t tell me this place doesn’t have a telephone.”
“In point of fact, no, there isn’t a telephone. This is an historical monument. The wires would disfigure the—”
“Underground lines, Banichi. Pipes overhead. The place has plenty of wires.”
“They have to get here.”
“There’s gas. There’s light. Why aren’t there plug-i
ns? Why can’t someone go down to the town, go to a hardware and get me a damned power extension and a screw-in plug? I could sacrifice a ceiling light. The historic walls wouldn’t suffer defacement.”
“There isn’t a hardware. The town of Maidingi is a very small place, nadi Bren.”
“God.” His head was starting to hurt, acutely. His blood pressure was coming up again and he was dizzy, the light and warmth and noise of the fire all pouring into his senses as he groped after the fireplace stonework. “Banichi, why is Tabini doing this?”
“Doing what, nadi? I don’t think the aiji-ji has a thing to do with hardwares in Maidingi.”
He wasn’t amused. He leaned his back against the stones, folded his arms and fixed Banichi with an angry stare, determined to have it out, one way or the other. “You know, ‘doing what.’ I could feel better if I thought it was policy. I don’t feel better thinking it might be something I’ve done, or trouble I’ve made for Tabini—I like him, Banichi. I don’t want to be the cause of harm to him, or to you, or to Jago. It’s my man’chi. Humans are like that. We have unreasonable loyalties to people we like, and you’re going far past the surface of my politeness, Banichi.”
“Clearly.”
“And I still like you, damn you. You don’t shake one of us, you don’t fling our liking away because your man’chi says otherwise, you can’t get rid of us when we like you, Banichi, you’re stuck with me, so make the best of it.”
There wasn’t a clear word for like. It meant a preference for salad greens or iced drinks. But love was worse. Banichi would never forgive him that.
Banichi’s nostrils flared, once, twice. He said, in accented Mosphei’, “What meaning? What meaning you say, nand’ paidhi?”
“It means the feeling I have for my mother and my brother and my job, I have for Tabini and for you and for Jago.” Breath failed him. Self-control did. He flung it all out. “Banichi, I’d walk a thousand miles to have a kind word from you. I’d give you the shirt from my back if you needed it; if you were in trouble, I’d carry you that thousand miles. What do you call that? Foolish?”
Another flaring of Banichi’s nostrils. “That would be very difficult for you.”
“So is liking atevi.” That got out before he censored it. “Baji-naji. It’s the luck I have.”
“Don’t joke.”
“I’m not joking. God, I’m not joking. We have to like somebody, we’re bound to like somebody, or we die, Banichi, we outright die. We make appointments with grandmothers, we drink the cups strangers offer us, and we don’t ask for help anymore, Banichi, what’s the damned point, when you don’t see what we need?”
“If I don’t guess what you like, you threaten to ruin my reputation. Is this accurate?”
The headache was suddenly excruciating. Things blurred. “Like, like, like—get off the damned word, Banichi. I cross that trench every day. Can’t you cross it once? Can’t you cross to where I am, Banichi, just once, to know what I think? You’re clever. I know you’re hard to mislead. Follow, Banichi, the solitary trail of my thoughts.”
“I’m not a cursed dinner-course!”
“Banichi-ji.” The pain reached a level and stayed there, tolerable, once he’d discovered the limits of it. He had his hand on the stonework. He felt the texture of it, the silken dust of age, the fire-heated rock, broken from the earth to make this building before humans ever left the home-world. Before they were ever lost, and desperate. He composed himself—he remembered he was the paidhi, the man in the middle. He remembered he’d chosen this, knowing there wouldn’t be a reward, believing, at the time, that of course atevi had feelings, and of course, once he could find the right words, hit the right button, find the clue to atevi thought—he’d win of atevi everything he was giving up among humankind.
He’d been twenty-two, and what he’d not known had so vastly outweighed what he’d known.
“Your behavior worries me,” Banichi said.
“Forgive me.” There was a large knot interfering with his speech. But he was vastly calmer. He chose not to look at Banichi. He only imagined the suspicion and the anger on Banichi’s face. “I reacted unprofessionally and intrusively.”
“Reacted to what, nand’ paidhi?”
A betraying word choice. He was slipping, badly. The headache had upset his stomach, which was still uncertain. “I misinterpreted your behavior. The mistake was mine, not yours. Will you attend my appointment with me in the morning, and guard me from my own stupidity?”
“What behavior did you misinterpret?”
Straight back to the attack. Banichi refused the bait he cast. And he had no ability to argue, now, or to deal at all in cold rationality.
“I explained that. It didn’t make sense to you. It won’t.” He stared into the hazy corners beyond the firelight, and remembered the interpretation Banichi had put on his explanation. “It wasn’t a threat, Banichi. I would never do that. I value your presence and your good qualities. Will you go with me tomorrow?”
Back to the simplest, the earliest and most agreed-upon words. Cold. Unfreighted.
“No, nadi. No one invites himself to the dowager’s table. You accepted.”
“You’re assigned—”
“My man’chi is to Tabini. My actions are his actions. The paidhi can’t have forgotten this simple thing.”
He was angry. He looked at Banichi, and went on looking, long enough, he hoped, for Banichi to think in what other regard his actions were Tabini’s actions. “I haven’t forgotten. How could I forget?”
Banichi returned a sullen stare. “Ask regarding the food you’re offered. Be sure the cook understands you’re in the party.”
The door in the outermost room opened. Banichi’s attention was instant and wary. But it was Jago coming through, rain-spattered as Banichi, in evident good humor until the moment she saw the two of them. Her face went immediately impassive. She walked through to his bedroom without comment.
“Excuse me,” Banichi said darkly, and went after her.
Bren glared at his black-uniformed back, at a briskly swinging braid—the two of Tabini’s guards on their way through his bedroom, to the servant quarters; he hit his fist against the stonework and didn’t feel the pain until he walked away from the fireside.
Stupid, he said to himself. Stupid and dangerous to have tried to explain anything to Banichi: Yes, nadi, no, nadi, clear and simple words, nadi.
Banichi and Jago had gone on to the servants’ quarters, where they lodged, separately. He went through to his own bedroom and undressed, with an eye to the dead and angry creature on the wall, the expression of its last, cornered fight.
It stared back at him, when he was in the bed. He picked up his book and read, because he was too angry to sleep, about ancient atevi battles, about treacheries and murders.
About ghost ships on the lake, and a manifestation that haunted the audience hall on this level, a ghostly beast that sometimes went snuffling up and down the corridors, looking for something or someone.
He was a modern man. They were atevi superstitions. But he took one look and then evaded the glass, glaring eyes of the beast on the wall.
Thunder banged. The lights all went out, except the fire in the next room, casting its uncertain glow, that didn’t reach all the corners of this one, and didn’t at all touch the servants’ hall.
He told himself lightning must have hit a transformer.
But the place was eerily quiet after that, except for a strange, distant thumping that sounded like a heartbeat coming through the walls.
Then far back in the servants’ hall, beyond the bath, steps moved down the corridor toward his bedroom.
He slid off the bed, onto his knees.
“Nand’ paidhi,” Jago’s voice called out. “It’s Jago.”
He withdrew his hand from beneath the mattress, and slithered up onto the bed, sitting and watching as an entire brigade of staff moved like shadows through his room and outward. He couldn’t see faces. He saw the s
park of metal on what he thought was Banichi’s uniform.
One lingered.
“Who is it?” he asked, anxiously.
“Jago, nadi. I’m staying with you. Go to sleep.”
“You’re joking!”
“It’s most likely only a lightning strike, nand’ paidi. That’s the auxiliary generator you hear. It keeps the refrigeration running in the kitchen, at least until morning.”
He got up, went looking for his robe and banged his knee on a chair, making an embarrassing scrape.
“What do you want, nadi?”
“My robe.”
“Is this it?” Jago located it instantly, at the foot of his bed, and handed it to him. Atevi night vision was that much better, he reminded himself, and took not quite that much comfort from knowing it. He put the robe on, tied it about him and went into the sitting room, as less provocative, out where the fireplace provided one kind of light and a whiter, intermittent flicker of lightning came from the windows.
A padding, metal-sparked shadow followed him. Atevi eyes reflected a pale gold. Atevi found it spooky that human eyes didn’t, that humans could slip quietly through the dark. Their differences touched each others’ nightmares.
But there was no safer company in the world, he told himself, and told himself also that the disturbance was in fact nothing but a lightning strike, and that Banichi was going to be wet, chilled, and in no good mood when he got back in.
But Jago wasn’t in her night-robe. Jago had been in uniform and armed, and so had Banichi been, when the lights had gone.
“Don’t you sleep?” he asked her, standing before the fire.
The twin reflections of her eyes eclipsed, a blink, then vanished as she came close enough to rest an elbow against the stonework mantel. Her shadow loomed over him, and fire glistened on the blackness of her skin. “We were awake,” she said.