“As you say, most high.”
“I told you there was no place in a poet’s life for a family. A lover here or there, certainly. Most men are too weak to deny themselves that much. But a wife? A child? No. There isn’t room for both what they require and what we do. And I told you that. You remember? I told you that, and you …”
The Dai-kvo shook his head, frowning in remembered frustration. It was a moment, Maati knew, when he could apologize. He could repent his pride and say that the Dai-kvo had indeed known better all along. He remained silent.
“I was right,” the Dai-kvo said for him. “And now you’ve done half a job as a poet and half a job as a man. Your studies are weak, and the woman took your whelp and left. You’ve failed both, just as I knew you would. I’m not condemning you for that, Maati. No man could have taken on what you did and succeeded. But this opportunity in Machi is what will wipe clean the slate. Do this well and it will be what you’re remembered for.”
“Certainly I will do my best.”
“Fail at it, and there won’t be a third chance. Few enough men have two.”
Maati took a pose appropriate to a student receiving a lecture. Considering him, the Dai-kvo responded with one that closed the lesson, then raised his hand.
“Don’t destroy this chance in order to spite me, Maati. Failing in this will do me no harm, and it will destroy you. You’re angry because I told you the truth, and because what I said would happen, did. Consider while you go north, whether that’s really such a good reason to hate me.”
THE OPEN window let in a cool breeze that smelled of pine and rain. Otah Machi, the sixth son of the Khai Machi, lay on the bed, listening to the sounds of water—rain pattering on the flagstones of the wayhouse’s courtyard and the tiles of its roof, the constant hushing of the river against its banks. A fire danced and spat in the grate, but his bare skin was still stippled with cold. The night candle had gone out, and he hadn’t bothered to relight it. Morning would come when it came.
The door slid open and then shut. He didn’t turn to look.
“You’re brooding, Itani,” Kiyan said, calling him by the false name he’d chosen for himself, the only one he’d ever told her. Her voice was low and rich and as careful as a singer’s. He shifted now, turning to his side. She knelt by the grate—her skin smooth and brown, her robes the formal cut of a woman of business, one strand of her hair fallen free. Her face was thin—she reminded him of a fox sometimes, when a smile just touched her mouth. She placed a fresh log on the fire as she spoke. “I half expected you’d be asleep already.”
He sighed and sketched a pose of contrition with one hand.
“Don’t apologize to me,” she said. “I’m as happy having you in my rooms here as in the teahouse, but Old Mani wanted more news out of you. Or maybe just to get you drunk enough to sing dirty songs with him. He’s missed you, you know.”
“It’s a hard thing, being so loved.”
“Don’t laugh at it. It’s not a love to carry you through ages, but it’s more than some people ever manage. You’ll grow into one of those pinched old men who want free wine because they pity themselves.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make light of Old Mani. It’s just …”
He sighed. Kiyan closed the window and relit the night candle.
“It’s just that you’re brooding,” she said. “And you’re naked and not under the blankets, so you’re feeling that you’ve done something wrong and deserve to suffer.”
“Ah,” Otah said. “Is that why I do this?”
“Yes,” she said, untying her robes. “It is. You can’t hide it from me, Itani. You might as well come out with it.”
Otah held the thought in his mind. I’m not who I’ve told you I am. Itani Noygu is the name I picked for myself when I was a child. My father is dying, and brothers I can hardly recall have started killing each other, and I find it makes me sad. He wondered what Kiyan would say to that. She prided herself on knowing him—on knowing people and how their minds worked. And yet he didn’t think this was something she’d already have guessed.
Naked, she lay beside him, pulling thick blankets up over them both.
“Did you find another woman in Chaburi-Tan?” she asked, half-teasing. But only half. “Some young dancing girl who stole your heart, or some other bit of your flesh, and now you’re stewing over how to tell me you’re leaving me?”
“I’m a courier,” Otah said. “I have a woman in every city I visit. You know that.”
“You don’t,” she said. “Some couriers do, but you don’t.”
“No?”
“No. It took me half a year of doing everything short of stripping bare for you to notice me. You don’t stay in other cities long enough for a woman to chip through your reserve. And you don’t have to push away the blankets. You may want to be cold, but I don’t.”
“Well. Maybe I’m just feeling old.”
“A ripe thirty-three? Well, when you decide to stop running across the world, I’d always be pleased to hire you on. We could stand another pair of hands around the place. You could throw out the drunks and track down the cheats that try to slip away without paying.”
“You don’t pay enough,” Otah said. “I talk to Old Mani. I know what your wages are.”
“Perhaps you’d get extra for keeping me warm at nights.”
“Shouldn’t you offer that to Old Mani first? He’s been here longer than I have.”
Kiyan slapped his chest smartly, and then nestled into him. He found himself curling toward her, the warmth of her body drawing him like a familiar scent. Her fingers traced the tattoo on his breast—the ink had faded over time, blurring lines that had once been sharp and clear.
“Jokes aside,” she said, and he could hear a weariness in her voice, “I would take you on, if you wanted to stay. You could live here, with me. Help me manage the house.”
He caressed her hair, feeling the individual strands as they flowed across his fingertips. There was a scattering of white among the black that made her look older than she was. Otah knew that they had been there since she was a girl, as if she’d been born old.
“That sounds like you’re suggesting marriage,” he said.
“Perhaps. You wouldn’t have to, but … it would be one way to arrange things. That isn’t a threat, you know. I don’t need a husband. Only if it would make you feel better, we could …”
He kissed her gently. It had been weeks, and he was surprised to find how much he’d missed the touch of her lips. Weeks of travel weariness slipped away, the deep unease loosened its hold on his chest, and he took comfort in her. He fell asleep with her arm over his body, her breath already soft and deep with sleep.
In the morning, he woke before she did, slipped out of the bed, and dressed quietly. The sun was not up, but the eastern sky had lightened and the morning birds were singing madly as he took himself across an ancient stone bridge into Udun.
A river city, Udun was laced with as many canals as roadways. Bridges humped up high enough for barges to pass beneath them, and the green water of the Qiit lapped at old stone steps that descended into the river mud. Otah stopped at a stall on the broad central plaza and traded two lengths of copper for a thick wedge of honey bread and a bowl of black, smoky tea. Around him, the city slowly came awake—the streets and canals filling with traders and merchants, beggars singing at the corners or in small rafts tied at the water’s edge, laborers hauling wagons along the wide flag stoned streets, and birds bright as shafts of sunlight—blue and red and yellow, green as grass, and pink as dawn. Udun was a city of birds, and their chatter and shriek and song filled the air as he ate.
The compound of House Siyanti was in the better part of the city, just downstream from the palaces, where the water was not yet fouled by the wastes of thirty thousand men and women and children. The red brick buildings rose up three stories high, and a private canal was filled with barges in the red and silver of the house. The stylized emblem of the sun
and stars had been worked into the brick archway that led to the central courtyard, and Otah passed beneath it with a feeling like coming home.
Amiit Foss, the overseer for the house couriers, was in his offices, ordering around three apprentices with sharp words and insults, but no blows. Otah stepped in and took a pose of greeting.
“Ah! The missing Itani. Did you know the word for halfwit in the tongue of the Empire was itani-nah?”
“All respect, Amiit-cha, but no it wasn’t.”
The overseer grinned. One of the apprentices—a girl of perhaps thirteen summers—whispered something angrily, and the boy next to her giggled.
“Fine,” the overseer said. “You two. I need the ciphers rechecked on last week’s letters.”
“But I wasn’t the one …,” the girl protested. The overseer took a pose that commanded her silence, and the pair, glowering at each other, stalked away.
“I get them when they’re just growing old enough to flirt,” Amiit said, sighing. “Come back to the meeting rooms. The journey took longer than I’d expected.”
“There were some delays,” Otah said as he followed the older man back. “Chaburi-Tan isn’t as tightly run as it was last time I was out there.”
“No?”
“There are refugees from the Westlands.”
“There are always refugees from the Westlands.”
“Not this many,” Otah said. “There are rumors that the Khai Chaburi-Tan is going to restrict the number of Westlanders allowed on the island.”
Amiit paused, his hands on the carved wood door of the meeting rooms. Otah could almost see the implications of this thought working themselves out behind the overseer’s eyes. A moment later, Amiit looked up, raised his eyebrows in appreciation, and pushed the doors open.
Half the day was spent in the raw silk chairs of the meeting rooms while Amiit took Otah’s report and accepted the letters—sewn shut and written in cipher—that Otah had carried with him.
It had taken Otah some time to understand all that being a courier implied. When he had first arrived in Udun six years before, hungry, lost and half-haunted by the memories he carried with him, he had still believed that he would simply be carrying letters and small packages from one place to another, perhaps waiting for a response, and then taking those to where they were expected. It would have been as right to say that a farmer throws some seeds in the earth and returns a few months later to see what’s grown. He had been lucky. His ability to win friends easily had served him, and he had been instructed in what the couriers called the gentleman’s trade: how to gather information that might be of use to the house, how to read the activity of a street corner or market, and how to know from that the mood of a city. How to break ciphers and re-sew letters. How to appear to drink more wine than you actually did, and question travelers on the road without seeming to.
He understood now that the gentleman’s trade was one that asked a lifetime to truly master, and though he was still a journeyman, he had found a kind of joy in it. Amiit knew what his talents were, and chose assignments for him in which he could do well. And in return for the trust of the house and the esteem of his fellows, Otah did the best work he could, brokering information, speculation, gossip, and intrigue. He had traveled through the summer cities in the south, west to the plains and the cities that traded directly with the Westlands, up the eastern coasts where his knowledge of obscure east island tongues had served him well. By design or happy coincidence, he had never gone farther north than Yalakeht. He had not been called on to see the winter cities.
Until now.
“There’s trouble in the north,” Amiit said as he tucked the last of the opened letters into his sleeve.
“I’d heard,” Otah said. “The succession’s started in Machi.”
“Amnat-Tan, Machi, Cetani. All of them have something brewing. You may need to get some heavier robes.”
“I didn’t think House Siyanti had much trade there,” Otah said, trying to keep the unease out of his voice.
“We don’t. That doesn’t mean we never will. And take your time. There’s something I’m waiting for from the west. I won’t be sending you out for a month at least, so you can have some time to spend your money. Unless …”
The overseer’s eyes narrowed. His hands took a pose of query.
“I just dislike the cold,” Otah said, making a joke to cover his unease. “I grew up in Saraykeht. It seemed like water never froze there.”
“It’s a hard life,” Amiit said. “I can try to give the commissions to other men, if you’d prefer.”
And have them wonder why it was that I wouldn’t go, Otah thought. He took a pose of thanks that also implied rejection.
“I’ll take what there is,” he said. “And heavy wool robes besides.”
“It really isn’t so bad up there in summer,” Amiit said. “It’s the winters that break your stones.”
“Then by all means, send someone else in the winter.”
They exchanged a few final pleasantries, and Otah left the name of Kiyan’s wayhouse as the place to send for him, if he was needed. He spent the afternoon in a teahouse at the edge of the warehouse district, talking with old acquaintances and trading news. He kept an ear out for word from Machi, but there was nothing fresh. The eldest son had been poisoned, and his remaining brothers had gone to ground. No one knew where they were nor which had begun the traditional struggle. There were only a few murmurs of the near-forgotten sixth son, but every time he heard his old name, it was like hearing a distant, threatening noise.
He returned to the wayhouse as darkness began to thicken the treetops and the streets fell into twilight, brooding. It wasn’t safe, of course, to take a commission in Machi, but neither could he safely refuse one. Not without a reason. He knew when gossip and speculation had grown hot enough to melt like sugar and stick. There would be a dozen reports of Otah Machi from all over the cities, and likely beyond as well. If even a suggestion was made that he was not who he presented himself to be, he ran the risk of being exposed, dragged into the constant, empty, vicious drama of succession. He would sacrifice quite a lot to keep that from happening. Going north, doing his work, and returning was what he would have done, had he been the man he claimed to be. And so perhaps it was the wiser strategy.
And also he wondered what sort of man his father was. What sort of man his brother had been. Whether his mother had wept when she sent her boy away to the school where the excess sons of the high families became poets or fell forever from grace.
As he entered the courtyard, his dark reverie was interrupted by laughter and music from the main hall, and the scent of roast pork and baked yams mixed with the pine resin. When he stepped in, Old Mani slapped an earthenware bowl of wine into his hands and steered him to a bench by the fire. There were a good number of travelers—merchants from the great cities, farmers from the low towns, travelers each with a story and a past and a tale to tell, if only they were asked the right questions in the right ways.
It was later, the warm air busy with conversation, that Otah caught sight of Kiyan across the wide hall. She had on a working woman’s robes, her hair tied back, but the expression on her face and the angle of her body spoke of a deep contentment and satisfaction. She knew her place was here, and she was proud of it.
Otah found himself suddenly stilled by a longing for her unlike the simple lust that he was accustomed to. He imagined himself feeling the same satisfaction that he saw in her. The same sense of having a place in the world. She turned to him as if he had spoken and tilted her head—not an actual formal pose, but nonetheless a question.
He smiled in reply. This that she offered was, he suspected, a life worth living.
CEHMAI TYAN’S dreams, whenever the time came to renew his life’s struggle, took the same form. A normal dream—meaningless, strange, and trivial—would shift. Something small would happen that carried a weight of fear and dread out of all proportion. This time, he dreamt he was walking in a
street fair, trying to find a stall with food he liked, when a young girl appeared at his side. As he saw her, his sleeping mind had already started to rebel. She held out her hand, the palm painted the green of summer grass, and he woke himself trying to scream.
Gasping as if he had run a race, he rose, pulled on the simple brown robes of a poet, and walked to the main room of the house. The worked stone walls seemed to glow with the morning light. The chill spring air fought with the warmth from the low fire in the grate. The thick rugs felt softer than grass against Cehmai’s bare feet. And the andat was waiting at the game table, the pieces already in place before it—black basalt and white marble. The line of white was already marred, one stone disk shifted forward into the field. Cehmai sat and met his opponent’s pale eyes. There was a pressure in his mind that felt the way a windstorm sounded.
“Again?” the poet asked.
Stone-Made-Soft nodded its broad head. Cehmai Tyan considered the board, recalled the binding—the translation that had brought the thing across from him out of formlessness—and pushed a black stone into the empty field of the board. The game began again.
The binding of Stone-Made-Soft had not been Cehmai’s work. It had been done generations earlier, by the poet Manat Doru. The game of stones had figured deeply in the symbolism of the binding—the fluid lines of play and the solidity of the stone markers. The competition between a spirit seeking its freedom and the poet holding it in place. Cehmai ran his fingertip along his edge of the board where Manat Doru’s had once touched it. He considered the advancing line of white stones and crafted his answering line of black, touching stones that long-dead men had held when they had played the same game against the thing that sat across from him now. And with every victory, the binding was renewed, the andat held more firmly in the world. It was an excellent strategy, in part because the binding had also made Stone-Made-Soft a terrible player.
The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. Stone-Made-Soft glowered down on its failing line.