‘No,’ Liat said. ‘I blame myself for it. If I had done better, if I hadn’t embarrassed the house . . .’
‘You did what Wilsin-cha asked you to do. If the trade had been what it seemed, they’d be calling your praises for it.’
‘Perhaps,’ Liat said. ‘It hardly matters. She’s gone. Wilsin-cha doesn’t have any faith in me. I’m an apprentice without a master.’
‘Well. We’re both that, at least.’
She coughed out a single laugh.
‘I suppose we are,’ she said, and scooped up his hand, holding it in her own. Maati’s heart raced, and something like panic made his mouth taste like copper. Something like panic, only glorious. He didn’t move, didn’t do anything that might make Liat untwine her fingers from his.
‘Where do you think he is?’ Maati asked, calling up the spirit of their friend - his master, her heartmate - to show that he understood that this moment, her hand in his, wasn’t something inappropriate. It was only friendship.
‘He’ll have reached Yalakeht. He might even be there by now,’ Liat said. ‘Or at least close, if he’s not.’
‘He’ll be back soon, then.’
‘Not for weeks,’ Liat said.
‘It’s a long time.’
‘Heshai-kvo. He’s not better?’
‘He’s not better. He’s not worse. He sleeps too much. He eats too little. His beard . . .’
‘It’s not improving?’
‘Longer. Not better. He really ought to shave it off.’
Liat shrugged, and Maati felt as if the motion shifted her nearer. So this was friendship with a woman, he told himself. It was pleasant, he told himself, this simple intimacy.
‘He seemed better when I came to see him,’ Liat said.
‘He makes an effort I think, when you’re there. I don’t know why.’
‘Because I’m a girl.’
‘Perhaps that, yes,’ Maati said.
Liat, releasing his hand, stretched and stood. Maati sighed, feeling that a moment had passed - some invisible, exquisite moment in his life. He had heard old epics telling of moments in a man’s youth that never truly left the heart - that stayed fresh and sweet and present through all the years and waited on the deathbed to carry him safely into his last sleep. Maati thought that those moments must be like this one. The scent of the sea, the perfect sky, the leaves, the roar of waves, and his hand, cooling where she had touched him.
‘I should come by more often, then,’ Liat said. ‘If it helps.’
‘I wouldn’t want to impose,’ he said, rising to stand beside her. ‘But if you have the time.’
‘I don’t foresee being given any new projects of note. Besides, I like the poet’s house. It’s a beautiful place.’
‘It’s better when you’re there,’ Maati said.
Liat grinned. Maati took a pose of self-congratulation to which Liat replied with one of query.
‘I’ve made you feel better,’ he said.
Liat weighed it, looking out to the horizon with her eyes narrowed. She nodded, as if he’d pointed out a street she’d never seen, or a pattern in the ways a tree branched. Her smile, when it came again, was softer.
‘I suppose you have,’ she said. ‘I mean, everything’s still a terrible mess.’
‘I’ll try fixing the world later. After dinner. Do you want to go back?’
‘I suppose I’d best. There’s no call to earn a reputation of being unreliable, incompetent, and sulky.’
They walked back to the city. It had seemed a longer path when he’d been on it alone, worried for Liat. Now, though they were hardly moving faster than a stroll, the walls of the city seemed to surround them almost immediately. They walked up the street of beads, paused at a stand where a boy of no more then eight summers was selling, with a ferocious seriousness, cakes smothered in fine-powdered sugar, and listened to an old beggar singing in a rough, melodious voice that spoke of long sorrow and moved Maati almost to tears. And still, they reached the crossroads that would lead her to the compound of House Wilsin and him to the oppressive, slow desperation of the poet’s house before the sun had reached the top of its arc.
‘So,’ Liat said, taking a pose that asked permission, but so casually that it assumed it granted, ‘shall I come to the poet’s house once I’m done here?’
Maati made a show of consideration then took a pose extending invitation. She accepted, but didn’t turn away. Maati felt himself frown, and she took a pose of query that he wasn’t entirely sure how to answer.
‘Liat-cha,’ he began.
‘Cha?’
He raised his hands, palms out. Not a real pose, but expressive nonetheless. Let me go on.
‘Liat-cha, I know it’s only because things went so wrong that Otah-kvo had to leave. And I wouldn’t ever have chosen what happened with Seedless. But coming to know you better has been very important to me, and I wanted you to know how much I appreciate your being my friend.’
Liat considered him, her expression unreadable but not at all upset.
‘Did you rehearse that?’ she asked.
‘No. I didn’t really know what I was going to say until I’d already said it.’
She smiled briefly, and then her gaze clouded, as if he’d touched some private pain. He felt his heart sink. Liat met his eyes and she smiled.
‘There’s something I think you should see, Maati-kya. Come with me.’
He followed her to her cell in silence. With each step, Maati felt his anxiety grow. The people they passed in the courtyard and walkway nodded to them both, but seemed unsurprised, undisturbed. Maati tried to seem to be there on business. When Liat closed the door of her cell, he took a pose of apology.
‘Liat-cha,’ he said. ‘If I’ve done anything that would . . .’
She batted his hands, and he released the pose. To his surprise, he found she had moved forward, moved against him. He found that her lips had gently pressed his. He found that the air had all gone from the room. She pulled back from the kiss. Her expression was soft and sorrowful and gentle. Her fingers touched his hair.
‘Go. I’ll come to the poet’s house tonight.’
‘Yes,’ was all he could think to say.
He stopped in the gardens of the low palaces, sat on the grass, and pressed his fingertips to his mouth, as if making sure his lips were still there; that they were real. The world seemed suddenly uprooted, dreamlike. She had kissed him - truly kissed him. She had touched his hair. It was impossible. It was terrible. It was like walking along a familiar path and suddenly falling off a cliff.
And it was also like flying.
14
The raft was big enough to carry eight people. It was pulled against the current by a team of four oxen, moving slowly but implacably along paths worn in the shore by generations of such passage. Otah slept in the back, wrapped in his cloak and in the rough wool blankets the boatman and his daughter provided. In the mornings, the daughter - a child of no more then nine summers - lit a brazier and cooked sweet rice with almond milk and cinnamon. At night, after they tied up, her father made a meal - most often a chicken and barley soup.
In the days spent in this routine, Otah had little to do besides watch the slow progress of trees moving past them, listen to the voices of the water and the oxen, and try to win over the daughter by telling jokes and singing with her or the boatman by asking him about life on the river and listening to his answers. By the time they reached the end of the last full day’s journey, both boatman and child were comfortable with him. The boatman shared a bowl of plum wine with him after the other passengers had gone to sleep. They never mentioned the girl’s mother, and Otah never asked.
The river journey ended at a low town larger than any Otah had seen since Yalakeht. It had wide, paved streets and houses as high as three stories that looked out across the river or into the branches of the pine forest that surrounded it. The wealth of the place was clear in its food, its buildings, the faces of its people. It was as if some n
ameless quarter of the cities of the Khaiem had been struck off and moved here, into the wilderness.
That the road to the Dai-kvo’s village was well kept and broad didn’t surprise him, but the discovery that - for a price higher than he wished to pay - he could hire a litter that would carry him the full day’s steep, uphill journey and set him down at the door of the Daikvo’s palaces did. He passed men in fine robes of wool and fur, envoys from the courts of the Khaiem or trading houses or other places, further away. Food stands at the roadside offered sumptuous fare at high prices for the great men who passed by or wheat gruel and chicken for the lower orders like himself.
Despite the wealth and luxury of the road, the first sight of the Daikvo’s village took Otah’s breath away. Carved into the stone of the mountain, the village was something half belonging to the world of men, half to the ocean and the sun and the great forces of the world. He stopped in the road and looked up at the glittering windows and streets, stairways and garrets and towers. A thin golden ribbon of a waterfall lay just within the structures, and warm light of the coming sunset made the stone around it glow like bronze. Chimes light as birdsong and deep as bells rang when the breeze stirred them. If the view had been designed to humble those who came to it, the designer could rest well. Maati, he realized, had lived in this place, studied in it. And he, Otah, had refused it. He wondered what it would have been like, coming down this road as a boy coming to his reward; what it would have been like to see this grandeur set out before him as if it were his right.
The path to the grand offices was easily found, and well peopled. Firekeepers - not members of the utkhaiem, but servants only of the Dai-kvo - kept kilns at the crossroads and teahouses and offered the promise of warmth and comfort in the falling night. Otah didn’t pause at them.
He reached the grand offices: a high, arched hall open to the west so that the lowering sun set the white stone walls ablaze. Men - only men, Otah noted - paced through the hall on one errand or another, passing from one corridor to another, through doors of worked rosewood and oak. Otah had to stop a servant who was lighting lanterns to find the way to the Dai-kvo’s overseer.
He was an old man with a kind face in the brown robes of a poet. When Otah approached his table, the overseer took a pose that was both welcome and query with a flowing grace that he had seen only in the Khai Saraykeht or the andat. Otah replied with a pose of greeting, and for an instant, he was a boy again in the cold, empty hallways of the school.
‘I’ve come with a letter for the Dai-kvo,’ he said, pushing the memory aside. ‘From Maati Vaupathi in Saraykeht.’
‘Ah?’ the overseer said. ‘Excellent. I will see that he gets it immediately.’
The beautiful, old hand reached to him, open to accept the packet still in Otah’s sleeve. Otah considered the withered fingers like carved wood, a sudden alarm growing in him.
‘I had hoped to see the Dai-kvo myself,’ he said, and the overseer’s expression changed to one of sympathy.
‘The Dai-kvo is very busy, my friend. He hardly has time to speak to me, and I’m set to schedule his days. Give the letter to me, and I will see that he knows of it.’
Otah pulled the letter out and handed it over, a profound disappointment blooming in his breast. It was obvious, of course, that the Dai-kvo wouldn’t meet with simple couriers, however sensitive the letters they bore. He shouldn’t have expected him to. Otah took a pose of gratitude.
‘Will you be staying to carry a reply?’
‘Yes,’ Otah said. ‘If there is one.’
‘I will send word tomorrow whether the most high intends to respond. Where will I find you?’
Otah took a pose of apology and explained that he had not taken rooms and didn’t know the village. The overseer gave him a recommendation, directions, and the patience Otah imagined a grandfather might have for a well-loved but rather slow grandchild. It was twilight - the distant skyline glorious with the gold and purple of the just-set sun - when Otah returned to the street, his errand complete.
On the way back down, there was time to see the village more closely, though the light around him was fading. It struck him for the first time that he had seen no women since he had left the road. The firekeepers’ kilns, the food carts and stalls, the inn to which he’d been directed - all were overseen by men. None of the people passing him in the steep, dim street had a woman’s face.
And as he looked more closely, he found other signs, subtler ones, that the life of the Dai-kvo’s village was unlike that of the ones he had known. The streets had none of the grime and dust of Saraykeht - no small plants or grasses pushed at the joints of the paving stones, no moss stained the corners of the walls. Even more than its singularity of gender, the unnatural perfection of the place made it seem foreign and unsettling and sterile.
He ate his dinner - venison and wine and fresh black bread - sitting alone at a low table with his back to the fire. A dark mood had descended on him. Visions of Liat and some small house, some simple work, bread cooked in his own kiln, meat roasted in his own kitchens seemed both ludicrous and powerful. He had done what he said he’d set out for. The letter was in the Dai-kvo’s hands, or would be shortly.
But he had come for his own reasons too. He was Otah, the sixth son of the Khai Machi, who had walked away from the greatest power in all the nations. He had been offered the chance to control the andat and refused. For the first time, here in this false village, he imagined what that must be to his brothers, his teachers, the boys who had taken the offer gladly when it had been given. To men like Maati.
And so who was this Itani Noyga, this simple laborer with simple dreams? He had come halfway across the lands of the Khaiem, he realized, to answer that question, and instead he had handed an old man a packet of papers. He remembered, setting out from Saraykeht, that it had seemed an important adventure, not only to Heshai and Seedless, the Khai Machi and Saraykeht, but to himself personally. Now, he wasn’t sure why he’d thought delivering a letter would mean more than delivering a letter.
He was given a small room, hardly large enough for the stretched-canvas cot and the candle on the table beside it. The blankets were warm and thick and soft. The mattress was clean and free of lice or fleas. The room smelled of cut cedar, and not rat piss or unbathed humanity. Small as it was, it was also perfect.
The candle was snuffed, and Otah more than half asleep when his door opened. A small man, bald as an egg, stepped in, a lantern held high. His round face was marked by two bushy eyebrows - black shot with white. Otah met his gaze, at first bleary, and then an instant later awake and alert. He took the pose of greeting he’d learned as a boy; he smiled sweetly and without sincerity.
‘I am honored by your presence, most high Dai-kvo.’
Tahi-kvo scowled and moved closer. He held the lantern close to Otah’s face until the brightness of the flame made his old teacher shadowy. Otah didn’t look away.
‘It is you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Show me your hands,’ his old teacher said. Otah complied, and the lantern shifted, Tahi-kvo leaning close, examining the callused palms. He bent so close, Otah could feel the breath on his fingertips. The old man’s eyes were going.
‘It’s true then,’ Tahi-kvo said. ‘You’re a laborer.’
Otah closed his hands. The words were no surprise, but the sting of them was. He would have thought he was beyond caring what opinion Tahi-kvo held. He smiled his charming smile like a mask and kept his voice mild and amused.
‘I’ve picked my own path,’ he said.
‘It was a poor choice.’
‘It was mine to make.’
The old man - Tahi-kvo, the Dai-kvo, the most powerful man in the world - stood, shaking his head in disgust. His robes whispered as he moved - silk upon silk. He tilted his head like a malefic bird.
‘I have consultations to make concerning the message you brought. It may take some days before I draft my reply.’
Otah waited for the stab of
words or the remembered whir of the lacquer rod, but Tahi only stood waiting. At length Otah took a pose of acceptance.
‘I will wait for it,’ he said.
For a moment, something glittered in Tahi-kvo’s eyes that might have been sorrow or impatience, and then without farewell, he was gone, the door closed behind him, and Otah lay back in his bed. The darkness was silent, except for the slowly retreating footsteps. They were long vanished before Otah’s heart and breath slowed, before the heat in his blood cooled.
The days that followed were among the most difficult of Amat Kyaan’s life. The comfort house was in disarray, and her coup only added to the chaos. Each individual person - whores, guards, the men at the tables, the men who sold wine, all of them - was testing her. Three times, fights had broken out. It seemed once a day that she was called on to stop some small liberty, and always with the plaintive explanation that Ovi Niit had allowed it. To hear it told now, he had been the most selfless and open-handed of men. Death had improved him. It was to be expected.