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 Mach] 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 familes 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 hoard. 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 StoneMade-Soft a terrible player.
The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. StoneMade-Soft
glowered down on its failing line.
"You're going to lose," Cehmai said.
"I know," the andat replied. Its voice was a deep rumble, like a distant
rockslide-another evocation of flowing stone. "Being doomed doesn't take
away from the dignity of the effort, though."
"Well said."
The andat shrugged and smiled. "One can afford to be philosophical when
losing means outliving one's opponent. This particular game? You picked
it. But there are others we play that I'm not quite so crippled at."
"I didn't pick this game. I haven't seen twenty summers, and you've seen
more than two hundred. I wasn't even a dirty thought in my grandfather's
head when you started playing this."
The andat's thick hands took a formal position of disagreement.
"We have always been playing the same game, you and I. If you were
someone else at the start, it's your problem."
They never started speaking until the game's end was a forgone
conclusion. That Stone-Made-Soft was willing to speak was as much a sign
that this particular battle was drawing to its end as the silence in
Cehmai's mind. But the last piece had not yet been pushed when a
pounding came on the door.
"I know you're in there! Wake up!"
Cehmai sighed at the familiar voice and rose. The andat brooded over the
board, searching, the poet knew, for some way to win a lost game. He
clapped a hand on the andat's shoulder as he passed by it toward the door.
"I won't have it," the stout, red-checked man said when the opened door
revealed him. He wore brilliant blue robes shot with rich yellow and a
copper tore of office. Not for the first time, Cehmai thought Baarath
would have been better placed in life as the overseer of a merchant
house or farm than within the utkhaiem. "You poets think that because
you have the andat, you have everything. Well, I've come to tell you it