"I sit through days of ceremony and let myself be hectored over the
things I don't do the way other people prefer," Otah said. "I'm not sure
that anything I've done here has actually made any difference at all. If
they stuffed a robe with cotton and posed the sleeves ..."
"You care about them," Kiyan said.
"I don't," he said. "I care about you and Eiah and I)anat. And Maati. I
know that I'm supposed to care about everyone and everything in Machi,
but love, I'm only a man. "l'hey can tell me I gave tip my own name when
I took the chair, but really the Khai Machi is only what I do. I
wouldn't keep the work if I could find a way out."
Kiyan embraced him with one arm. Her hair was fragrant with lavender oil.
"You're sweet," she said.
"Am I? I'll try to confess my incompetence and selfishness more often."
"As long as it includes me," she said. "Now go let those poor men change
your clothes and get hack to beds of their own."
The servants had become accustomed to the Khai's preference for brief
ablutions. Otah knew that his own father had managed somehow to enjoy
the ceremony of being dressed and bathed by others. But his father had
been raised to take the chair, had followed the traditions and forms of
etiquette, and had never that Otah knew stepped outside the role he'd
been horn to. Otah himself had been turned out, and the years he had
spent being a simple, free man, reliant upon himself had ruined him for
the fawning of the court. He endured the daily frivolity of having foods
brought to him, his hands cleaned for him, his hair combed on his
behalf. He allowed the body servants to pull off his formal robes and
swathe him in a sleeping shift, and when he returned to his bed, Kiyan's
breath was already deep, slow, and heavy. He slipped in beside her,
pulling the blankets up over himself, and closed his eyes at last.
Sleep, however, did not come. His body ached, his eyes were tired, but
it seemed that the moment he laid his head back, Utah's mind woke. I Ic
listened to the sounds of the palace in night: the almost silent wind
through a distant window, the deep and subtle ticking of cooling stone,
the breath of the woman at his side. Beyond the doors to the apartments,
someone coughed-one of the servants set to watch over the Khai Machi in
case there was anything he should desire in the night. Utah tried not to
move.
He hadn't asked Kiyan about Danat's health. He'd meant to. But surely if
there had been anything concerning, she would have brought it up to him.
And regardless, he could ask her in the morning. Perhaps he would cancel
the audiences before midday and go speak with Danat's physicians. And
speak to Eiah. He hadn't said he would do that, but Kiyan had asked, and
it wasn't as if being present in his own daughter's life should he an
imposition. He wondered what it would have been to have a dozen wives,
whether he would have felt the need to attend to all of their children
as he did to the two he had now, how he would have stood watching his
boys grow tip when he knew he would have to send them away or else watch
them slaughter one another over which of them would take his own place
here on this soft, sleepless bed and fear in turn for his own sons.
The night candle ate through its marks as he listened to the internal
voice nattering in his mind, gnawing at half a thousand worries both
justified and inane. The trade agreements with tJdun weren't in place
yet. Perhaps something really was the matter with Eiah. He didn't know
how long stone buildings stood; nothing stands forever, so it only made
sense that someday the palaces would fall. And the towers. The towers
reached so high it seemed that low clouds would touch them; what would
he do if they fell? But the night was passing and he had to sleep. If he
didn't the morning would be worse. He should talk with Maati, find out
how things had gone between him and the Dai-kvo's envoy. Perhaps a dinner.
And on, and on, and on. When he gave tip, slipping from the bed softly
to let Kiyan, at least, sleep, the night candle was past its
threequarter mark. Utah walked to the apartment's main doors on bare,
chilled feet and found his keeper in the hall outside dozing. He was a
young man, likely the son of some favored servant or slave of Utah's own
father, given the honor of sitting alone in the darkness, bored and
cold. Utah considered the boy's soft face, as peaceful in sleep as a
corpse's, and walked silently past him and into the dim hallways of the
palace.
His night walks had been growing more frequent in recent months.
Sometimes twice in a week, Utah found himself wandering in the darkness,
sleep a stranger to him. He avoided the places where he might encounter
another person, jealously keeping the time to himself. 'lbnight, he took
a lantern and walked down the long stairways to the ground, and then on
down, to the tunnels and underground streets into which the city
retreated in the deep, hone-breaking cold of winter. With spring come,
Utah found the palace beneath the palace empty and silent. The smell of
old torches, long gone dark, still lingered in the air, and Utah
imagined the corridors and galleries of the city descending forever into
the earth. Dark archways and domed sleeping chambers cut from stone that
had never seen daylight, narrow stairways leading endlessly down like a
thing from a children's song.
He didn't consider where he intended to go until he reached his father's
crypt and found himself unsurprised to be there. The dark stone seemed
to wrap itself in shadows, words of ancient language cut deep into the
walls. An ornate pedestal held the pale urn, a dead flower. And beneath
it, three small boxes-the remains of Biitrah, Danat, Kaiin. Otah's
brothers, dead in the struggle to become the new Khai Nlachi. Lives cut
short for the honor of having a pedestal of their own someday, deep in
the darkness.
Utah sat on the bare floor, the lantern at his side, and contemplated
the man he'd never known or loved whose place he had taken. Here was how
his own end would look. An urn, a tomb, high honors and reverence for
hones and ashes. And between the chill floor and the pale urn, perhaps
another thirty summers. Perhaps forty. Years of ceremony and
negotiation, late nights and early mornings and little else.
But when the time came, at least his crypt would be only his own. Danat,
brotherless, wouldn't be called upon to kill or die in the succession.
't'here would be no second sons left to kill the other for the black
chair. It seemed a thin solace, having given so much of himself to
achieve something that a merchant's son could have had for free.
It would have been easier if he'd never been anything but this. A man
horn into the Khaiem who had never stepped outside wouldn't carry the
memories of fishing in the eastern islands, of eating at the wayhouses
outside Yalakeht, of being free. If he could have forgotten it all,