So he trudged back inside, called for a pot of tea and watched — rare sight — the play of flames in the fireplace for the better part of an hour while servants hurried about their business and security crawled about in places atevi didn't fit, installing security devices, some of which might be lethaclass="underline" he didn't ask.
Banichi came back with traces of dust and gravel on his knees and said he'd appreciate a pot of tea himself. Which meant, he was sure, Banichi had overtaxed his recent injury and was feeling it.
"Game of darts?" Banichi said when he'd had a chance to catch his breath and sip half a cup of tea. It was one human game atevi had taken to with a passion approaching that for television. He suspected he was going to lose.
Worse, as happened. Banichi offered him a handicap. He refused to take it. Banichi shrugged and still backed up a couple of meters —"Longer arm," Banichi said. "Let's be fair."
It was a slaughter, all the same. Four rounds of it.
"I don't think you canmiss," Bren said.
Banichi laughed, and put one in the margin. "There. What do you say? No one's perfect?"
Bren made his best try to put one dead center. Which got him a finger's breadth out. "Well," he said, "some of us miss better than others."
Banichi thought that was funny, and sat down and stretched his legs out on a footstool.
"Sit down," Banichi said. "Enjoy the rest."
He did. He sat down, and without clearly realizing how tired he was, nodded off in the chair. And finally gave way to sleep altogether, a comfortable nap, with Banichi close by him.
"He's quite tired," Banichi said to someone quietly. "Keep the noise down."
People were walking nearby, a lot of people, and the paidhi finally had to pay attention to it. He heard Banichi talking to someone, and rubbed the soreness in his neck, blinked the room into focus and realized by the preparations and the conversations that Tabini was coming in, and with him, he was sure, Tano and Algini. Commotion preceded the aiji like a storm front: running through the sitting room and the kitchens, armed security headed through back halls of Taiben where the discreetly camouflaged rail station had its outlet on the side of the building, a station blasted out of the living stone of the hillside. Tano and Algini in fact came in, carrying their own baggage and a couple of heavy canvas cases that looked to hold electronics.
And if the place had felt homelike in his arrival, it felt far other than that now, with weapons in plain sight, Tabini's personal security with armored vests and heavy rifles — Tano and Algini in similar dress and no longer occupied with the ordinary business of clericals and offices: that was surveillance or communications equipment, he was certain.
If Saidin had — and he was sure that she had — put an Atigeini Guild member in the staff — it wasn't such an obvious presence; it was one of the quietly efficient women in soft, expensive fabrics and soundless soles, who whispered when they spoke among themselves and who had such a hair's breadth sensitivity to a design out of adjustment.
Damiri's. Or even Tatiseigi's.
While Damiri was, he recalled with a jolt, still in the Bu-javid — wasn't she?
In the Bu-javid, where herlife might not be secure if an Atigeini moved against Tabini at Taiben. Atevi didn't take hostages, as such. But you damned well knew when you were in reach, and Damiri was — evidently voluntarily — staying in reach.
So very much went on tacit and unspoken — and the paidhiin one and all had had so little idea until he'd had the crash course at Malguri, and finally, rammed through a stupid human head on the plane, the implications he'd missed by not knowing well enough where the associa-tional lines lay, the sub-associations the paidhiin had always known were there, the potency of which the paidhiin had completely underestimated.
The paidhiin had learned to appreciate atevi television, and machimi plays, in which, so often as to be cliche, the stinger in the situation was atevi not knowing an ally had a more complicated hierarchy of man'chithan even the lord had thought he had. Or the lord, who theoretically lacked man 'chiby reason of being a lord, turning out to have man'chito someone no one accounted for.
God, it was right out there in front of the paidhi; it had been right there in front of the State Department and the FO and the university, if anybody had known remotely how to trace it: the university kept meticulous records of genealogies, the provable indications of man'chi— and he knew who was related to whom, more or less. But that didn't say a thing about what Banichi had talked about, the man 'chiof where mates came from — or why.
Or the man'chiof servants; or the man'chione atevi awarded another — Cenedi had found it necessary to tell him, perhaps as a point of honor he'd pay any deserving person, perhaps just a warning for the dim-witted human, that he couldn't regard any debt of life and limb ahead of his man'chito Ilisidi. Cenedi hadn't needed to say that: he'd understood when he'd put Cenedi in a position humans would call debt that Cenedi would owe him no favors.
Banichi had protested vehemently his announcement he'd attached man'chito him and Jago. He didn't know why they should object — unless —
— of course. He felt his face go hot. Banichi had said, with some bewilderment and force — you're not physically attracted to me, and then added that about Jago. Man'chiwas hierarchical. Except the exception Banichi had hinted at. He'd declared man'chieither reversing the order of hierarchy, the paidhi toward his security —
— or he'd said something exceptionally embarrassing to Banichi, who couldn't even, in what Banichi might know about the incident between him and Jago, entirely swear that that wasn't exactly what a crazy human wasfeeling at the moment —
And the university didn't, couldn't, without more shrewd observations from the paidhiin than they'd ever gotten, trace the hidden lines of obligation, the not-so-obvious lines that evidently came down through generations that couldbe inherited, but that weren't, universally; or that could be acquired through physical or psychological attraction; or that could be forged behind closed doors by alliance of two leaders way up in the ranks of the nobility, and bind or not bind their kinsmen, their followers, their political adherents, according to rules he stilldidn't understand and atevi didn't acknowledge, at least out loud, maybe even in the privacy of their own self-realizations. There might be atevi who really, just like humans, didn't wholly understand the psychological entanglements they'd landed in. For a human, he thought, he was doing remarkably well at figuring out the entanglements of man'chiafter the fact; he'd yet to get ahead of atevi maneuvering — and he'd no assurance even now he was looking in the right direction. He'd asked Jago once where her man'chilay — and Jago'd taken at least nominal offense and told him in so many words to mind his own business: it wasn't something polite people ever asked each other. Banichi likewise.
He wondered if even the recipients of such man 'chialways knew what was due them, or if that was, among the other logical and perhaps embarrassing causes, also why Banicbi had turned his declaration away with, Not to as, nand' paidhi — in, for Banichi, quite an expression of dismay.
Servants made a last frantic pass about the sitting room, whisking the suspicion of dust off the fireplace stones, tidying the position of a vase so the largest flowers were foremost.