rails, turned away from the Galts and the negotiated future forming
behind them. Eiah had known. Otah felt he had still only half-grasped
it. Fatter Dasin, he thought, might see it more clearly.
"It appears to be going quite well, wouldn't you say, Most High?"
Balasar Gice stood beside the dais, his hands in a pose of greeting. The
cool night air or else the wine had touched his cheeks with red.
"Does it? I hope so," Otah said, smoothing away his darker thoughts. "I
think there are more trade agreements than wars brewing tonight. It's
hard to know"
"There's hope," Balasar said. And then, his voice growing reflective,
"There's hope, and that's actually quite new. I hadn't realized it had
become quite such a rare thing, these last few years."
"How nice," Otah said more sharply than he'd intended. Balasar looked at
him more closely, and Otah waved the concern away. "I'm old and tired.
And I've eaten more Galtic food than I could have wanted in a lifetime.
It's astounding you people ever got up from your tables."
"You aren't expected to finish every dish," Balasar said. "Ah, I think
the entertainment has begun."
Otah looked up. Servants and sailors were silently moving across the
deck like a wind over the water. The glow of candles lessened and the
scent of spent wicks filled the air as a stage appeared as if conjured
across the deck from Otah's dais. The singers that had hung from the
rigging had apparently made their way down, because they rose now,
taking their places. Servants placed three more chairs on the dais at
Otah's side, and Councilman Dasin and his family took their seats.
Fatter smelled prodigiously of distilled wine and sat the farthest from
him, his wife close at his side, leaving Ana nearest to Otah.
The singers bowed their heads for a moment, then the low sounds of their
voices began to swell. Otah closed his eyes. It was a song he knewa
court dance from the Second Empire. The harmonies were perfect and rich,
sorrowful and joyous. This, he understood, was a gift. Galtic voices
raised in a song of an empire that was not their own. He let himself be
carried by it, and when the voices fell again, the last throbbing notes
fading to silence, he was among the first to applaud. Otah was surprised
to find tears in his eyes.
Ana Dasin, at his side, was also weeping. When he met her eyes, she
looked down, said something he couldn't hear, and walked briskly away.
He watched her descend the stairs below decks as the singers began
another, more boisterous song. Otah's gaze flickered to Issandra. In the
dim light, the subtle signs of age were softened. He saw for a moment
who she had been as a younger woman. She met his eyes with a profound
weariness. Fatter had his hand on her arm, holding her gently to him,
though the man's face remained turned away. Otah wondered, not for the
first time, what brokering this agreement had cost Issandra Dasin.
He glanced at the stairs down which her daughter had vanished, and then
back, his hands shifting into a pose that made an implicit offer.
Issandra raised an eyebrow, a half-smile making a dimple in one cheek.
Otah tugged at his robes, straightening the lines, and stepped carefully
down from the dais. The girl Ana would be his daughter too, soon enough.
If her true mother and father weren't placed to speak with her in her
distress, perhaps it was time that Otah did.
Below decks, the Galtic ship was as cramped and close and ripe with the
scent of tightly quartered humanity as any ship Otah had sailed with.
Under normal circumstances, the deck now peopled with the guests of the
Dasin family would have given room to a full watch of sailors. Instead,
most were lurking in the tiny rooms, waiting for the songs to end and
their own turn with fresh air to come. Still, Otah, Emperor of the
Khaiem, found a way cleared for him, conversations stopping when he came
in view. He made his way forward, squinting into the darkness for a
glimpse of the rabbit-faced girl.
Galtic design divided the cargo hold in sections, and it was in one of
these dark chambers that he heard the girl's voice. Crates and boxes
loomed above him to either side, the binding ropes creaking gently with
the rolling ship. Rats chattered and complained. And there, hunched over
as if she were protecting something pressed to her belly, sat Ana Dasin.
"Excuse me," Otah said. "I don't mean to intrude, but ... may I sit?"
Ana looked up at him. Her dark eyes shone in the dim light. Her nod was
so faint it might almost have been the movement of the ship. Otah
stepped carefully over the rough board, hitched his robes up to his
shins, and sat at the girl's side. They were silent. Above them, the
singers struck a complex rhythm, like jugglers tossing pins between
them. Otah sighed.
"I know this isn't easy for you," he said.
"What isn't, Most High?"
"Otah. Please, my name is Otah. You can call me that. I mean all of
this. Being uprooted, married off to a man you've never met in a city
you've never been to."
"It's what's expected of me," she said.
"Yes, I know, but ... it isn't really fair."
"No," she said, her voice suddenly hard. "It isn't."
Otah clasped his hands, fingers laced together.
"He isn't a bad man, my son," Otah said. "He's clever and he's strong,
and he cares about people. He feels deeply. He's probably a better man
than I was at his age."
"Forgive me, Most High," Ana Dasin said. "I don't know what you want me
to say."
"Nothing. Nothing in particular. Only know that this life that we've
forced on you ... it might have some redeeming qualities. The gods all
know the life I've had wasn't the one I expected, either. We do what we
have to do. In my ways, I'm as constrained by it as you are."
She looked at him as if he were speaking a language she hadn't heard
before. Otah shook his head.
"It's nothing, Ana-cha," he said. "Only know that I know how hard this
time is, and it will get better. If you allow room for it, this new life
might even surprise you."
The girl was quiet for a moment, her brow furrowed. She shook her head.
"Thank you?" she said.
Otah chuckled ruefully.
"I'm not doing a particularly good job of this, am I?" he said.
"I don't know," Ana Dasin said after a pause. Her tone carried the
shielded contempt of an adolescent for her elders. "I don't know what
you're doing."
Making his way back through the crowded belly of the ship, Otah wondered
what he had thought he would say to a Galtic girl who had seen
forty-five fewer summers than himself. He had expected to offer some
kind of wisdom, some variety of comfort, and instead it had been like
trying to hold a conversation with a cat. Who would have thought a man
could be as old as he was, wield the power of empire, and still be so