Otah felt himself begin to weep slightly. He wished deeply that Kiyan
had lived to see this night. He hoped that whatever gods were more than
stories and metaphors took word of it to her. The old Galt bowed his
head to the crowd. The applause was like an earthquake or a flood. Otah
rose and held his hand out to Danat as Fatter Dasin did the same with
his daughter. The Emperor-to-be and his Empress meeting here for the
first time. There would be songs sung of this night, Otah knew.
Ana was beautiful. Someone had seen to it that the gown she wore
flattered her. Her face was painted in perfect harmony with her hair and
the gold of her necklace. Danat wore a black robe embroidered with gold
and cut to please the Galtic eye. Farrer and Otah stepped back, leaving
their children to the center of the dais. Danat tried a smile. The
girl's eyes fluttered; her cheeks were flushed under the paint, her
breath fast.
"Danat Machi?" she said.
"Ana Dasin," he replied.
The girl took a deep breath. Her pretty, rodentlike face shone. When she
spoke, her voice was strong and certain.
"I will never consent to lay down with you, and if you rape me, I will
see the world knows it. My lover is Hanchat Dor, and I will have no other."
Otah felt his face go white. In the corner of his eye, he saw Farrer
Dasin rock back like a man struck by a stone and then raise a hand to
his face. Danat's mouth opened and closed like a fish's. The whisperers
paused, and then a heartbeat later, the words went out where they could
never be called back. The voice of the crowd rose up like the waters of
chaos come to drown them all.
6
Maati relived his conversation with Cehmai a thousand times in the weeks
that followed. He rose in the morning from whatever rough camp or
wayhouse bed he'd fallen into the night before, and he muttered his
arguments to Cehmai. He rode his weary mule along overgrown tracks thick
with heat and heavy with humidity, and he spoke aloud, gesturing. He ate
his evening meals with the late sunset of summer, and in his mind,
Cehmai sat across from him, dumbfounded and ashamed, persuaded at last
by the force of Maati's argument. And when Maati's imagination returned
him to the world as it was, his failure and shame poured in on him afresh.
Every low town he passed through, the mud streets empty of the sound of
children, was a rebuke. Every woman he met, an accusation. He had
failed. He had gone to the one man in the world who might have lightened
his burden, and he had been refused. The better part of the season was
lost to him now. It was time he should have spent with the girls,
preparing the grammar and writing his book. They were days he would
never win back. If he had stayed, perhaps they would have had a
breakthrough. Perhaps there would already be an andat in the world, and
Otah's plans ruined.
And what if by going after Cehmai, Maati had somehow lost that chance?
With every day, it seemed more likely. As the trees and deer of the
river valleys gave way to the high, dry plains between Pathai and ruined
Nantani, Maati became more and more sure that his error had been
catastrophic. Irretrievable. And so it was also another mark against
Otah Machi. Otah, the Emperor, to whom no rules applied.
Maati found the high road, and then the turning that would lead, given
half a day's ride, to the school. To his students. To Eiah. He camped at
the crossroads.
He was too old to be living on muleback. Lying in the thin folds of his
bedroll, he ached as if he'd been beaten. His back had been suffering
spasms for days; they had grown painful enough that he hadn't slept
deeply. And his exhaustion seemed to make his muscles worse. The high
plains grew cool at night, almost cold, and the air smelled of dust. He
heard the skittering of lizards or mice and the low call of owls. The
stars shone down on him, each point of light smeared by his aging eyes
until the whole sky seemed possessed by a single luminous cloud.
There had been a time he'd lain under stars and picked out
constellations. There was a time his body could have taken rest on
cobblestone, had the need arisen. There was a time Cehmai, poet of Machi
and master of Stone-Made-Soft, had looked up to him.
It was going to be hard to tell Eiah that he'd failed. The others as
well, but Eiah knew Cehmai. She had seen them work together. The others
might be disappointed, but Eiah alone would understand what he had lost.
His dread slowed him. At this, his last camp, he ate his breakfast and
watched the slow sunrise. He packed his mule slowly, then walked
westward, his shadow stretching out ahead and growing slowly smaller.
The shapes of the hills grew familiar, and the pauses he took grew
longer. Here was the dry streambed where he and the other black-robed
boys had sat in the evenings and told one another stories of the
families they had already half-forgotten. There, a grouping of stumps
showed where the stand of trees they had climbed had been felled by
Galtic axes and burned. A cave under an outcropping of rock where they'd
made the younger boys slither into the darkness to hunt snakes. The air
was as rich with memory as the scent of dust and wildflowers. His life
had been simpler then, or if not simpler, at least a thing that held
promise.
He managed to postpone his arrival at the school itself until the sun
was lowering before him. The grand stone buildings looked smaller than
he remembered them, but the great bronze door that had once been
reserved for the Dai-kvo was just as grand. The high, narrow windows
were marked black at the tops, the remnants of some long-dead fire. The
wall of one of the sleeping chambers had fallen, stones strewn on the
ground. The gardens were gone, marked only by low mounds where stones
had once formed their borders. Time and violence had changed the place,
but not yet beyond recognition. Another decade of rain washing mortar
from between the stones, another fire, and perhaps the roofs would
collapse. The ground would reclaim its own.
Maati tied his mule to a low, half-rotten post and made his way in. The
grand room where he and the other boys had stood in rows each morning
before marching off to their duties and classes. The wide corri dors
beyond it, lit only by the reddish rays of the evening sun. Where were
the bodies of the boys who had been here on the day the armies of Galt
arrived? Where had those bones been buried? And where, now, were Maati's
own students? Had something gone awry?
When he reached the inner courtyard, his concerns eased. The flagstone
paths were clear of dirt and dust, the weeds and grass had been pulled
from between the stones. And there, in the third window that had once
been the teachers' quarters, a lantern glowed already against the
falling night.
The door that opened to the wide central hall had been fitted with a new
leather hinge. The walls and floors, freshly washed, shone in the light