of a hundred candles. The scent of curry and the sound of women's voices
raised in conversation came through the air as if the one were part of
the other. Maati found himself disoriented for a moment, as if he'd
walked down a familiar street only to find it opening upon some unknown
city. He walked forward slowly, drawn in by the voices as if they were
music. There was Ashti Beg's dry voice, Large Kae's laughter. As he drew
nearer, the pauses between the louder voices were filled with the softer
voices of Vanjit and Irit. The first words he made out were Eiah's.
"Yes," she said, "but how would you fit that into a grammatic structure
that doesn't already include it? Or am I talking in a circle?"
"I think you may be," Small Kae replied. "Maati-kvo said that binding an
andat involves all kinds of inclusions. I don't see why this one would
be any different."
There was a pause, a sound that might have been the ghost of a sigh.
"Add it to the list," Eiah said as Maati turned through a well-lit
doorway and into the room.
"What list?" he asked.
There was a moment's silence, and then uproar. The circle of chairs was
abandoned, and Maati found himself the subject of a half-dozen embraces.
The dread and anger and despair that had dogged his steps lightened if
it didn't vanish. He let Vanjit lead him to an empty chair, and the
others gathered around him, their eyes bright, their smiles genuine. It
was like coming home. When Eiah returned to his question, he had
forgotten it. It took a moment to understand what she was saying.
"It's a list of questions for you," she said. "After we came and put the
place more or less to rights, we started ... well, we started holding
class without you."
"It wasn't really the same," Small Kae said with an apologetic pose. "We
only didn't want to forget what we'd learned. We were only talking about
it."
"After a few nights it became clear we were going to need some way to
keep track of the parts that needed clarifying. It's become rather a
long list. And some of the questions ..."
Maati took a pose that dismissed her concerns, somewhat hampered by the
bowl of curried rice in his hand.
"It's a good thought," he said. "I would have recommended it myself, if
I'd been thinking clearly. Bring me the list tonight, and perhaps we can
start going over it in the morning. If you are all prepared to begin
working in earnest?"
The roar of agreement drowned out his laughter. Only Eiah didn't join
in. Her smile was soft, almost sad, and she took no pose to explain it.
Instead, she poured a bowl of water for him.
"Is Cehmai-kvo here?" Large Kae asked.
Maati took a bite of the rice, chewing slowly, letting the spices burn
his tongue a little before answering.
"I didn't find him," Maati said. "There was a message, but it was
outof-date. I searched as long as there seemed some chance of finding
him, but there was no sign. I left word where I could, and it may very
well reach him. He might join us at any time. My job is to have you all
prepared in case he does."
It was kinder than the truth. If Maati's failure had been only that he
hadn't found help, it left them the hope that help might still arrive.
It was no great lie to give them an image of the future in which
something good might come. And it was easier for him if he didn't have
to say he'd been refused. Only Eiah knew; he could hear it in her
silence. She would follow his lead.
Maati's mule was seen to, his things hauled into the room they had
prepared for him, and a bath drawn in a wide copper tub set before a
fire grate. It reminded him of nothing so much as his days living in
court, servants available at any moment to cater to his needs. It was
strange to recall that he had lived that way once. It seemed both very
recent and very long ago. And also, the slaves and servants that had
driven the life in the palaces of Machi hadn't been women he knew and
cared for. Slipping into the warm water, feeling his travel-abused
joints ache just a degree less, letting his eyes rest, Maati wondered
what it would have been like to receive so much female attention when
he'd been younger. There would have been a time when the simple sensual
pleasures of food and a warm bath might have suggested something more
sexual. It might still, if bone-deep weariness hadn't held him.
But no, that wasn't true. He wasn't dead to lust, but it had been years
since it had carried the urgency that he remembered from his youth. He
wondered if that wasn't part of why women had been barred from the
school and the village of the Dai-kvo. Would any poet have been able to
focus on a binding if half his mind was on a woman his body was aching
for? Or perhaps there was something in that mind-set itself that would
affect the binding. So much of the andat was a reflection of the poet
who bound it, it would be easy to imagine andat fashioned by younger
poets in the forms of wantons and whores. Apart from the profoundly
undignified nature of such a binding, it might actually make holding the
andat more difficult as decades passed and a man's fires burned less
brightly. He wondered if there was an analogy with women.
The scratch at the door brought him back. He'd half fallen asleep there
in the water. He rose awkwardly, reaching for his robe and trying not to
spill so much water that it flowed into the fire grate and killed the
flames.
"Yes, yes," he called as he fastened the robe's ties. "I'm not drowned
yet. Come in."
Eiah stepped through the doorway. There was something in her arms, held
close to her. Between the unsteady light of the fire and his own
age-blunted sight, he couldn't tell more than it looked like a book.
Maati took a pose of welcome, his sleeves water-stuck to his arms.
"Should I come back later?" she asked.
"No, of course not," Maati said, pulling a chair toward the fire for
her. "I was only washing the road off of me. Is this the famed list?"
"Part of it is," she said as she sat. She was wearing a physician's robe
of deep green and gold. "Part of it's something else."
Maati settled himself on the tub's wide lip and took a pose that
expressed curiosity and surprise. Eiah handed him a scroll, and he
unfurled it. The questions were all written in a large hand, clearly,
and each with a small passage to give some context. He read three of
them. Two were simple enough, but the third was more interesting. It
touched on the difficulties of generating new directionals, and the
possibility of encasing absolute structures within relative ones. It
gave the grammar an odd feeling, as if it were suggesting that fire was
hot rather than asserting it.
It was interesting.
"Are they all like this?" he asked.
"The questions? Some of them, yes," Eiah said. "Vanjit's especially were