pride of the moment and the sense, hardly noticed at the time, that it
was an honor he didn't wholly deserve.
"Would you have done it differently, Milah-kvo?" he asked the dead man
and the empty air. "If you had known what I was going to do, would you
still have made the offer?"
The air said nothing. Maati felt himself smile without knowing precisely
why.
"Maati-kvo?"
He turned. In the dim light of his candle, Eiah seemed like a ghost.
Something conjured from his memory. He took a pose of greeting.
"You're awake," she said, falling into step beside him.
"Sometimes sleep abandons old men," he said with a chuckle. "It's the
way of things. And you? I can't think you make a practice of wandering
the halls in the middle of the night."
"I've just left Vanjit. She sits up after the lecture is done and goes
over everything we said. Everything anyone said. I agreed to sit with
her and compare my memory to hers."
"She's a good girl," Maati said.
"Her dreams are getting worse," Eiah said. "If the situation were
different, I'd be giving her a sleeping powder. I'm afraid it will dull
her, though."
"They're bad then?" Maati said.
Eiah shrugged. In the dim light, her face seemed older.
"They're no worse than anyone who watched her family die before her
eyes. She has told you, hasn't she?"
"She was a child," Maati said. "The only one to live."
"She said no more than that?"
"No," Maati said. They passed through a stone archway and into the
courtyard. Eiah looked up at the stars.
"It's as much as I know too," Eiah said. "I try to coax her. To get her
to speak about it. But she won't."
"Why try?" Maati said. "Talking won't undo it. Let her be who and where
she is now. It's better that way."
Eiah took a pose that accepted his advice, but her face didn't entirely
match it. He put a hand on her shoulder.
"It will be fine," he said.
"Will it?" Eiah said. "I tell myself the same thing, but I don't always
believe it."
Maati stopped at a stone bench, flicked a snail from the seat, and
rested. Eiah sat at his side, hunched over, her elbows on her knees.
"You think we should stop this?" he asked. "Call off the binding?"
"What reason could we give?"
"That Vanjit isn't ready."
"It isn't true, though. Her mind is as good as any of ours will ever be.
If I called this to a halt, I'd be saying I didn't trust her to be a
poet. Because of what she's been through. That the Galts had taken that
from her too. And if I say that of her, who won't it be true of? Ashti
Beg lost her husband. Irit's father burned with his farm. Large Kae only
had her womb turned sick and saw the Khai Utani slaughtered with his
family. If we're looking for a woman who's never known pain, we may as
well pack up our things now, because there isn't one."
Maati let the silence stretch, in part to leave Eiah room to think. In
part because he didn't know what wisdom he could offer.
"No, Uncle Maati, I don't want to stop. I only ... I only hope this
brings her some peace," Eiah said.
"It won't," Maati said, gently. "It may heal some part of her. It may
bring good to the world, but the andat have never brought peace to poets."
"No. I suppose not," Eiah said. Then, a moment later, "I'm going into
Pathai. I'll just need a cart and one of the horses."
"Is there need?"
"We aren't starving, if that's what you mean. But buying at the markets
there attracts less notice than going straight to the low towns. It
would be better if no one knows there are people living out here. And
there might be news."
"And if there's news, there will be some idea of how soon Vanjit-cha
will need to make her attempt."
"I was thinking more of how much time I have," Eiah said. She turned to
look at him. The warm light of the candle and the cool glow of the moon
made her seem like two different women at once. "This doesn't rest on
Vanjit. It doesn't rest on any of them. Binding an andat isn't enough to
... fix things. It has to be the right one."
"And Clarity-of-Sight isn't the right one?" he asked.
"It won't give any of these women babies. It won't put them back in the
arms of the men who used to be their husbands or stop men like my father
from trading in women's flesh like we were sheep. None of it. All the
binding will do is prove that it can be done. That a solution exists. It
doesn't even mean I'll be strong enough when my turn comes."
Maati took her hand. He had known her for so many years. Her hand had
been so small that first time he had seen her. He remembered her deep
brown eyes, and the way she had gurgled and burrowed into her mother's
cradling arms. He could still see the shape of that young face in the
shape of her cheeks and the set of her jaw. He leaned over and kissed
her hair. She looked up at him, amused to see him so easily moved.
"I was only thinking," he said, "how many of us there are carrying this
whole burden alone."
"I know I'm not alone, Maati-kya. It only feels like it some nights."
"It does. It certainly does," he said. Then, "Do you think she'll manage
it?"
Eiah rose silently, took a pose that marked parting with nuances as
intimate as family, and walked back into the buildings of the school.
Maati sighed and lay back on the stone, looking up into the night sky. A
shooting star blazed from the eastern sky toward the north and vanished
like an ember gone cold.
He wondered if Otah-kvo still looked at the sky, or if he had grown too
busy being the Emperor. The days and nights of power and feasting and
admiration might rob him of simple beauties like a night sky or a fear
grown less by being shared. Might, in fact, cut Otah-kvo off from all
the things that gave meaning to people lower than himself. He was, after
all, planning his new empire by denying all the women injured by the
last war any hope of those simple, human pleasures. A babe. A family.
Tens of thousands of women, cut free from the lives they were entitled
to, now to be forgotten.
He wondered if a man who could do that still had enough humanity left to
enjoy a falling star or the song of a nightingale.
He hoped not.
Eiah left the next morning. The high road was still in good repair, and
travel along it was an order of magnitude faster than the tracking Maati
had done between the low towns. When Maati and the others saw her off,
she was wearing simple robes and the leather satchel hung at her side.
She could have been mistaken for any traveling physician. Maati might
have imagined it, but he thought that Vanjit held her parting stance