Maati wondered how often scenes like this one had passed without comment
or notice. Many years before, he had cared for an infant himself, and
the frustration of it was something he understood. This was something
different. He thought of what it would have been to have a child that
hated him, that wanted nothing more than to be free. Clarity-ofSight was
all the longing that haunted Vanjit and all the anger that sustained her
put into a being that would do whatever was needed to escape. Vanjit had
been betrayed by the cruelty of the world, and now also her own desire
made flesh.
At last she had the baby that had haunted her dreams. And it wanted to die.
Eiah spoke in his memory. What makes its imagine we can do good with
these as our tools?
19
Low towns clustered around the great cities of the Khaiem, small centers
of commerce and farming, justice and healing. Men and women could live
out their lives under the nominal control of the Khaiem or now of the
Emperor and never pass into the cities themselves. They had low courts,
road taxes, smiths and stablers, wayhouses and comfort houses and common
meadows for anyone's use. He had seen them all, years before, when he
had only been a courier. They were the cities of the Khaiem writ small,
and as he passed through them with his armsmen, his son, and the Galtic
half-stowaway, Otah saw all his fears made real.
Silences lay where children should have been playing street games. Great
swings made from rope and plank hung from ancient branches that shadowed
the common fields, no boys daring each other higher. As a child who had
seen no more than twelve summers, Otah had set out on his own, competing
with low-town boys for small work. With every low town he entered, his
eyes caught the sorts of things he had done: roofs with thatch that
wanted care, fences and stone walls in need of mending, cisterns grown
thick and black with weeds that required only a strong back and the
energy of youth to repair. But there were no boys, no girls; only men
and women whose smiles carried a bewildered, permanent sorrow. The
leaves on the trees had turned brown and yellow and fallen. The nights
were long, and the dawns touched by frost.
The land was dead. He had known it. Being reminded brought him no joy.
They stopped for the night in a wayhouse nestled in a wooded valley. The
walls were kiln-fired brick with a thick covering of ivy that the autumn
chill had turned brown and brittle. News of his identity and errand had
spread before him like a wave on water, making quiet investigation
impossible. The keeper had cleared all his rooms before they knew where
they meant to stop, had his best calf killed and hot baths drawn on the
chance that Otah might stop to rest. Sitting now in the alcove of a room
large enough to fit a dozen men, Otah felt his muscles slowly and
incompletely unknotting. With the supplies carried on the steam wagons
and the men shifting between tending the kilns and riding, Pathai was
less than two days away. Without the Galtic machines, it would have been
four, perhaps five.
Low clouds obscured moon and stars. When Otah closed the shutters
against the cold night air, the room grew no darker. The great copper
tub the keeper had prepared glowed in the light of the fire grate. The
earthenware jar of soap beside it was half-empty, but at least Otah felt
like his skin was his own again and not hidden under layers of dust and
sweat. His traveling robes had vanished and he'd picked a simple garment
of combed wool lined with silk. The voices of the armsmen rose through
the floorboards. The song was patriotic and bawdy, and the drum that
accompanied them kept missing the right time. Otah rose on bare feet and
walked out to the stairs. No servants scuttled out of his way, and he
noticed the absence.
Danat was not among the armsmen or out with the horses. It was only when
Otah approached the room set aside for Ana Dasin that he heard his son's
voice. The room was on the lower floor, near the kitchens. The floor
there was stone. Otah's steps made no sound as he walked forward. Ana
said something he couldn't make out, but when Danat answered, he'd come
near enough to hear.
"Of course there are, it's only Papa-kya isn't one of them. When I was a
boy, he told me stories from the First Empire about a half-Bakta boy.
And he nearly married a girl from the eastern islands."
"When was that?" Ana asked. Otah heard a sound of shifting cloth, like a
blanket being pulled or a robe being adjusted.
"A long time ago," Danat said. "Just after Saraykeht. He lived in the
eastern islands for years after that. They build their marriages in
stages there. He's got the first half of the marriage tattoo."
"Why didn't he finish it?" Ana asked.
Otah remembered Maj as he hadn't in years. Her wide, pale lips. Her eyes
that could go from blue the color of the sky at dawn to slate gray. The
stretch marks on her belly, a constant reminder of the child that had
been taken from her. In his mind, she was linked with the scent of the
ocean.
"I don't know," Danat said. "But it wasn't that he was trying to keep
his bloodline pure. Really, there's a strong case that my lineage isn't
par ticularly high. My mother didn't come from the utkhaiem, and for
some people that's as much an insult as marrying a Westlander."
"Or a Galt," Ana said, tartly.
"Exactly," Danat said. "So, yes. Of course there are people in the court
who want some kind of purity, but they've gotten used to disappointment
over the last few decades."
"They would never accept me."
"You?" Danat said.
"Anyone like me."
"If they won't, then they won't accept anyone. So it hardly matters what
they think, because they won't have any sons or daughters at court. The
world's changed, and the families that can't change with it won't survive."
"I suppose," Ana said. They were silent for a moment. Otah debated
whether he should scratch on her door or back quietly away, and then Ana
spoke again. Her voice had changed. It was lower now, and dark as rain
on stone. "It doesn't really matter, though, does it. There isn't going
to be a Galt."
"That's not true," Danat said.
"Every day that we're like ... like this, more of us are dying. It's
harvest time. How are they going to harvest the grain if they can't see
it? How do you raise sheep and cattle by sound?"
"I knew a blind man who worked leather in Lachi," Danat said. "His work
was just as good as a man's with eyes."
"One man doesn't signify," Ana said. "He wasn't baking his own bread or
catching his own fish. If he needed to know what a thing looked like,
there was someone he could ask. If everyone's sightless, it's different.
It's all falling apart."
"You can't know that," Danat said.