do is ask them to reconsider. So I suppose I'll do that and see what
happens next. I know that you think I should go in and kill them all-"
"I didn't say that," Idaan said. "I said it was what I would do. My
judgment on those matters is ... occasionally suspect."
Otah sipped his wine, then put the bowl down carefully.
"I think that's the nearest you've ever come to apologizing," he said.
"To you, perhaps," Idaan said. "I spent years talking to the dead about
it. They didn't have much to say back."
"Do you miss them?"
"Yes," Idaan said without hesitation. "I do."
They lapsed into silence again. Danat and Ashti Beg were in the middle
of a lively debate over the ethics of showfighting, Ana listening to
them both with a frown. Her hand pressed her belly as if the fish was
troubling her.
"If Maati were here tonight," Otah said, "and demanded that he be named
emperor, I think I'd give it to him."
"He'd hand it back in a week," Idaan said with a smile.
"Who's to say I'd take it?"
They left in the morning, the horses rested or changed for fresh, the
carts restocked with wood and coal and water. Ana looked worse, but kept
a brave face. Idaan stayed with her like a personal guard, to Danat's
visible annoyance. A cold wind haunted them, striking leaves from the trees.
News of the Emperor's party came close to overwhelming stories of the
mysterious baby at the wayhouse. No couriers came to trouble Otah with
word of fire or death. Twice, Otah dreamed that Sinja was riding at his
side, robes soaked with seawater and black as a bat's wing, and he woke
each time with an obscure feeling of peace. And with every stop, they
found the poets had passed before them more and more recently.
Three days ago. Then two.
When they reached the river Qiit, tea-dark with newly fallen leaves,
just the day before.
24
The cold caught up with them in the middle of the day, a wind from the
west that rattled the trees and sent tiny whitecaps across the river's
back. They had covered a great stretch of river in their day's travel,
but night meant landing. The boatman was adamant. The river, he said,
was a living thing; it changed from one journey to the next. Sandbars
shifted, rocks lurked where none had been before. The boat was shallow
enough to pass over many dangers, but a log invisible in the darkness
could break a hole in the deck. Better to run in the daylight than swim
in the dark. The way the boatman said it left no room for disagreement.
They camped at the riverside, and awakened with tents and robes soaked
heavy by dew. Morning light saw them on the water again, the boiler at
the stern muttering angrily to itself, the paddle wheel punishing the water.
Maati sat away from the noise, huddled in two wool robes, and watched
the trees march from the north to the south like an army bent on sacking
Saraykeht. Large Kae and Small Kae sat in the stern, making conversation
with the boatman and his second when the men would deign to speak.
Vanjit and Eiah turned around each other, one in the bow, the other in
the center of the craft, both maintaining a space between them, the
andat watching with rage and hunger in its black eyes. It was like
watching an alley-mouth knife fight drawn out over hours and days.
It was hard now to remember the days before they had been splintered.
The years he had spent in hiding had seemed like a punishment at the
time. Living in warehouses, giving the lectures he half-recalled from
his own youth and half-invented anew, trying to understand the ways in
which a woman's mind was not a man's and how that power could be
channeled into grammar. He had resented it. He recalled crawling onto a
cot, exhausted from the day's work. He could still picture the
expressions of hunger and determination on their faces. He had not seen
it then, but it had all of it been driven by hope. Even the sorrow and
mourning that came after a binding failed and they lost someone to the
andat's grim price had held a sense of community.
Now they had won, and the world seemed all cold wind and dark water.
Even the two Kaes seemed to have set themselves apart from Vanjit, from
Eiah, from himself. The nights of conversation and food and laughter
were gone like a pleasant dream. They had created a women's grammar and
the price was higher than he could have imagined.
Murder. He was planning to murder one of his own.
As he had expected, the boat was too small for any more private
conversations. He had managed no more than a few moments with Eiah when
none of the others were paying them attention. Something in Vanjit's
wine, perhaps, to slow her mind and deepen her sleep. She mustn't know
that the blow was coming.
He could see that it weighed on Eiah as much as it did upon him. She sat
carving soft wood with a knife wherever Vanjit was not, her mouth in a
vicious scowl. The wax tablets that had been her whole work before he'd
come to her lay stacked in a crate. The latest version of Wounded,
waiting for his analysis and approval. He imagined the two of them would
sit nearer each other if it weren't for the fear that Vanjit would
suspect them of plotting. And he would not fear that except that it was
truth.
For their own part, Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight held to themselves. Poet
and andat in apparent harmony, watching the night sky or penetrating the
secrets of wood and water that only she could see. Vanjit hadn't offered
to share the wonders the andat revealed since before they had left the
school, and Maati couldn't bring himself to ask the favor. Not knowing
what he knew. Not intending what he intended.
When evening came, the boatman sang out, his second joining the high
whooping call. There was no reason for it that Maati could see, only the
habit of years. The boat angled its way to a low, muddy bank. When the
water was still enough, the second dropped over the side and slogged to
the line of trees, a rope thick as his arm trailing behind him. Once the
rope had been made fast to the trees, he called out again, and the
boatman shifted the mechanism of the boiler from paddle wheel to winch,
and the great rope went taut. It creaked with the straining, and river
water flowed from the strands as if giant hands were wringing it. By the
time the boatman stopped, the craft was almost jumping distance from the
shore and felt as solid as a building. It made Maati uncomfortable,
afraid that they had grounded it so well that they wouldn't be able to
free it in the morning. The boatman and his second showed no unease.
A wide plank made a bridge between boat and shore. The boatman wrestled
it into place with a stream of perfunctory vulgarity. The second, his
robes soaked and muddied, trotted back onto the deck.
"We're doing well, eh?" Maati said to the boatman. "The distance we went