Danat paused. The reflection of his father's rage warmed the boy's face,
but not more than that.
"I didn't think an alliance with Galt would please you."
"I didn't either," Maati said, "but I have enough experience with losing
to your father that I'm learning to be generous about it."
Danat almost started. Maati wondered what nerve he had touched, but
before he could ask, a flock of birds a more violent blue than anything
Maati had seen burst from a treetop down the avenue. They wheeled around
one another, black beaks and wet eyes and tiny tongues pink as a
fingertip. Maati closed his eyes, disturbed, and when he opened them,
Danat was kneeling before him. The boy's face was a webwork of tiny
lines like the cracked mud in a desert riverbed. Fine, dark whiskers
rose from Danat's pores. His eyelashes crashed together when he blinked,
interweaving or pressing one another apart like trees in a mudslide.
Maati closed his eyes again, pressing his palms to them. He could see
the tiny vessels in each eyelid, layer upon layer almost out to the skin.
"Maati-cha?"
"She's seen us," Maati said. "She knows I'm here."
In spite of the knowledge, it took Maati half a hand to find her. He
swept the horizon and from east to west and back again. He could see
half-a-hundred rooftops. He found her at last near the top of the
palaces of the Khai Udun on a balcony of bricks enameled the color of
gold. At this distance, she was smaller than a grain of sand, and he saw
her perfectly. Her hair was loose, her robe ripped at the sleeve. The
andat was on her hip, its black, hungry eyes on his own. Vanjit nodded
and put the andat down. Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, she took a
pose of greeting. Maati returned it.
"Where? Where is she?" Danat asked. Maati ignored him.
Vanjit shifted her hands and her body into a pose that was both a rebuke
and an accusation. Maati hesitated. He had imagined a thousand scenarios
for this meeting, but they had all involved the words he would speak,
and what she would say in return. His first impulse now was toward
apology, but something in the back of his mind resisted. Her face was a
mask of self-righteous anger, and, to his surprise, he recognized the
expression as one he himself had worn in a thousand fantasies. In his
dreams, he had been facing Otah, and Otah had been the one to beg
forgiveness.
Like a voice speaking in his ear, he knew why his hands would not take
an apologetic pose. She is here to see you abased. Do it now, and you
have nothing left to offer her. Maati pulled his shoulders back, lifted
his chin, and took a pose that requested an audience. Its nuances didn't
claim his superiority as a teacher to a student but neither did they
cede it. Vanjit's eyes narrowed. Maati waited, his breath short and
anxiety plucking at him.
Vanjit took a pose appropriate to a superior granting a servant or slave
an indulgence. Maati didn't correct her, but neither did he respond.
Vanjit looked down as if the andat had cried out or perhaps spoken, then
shifted her hands and her body to a pose of formal invitation
appropriate for an evening's meal. Only then did Maati accept, shifting
afterward to a pose of query. Vanjit indicated the balcony on which she
stood, and then made a gesture that implied either intimacy or solitude.
Meet me here. In my territory and on my terms. Come alone.
Maati moved to an accepting pose, smiling to himself as much as to the
girl in the palaces. With a physical sensation like that of a gnat
flying into his eye, Maati's vision blurred back to merely human acuity.
He turned his attention back to Danat.
The boy looked half-frantic. He held his blade as if prepared for an
attack, his gaze darting from tree to wall as if he could see the things
that Maati had seen. The moons that passed around the wandering stars,
the infinitesimal animals that made their home in a drop of rain, or the
girl on her high balcony halfway across the city. Maati had no doubt she
was still watching them.
"Come along, then," he said. "We're done here."
"You saw her," Danat said.
"I did."
"Where is she? What did she want?"
"She's at the palaces, and there's no point in rushing over there like a
man on fire. She can see everything, and she knows to watch. We could no
more take her by surprise than fly."
Maati took a deep breath and turned back along the path they'd just
come. There was no reason to follow Otah's route now, and Maati wanted
to sit down for a while, perhaps drink a bowl of wine, perhaps speak to
Eiah for a time. He wanted to understand better why the dread in his
breast was mixed with elation, the fear with pleasure.
"What does she want?" Danat asked, trotting to catch up to Maati.
"I suppose that depends upon how you look at things," Maati said. "In
the greater scheme, she wants what any of us do. Love, a family,
respect. In the smaller, I believe she wants to see me beg before I die.
The odd thing is that even if she had that, it wouldn't bring her any
last„ ing peace.
"I don't understand."
Maati stopped. It occurred to him that if he had taken the wrong pose,
made the wrong decision just now, he and the boy would be trying to find
their way back to camp by smell. He put a hand on Danat's shoulder.
"I've asked Vanjit to meet with me tonight. She's agreed, but it can
only be the two of us," Maati said. "I believe that once it's done I'll
be able to tell you whether the world is still doomed."
29
"No," Otah said. "Absolutely not."
"All respect," Maati said. "You may be the Emperor, but this isn't your
call to make. I don't particularly need your permission, and Vanjit's
got no use for it at all."
"I can have you kept here."
"You won't," Maati said. The poet was sure of himself, Otah thought,
because he was right.
When Danat and Maati had returned early, he had known that something had
happened. The quay they had adopted as the center of the search had been
quiet since the end of the afternoon meal. Ana and Eiah sat in the
shadow of a low stone wall, sleeping or talking when Eiah wasn't going
through the shards of her ruined binding, arranging the shattered wax in
an approximation of the broken tablets. The boatman and his second had
taken apart the complex mechanism connecting boiler to wheel and were
cleaning each piece, the brass and bronze, iron and steel laid out on
gray tarps and shining like jewelry. The voices of the remaining armsmen
joined with the low, constant lapping of the river and the songs of the
birds. At another time, it might have been soothing. Otah, sitting at
his field table, fought the urge to pace or shout or throw stones into
the water. Sitting, racking his brain for details of a place he'd lived