Healing.
"I don't know that," Maati said, half-ashamed by the peevishness in his
voice. "I only said that I didn't see a flaw in them. I never said there
wasn't one, only that I couldn't see it. And besides which, it might be
too near something that's been done before. I won't lose you because
some minor poet in the Second Empire bound Making-Things-Right or
Fix-the-Broken or some idiotically broad concept like that."
"Even if they did, they hadn't trained as physicians. I know how flesh
works in ways they wouldn't have. I can bring things back the way
they're meant to be. The women that Sterile broke, I can make whole
again. If we could only-"
"You're too important."
Eiah went silent. When she spoke again, her voice was heavy and bitter.
"You know you've just called all the others unimportant," Eiah said.
"Not unimportant," Maati said. "They're all important. They only aren't
all irreplaceable. Wait, Eiah-kya. Be patient. Once we have a grammar
that we know can work, I won't stop you. But let someone else be first."
"There isn't time," Eiah said. "We have a handful of months before the
trade starts in earnest. Maybe a year."
"Then we'll find a way to move them faster," Maati said.
The question of how that might be done, however, haunted him the rest of
the night. He lay on his cot, the night candle hissing almost inaudibly
and casting its misty light on the stone ceiling. The women, his
students, had all retired to what quarters Eiah had quietly arranged for
them. Eiah herself had gone back to the palaces of the Emperor, the
great structures dedicated to Otah, while Maati lay in the near-dark
under a warehouse, sleep eluding him and his mind gnawing at questions
of time.
Maati's father had died younger than he was now. Maati had been an
aspiring poet at the village of the Dai-kvo at the time. When the word
came, he had not seen the man in something near a decade. The news had
stung less than he would have anticipated, not a fresh loss so much as
the reminder of one already suffered. A slowing of blood had taken the
man, the message said, and Maati had never looked into the matter more
deeply. Lately he'd found himself wondering whether his father had done
all that he'd wished, if the son he'd given over to the poets had made
him proud, what regrets had marked that last illness.
The candle had almost burned itself to nothing when he gave up any hope
of sleep. Outside, songbirds were greeting the still-invisible dawn, but
Maati took no joy in them. He lit a fresh candle and sat on the
smooth-worn stone steps and considered the small wooden box that carried
the only two irreplaceable things he owned. One was a painting he had
done from memory of Nayiit Chokavi, the son he should have had, the
child he had helped, however briefly, to raise, the boy whom Otah- Otah
to whom no rules applied-had brought into the world in Saraykeht and
taken out of it in Machi. The other was a book bound in black leather.
He opened the cover and considered the first page, squinting to bring
the letters clear. He could not help but think of another book-that one
brown-which had been his gift from Heshai-kvo and Seedless. Heshai's
handwriting had been clearer than Maati's own, his gift for language
more profound.
I, Maati Vaupathai, am one of the two men remaining in the
world who has wielded the power of the andat. As the
references from which I myself learned are lost, I shall
endeavor to record here what I know Q f grammar and of the
forms of thought by which the andat may be bound and the
abstract made physical. And, with that, my own profound
error from which the world is still suffering.
Half-reading, he flipped through the pages, caught occasionally by a
particular turn of phrase of which he was fond or tripped by a diagram
or metaphor that was still not to his best liking. Though his eyes
strained, he could still read what he'd written, and when the ink seemed
to blur, he had the memory of what he had put there. He reached the
blank pages sooner than he expected, and sat on his stairs, fingertips
moving over the smooth paper with a sound like skin against skin. There
was so much to say, so many things he'd thought and considered. Often,
he would come back from a particularly good lecture to his students full
of fire and intentions, prepared to write a fresh section. Sometimes his
energy lasted long enough to do so. Sometimes not.
It will be a sad legacy to die with this half-finished, he thought as he
let the cover close.
He needed a real school, the school needed a teacher, and he himself
could manage only so much. There wasn't time to lecture all his students
and write his manual and slink like a criminal through the dark corners
of the Empire. If he'd been younger, perhaps-fifty, or better yet forty
years old-he might have made the attempt, but not now. And with this mad
scheme of Otah's, time had grown even dearer.
"Maati-cha?"
Maati blinked. Vanjit came toward him, her steps tentative. He tucked
his book into its box and took a pose of welcome.
"The door wasn't bolted," she said. "I was afraid something had happened?"
"No," Maati said, rising and hoisting himself up the stairs. "I forgot
it last night. An old man getting older is all."
The girl took a pose that was both an acceptance and a denial. She
looked exhausted, and Maati suspected there were dark smudges under his
own eyes to match hers. The scent of eggs and beef caught his attention.
A small lacquer box hung at Vanjit's side.
"Ah," Maati said. "It that what I hope it is?"
She smiled at that. The girl did have a pleasant smile, when she used
it. The eggs were fresh; whipped and steamed in bright orange blocks.
The beef was rich and moist. Vanjit sat beside him in the echoing, empty
space of the warehouse as the morning light pressed in at the high,
narrow windows, blue then yellow then gold. They talked about nothing
important: the wayhouse where she was staying, his annoyance with his
failing eyes, the merits of their present warehouse as compared to the
half-dozen other places where Maati had taken up his chalk. Vanjit asked
him questions that built on what they'd discussed the night before: How
did the different forms of being relate to time? How did a number exist
differently than an apple or a man? Or a child?
Maati found himself holding forth on matters of the andat and the poets,
his time with the Dai-kvo, and even before that at the school. Vanjit
sat still, her gaze on him, and drank his words like water.