THE (tlpq-4) (51 page)

saw the armsmen turn their backs to him out of respect, and at the bow,

Maati turned his back for another reason. Otah felt a flicker of his

rage come back, a tongue of flame rising from old coals. Maati had done

this. None of it would have happened if Maati hadn't been so bent by his

own guilt or so deluded by his optimism that he ignored the dangers.

Or if Otah had found him and stopped him when that first letter had

come. Or if Eiah hadn't made common cause with Maati's clandestine

school. Or if Vanjit hadn't been mad, or Balasar ambitious, or the world

and everything in it made from the first. Otah closed his eyes, letting

the darkness create a space large enough for the woman in his arms and

his own complicated heart.

Eiah murmured something he couldn't make out. He made a small

interrogative sound in the back of his throat, and she coughed before

repeating herself.

"There was no one at the school I could talk with," she said. "I got so

tired of being strong all the time."

"I know," he said. "Oh, love. That, I know."

Otah slept deeply that night, lulled by exhaustion and the soft sounds

of familiar voices and of the river. He slept as if he had been ill and

the fever had only just broken. As if he was weak, and gaining strength.

The dreams that possessed him faded with his first awareness of light

and motion, less substantial than cobwebs, less lasting than mist.

The air itself seemed cleaner. The early-morning haze burned off in

sunlight the color of water. They ate boiled wheat and honey, dried

apples, and black tea. The boatman's second made his call, the boatman

responded, and they nosed out again into the flow. Maati, sulking, kept

as nearly clear of Otah as he could but kept casting glances at Eiah.

Jealous, Otah assumed, of the conversation between father and daughter

and unsure of her allegiance. Eiah for her part seemed to be making a

point of speaking with her brother and her aunt and Ana Dasin, sitting

with them, eating with them, making conversation with the jaw-clenched

determination of a horse laboring uphill.

The character of the river itself changed as they went farther north.

Where the south was wide and slow and gentle, the stretch just south of

Udun was narrower-sometimes no more than a hundred yards acrossand

faster. The boatman kept his kiln roaring, the boiler bumping and

complaining. The paddle wheel spat up river water, slicking the deck

nearest the stern. Otah would have been concerned if the boatman and his

second hadn't appeared so pleased with themselves. Still, whenever the

boiler chimed after some particularly loud knock, Otah eyed it with

suspicion. He had seen boilers burst their seams.

The miles passed slowly, though still faster than the poet girl could

have walked. Every now and then, a flicker of movement on the shore

would catch Otah's attention. Bird or deer or trick of the light. He

found himself wondering what they would do if she appeared, andat in her

arms, and struck them all blind. His fears always took the form of

getting Danat and Eiah and Ana to safety, though he knew that his own

danger would be as great as theirs and their competence likely greater.

The spitting waterwheel slowly drove them toward the bow. Near midday,

the captain of the guard brought them tin bowls of raisins and bread and

cheese. They all sat in a clump, and even Maati haunted the edges of the

conversation. Ana and Eiah sat hand in hand on a long, low bench; Danat,

cross-legged on the deck. Otah and Idaan kept to leather and canvas

stools that creaked when sat upon and resisted any attempt to rise. The

cheese was rich and fragrant, the bread only mildly stale, and the topic

a council of war.

"If we do find her," Idaan said, answering Otah's voiced concerns, "I'm

not sure what we do with her. Can she be made to see reason?"

"A month ago, I'd have said it was possible," Eiah said. "Not simple,

but possible. I'm half-sorry we didn't kill her in her sleep when we

were still at the school."

"Only half?" Danat asked.

"There's Galt," Eiah said. "As it stands now, she's the only one who can

put it back. It's harder for her to do that dead."

Danat looked chagrined, and, as if sensing it, Idaan put a hand on his

shoulder. Eiah squeezed Ana's hand, then gently bent it at the wrist, as

if testing something.

"She's alone. She's hurt and she's sad. I'm not saying that's all

certain to work in our favor," Maati said, "but it's something." Otah

thought he sounded petulant, but none of the others appeared to hear it

that way.

Eiah's voice cut the conversation like a blade. Even before he took the

sense of the words, Otah was halfway to his feet.

"How long?" Eiah asked.

Her hands were around Ana's wrists, her fingers curled as if measuring

the girl's pulses. Eiah's face was pale.

"Ah," Idaan said. "Well. Sitting those two together was a mistake."

"Tell me," Eiah said. "How far along?"

"A third, perhaps," Ana said softly.

"We hadn't mentioned it to the men," Idaan said. "I understand the first

ones don't always take."

It took him less than a breath to understand.

"Ah," Otah said, a hundred tiny signs falling into place. Ana's weeping

at the school, her avoidance of Danat, the way she'd kept to herself in

the mornings and eaten with Idaan.

"What?" Danat asked, baffled.

"I'm pregnant," Ana said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact, her cheeks

as bright as apples with her blush. The whole boat seemed to breathe in

at once.

"And how long has this been going on?" Otah demanded, shifting his gaze

to the dumbstruck Danat at his feet. His son blinked up,

uncomprehending. It was as if Otah had asked in an unknown language.

"You're joking," Idaan said. "You have a boy who's just ended his

twentieth summer and a girl not two years younger, an escort of

professional armsmen as chaperone, and a steamcart with private quarters

built on its back. What did you expect would happen?"

"But," Otah began, then found he wasn't sure what he intended to say.

She's blinded, or They aren't wed, or Farrer Dasin will say it's my

fault for not keeping better watch over them. Each impulse seemed more

ridiculous than the last.

"I'm going to be a father," Danat said as if testing out the words. He

turned to look up at Otah and started to grin. "You're going to be a

grandfather."

Eiah was weeping openly, her arms around Ana. A clamor of voices and a

whoop from the stern said that whatever hope there might have been that

the thing would be kept quiet once they returned to court was gone. Otah

sat back, his stool creaking under his weight. Idaan took a pose of

query that carried nuances of both pity at his idiocy and

congratulations. Otah started laughing and found it hard to stop.

It had been so long since he'd felt joy, he'd almost forgotten what it

was like.

The rest of the day was spent in half-drunken conversation. Otah was

made to retell the details of Danat's birth, and of Eiah's. Danat grew

slowly more pleased with himself and the world as the initial shock wore

thin. Ana Dasin smiled, her grayed eyes taking in nothing and giving out

a pleasure and satisfaction that seemed more intimate in that she

couldn't see its reflection in the faces around her.

Stories came pouring out as if they had only been waiting for the chance

to be told. Idaan's spectacularly failed attempts to care for a younger

half-sister when she'd been little more than fourteen summers old.

Otah's work in the eastern islands as an assistant midwife, and the

awkward incident of the baby born to an island mother and island father

and with a complexion that sang to the stars of Obar State. Eiah spilled

out every piece of secondhand wisdom she'd ever heard about keeping a

new babe safe in the womb until it was ready to be born. At one point

the armsmen broke into giddy song and, against Danat's protests, lifted

him onto their shoulders, the deck shifting slightly under them. The sun

itself seemed to shine for them, the river to laugh.

Maati alone seemed not to recover entirely from the first surprise. He

smiled and chuckled and nodded when it fit the moment, but his eyes were

reading letters in the air. He looked neither pleased nor displeased,

but lost. Otah saw his lips moving as Maati spoke to himself, as if

trying to explain something to his body that only his mind knew. When

the poet hefted himself up and came to take Ana's hand, it was with a

formality that might have been mixed feelings on his part or only a fear

that his kind thoughts would be unwelcome. Ana accepted the formal,

somewhat stilted blessing, and afterward Eiah took Maati's hand, pulling

him down to sit at her side.

Even braided together, Otah's anger and distrust and sorrow couldn't

overcome the moment. The blood and horror of the world lifted, and a

future worth having peeked through the crack.

It was only much later, when the sun fell carelessly into the treetops

of the western bank and shadows darkened the water, that the celebration

faltered. The boat passed a brickwork tower standing on the riverbank,

ivy almost obscuring the scars where fire had burned through timber and

stripped the shutters from the empty windows. Otah watched the structure

with the eerie feeling that it was watching back. The river bent, and a

great stone bridge came into sight, gaps in its rail like missing teeth.

Birds as bright as fire sang and fluttered, even in the autumn cold.

Their songs filled the air, the familiar trills greeting Otah like the

wail of a ghost.

The ruins of the river city. The corpse of a city of birds.

They had come to dead Udun.

28

Maati tramped through the overgrown streets, Idaan walking silently at

his side. The hunter's bow slung over her shoulder was meant more as

protection from feral dogs than to assassinate Vanjit, though Maati knew

Idaan could use it for either. To their left, an unused canal stank of

stale water and rotting vine. To the right, walls stood or leaned, roofs

sagged or had fallen in. Every twenty steps seemed to offer up a new

display of how war and time could erase the best that humanity achieved.

And above the ruins, rising like a mountain over the city, the ruined

palaces of the Khai Udun were grayed by the moisture in the air. The

towers and terraces of enameled brick as soft as visions.

He had lost Eiah too.

Squatting on the boat as they made their way upriver, he had watched her

turn to Otah, watched her become his daughter again where before she had

chosen the role of outcast. She had lost faith in Maati's dream, and he

understood why. She had delighted in the Galtic girl's condition as if

it weren't the very thing that they had feared and fought against.

Maati had wanted the past. He had wanted to make the world whole as it

had been when he was a boy, none of his opportunities squandered. And

she had wanted that too. They all had. But with every change that

couldn't be undone, the past receded. With every new tragedy Maati

brought upon the world, with each friend that he lost, with failure upon

failure upon failure, the dim light faded. With Eiah returned to her

father's cause, there was nothing left to lose. His despair felt almost

like peace.

"Left or right?" Idaan asked.

Maati blinked. The road before them split, and he hadn't even noticed

it. He wasn't much of a scout.

"Left," he said with a shrug.

"You think the canal bridge will hold?"

"Right, then," Maati said, and turned down the road before the woman

could raise some fresh objection.

It was only a decade and a half since the war. It seemed like days ago

that Maati had been the librarian of Machi. And yet the white-barked

tree that split the road before them, street cobbles shattered and

lifted by its roots, hadn't existed then. The canals he walked past had

run clean. There had been no moss on the walls. Udun had been alive,

then. The forest and the river were eating the city's remains, and it

seemed to have happened in the space between one breath and the next. Or

perhaps the library, the envoys from the Dai-kvo, the long conversations

with Cehmaikvo and Stone-Made-Soft had been part of some other lifetime.

The sound was low and violent-something thrashing against wood or stone.

Maati looked around him. The square they'd come to was paved in wide,