A Shadow In Summer (31 page)

"Let me make this clear," he said. "The watch recognizes this contract as valid. The house is the lawful property of Amat Kyaan. Any agreements are hers to enforce, and any disagreements that threaten the peace of the quarter, we'll be dealing with."

The tiles man shifted, his brows furrowed, his hands twitching toward some half-formed pose.

"Let's not be stupid about this," the captain said, his eyes, Amat saw, locked on the tiles man. There was a moment of tension, and then it was over. It was rotten as last month's meat, and everyone knew it. And it didn't matter. With the watch behind her, she'd stolen it fairly.

"The house will be closed tonight," Amat announced. "Torish-cha and his men are to be acting as guards. Any of you with weapons will turn them over now. Anyone besides them found with a weapon will be punished. Anyone using a weapon will be blinded and turned out on the street. Remember, you're my property now, until your indentures are complete or I release you. I'm going to ask the watch to stay until a search of the house is complete. Torish-cha?"

From behind her, the men moved forward. The captain stepped over to her. His leathers stank.

"You've got yourself a handful of vipers," he said as her thugs and cutthroats disarmed Ovi Niit's thugs and cutthroats. "Are you certain you want this?"

"It's mine now. Good or ill."

"The watch will back you, but they won't like it. Whatever you did, you did outside the quarter, but some people think this kind of thing is poor form. Your troubles aren't over."

"Transitions are always hard," she said, taking a pose of agreement so casual it became a dismissal. The captain shook his head and moved away.

The search went on, moving from room to room with an efficiency that spoke of experience. Amat followed slowly, considering the worn mattresses, the storage chambers in casual disarray. The house was kept no better than its books. That would change. Everything would change. Nothing would be spared.

Sorrow, as powerful as it was unexpected, stung her eyes. She brushed the tears away. This wasn't the time for it. There would never be a time for it. Not in her lifetime.

The search complete, the watch gone, Amat gathered her people—her vipers—in the common room at the back. The speech she'd prepared, rehearsed a thousand times in her mind, seemed suddenly limp; words that had seemed commanding were petty and weak. Standing at the head of one long table, she drew breath and slowly let it out.

"Well . . ." she said.

In the pause, the voice came from the crowd.

"Grandmother? Is it really you?"

It was a boy of five or six summers. He had been sleeping on a bench one morning, she remembered, when she'd come out of her hellish little cell for a plate of barley gruel and pork. He'd snored.

"Yes," she said. "I've come back."

I
N THE
days that followed, Heshai didn't improve, but neither did he seem to grow worse. His patchy beard grew fuller, his weight fell for a time and then slowly returned. He would rouse himself now to wander the house, though he didn't leave it, except to lumber down to the pond at night and stare into the black depths. Maati knew—because who else would take the time to care—that Heshai ate less at night than in the mornings, that he changed to clean robes if they were given him, that he might bathe if a bath was drawn, or he might not.

Thankfully the cotton harvest was complete, and there was nothing official the poet had been called on to perform. Physicians came from the Khai, but Heshai refused to see them. Servants who tried to approach the poet soon learned to ask their questions of Maati. Sometimes Maati acted as go between, sometimes, he just made the decisions himself.

For his own life, Maati found himself floating. Unless he was engaged in the daily maintenance of his invalid master, there was no direction for him that he didn't choose, and so he found that his days had grown to follow his emotions. If he felt frightened or overwhelmed, he studied Heshai's brown book, searching for insights that might serve him later if he were called on to hold Seedless. If he felt guilty, he sat by Heshai and tried to coax him into conversation. If he felt lonesome—and he often felt lonesome—he sought out Liat Chokavi. Sometimes he dreamed of her, and of that one brief kiss.

If his feelings for her were complex, it was only because she was beautiful and his friend and Otahkvo's lover. There was no harm in it, because nothing could come from it. And so, she was his friend, his only friend in the city.

It was because he had become so familiar with her habits and the places where she spent her days that, when the news came—carried by a palace slave with his morning meal—Maati found her so easily. The clearing was west of the seafront and faced a thin stretch of beach she'd shown him one night. Half-leaved trees and the curve of the shore hid the city. Liat sat on a natural bench of stone, leaning against a slab of granite half her height, and looking at the waves without seeing them. Maati moved forward, his feet crackling in the fallen leaves. Liat turned once, and seeing it was him, turned back to the water without speaking. He smoothed a clear spot beside her on the bench and sat.

"It's true then?" he asked. "Amat Kyaan quit the house?"

Liat nodded.

"Wilsincha must be furious."

She shrugged. Maati sat forward, his elbows on his knees. The waves gathered and washed the sand, each receding into the rush of the next. Gulls wheeled and screamed to the east and a huge Galtic ship floated at anchor on the horizon. They were the only signs of the city. He stirred the pile of dry leaves below them with his heel, exposing the dark soil beneath them.

"Did you know?"

"She didn't tell me," Liat said, and her voice was calm and blasted and empty. "She just went. Her apartments were empty except for a box of house papers and a letter to Wilsincha."

"So it wasn't only you, at least. She hadn't told anyone. Do you know why she left?"

"No," Liat said. "I blame myself for it. If I had done better, if I hadn't embarrassed the house . . ."

"You did what Wilsincha asked you to do. If the trade had been what it seemed, they'd be calling your praises for it."

"Perhaps," Liat said. "It hardly matters. She's gone. Wilsincha doesn't have any faith in me. I'm an apprentice without a master."

"Well. We're both that, at least."

She coughed out a single laugh.

"I suppose we are," she said, and scooped up his hand, holding it in her own. Maati's heart raced, and something like panic made his mouth taste like copper. Something like panic, only glorious. He didn't move, didn't do anything that might make Liat untwine her fingers from his.

"Where do you think he is?" Maati asked, calling up the spirit of their friend—his master, her heartmate—to show that he understood that this moment, her hand in his, wasn't something inappropriate. It was only friendship.

"He'll have reached Yalakeht. He might even be there by now," Liat said. "Or at least close, if he's not."

"He'll be back soon, then."

"Not for weeks," Liat said.

"It's a long time."

"Heshaikvo. He's not better?"

"He's not better. He's not worse. He sleeps too much. He eats too little. His beard . . ."

"It's not improving?"

"Longer. Not better. He really ought to shave it off."

Liat shrugged, and Maati felt as if the motion shifted her nearer. So this was friendship with a woman, he told himself. It was pleasant, he told himself, this simple intimacy.

"He seemed better when I came to see him," Liat said.

"He makes an effort I think, when you're there. I don't know why."

"Because I'm a girl."

"Perhaps that, yes," Maati said.

Liat, releasing his hand, stretched and stood. Maati sighed, feeling that a moment had passed—some invisible, exquisite moment in his life. He had heard old epics telling of moments in a man's youth that never truly left the heart—that stayed fresh and sweet and present through all the years and waited on the deathbed to carry him safely into his last sleep. Maati thought that those moments must be like this one. The scent of the sea, the perfect sky, the leaves, the roar of waves, and his hand, cooling where she had touched him.

"I should come by more often, then," Liat said. "If it helps."

"I wouldn't want to impose," he said, rising to stand beside her. "But if you have the time."

"I don't foresee being given any new projects of note. Besides, I like the poet's house. It's a beautiful place."

"It's better when you're there," Maati said.

Liat grinned. Maati took a pose of self-congratulation to which Liat replied with one of query.

"I've made you feel better," he said.

Liat weighed it, looking out to the horizon with her eyes narrowed. She nodded, as if he'd pointed out a street she'd never seen, or a pattern in the ways a tree branched. Her smile, when it came again, was softer.

"I suppose you have," she said. "I mean, everything's still a terrible mess."

"I'll try fixing the world later. After dinner. Do you want to go back?"

"I suppose I'd best. There's no call to earn a reputation of being unreliable, incompetent,
and
sulky."

They walked back to the city. It had seemed a longer path when he'd been on it alone, worried for Liat. Now, though they were hardly moving faster than a stroll, the walls of the city seemed to surround them almost immediately. They walked up the street of beads, paused at a stand where a boy of no more then eight summers was selling, with a ferocious seriousness, cakes smothered in fine-powdered sugar, and listened to an old beggar singing in a rough, melodious voice that spoke of long sorrow and moved Maati almost to tears. And still, they reached the crossroads that would lead her to the compound of House Wilsin and him to the oppressive, slow desperation of the poet's house before the sun had reached the top of its arc.

"So," Liat said, taking a pose that asked permission, but so casually that it assumed it granted, "shall I come to the poet's house once I'm done here?"

Maati made a show of consideration then took a pose extending invitation. She accepted, but didn't turn away. Maati felt himself frown, and she took a pose of query that he wasn't entirely sure how to answer.

"Liat-cha," he began.

"Cha?"

He raised his hands, palms out. Not a real pose, but expressive nonetheless.
Let me go on
.

"Liat-cha, I know it's only because things went so wrong that Otahkvo had to leave. And I wouldn't ever have chosen what happened with Seedless. But coming to know you better has been very important to me, and I wanted you to know how much I appreciate your being my friend."

Liat considered him, her expression unreadable but not at all upset.

"Did you rehearse that?" she asked.

"No. I didn't really know what I was going to say until I'd already said it."

She smiled briefly, and then her gaze clouded, as if he'd touched some private pain. He felt his heart sink. Liat met his eyes and she smiled.

"There's something I think you should see, Maati-kya. Come with me."

He followed her to her cell in silence. With each step, Maati felt his anxiety grow. The people they passed in the courtyard and walkway nodded to them both, but seemed unsurprised, undisturbed. Maati tried to seem to be there on business. When Liat closed the door of her cell, he took a pose of apology.

"Liat-cha," he said. "If I've done anything that would . . ."

She batted his hands, and he released the pose. To his surprise, he found she had moved forward, moved against him. He found that her lips had gently pressed his. He found that the air had all gone from the room. She pulled back from the kiss. Her expression was soft and sorrowful and gentle. Her fingers touched his hair.

"Go. I'll come to the poet's house tonight."

"Yes," was all he could think to say.

He stopped in the gardens of the low palaces, sat on the grass, and pressed his fingertips to his mouth, as if making sure his lips were still there; that they were real. The world seemed suddenly uprooted, dreamlike. She kissed him—truly kissed him. She had touched his hair. It was impossible. It was terrible. It was like walking along a familiar path and suddenly falling off a cliff.

And it was also like flying.

Chapter 14

The raft was big enough to carry eight people. It was pulled against the current by a team of four oxen, moving slowly but implacably along paths worn in the shore by generations of such passage. Otah slept in the back, wrapped in his cloak and in the rough wool blankets the boatman and his daughter provided. In the mornings, the daughter—a child of no more then nine summers—lit a brazier and cooked sweet rice with almond milk and cinnamon. At night, after they tied up, her father made a meal—most often a chicken and barley soup.

In the days spent in this routine, Otah had little to do besides watch the slow progress of trees moving past them, listen to the voices of the water and the oxen, and try to win over the daughter by telling jokes and singing with her or the boatman by asking him about life on the river and listening to his answers. By the time they reached the end of the last full day's journey, both boatman and child were comfortable with him. The boatman shared a bowl of plum wine with him after the other passengers had gone to sleep. They never mentioned the girl's mother, and Otah never asked.

The river journey ended at a low town larger than any Otah had seen since Yalakeht. It had wide, paved streets and houses as high as three stories that looked out across the river or into the branches of the pine forest that surrounded it. The wealth of the place was clear in its food, its buildings, the faces of its people. It was as if some nameless quarter of the cities of the Khaiem had been struck off and moved here, into the wilderness.

That the road to the Dai-kvo's village was well kept and broad didn't surprise him, but the discovery that—for a price higher than he wished to pay—he could hire a litter that would carry him the full day's steep, uphill journey and set him down at the door of the Dai-kvo's palaces did. He passed men in fine robes of wool and fur, envoys from the courts of the Khaiem or trading houses or other places, further away. Food stands at the roadside offered sumptuous fare at high prices for the great men who passed by or wheat gruel and chicken for the lower orders like himself.