The Price Of Spring (32 page)

"I agree," Maati said as she ended, then plucked his sleeves back into their proper place. "Do you think ..."

"Before Candles Night, certainly," Eiah said. "But there is going to be a complication. We have to leave the school. Utani would be best, but Pathai would do if that's impossible. You and I can leave in the morning, and the others can join us."

Maati chuckled.

"Eiah-kya," he said. "You've apologized for letting Ashti Beg go. I understand why you did it, but there's nothing to be concerned about. Even if she did tell someone that we're out here, Vanjit could turn Clarityof-Sight against them, and we could all walk quietly away. The power of the andat-"

"Your heart is failing," Eiah said. "I don't have the herbs or the baths to care for you here."

She said it simply, her voice flat with exhaustion. Maati felt the smile fading from his lips. He saw tears beginning to glimmer in her eyes, the drops unfallen but threatening. He took a pose that denied her.

"Your color is bad," she said. "Your pulses aren't symmetric. Your blood is thick and dark. This is what I do, Uncle. I find people who are sick, and I look at the signs, and I think about them and their bodies. I look at you, here, now, and I see a man whose blood is slow and growing slower."

"You're imagining things," Maati said. "I'm fine. I only haven't slept well. I would never have guessed that you of all people would mistake a little lost rest for a weak heart."

"I'm not-"

"I am fine!" Maati shouted, pounding the arm of the chair. "And we cannot afford to run off into the teeth of winter. You aren't a physician any longer. That's behind you. You are a poet. You are the poet who's going to save the cities."

She took his hand in both of hers. For a moment, there was no sound but the low murmur of the fire and the nearly inaudible sound of her palm stroking the back of his hand. One of the threatened tears fell, streaking her cheek black. He hadn't realized she wore kohl.

"You," he said softly, "are the most important poet there is. The most important one there ever was."

"I'm just one woman," Eiah said. "I'm doing the best I can, but I'm tired. And the world keeps getting darker around me. If I can't take care of everything, at least let me take care of you."

"I will be fine," Maati said. "I'm not young anymore, but I'm a long way from death. We'll finish your binding, and then if you want to haul me to half the baths in the Empire, I'll submit."

Another tear marked her face. Maati took his sleeve and wiped her cheek dry.

"I'll be fine," he said. "I'll rest more if you like. I'll pretend my bones are made of mud brick and glass. But you can't stop now to concern yourself with me. Those people out there. They're the ones who need your care. Not me."

"Let me go to Pathai," she said. "I can get teas there."

"No," Maati said. "I won't do that."

"Let me send Large Kae, then. I can't stand by and do nothing."

"All right," Maati said, holding up a placating hand. "All right. Let's wait until morning, and we can talk to Large Kae. And perhaps you'll see that I'm only tired and we can move past this."

She left in the end without being convinced. As darkness fell, Maati found himself slipping into a soft despair. The world was quiet and still and utterly unaware of him.

His son was dead. The people he had counted as his friends had become his enemies, and he was among the most despised men in the world. Eiah was wrong, of course. His health was fine. But someday, it would fail. All men died, and most were forgotten. The few that the world remembered were not always celebrated.

He lit the night candle by holding it to the fire, the wax hissing where it dripped on the coals. He found his book and settled close to the fire grate before opening the cover and considering the words.

I, Maati Vaupathai, am one of the two men remaining in the world who has wielded the power of the andat.

Already, it was not true. There were three living poets now, and one of them a woman. Between the time he had touched a pen to this page and this moment, reading it in the early night, the world had moved on. He wondered how much of the rest was already old, already the property of a past that could never be regained. He read slowly, tracing the path his own mind had taken. The candle lent the pages an orange glow, the ink seeming to retreat into the pages, as if they were much larger and much farther away. The fire warmed his ankles and turned strong, solid wood into ashes softer than snow.

He was surprised to see the anger and bitterness in the book. There was a thread, he thought, of hatred in these words. He didn't think he'd meant it to be there, and yet sitting alone with his slowing blood, it could not be denied. Hatred of Otah and the Galts, of course, but also of Cehmai. Of Liat, whom he mentioned more frequently than he remembered and in terms that he knew she didn't deserve. Hatred toward the gods and the world. And thus, he had to think, toward himself. Before he reached the last page, Maati was weeping quietly.

He found an ink brick and a fresh pen, lit all the lanterns and candles he could find, and sat at his desk. He drew a line across the middle of the last page, marking a change in the book and in himself that he could not yet describe. He freshened the ink and did not know precisely what he intended to write until the nib touched the page, tracing out letters with a sound as dry and quiet as a lizard on stones.

If it were within my power, I would begin again. I would begin as a boy again, and live my life a different way. I have been told tonight that my heart is growing weak. Looking back upon the man I have been until now, I think it always has been. I think it was shattered one time too many and put back without all the shards in place.

And, though I think this is the cry of a coward, I do not want to die. I want to see the world made right. I want to live that long, at least.

He paused, looking at the words where they grew fainter, the ink running thin.

He found Eiah asleep on her cot, still wearing the robes she'd worn all day. Her door stood ajar, and his scratch woke her.

"Uncle," she said, yawning. "What's happened? Is something wrong?"

"You're certain. What you said about my blood. You're sure."

"Yes," she said. There was no hesitation in her.

"Perhaps," he said, then coughed. "Perhaps we should go to Utani."

Tears came to her eyes again, but with them a smile. The first true smile he'd seen from her since her journey to the low town. Since Vanjit's blinding of the Galts.

"Thank you, Uncle," she said.

In the morning, the others were shocked, and yet before the sun broke through the midday clouds, the cart was loaded with food and books, wax tables and wineskins. The horses were fitted with their leads and burdens, and all six of the travelers, seven if he counted Clarityof-Sight, were wrapped in warm robes and ready for the road. The only delay was Irit scrambling back at the last moment to find some small, forgotten token.

Maati pulled himself deep into the enfolding wool as the cart shifted under him, and the low buildings with snow on the roofs and the cracks between stones receded. His breath plumed before him, rubbing out the division between sky and snow.

Vanjit sat beside him, the andat wrapped in her cloak. Her expression was blank. Dark smudges of fatigue marked her eyes, and the andat squirmed and fussed. The wide wheels tossed bits of hard-packed snow up into the cart, and Maati brushed them away idly. It would be an hour or more to the high road, and then perhaps a day before they turned into the network of tracks and roads that connected the low towns that would take them to the grand palaces of Utani, center of the Empire. Maati found himself wondering whether Otahkvo would have returned there, to sit on the goldworked seat. Or perhaps he would still be in Saraykeht, scheming to haul countless thousands of blinded women from Kirinton, Acton, and Marsh.

He tried to picture his old friend and enemy, but he could conjure only a sense of his presence. Otah's face escaped him, but it had been a decade and a half since they had seen each other. All memory faded, he supposed. Everything, eventually, passed into the white veil and was forgotten.

The snow made roadway and meadow identical, so the first bend in the road was marked by a stand of thin trees and a low ridge of stone. Maati watched the dark buildings vanish behind the hillside. It was unlikely that he would ever see them again. But he would carry his memories of the warmth of the kitchens, the laughter of women, the first binding done by a woman, and the proof that his new grammar would function. Better that than the death house it had been when the Galts had come down this same road, murder in their minds. Or the mourning chambers for boys without families before that.

Vanjit shuddered. Her face was paler. Maati freed his hands and took a pose that expressed concern and offered comfort. Vanjit shook her head.

"He's never been away," she said. "He's leaving home for the first time."

"It can be frightening," Maati said. "It will pass."

"No. Worse, really. He's happy. He's very happy to be leaving," Vanjit said. Her voice was low and exhausted. "All the things we said about the struggle to hold them. It's all truth. I can feel him in the back of my mind. He never stops pushing."

"It's the nature of the andat," Maati said. "If you'd like, we can talk about ways to make bearing the burden easier."

Vanjit looked away. Her lips were pale.

"No," she said. "We'll be fine. It's only a harder day than usual. We'll find another place, and see you cared for, and then all will be well. But when the time comes to bind Wounded, there are things I'll do differently."

"We can hope it never comes to that," Maati said.

Vanjit shifted, her eyes widening for a moment, and the soft, almost flirting smile came to her lips.

"Of course not," she said. "Of course it won't. Eiahcha will be fine. I was only thinking aloud. It was nothing."

Maati nodded and lay back. His thick robes cushioned the bare wood of the cart's side. Crates and chests groaned and shifted against their ropes. Small Kae and Irit began singing, and the others slowly joined them. All of them except Vanjit and himself. He let his eyes close to slits, watching Vanjit from between the distorting bars of his eyelashes.

The andat squirmed again, howled out once, and her face went hard and still. She glanced over at Maati, but he feigned sleep. The others, involved in their song and the road, didn't see it when she pulled Clarityof-Sight from her cloak, staring at it. The tiny arms flailed, the soft legs whirled. The andat made a low, angry sound, and Vanjit's expression hardened.

She shook the thing once, hard enough to make the oversized head snap back. The tiny mouth set itself into a shocked grimace and it began to wail. Vanjit looked about, but no one had seen the small violence between them. She pulled the andat back to her, cooing and rocking slowly back and forth while it whimpered and fought. Desolate tears tracked her cheeks. And were wiped away with a sleeve.

Maati wondered how often scenes like this one had passed without comment or notice. Many years before, he had cared for an infant himself, and the frustration of it was something he understood. This was something different. He thought of what it would have been to have a child that hated him, that wanted nothing more than to be free. Clarity-ofSight was all the longing that haunted Vanjit and all the anger that sustained her put into a being that would do whatever was needed to escape. Vanjit had been betrayed by the cruelty of the world, and now also her own desire made flesh.

At last she had the baby that had haunted her dreams. And it wanted to die.

Eiah spoke in his memory. What makes its imagine we can do good with these as our tools?

Chapter 19

Low towns clustered around the great cities of the Khaiem, small centers of commerce and farming, justice and healing. Men and women could live out their lives under the nominal control of the Khaiem or now of the Emperor and never pass into the cities themselves. They had low courts, road taxes, smiths and stablers, wayhouses and comfort houses and common meadows for anyone's use. He had seen them all, years before, when he had only been a courier. They were the cities of the Khaiem writ small, and as he passed through them with his armsmen, his son, and the Galtic half-stowaway, Otah saw all his fears made real.

Silences lay where children should have been playing street games. Great swings made from rope and plank hung from ancient branches that shadowed the common fields, no boys daring each other higher. As a child who had seen no more than twelve summers, Otah had set out on his own, competing with low-town boys for small work. With every low town he entered, his eyes caught the sorts of things he had done: roofs with thatch that wanted care, fences and stone walls in need of mending, cisterns grown thick and black with weeds that required only a strong back and the energy of youth to repair. But there were no boys, no girls; only men and women whose smiles carried a bewildered, permanent sorrow. The leaves on the trees had turned brown and yellow and fallen. The nights were long, and the dawns touched by frost.

The land was dead. He had known it. Being reminded brought him no joy.

They stopped for the night in a wayhouse nestled in a wooded valley. The walls were kiln-fired brick with a thick covering of ivy that the autumn chill had turned brown and brittle. News of his identity and errand had spread before him like a wave on water, making quiet investigation impossible. The keeper had cleared all his rooms before they knew where they meant to stop, had his best calf killed and hot baths drawn on the chance that Otah might stop to rest. Sitting now in the alcove of a room large enough to fit a dozen men, Otah felt his muscles slowly and incompletely unknotting. With the supplies carried on the steam wagons and the men shifting between tending the kilns and riding, Pathai was less than two days away. Without the Galtic machines, it would have been four, perhaps five.