The Price Of Spring (6 page)

Ten bindings, ending in ten failures and ten corpses. His fallen soldiers, Maati thought. His girls who had sacrificed themselves. And here, wet as a canal rat and sad to her bones, Vanjit impatient to make her own try, risk her own life. Maati took her small hand in his own. The girl smiled at the wall.

"This will happen," he said.

"I know it," she said, her voice soft. "It's just so hard to wait when the dream keeps coming."

Maati sat with her for a moment, only the tapping of raindrops and the songs of birds between them. He stood, fished the chalk from his sleeve, and went back to the wall.

"If you'd like, you could light a fire in the office grate," Maati said. "We could surprise the others with some fresh tea."

It wasn't called for, but it gave the girl something to do. He squinted at the figure he'd drawn until the lines came into focus. Ah, yes. Four categories of being.

The rain slackened as the others arrived. Large Kae checked the coverings over the windows, careful that no stray light betray their presence, as Irit fluttered sparrowlike lighting the lanterns. Small Kae and Ashti Beg adjusted the seats and benches, the younger woman's light voice contrasting with her elder's dry one.

The scents of wood smoke and tea made their warehouse classroom seem less furtive. Vanjit poured bowls for each of his students as they took their places. The soft light darkened the stone so that the chalk marks almost seemed written on air. Maati took a moment to himself to think of his teachers, of their lectures. He willed himself to become one of their number.

"The world," Maati began, "has two essential structures. There's the physical"-he slapped the stone wall behind him-"and there's the abstract. Two and two are always four, regardless of whether you're talking about grains of sand or racing camels. Twelve could always be broken into two sets of six or three sets of four long before anybody noticed the fact. Abstract structure, you see?"

They bent toward him like flowers toward the sun. Maati saw the hunger in their faces and the set of their shoulders.

"Now," Maati said. "Does the physical require the abstract? Come on. Think! Can you have something physical that doesn't have abstract structure?"

There was a moment's silence.

"Water?" Small Kae asked. "Because if you put two drops of water together with two drops of water, you just get one big drop."

"You're ahead of yourself," Maati said. "That's called the doctrine of least similarity. You're not ready for that. What I mean is this: is there anything real that can't be described by its abstract structure? Any of you? No one has a thought about this? I answered that one correctly before I'd seen ten summers."

"No?" suggested Irit.

"No. How many of you think she's right? Go on! Take a stand about it one way or the other! Good. Yes. Irit's right," Maati said and spat at the floor by his feet. "Everything physical has abstract structure, but not everything abstract need be physical. That's what we're doing here. That's the asymmetry that lets the andat exist."

In all their faces, turned to his, there was the same expression. Hunger, he thought, or desperation. Or longing halfway forged into something stronger. It gave him hope.

After the lecture, he made them run through grammar exercises, and then, as the moon rose and the lanterns smoked and the rats came out to chuff and chitter at them from the shadows, they considered the failed bindings of the women who had gone before them. Slowly, they were developing a sense of what it was to capture an andat, to take a thought and translate it into a different form. To give it volition and a human shape. To keep the binding present in your mind for the rest of your life, holding the spirit back from its natural state of nothingness like holding a stone over a well: slip once, and it is gone. Maati could see the knowledge growing in the set of their poses and hear it in the questions they asked. He had almost reached the end of his night's plan when the small door to the street flew open again.

Eiah strode in, her breath labored. She wore a drab cloak over a silk robe rich with all the colors of sunset. The others fell silent. Maati, standing before a wall now covered in white, ghostly notations and graphs, took a pose that expressed his alarm and asked the cause of hers.

"Uncle Maati," she said between gasps, "there's news from Galt. My father."

Maati shifted toward several poses at once, managing none of them. Eiah's expression was grim.

"That's all for tonight," he said. "Come back tomorrow."

He had intended to assign exercises, translation puzzles for them to work in their time away from class. He abandoned the idea and shooed them out the door. All of them left except Eiah, sitting on a low chair in the warehouse office, her face lit by the shifting flames in the grate.

The letters had arrived by fast courier. Against all expectation, the Emperor's benighted mission to Galt had borne fruit. Danat was to be married to a daughter of the Galtic High Council. Terms were being arranged for the transport of a thousand Galtic women of childbearing age to the cities of the Khaiem. Applications would be taken for a thousand men to leave their lives among the cities of the Khaiem and move to Galt. It was, Eiah said, intended to be the first exchange of many.

There were protests and anger in only a few cities. Nantani and Yalakeht, hit hard by the war, were sending petitions of condemnation. In the low towns, the anger burned brighter. Galt was still the enemy, and there were rumors of plots to kill whomever of them dared set foot on Khaiate soil: talk and rumor, drunken rhetoric likely to come to nothing.

The greater mass of the utkhaiem were already gathering their best robes and most garish jewelry in preparation for the journey south to Saraykeht to greet the returning fleet and see this Galtic girl who would one day be Empress. Maati listened to it all, his frown deepening until his mouth began to ache.

"It doesn't change anything," he said. "Otah can sell us to our enemies if he wants. It doesn't affect our work here. Once we have the grammar worked through and the andat back in the world-"

"It changes everything," Eiah said. "Danat is marrying a Galt. The utkhaiem are either going to line up like sailors at a comfort house to follow the example or resist and restart a war we'll never win. Or worse, both. Perhaps he'll divide the utkhaiem so deeply that we turn on each other."

Maati took the tea from the fire and filled his bowl. It was bitter and overbrewed and scalded his tongue. He drank it anyway. Eiah was looking at him, waiting for him to speak. The fire danced over the graying lumps of coal.

"The women's grammar won't matter if the world's already passed us by," Eiah said softly. "If it takes us five more years to capture an andat, there will already be a half-Galt child on its way to becoming Emperor. There will already be half-Galt children born to every family with any power, anywhere in the cities. Will an andat undo that? Will an andat unmake the love these fathers feel for their new children?"

If it's the right one, yes, Maati thought but didn't say. He only stared down into his bowl of tea, watching the dark leaves staining its depth.

"He is remaking the world without us," Eiah went on. "He's giving his official seal to the thought that if a woman can't bear a child, she doesn't matter. He's doing the wrong thing, and once a wound has healed badly, Uncle, it's twice as hard to put right."

Everything she said made sense. The longer it took to bring back the andat, the harder it would be to repair the damage he'd done. And if the world had changed past recognition before his work was complete, he wasn't sure what meaning the effort would have. His jaw ached, and he realized he'd been clenching it.

"So what then?" Maati said, taking a pose that made his words a challenge. "What do you want me to do I'm not doing already?"

Eiah sat back, her head in her hands. She looked like Otah when she did it. It was always unnerving when he caught a glimpse of her father in her. He knew what she would say before she spoke. It was, after all, what she'd been steering him toward from the conversation's start. It was the subject they had been arguing for months.

"Let me try my binding," Eiah said. "You've seen my outlines. You know the structure's sound. If I can capture Returning-to-NaturalEquilibrium ..."

She let the words trail away. Returning-to-NaturalEquilibrium, called 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.

"Maaticha?"

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?