He lowered himself to sit at the table where Otah's food lay abandoned.
There was a carafe of water and a porcelain bowl. As Otah sat, his boy
wet one of his sleeves and set about wiping the blood from around his
grin. Otah's first violent impulses to protect his son and punish his
assailant were disarmed by that smile. Not conquered, but disarmed.
"He and Ana-cha were haunting the path between the palaces and the
poet's house, just before the pond," Danat said. "We had words. He took
some exception to our demand that Ana-cha apologize. He suggested that I
should feel honored to have breathed the same air as his darling
chipmunk. Seriously, Papa. `Darling chipmunk."'
"It might be a Galtic endearment," he said, trying to match his son's
light tone.
Danat waved the thought away. It would be no more dignified, Otah
admitted to himself, because a whole culture said it. Danat went on.
"I said that my business wasn't with him, but with Ana-cha. He began
declaiming something in rhymed verse about him and his love being one
flesh. Ana-cha told him to stop, but he only started bellowing it."
"How did Ana-cha react?"
Danat's grin widened. Blood had pinked his teeth.
"She seemed a bit embarrassed. I began speaking to her as if he weren't
there. And ..."
Danat shrugged.
"He hit you?"
"I may have goaded him," Danat said. "A little."
Otah sat back, stunned. Danat raised his hands to a pose appropriate to
the announcement of victory in a game. Otah let himself smile too, but
there was a touch of melancholy behind it. His son was no longer the
ill, fragile child he'd known. That boy was gone. In his place was a
young man with the same instinct to rough-and-tumble as any number of
young men. The same as Otah had suffered once himself. It was so easy to
forget.
"I had the palace armsmen throw him in a cell," Danat said. "I've set a
guard on him in case anyone decides to defend my abused dignity by
killing him."
"Yes, that would complicate things," Otah agreed.
"Ana followed the whole way shrieking, but she was as angry at
Hanchat-cha as at me. Once I get to looking a bit less like an
apprentice showfighter's first night, I'm sending an invitation to
Ana-cha for a formal dinner at which we can further discuss her poor
treatment of our hospitality. And then I'm going to meet my new lover."
"Your new lover?"
"Shija Radaani has offered to play the role. I think she was flattered
to be asked. Issandra-cha is adamant that nothing makes a man worth
having like another woman smiling at him."
"Issandra-cha is a dangerous woman," Otah said.
"She is," Danat agreed.
They laughed together for a moment. Otah was the first to sober.
"Will it work, do you think?" he asked. "Can it be done?"
"Can I win Ana's heart and make her want what she's professed before
everyone of power in two empires that she hates?" Danat said. Saying it
that way, he sounded like his mother. "I don't know. And I can't say
what I feel about the way it's happening. I'm plotting against her. Her
own mother is plotting against her. I feel that I ought to disapprove.
That it isn't honest. And yet ..."
Danat shook his head. Otah took a querying pose.
"I'm enjoying myself," Danat said. "Whatever it says of me, I've been
struck bloody by a Galt boy, and I feel I've scored a point in some game.
"It's an important game."
Danat rose. He took a pose that promised his best effort, appropriate to
a junior competitor to his teacher, and left.
There had to be some way that he could aid in Danat's task, but for the
moment, he couldn't think what it might be. Perhaps if there was a way
to arrange some sort of isolation for the two. A journey, perhaps, to
Yalakeht. Or, no, there was the conspiracy with Obar State there that
still hadn't been rooted out. Well, Cetani, then. Something long and
arduous and cold by the time they got there. And without the bastard
who'd struck his son ...
Otah finished his fish and rice, lingering over a last bowl of wine and
looking out at the small garden. It was, he thought, the size of the
walled yard at the wayhouse Kiyan had owned before she became his first
and only wife and he became the Khai Machi. That little space of green
and white, of finches in the branches and voles scuttling in the low
grass, might have been the size of his life.
Until the Galts came and slaughtered them all with the rest of Udun.
And instead, he had the world, or most of it. And a son. And, however
little she liked it, a daughter. And Kiyan's ashes and his memory of
her. But it had been a pretty little garden.
Otah returned to the waiting supplicants with his mind moving in ten
different directions at once. He did his best to focus on the work
before him, but everything seemed trivial. No matter that men's fortunes
lay in his decision. No matter that he was the final appeal for justice,
or if not that, at least peace. Or mercy. Justice and peace and mercy
all seemed insignificant when held next to duty. His duty to Chaburi-Tan
and all the other cities, to Danat and Eiah and the shape of the future.
By the time the sun sank in the western hills, he had almost forgotten
Idaan.
His sister waited for him in the apartments Sinja had found for her. She
looked out of place among the sweeping arches and intricately carved
stonework. Her hands were thick and calloused, her face roughened by
sun. Some servant had arranged a robe for her, well-cut silk of green
and cream. He considered her dark eyes and calm, weighing expression. He
could not forget that she had killed men coldly, with calculation. But
then so had he.
"Idaan-cha," he said as she rose. Her hands took a pose of greeting
formal as court, but made awkward by decades without practice. Otah
returned it.
"You've made a decision," she said.
"Actually, no. I haven't. I hope to by this time tomorrow. I'd like you
to stay until then."
Idaan's eyes narrowed, her lips pressed thin. Otah fought the urge to
step back.
"Forgive me if it isn't my place to ask, Most High. But is there
something more important going on than Maati bringing back the andat?"
"There are a hundred things that are more certain," Otah said. "He may
manage it, but the chances are that he won't. Meantime, I know for
certain of three ... four other things that are happening that could
unmake the cities of the Khaiem. I don't have time to play in might be."
He'd meant to turn at the end of his pronouncement and walk from the
rooms. Her voice was cutting.
"So instead, you'll wait until is?" Idaan said. "Or is it only that you
have too many apples in the air, and you're only a middling juggler?"
"I'm not in the mood to be-"
"Dressed down by a woman who's only breathing because you've chosen to
let her? Listen to yourself. You sound like the villain from some
children's bedtime story."
"Idaan-cha," he said, and then found that he had nothing to follow it.
"I've come to tell you that your old friend and enemy is harnessing
gods, and not for your benefit. It's the most threatening thing I can
imagine happening. And what's your response? You knew. You've known for
years. What's more, knowing now that he's redoubling his efforts, you
can't be bothered even to consider the question until you've cleared
your sheet of audiences? I've held a thousand opinions of you over the
years, brother, but I never thought you were stupid."
Otah felt rage bloom in his chest, rising like a fiery wave, only to die
with the woman's next words.
"It's the guilt, isn't it?" she said. When he didn't answer at once, she
nodded to herself. "You aren't the only one that's done this, you know."
"Been Emperor? Are there others?"
"Betrayed the people you loved," she said. "Come. Sit down. I still have
a little tea."
Almost to his surprise, Otah walked forward, sitting on a divan while
the former exile poured pale green tea into two carved bone bowls.
"After you set me free, I spent years without sleeping through a full
night. I'd dream of the people I'd ... the people I was responsible for.
Our father. Adrah. Danat. You never knew Danat, did you?"
"I named my son for him," Otah said. Idaan smiled, but there was a
sorrow in her eyes.
"He'd have liked that, I think. Here. Choose a bowl. I'll drink first if
you'd like. I don't mind."
Otah drank. It was overbrewed and sweetened with honey; sweet and
bitter. Idaan sipped at hers.
"After you sent me away, there was a time I went about the business of
living with what I'd done by working myself like a war slave," she said.
"Sunrise to dark, I did whatever it was I was doing until I could fall
down at the end half-dead and too tired to dream."
"It doesn't sound pleasant," Otah said.
"I did a lot of good," Idaan said. "You wouldn't guess it, but I
organized a constabulary through half of the low towns in the north. I
was actually a judge for a few years, if you'll picture that. I found
that meting out justice wasn't something I felt suited for, but I kept a
few murderers and rapists from making a habit of it. I made a few places
safer. I wasn't utterly ineffective, even though half the time I was too
tired to focus my eyes.
"And you think I'm doing the same thing?" Otah said. "You don't
understand what it is to be an emperor. All respect for whatever you did
after Machi, but I have hundreds of thousands of people relying upon me.
The politics of empire aren't like a few low towns organizing to keep
the local thugs in line."
"You also have a thousand servants," she said. "Dozens of high fami lies
who would do your bidding just for the status that comes from being
asked. Tell me, why did you go to Galt yourself? You have men and women
who'd have been ambassador for you."
"It needed me," Otah said. "If it had been someone lower, it wouldn't
have carried the weight."
"Ah, I see," she said. She sounded less than persuaded.
"Besides which, I don't have anything to feel guilt over."
"You broke the world," she said. "You ordered Maati and Cehmai to bind
that andat, and when it went feral on them and shredded every womb in
the cities, my own included, you threw your poets into the wind. Men who
trusted you and sacrificed for you. You became the heroic figure that
bound the cities together, and they became outcasts."
"Is that how you see it?"
Idaan put her bowl down softly on the stone table. Her black eyes held
his. She had a long face. Northern, like his own. He remembered that of
all the children of the old Khai Machi, he and Idaan had shared a mother.
"It doesn't matter how I see it," she said. "My opinion doesn't make the
world. Or unmake it. All that matters is what it actually is. So, tell
me, Most High, am I right?"
Otah shook his head and rose, leaving his tea bowl beside hers.
"You don't know me, Idaan-cha. We've spoken to each other fewer times
than I have fingers. I don't think you're in a position to judge my
motives."
"Yours, no," she said. "But I've made the mistakes you're making now.
And I know why I did."
"We aren't the same person."
She smiled now, her gaze cast down and her hands in a pose that accepted
correction and apologized for her transgression without making it clear
what transgression she meant.
"Of course not," she said. "I'll stay through tomorrow, Most High. In
case you come to a decision that I might be able to aid you with."
Otah left with the uncomfortable impression that his sister pitied him.
He made his way back to his apartments, ate half of the meal the
servants brought him, and refused the singers and musicians whose only
function in the world was to wait upon his whim. Instead, he took a
chair out to his balcony and sat in the starlight, looking south to the sea.
Thin clouds streaked the high air, and the ocean was a vast darkness.
The city that spilled down the hills before him glittered brighter than
the stars; torches and lanterns, candles and firekeepers' kilns. The
breeze smelled of smoke and salt and the lush flowers of early autumn.
He closed his eyes.