“Who is that?” Mahit whispered to Three Seagrass.
“Fourteen Spire,” Three Seagrass said. “She’s exquisitely dull in her basic competence and always has been. She’s never won anything before.”
Nine Maize’s face was impassive. Mahit couldn’t tell if he was pleased to be so obviously snubbed or angry about it; whether he’d meant to ruin the evening so firmly. Fourteen Spire prostrated herself before the Emperor and received a blown-glass flower as her prize. Got up again. The assembled courtiers managed to shout her name, and Mahit joined in—it would have been stranger not to.
“Are you going to finish the drink?” asked Three Seagrass when the noise had died away.
“Yes. Why?”
“Because I am going to have to talk about Fourteen Spire’s use of assonance for the rest of the evening, and you’re going to have to listen, and we should both be slightly more inebriated.”
“Oh,” said Mahit. “When you put it like that.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
SIX OUTREACHING PALMS (TEIXCALAAN HIGH COMMAND) to FLEET CAPTAIN THREE SUMAC, 249.3.11-SIX DIRECTION, code 19 (TOP SECRET): Prepare for immediate withdrawal of Battle Groups Eight through Thirteen of the Twenty-Sixth Legion from active engagement in Odile. Battle Group Nine will remain in place under the command of ikantlos Eighteen Turbine. Proceed immediately with Groups Eight through Thirteen to the following coordinates to rendezvous with the rest of the Third Imperial Fleet and prepare for imminent jumpgate travel toward the Parzrawantlak Sector. Expedite. MESSAGE ENDS. COORDINATES FOLLOW.
Lsel Station thanks you for your interest in serving our people in our deepest tradition: movement through space. We of the Pilots’ Guild are proud to welcome prospective pilots to this informational session. This pamphlet summarizes how to adequately prepare for application to the Pilots’ Guild during the period approaching aptitude testing. Prospective candidates should keep in mind the following requirements: mathematical preparation in classical and quantum physics, basic chemistry, engineering; physical condition rated Excellent-2 with capacity to reach Excellent-4 in hand-eye coordination; high scores on aptitudes in spatial awareness and proprioception; high scores on aptitudes in group cohesion as well as independent initiative …
SOMEWHERE in the middle of her third glass of the pale spirit Three Seagrass kept bringing her (Three Seagrass herself was drinking something milky-white that she called ahachotiya, which Mahit was convinced meant “spoilt burst fruit”—at least from her understanding of the roots of the unfamiliar word—and couldn’t quite figure out why it was in any way desirable to consume, let alone consume multiple instances of), Mahit found herself standing on the edge of a circle of Teixcalaanlitzlim, watching them have what she could only describe as not a poetry contest but a battle of wits conducted entirely in extemporaneous verse. It had begun as a sort of game: one of Three Seagrass’s evanescently clever friends took up the last line of Fourteen Spire’s dull and prize-winning poem, said “Let’s play, shall we?” and proceeded to use that last line as her first one, composing a quatrain that shifted the rhythm from the standard fifteen-syllable political verse form to something that was absolutely stuffed full of dactyls. And then she’d pointed her chin at another one of Three Seagrass’s friends, in challenge—and he took her last line, and apparently came up with a perfectly acceptable quatrain on his own, with no preparatory time. Mahit caught a few of his references: he was imitating the style of a poet she’d read, Thirteen Penknife, who used the same vowel-sound pattern repeated on either side of a caesura.
Imitating Thirteen Penknife seemed to be the order of the day, after that—Three Seagrass took a turn, and then another woman, and then a Teixcalaanlitzlim of a gender Mahit didn’t recognize, and then it was back to the initial challenger—who changed the game again, adding another element: now each quatrain had to start with the last line of the previous one, be in dactylic verse with a vowel-repeated caesura, and be on the subject of repairs made to City infrastructure.
Three Seagrass was annoyingly good at describing repairs to City infrastructure. She was lucid even through many glasses of ahachotiya, laughing, saying lines like the grout seal around the reflecting pool / lapped smooth and clear-white by the tongues of a thousand Teixcalaanli feet / nevertheless frays granular and impermanent / and will be spoken again, remade in the image / of one department or another / clamoring, and Mahit knew two things: first, that if she wanted to take a turn at this game, all she needed to do was step forward into the circle, and someone would challenge her, same as any other Teixcalaanlitzlim—and second, that she would fail at it completely. There was no way she could do this. She’d spent half her life studying Teixcalaanli literature and she was just barely good enough to follow this game, recognize a few of the referents. If she tried herself she’d—oh, they wouldn’t laugh. They’d be indulgent. Indulgent of the poor, ignorant barbarian playing so hard at civilization and—
Three Seagrass wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to her.
Mahit slipped back, away from the circle of clever young people, and made herself disappear into the great ballroom under the glittering starlit fan-vaults, and tried not to feel like she was going to cry. There wasn’t any point in crying over this. If she wanted to weep she should weep for Yskandr, or for how much political trouble she was in, not over being unable to describe pool grout while referencing a centuries-old poem on departmental conflict. One department or another, clamoring. She’d read that poem in one of her collections, on the Station, and thought she’d understood. She hadn’t.
The hall was still packed with inebriated courtiers; there seemed, if anything, to be more of them than before, a secondary tier of people who had come for the party now that the Emperor and his oration contest had finished—Six Direction himself was nowhere to be seen, and Mahit was glad of that. Glad, because he was hard to look at without wanting to go near. Glad, because he’d been so fragile, under all that power, and some part of her which she assumed was mostly Yskandr wanted him to be able to rest, and not waste time on entertaining this mess of shimmering Teixcalaanlitzlim. She got herself another drink (one more was not going to make a difference at this point, and she’d figured out how to avoid any of the ones that tasted of violets or milk-rotted flowers), and struck out across the floor.
Most people avoided her, or greeted her with the formality her office deserved, and that was absolutely fine. That was actually pleasant. She could do courtesy ritual, even without Yskandr’s help, and she could be personable—these were all amongst her talents, these were the talents she had been specifically selected for, possessed aptitude in, and no Lsel imago-compatibility test ever looked for fluid improvisational verse. That was just a barbarian child’s dream of a desire.