seafront laborer might offer another. Nayiit only looked shocked for a
moment, then clasped Otah's hand.
"Whenever they're too nervous to tell me what I'm doing wrong, you come
to me, Nayiit-cha. I haven't got many people I can trust to do that, and
I've left most of them hack in Mach 1.11
"If you'll promise not to have me whipped for impertinence," the boy said.
"I won't have you whipped, and I won't have you sent hack."
""I'hank you," Nayiit said, and again Otah was moved to see that the
gratitude was genuine. After Nayiit had gone, Otah was left with the
aches in his body and the unease that came with having a man with a wife
and child thank you for leading him toward the real chance of death. The
life of the Khai Machi, he thought, afforded very few opportunities to
he humbled, but this was one. When the attendant returned, Otah didn't
recognize the sound of his scratching until the man's voice came.
"Most High?"
"Yes, come in. And bring that ointment here. No, I can put it on myself.
But bring me the captains of the houses. I've decided to take a day to
rest and send the scouts ahead."
"Yes, Most High."
"And when you've done with that, there's a man named Saya. He's on foot.
A blacksmith from Machi, I think."
"Yes, Most High?"
"Ask him to join me for a howl of wine. I'd like to meet him."
MAA7'I WOKE TO FIND LIAT ALREADY GONE. HIS HAND TRACED THE INI)EN-
tation in the mattress at his side where she had slept. The world
outside his door was already bright and warm. The birds whose songs had
filled the air of spring were busy now teaching their hatchlings to fly.
The pale green of new leaves had deepened, the trees as rich with summer
as they would ever be. High summer had come. Maati rose from his bed
with a grunt and went about his morning ablutions.
The days since the ragged, improvised army of Machi began its march to
the east had been busy. The loss of Stone-Made-Soft would have sent the
court and the merchant houses scurrying like mice before a flood even if
nothing more had happened. Word of the other lost andat and of the
massed army of Galt made what in other days would have been a cataclysm
seem a side issue. For half a week, it seemed, the city had been
paralyzed. Not from fear, but from the simple and profound lack of any
ritual or ceremony that answered the situation. Then, first from the
merchant houses below and Kiyan-cha's women's ban- (lucts above and then
seemingly everywhere at once, the utkhaiem had flushed with action.
Often disorganized, often at crossed purpose, but determined and intent.
Nlaati's own efforts were no less than any others.
Still, he left it behind him now-the books stacked in distinct piles,
scrolls unfurled to particular passages as if waiting for the copyist's
attention-and walked instead through the wide, bright paths of the
palaces. "There were fewer singing slaves, more stretches where the
gravel of the path had scattered and not yet been raked back into place,
and the men and women of the utkhaiem who he passed seemed to carry
themselves with less than their full splendor. It was as if a terrible
wind had blown through a garden and disarrayed those blossoms it did not
destroy.
The path led into the shade of the false forest that separated the
poet's house from the palaces. "There were old trees among these, thick
trunks speaking of generations of human struggle and triumph and failure
since their first tentative seedling leaves had pushed away this soil.
Moss clothed the bark and scented the air with green. Birds fluttered
over Nlaati's head, and a squirrel scolded him as he passed. In winter,
with these oaks bare, you could see from the porch of the poet's house
out almost to the palaces. In summer, the house might have been in a
different city. The door of the poet's house was standing open, and
Maati didn't bother to scratch or knock.
Cehmai's quarters suffered the same marks as his own-books, scrolls,
codices, diagrams all laid out without respect to author or age or type
of binding. Cehmai, sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, held a
book open in his hand. With the brown robes of a poet loose around his
frame, he looked, Nlaati thought, like a young student puzzling over an
obscure translation. Cehmai looked up as Maati's shadow crossed him, and
smiled wearily.
"Have you eaten?" hlaati asked.
"Some bread. Some cheese," Cehmai said, gesturing to the back of the
house with his head. ""There's some left, if you'd like it."
It hadn't occurred to Maati just how hungry he was until he took up a
corner of the rich, sweet bread. He knew he'd had dinner the night
before, but he couldn't recall what it had been or when he'd eaten it.
He reached into a shallow ceramic howl of salted raisins. They tasted
rich and full as wine. Ile took a handful and sat on the chair beside
Cchmai to look over the assorted results of their labor.
"What's your thought?" Cehmai said.
"I've found more than I expected to," Nlaati said. "'T'here was a
section in Vautai's Fourth Meditations that actually clarified some
things I hadn't been certain of. If we were to put together all the
scraps and rags from all of the hooks and histories and scrolls, it
might be enough to support binding a fresh andat."
Cehmai sighed and closed the hook he'd been holding.
"That's near what I've come to," the younger poet agreed. Then he looked
up. "And how long do you think it would take to put those scraps and
rags into one coherent form?"
"So that it stood as a single work? I'm likely too old to start it,"
Maati said. "And without the full record from the Dai-kvo, there would
be no way to know whether a binding was dangerously near one that had
already been done."
"I hated those," Cehmai said.
"'They went hack to the beginning of the First Empire," Nlaati said.
"Some of the descriptions are so convoluted it takes reading them six
times to understand they're using fifty words to carry the meaning of
five. But they are complete, and that's the biggest gap in our resources."
Cehmai got to his feet with a grunt. Ilis hair was disheveled and there
were dark smudges under his eyes. Nlaati imagined he had some to match.
"So to sum up," Cehmai said, "if the Khai fails, we might be able to
hind a new andat in a generation or so."
"Unless we're unlucky and use some construct too much like something a
minor poet employed twenty generations back. In that case, we attempt