“For all I know,” Tatiseigi said, “they crossed the corner of Kadigidi land and headed for the high hills.”
Not impossible. But dangerous. Deadly dangerous.
“Excuse a question, nandi.” Bren felt he needed to ask. “Have there been planes up?”
“Not over Atageini land, we assure you! Noisy contraptions. Not over our land.”
So they could not track Tabini by that means, not close at hand, and that might have let him get into the hills—or even circle back into Taiben. He might have been there, and the people of Taiben would not have betrayed his presence, not until he had given personal consent, which their hasty passage might not have allowed.
It might be wise for Ilisidi and Cajeiri to set up here and let Tabini come to them, if he could—if they could keep the peace with Uncle Tatiseigi in the meanwhile. But there might be lives already at risk on the coast. A counter-revolution would be a delicate thing, easily crushed, unless something busied the Kadigidi very quickly, and stirred up maximum trouble.
The paidhi, in that regard, had a job to do. He had to overcome the Kadigidi arguments, had to prove that Tabini was not wrong to have relied on his advice. And if he could not convince this old man, who had accepted him under his roof, he had no chance at all in places where he might be less favorably regarded.
“One wishes cautiously to advance a plan of action, nandiin.” Bren’s throat constricted unexpectedly, and his hands sweated. “I feel I should not impose my presence here overlong. That I should go to the capital, to the Guild, to present the case for our mission, to say what we have found, to justify my advice to the aiji, which it seems I must do.”
“Suicide,” Ilisidi said sharply.
“Is there a justification for bad advice?” Tatiseigi retorted. “Is there any justification for this overthrow of kabiu, this intrusion of belching machines and smoke into our skies? Is there any justification for this general corruption of our traditions, setting our young people grasping after human toys, is there any justification for television and rushing across the country in an afternoon, scaring the game and ruining perfectly good land with racketing airports?”
There it was in a nutshell. Justifiable, considering all that atevi had already let slip, precariously close to forgetting certain imperatives. For a moment he saw no argument on his side at all. What had been done in the heavens, humans could have done.
He could have done. If he ever could have gotten into space without atevi industry behind him, and could not have had that without Tabini’s strong backing, and that had been the beginning of all the changes, and the present trouble.
There was a chain of justification. Difficult as it was, the reasons were unavoidable, if egocentric—because there was no one but a person skilled in cross-species logic who could have seen the problem.
And it had taken a seven-year-old atevi prince to make the kyo believe their intentions.
“With the aiji-dowager’s leave,” he began, “I do wish to justify it, sir, and beg your indulgence to begin under this roof.”
“No,” Ilisidi said sharply. “You will never convince him. He is set against it. He is convinced I have lost my senses and soared off to the heavens with my great-grandson, intending to corrupt him and turn him human.”
“Well?” Tatiseigi asked, with a jut of that Atageini jaw. “And you bring him back here with two ragamuffins from Taiben, no less—Taiben! No doubt they have poached in our woods, and now eye the household silver.”
“I am Ragi,” Cajeiri’s higher voice said, “and you are my great-great-uncle, and great-grandmother is Malguri! And you should not speak badly of my father and my mother!”
There was a small, shocked silence.
“The world is changing,” Ilisidi said. “Living things do change, Tati-ji. Even the hills change. Kabiu itself moves slowly, but it does move, as the very earth moves. Baji-naji. There is always room to flex, or a thing breaks, Tati-ji.”
Around the flank and uncomfortably up from behind. Tatiseigi looked disquieted, and very much out of sorts.
“Look at this boy,” Ilisidi said, “half Atageini, and tell me there is no connection. He has your jaw, Tati-ji.”
“Clearly!”
Ilisidi took up her napkin. “We shall discuss this without the boy.”
“To be sure.” Tatiseigi was still irate, but the thunder and the fury sank, a temporary lull, like a pause in a storm that had only had its initial run. “To be sure. Take the paidhi with you.”
Tatiseigi laid aside his own napkin. Breakfast was over. There were courtesies, bows, as they rose. Bren had the notion he had just been in a war, and wished only to clear the area without complete disaster.
“Nand’ Bren,” Cajeiri said, and fixed him with an eye-level stare. That was all he said, just an acknowledgement of his presence, and the boy’s disquiet, perhaps, at certain transactions.
“Nandi,” he said, and let everyone including Tatiseigi precede him off the balcony, back into the hall. He was cold, chilled through. He was always cold at these open-air breakfasts. He walked out to collect his bodyguard and retraced his steps with them through the halls, with every confidence that they had heard everything that passed out there… staff on the next floor might have heard a good part of it.
Upstairs, then, and behind their own doors, where Tano and Algini had kept things safe and secure.
“It did not go well, nadiin-ji,” he said, “but it was not disastrous. No one was assassinated.”
Banichi thought it funny. He was less sure. His efforts to persuade Tatiseigi had gotten him nowhere, Ilisidi had some agenda of her own, or Tatiseigi had, and the boy, defending him, had annoyed the old man… all of which was predictable, now that he thought about it. He should not be glum about the situation—raw fear might be appropriate, but glumness was hardly warranted, when his companions had behaved exactly as they might be expected to behave.
Which argued, perhaps, that going into a critical debate with Cajeiri at hand was not the best choice.
Wind blew through open windows, wind stirring the gauzy inner draperies, and carrying all the scents of the earth.
He had had a night’s sleep, even a decent night’s sleep. But when he tried to think about what to say to Lord Tatiseigi, if he could get a quiet meeting, it completely refused to take shape in his brain, as if that was not what he ought to be thinking about, as if the whole world was pulling at his sleeve, wanting his attention, refusing to deal logically, or at least, refusing to deal in human logic. He wanted to throw himself into bed, pull the covers up around his ears and lie there getting warm and digesting a too-large breakfast—desire for the tastes had led him to overindulge, and he had eaten to appear uninvolved while the barbs flew—but the desire for sleep was not a desire for sleep. He knew himself, that the instant his head hit the pillows he would start processing the things he had heard, sifting them for every nuance, regretting things not said, and things said. It was his job to parse such things: something in what the dowager and Tatiseigi had said, or something he had picked up elsewhere this morning or last night, had begun to make a nest in his subconscious. If he went to bed, he would have to undress, to save the clothes; if he delayed to undress, he might lose the thought. And right now the safest place for him was a large, well-padded chair in the sitting area, and not letting those subconscious thoughts surface and distract him from what he, dammit, needed to think about. It could be as foreign to the problem as a remembrance of something Barb had said. He began to wonder if it was something he had eaten or drunk, the somnolence was so urgent, so absolutely pressing.
He sat, finding warmth in the well-padded chair, attempted to distract himself with a view of the land and sky outside, all veiled in blowing gauze, but he kept seeing the metal and plastics of the ship. He kept thinking of Jase, who had a food-short population on his hands, and tanks to get into operation, and who would have loved half of the breakfast he had just had. Of Barb. Of Toby, at the wheel of his boat. Crack of sails in a stiff breeze.