"… power over us. It isn't right, it isn't fair, and I will not simper and smile and lick her ass because she happened to be the one to go first!"
"Enough!" Maati said. "Enough, all of you. Gods. Gods. Vanjit. Come with me."
The girl looked over as if noticing him for the first time. The rage in her expression faltered. Her hands were shaking. Eiah stepped forward, keeping herself between Ashti Beg and her prey as Vanjit walked across the room.
"Eiah, see to Ashti-cha," Maati said, taking Vanjit's wrist. "The rest of you, clean this mess. I'd rather not eat food prepared in a child's playpen."
He turned away, pulling Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight after him. The andat was silent now. Maati crossed the hallway and started down a flight of stone stairs that led to the sleeping rooms for the younger cohorts. The voices of the others rose behind them and faded. He wasn't certain where he was taking her until he reached the branching hall that led to the slate-paved rooms where the teachers had once disciplined boys with the cutting slash of a lacquered rod. He stopped in the hallway instead, putting the reflexive impulse to violence aside. Vanjit bowed her head.
"I would like an explanation of that," he said, his voice shaking with anger.
"It was Ashti Beg," Vanjit said. "She can't contain her jealousy any longer, Maati-kvo. I have tried to give her the time and consideration, but she won't understand. I am a poet now. I have an andat to care for. I can't be expected to work and toil like a servant."
The andat twisted in her grasp, looking up at Maati with tears in its black eyes. The tiny, toothless mouth gaped in what would have been distress if it had been a baby.
"Tell me," Maati said. "Tell me what happened."
"Ashti Beg said that I had to clean the pots from breakfast. Irit offered to, but Ashti wouldn't even let her finish her sentences. I explained that I couldn't. I was very calm. I am patient with her, Maati-kvo. I'm always very patient."
"What happened?" Maati insisted.
"She tried to take him," Vanjit said. Her voice had changed. The pleading tone was gone. Her words could have been shaved from ice. "She said that she could look after him as well as anyone, and that I was more than welcome to have him back once the kitchen had been cleaned."
Maati closed his eyes.
"She put her hands on him," Vanjit said. In her voice, it sounded like a violation. Perhaps it was.
"And what did you do," Maati asked, though he knew the answer.
"What you told me," Vanjit said. "What you said about Wounded."
"Which was?" he said. Clarity-of-Sight gurgled and swung its thick arms at Vanjit's ears, its dumb show of fear and distress forgotten.
"You said that Eiah-cha couldn't make an andat based on things being as they're meant to, because the andat aren't meant to be bound. It's not their nature. You said she had to bind Wounded and then withdraw it from all the women who still can't bear babes. And so we withdrew from Ashti Beg."
The andat cooed. It might have been Maati's imagination, but the thing seemed proud. Clarity-of-Sight. And so also Blindness.
The warmth that bloomed in his breast, the tightening of his jaw, the near-unconscious shaking of his head. They were not anger so much as a bone-deep impatience.
"It is manipulating you," he said. "We've talked about this from the beginning. The andat wants its freedom. Whatever else it is, it will always struggle to be free. It has been courting Ashti Beg and the others for days to precipitate exactly this. You have to know yourself better than it does. You have to behave like a grown woman, not a selfrighteous child."
"But she-"
Maati put two fingers against the girl's lips. The andat was silent now, staring at him with silent anger.
"You have been entrusted with a power beyond any living person," Maati said, his tone harsher than he'd intended. "You are responsible for that power. You understand me? Responsible. I have tried to make you see that, but now I think I've failed. Poets aren't simply men… or women… who have a particular profession. We aren't like sailors or cabinetmakers or armsmen. Holding the andat is like holding small gods, and there is a price you pay for that. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes, Maati-kvo," Vanjit whispered.
"I doubt that," he said. "After what I've seen today, I very much doubt it.
She was weeping silently. Maati opened his mouth, some cutting comment ready to humiliate her further, and stopped. For a moment, he was a boy again, in this same hallway. He could feel the thin robes and the winter cold, and the tears on his own cheeks as the older boys mocked him or Tahi-kvo-bald, cruel Tahi-kvo, who had later become the Dai- kvo-beat him. He wondered if this fear and rage had been what drove his teachers back then, or if it had been something colder.
"Fix it," Maati said. "Put Ashti Beg back as she was, and never, never use the andat for petty infighting again."
"No, Maati-kvo."
"And wash the pots when your turn comes."
Vanjit took a pose that was a promise and an expression of gratitude. The quiet sobs as she walked away made Maati feel smaller. If they had been in a city, he would have gone to a bathhouse or some public square, listened to beggars singing on the corners and bought food from the carts. He would have tried to lose himself for a while, perhaps in wine, perhaps in music, rarely in gambling, and never in sex. At the school, there was no escape. He walked out, leaving the stone walls and memories behind him. Then the gardens. The low hills that haunted the land west of the buildings.
He sat on the wind-paved hillside, marking the passage of the sun across the afternoon sky, his mind tugged a hundred different ways. He had been too harsh with Vanjit, or not harsh enough. The binding of Wounded was overworked or not deeply enough considered, doomed or on the edge of being perfected. Ashti Beg had been in the wrong or justified or both. He closed his eyes and let the sunlight beat down on them, turning the world to red.
In time, the turmoil in his heart calmed. A small, blue-tailed lizard scrambled past him. He had chased lizards like it when he'd been a boy. He hadn't recalled that in years.
It was folly to think of poets as different from other men. Other women, now that Vanjit had proved their grammar effective. It was that mistake which had made the school what it was, which had deformed the lives of so many people, his own included. Of course Vanjit was still subject to petty jealousy and pride. Of course she would need to learn wisdom, just the same as anyone else. The andat had never changed who someone was, only what they could do.
He should have taught them that along with all the rest. Every now and again, he could have spent an evening talking about what power was, and what responsibility it carried. He'd never thought to do it, he now realized, because when he imagined a woman wielding the power of the andat, that woman was always Eiah.
Maati made his way back as the cold afternoon breeze set the trees and bushes rustling. He found the kitchen empty but immaculate. The broken cutting stone had been replaced with a length of polished wood, but otherwise everything was as it had been. His students, he found under Eiah's command in the courtyard. They were raking the fallen leaves into a pit for burning and resetting a half-dozen flagstones that had broken from years of frost, tree roots, and neglect. Vanjit knelt with Large Kae, lifting the stones from the ground. Clarity-of-Sight nestled in Irit's lap, its eyes closed and its mouth a perfect O. Ashti Beg, her vision clearly restored, was by Small Kae's side, a deep pile of russet leaves before them.
"Maati-kvo," Eiah said, taking a pose of greeting, which he returned. The others acknowledged him with a smile or simple pose. Vanjit turned away quickly, as if afraid to see anger still in his expression.