"Read it out loud."
Hezhi brushed her hair out of her face. She glanced toward Tsem, hoping for a little courage.
"Ah, let's see. 'Herein begins our—something—we undertake to—ah—something—the many divisions of the delta lands—ah— inundated—the many dams and levees—"
"Stop." Ghan reached over and took the book from her hands, gently closed it.
"I'm sorry," Hezhi whispered. "I just didn't know all of those characters."
Ghan sat back down on his stool. "I want to know how you know any of them."
"I have a few books."
"Do you? In the old script?"
"I have a copy of the Hymn to Bitter Lands."
"Who taught you to read it?"
"I also have a book about the old script."
Ghan crooked his mouth to one side. "You mean you taught yourself?"
"Yes."
"That would explain your awful pronunciation, wouldn't it?"
Hezhi felt herself near tears. "I didn't know my pronunciation was bad."
Ghan shrugged almost imperceptibly. "Why do you want to study here, Princess?"
"What else is there for me to do?"
"Go to parties. Court young men. You must nearly be a woman now."
"I don't like parties," she replied.
Ghan nodded. "Princess, let me tell you the truth. I'm a little impressed that you taught yourself this much of the ancient script. It shows that you have sense somewhere in that little head. It's not too rare for you royal brats to come in here and waste my time, to try to learn just enough to make sparkling conversation and impress the court. What is rare is a young woman who already knows how to read. If you were a man, Princess, I would not turn you away. I might teach you something. But you are not a man. In a year or two, you will be a woman, and you will marry some fair-faced fool, and he will not want you to be smarter than he is. Teaching you would be a waste of my time, and I have little enough time to waste."
Anger was lurking behind Hezhi's fear and intimidation, hidden like a cat. Now it sprang like a cat, suddenly and without warning. "I would not want to waste your time!" she snapped. "I don't care if you teach me anything. Just sit here with your stupid pen and your stupid ink, and I'll find whatever I need. I'll teach myself, like I always have. Just leave me alone and stay out of my way!"
Ghan shook his head. "One must be taught how to use a library, whether one can read or not. You want to know about architecture. Do you think the books that treat that subject are somehow going to leap out at you? You think we keep them all together?"
"I don't care! I'll find what I want!"
Ghan stared at her, and beneath his skeptical gaze, Hezhi felt her anger begin to retreat once more. Without its heat, it was difficult to withstand Ghan's scrutiny, but she forced herself to, even when her anger was stone cold and she became frightened at her own outburst. She wondered if she should add a "please?" to her last statement, but now her jaw seemed frozen in place.
Ghan nodded suddenly. "Very well. You will be very quiet. You will never speak to me. You will be very careful with my books, and the first time you tear one sheet of paper, I will send notice to your father and have you barred from this place. Do you understand these conditions, Princess?"
Hezhi nodded dumbly, at last letting her gaze stray to the richly embroidered carpet beneath her feet. "Yes, Ghan."
"Good." Ghan took his writing board back up into his lap, retrieved his parchment, brush, and ink. He did not look back up at her.
Her knees shaking a bit, Hezhi turned to confront the hundreds upon hundreds of shelves that seemed to lead back into infinite depths.
Like the darkness, she thought to herself. Two years ago, I stepped into real darkness for the first time, searching for D'en. Into the unknown.
Here I go again.
"Confusing," Hezhi told Tsem, as the wind fluttered the cottonwood leaves above their heads. "You could know exactly what you want and never find it. But I made progress, I think."
"What are you trying to find?" Tsem muttered, scratching at an ant bite on his hairy lower leg. Nearby, water gurgled in an alabaster fountain beneath a sky of lapis lazuli and gold. The roof garden of her mother's apartments was one of Hezhi's favorite places.
Hezhi snorted. "You know. Maps. Old maps, drawn before this city was built upon the flooded one. Maps I can use to figure out how to get to D'en other than by the Darkness Stair."
"If D'en is even…" Tsem cut that off; how many times in the past two years had they had this argument? The given was that Hezhi would assume D'en was alive until she had evidence that he was not.
But this time Hezhi's face clouded, not with anger, but with sorrow. "I… Tsem, I'm not sure I remember what he looked like any more. He had black hair like mine, and a little round face… Sometimes I wonder if it's even him I'm trying to find, now. But I loved him so much, Tsem. It seems like a long time ago, when I was very young…"
"You are still young, Princess," Tsem reminded her. "Master Ghan is right. You have other things you could be doing."
"Oh, yes," Hezhi responded sarcastically. "Important things. Like going to parties. Like meeting men."
"Qey thinks…"
"I know what Qey thinks, and so what? Anyway, I'm not old enough for men yet. I haven't started my bleeding."
Tsem suddenly grew a shade darker and turned his attention intently upon the fountain. Realizing she had embarrassed him, Hezhi stood and walked to the waist-high wall that encircled the rooftop garden. The city of Nhol stretched out before and around her, a bone metropolis shimmering in the westering light. Her mother's garden occupied the southern wing of the palace, and though the towers and ziggurats of the central halls soared high above her to the north, nothing obstructed her view to the west, south, or east; this rooftop was the highest on the wing.
Now Hezhi gazed off east. Behind the palace, gardens and vineyards rolled out green for a thousand paces before they were bounded by the wall. Beyond that, vast fields of millet and wheat checkered the floodplain in black fallow and viridian cultivation. Not far beyond them, Hezhi knew, the desert began, the vast waste her people called Hweghe, "The Killer."
Tracing her finger along the stuccoed wall, Hezhi walked south, gazed out at where the walls of the palace faded seamlessly into the city, a jumbled, chaotic tangle of streets, shops, and dwellings. Near the palace, these were of comfortable size, but they seemed to diminish with distance. Though Hezhi had never been into the city, it seemed difficult to believe that her eyes told the truth about the most distant—and most numerous— houses visible to her. It seemed that they were no larger than Qey's kitchen—perhaps smaller.
East and south lay the River. Before him loomed the Great Water Temple, a seven-tiered ziggurat that blazed white, gold, and bronze, from whose sides four streams of water constantly cascaded, drawn up from the River by his own will. The two waterfalls Hezhi could see glistened like silver and diamonds. The River himself, beyond, was nearly too wide to see across. He lay heavy and cobalt, massive, unmerciful, unstoppable. A thousand colored toys bobbed upon his back: her father's great trading barges, fishing boats, houseboats, the tiny craft that could hold only one or two people. Foreign ships, beautifully clean and graceful of line, swept along beneath billowing sails, coming and going from the Swamp Kingdoms and the seacoast beyond like so many swans. All on the River, trusting—no, praying—that he would not capriciously choose to swallow them. People loved the River, worshipped the River, but they did not really trust him. The River had taken people in from the Killer, saved them, made them his own. The people of Nhol had no other god but the River—and his manifestations, the nobility. Like her father, who was part god.