He kissed her gently. It had been weeks, and he was surprised to find how much he’d missed the touch of her lips. Weeks of travel weariness slipped away, the deep unease loosened its hold on his chest, and he took comfort in her. He fell asleep with her arm over his body, her breath already soft and deep with sleep.
In the morning, he woke before she did, slipped out of the bed, and dressed quietly. The sun was not up, but the eastern sky had lightened and the morning birds were singing madly as he took himself across an ancient stone bridge into Udun.
A river city, Udun was laced with as many canals as roadways. Bridges humped up high enough for barges to pass beneath them, and the green water of the Qiit lapped at old stone steps that descended into the river mud. Otah stopped at a stall on the broad central plaza and traded two lengths of copper for a thick wedge of honey bread and a bowl of black, smoky tea. Around him, the city slowly came awake - the streets and canals filling with traders and merchants, beggars singing at the corners or in small rafts tied at the water’s edge, laborers hauling wagons along the wide flagstoned streets, and birds bright as shafts of sunlight - blue and red and yellow, green as grass, and pink as dawn. Udun was a city of birds, and their chatter and shriek and song filled the air as he ate.
The compound of House Siyanti was in the better part of the city, just downstream from the palaces, where the water was not yet fouled by the wastes of thirty thousand men and women and children. The red brick buildings rose up three stories high, and a private canal was filled with barges in the red and silver of the house. The stylized emblem of the sun and stars had been worked into the brick archway that led to the central courtyard, and Otah passed beneath it with a feeling like coming home.
Amiit Foss, the overseer for the house couriers, was in his offices, ordering around three apprentices with sharp words and insults, but no blows. Otah stepped in and took a pose of greeting.
‘Ah! The missing Itani. Did you know the word for half-wit in the tongue of the Empire was itani-nah?’
‘All respect, Amiit-cha, but no it wasn’t.’
The overseer grinned. One of the apprentices - a girl of perhaps thirteen summers - whispered something angrily, and the boy next to her giggled.
‘Fine,’ the overseer said. ‘You two. I need the ciphers rechecked on last week’s letters.’
‘But I wasn’t the one . . .’ the girl protested. The overseer took a pose that commanded her silence, and the pair, glowering at each other, stalked away.
‘I get them when they’re just growing old enough to flirt,’ Amiit said, sighing. ‘Come back to the meeting rooms. The journey took longer than I’d expected.’
‘There were some delays,’ Otah said as he followed the older man back. ‘Chaburi-Tan isn’t as tightly run as it was last time I was out there.’
‘No?’
‘There are refugees from the Westlands.’
‘There are always refugees from the Westlands.’
‘Not this many,’ Otah said. ‘There are rumors that the Khai Chaburi-Tan is going to restrict the number of Westlanders allowed on the island.’
Amiit paused, his hands on the carved wood door of the meeting rooms. Otah could almost see the implications of this thought working themselves out behind the overseer’s eyes. A moment later, Amiit looked up, raised his eyebrows in appreciation, and pushed the doors open.
Half the day was spent in the raw silk chairs of the meeting rooms while Amiit took Otah’s report and accepted the letters - sewn shut and written in cipher - that Otah had carried with him.
It had taken Otah some time to understand all that being a courier implied. When he had first arrived in Udun six years before, hungry, lost and half-haunted by the memories he carried with him, he had still believed that he would simply be carrying letters and small packages from one place to another, perhaps waiting for a response, and then taking those to where they were expected. It would have been as right to say that a farmer throws some seeds in the earth and returns a few months later to see what’s grown. He had been lucky. His ability to win friends easily had served him, and he had been instructed in what the couriers called the gentleman’s trade: how to gather information that might be of use to the house, how to read the activity of a street corner or market, and how to know from that the mood of a city. How to break ciphers and re-sew letters. How to appear to drink more wine than you actually did, and question travelers on the road without seeming to.
He understood now that the gentleman’s trade was one that asked a lifetime to truly master, and though he was still a journeyman, he had found a kind of joy in it. Amiit knew what his talents were, and chose assignments for him in which he could do well. And in return for the trust of the house and the esteem of his fellows, Otah did the best work he could, brokering information, speculation, gossip, and intrigue. He had traveled through the summer cities in the south, west to the plains and the cities that traded directly with the Westlands, up the eastern coasts where his knowledge of obscure east island tongues had served him well. By design or happy coincidence, he had never gone farther north than Yalakeht. He had not been called on to see the winter cities.
Until now.
‘There’s trouble in the north,’ Amiit said as he tucked the last of the opened letters into his sleeve.
‘I’d heard,’ Otah said. ‘The succession’s started in Machi.’
‘Amnat-Tan, Machi, Cetani. All of them have something brewing. You may need to get some heavier robes.’
‘I didn’t think House Siyanti had much trade there,’ Otah said, trying to keep the unease out of his voice.
‘We don’t. That doesn’t mean we never will. And take your time. There’s something I’m waiting for from the west. I won’t be sending you out for a month at least, so you can have some time to spend your money. Unless . . .’
The overseer’s eyes narrowed. His hands took a pose of query.
‘I just dislike the cold,’ Otah said, making a joke to cover his unease. ‘I grew up in Saraykeht. It seemed like water never froze there.’
‘It’s a hard life,’ Amiit said. ‘I can try to give the commissions to other men, if you’d prefer.’
And have them wonder why it was that I wouldn’t go, Otah thought. He took a pose of thanks that also implied rejection.
‘I’ll take what there is,’ he said. ‘And heavy wool robes besides.’
‘It really isn’t so bad up there in summer,’ Amiit said. ‘It’s the winters that break your stones.’
‘Then by all means, send someone else in the winter.’
They exchanged a few final pleasantries, and Otah left the name of Kiyan’s wayhouse as the place to send for him, if he was needed. He spent the afternoon in a teahouse at the edge of the warehouse district, talking with old acquaintances and trading news. He kept an ear out for word from Machi, but there was nothing fresh. The eldest son had been poisoned, and his remaining brothers had gone to ground. No one knew where they were nor which had begun the traditional struggle. There were only a few murmurs of the near-forgotten sixth son, but every time he heard his old name, it was like hearing a distant, threatening noise.
He returned to the wayhouse as darkness began to thicken the treetops and the streets fell into twilight, brooding. It wasn’t safe, of course, to take a commission in Machi, but neither could he safely refuse one. Not without a reason. He knew when gossip and speculation had grown hot enough to melt like sugar and stick. There would be a dozen reports of Otah Machi from all over the cities, and likely beyond as well. If even a suggestion was made that he was not who he presented himself to be, he ran the risk of being exposed, dragged into the constant, empty, vicious drama of succession. He would sacrifice quite a lot to keep that from happening. Going north, doing his work, and returning was what he would have done, had he been the man he claimed to be. And so perhaps it was the wiser strategy.
And also he wondered what sort of man his father was. What sort of man his brother had been. Whether his
mother had wept when she sent her boy away to the school where the excess sons of the high familes became poets or fell forever from grace.
As he entered the courtyard, his dark reverie was interrupted by laughter and music from the main hall, and the scent of roast pork and baked yams mixed with the pine resin. When he stepped in, Old Mani slapped an earthenware bowl of wine into his hands and steered him to a bench by the fire. There were a good number of travelers - merchants from the great cities, farmers from the low towns, travelers each with a story and a past and a tale to tell, if only they were asked the right questions in the right ways.
It was later, the warm air busy with conversation, that Otah caught sight of Kiyan across the wide hall. She had on a working woman’s robes, her hair tied back, but the expression on her face and the angle of her body spoke of a deep contentment and satisfaction. She knew her place was here, and she was proud of it.
Otah found himself suddenly stilled by a longing for her unlike the simple lust that he was accustomed to. He imagined himself feeling the same satisfaction that he saw in her. The same sense of having a place in the world. She turned to him as if he had spoken and tilted her head - not an actual formal pose, but nonetheless a question.
He smiled in reply. This that she offered was, he suspected, a life worth living.
Cehmai Tyan’s dreams, whenever the time came to renew his life’s struggle, took the same form. A normal dream - meaningless, strange, and trivial - would shift. Something small would happen that carried a weight of fear and dread out of all proportion. This time, he dreamt he was walking in a street fair, trying to find a stall with food he liked, when a young girl appeared at his side. As he saw her, his sleeping mind had already started to rebel. She held out her hand, the palm painted the green of summer grass, and he woke himself trying to scream.
Gasping as if he had run a race, he rose, pulled on the simple brown robes of a poet, and walked to the main room of the house. The worked stone walls seemed to glow with the morning light. The chill spring air fought with the warmth from the low fire in the grate. The thick rugs felt softer than grass against Cehmai’s bare feet. And the andat was waiting at the game table, the pieces already in place before it - black basalt and white marble. The line of white was already marred, one stone disk shifted forward into the field. Cehmai sat and met his opponent’s pale eyes. There was a pressure in his mind that felt the way a windstorm sounded.
‘Again?’ the poet asked.
Stone-Made-Soft nodded its broad head. Cehmai Tyan considered the board, recalled the binding - the translation that had brought the thing across from him out of formlessness - and pushed a black stone into the empty field of the board. The game began again.
The binding of Stone-Made-Soft had not been Cehmai’s work. It had been done generations earlier, by the poet Manat Doru. The game of stones had figured deeply in the symbolism of the binding - the fluid lines of play and the solidity of the stone markers. The competition between a spirit seeking its freedom and the poet holding it in place. Cehmai ran his fingertip along his edge of the board where Manat Doru’s had once touched it. He considered the advancing line of white stones and crafted his answering line of black, touching stones that long-dead men had held when they had played the same game against the thing that sat across from him now. And with every victory, the binding was renewed, the andat held more firmly in the world. It was an excellent strategy, in part because the binding had also made Stone-Made-Soft a terrible player.
The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. Stone-Made-Soft glowered down on its failing line.
‘You’re going to lose,’ Cehmai said.
‘I know,’ the andat replied. Its voice was a deep rumble, like a distant rockslide - another evocation of flowing stone. ‘Being doomed doesn’t take away from the dignity of the effort, though.’
‘Well said.’
The andat shrugged and smiled. ‘One can afford to be philosophical when losing means outliving one’s opponent. This particular game? You picked it. But there are others we play that I’m not quite so crippled at.’
‘I didn’t pick this game. I haven’t seen twenty summers, and you’ve seen more than two hundred. I wasn’t even a dirty thought in my grandfather’s head when you started playing this.’
The andat’s thick hands took a formal position of disagreement.
‘We have always been playing the same game, you and I. If you were someone else at the start, it’s your problem.’
They never started speaking until the game’s end was a forgone conclusion. That Stone-Made-Soft was willing to speak was as much a sign that this particular battle was drawing to its end as the silence in Cehmai’s mind. But the last piece had not yet been pushed when a pounding came on the door.
‘I know you’re in there! Wake up!’
Cehmai sighed at the familiar voice and rose. The andat brooded over the board, searching, the poet knew, for some way to win a lost game. He clapped a hand on the andat’s shoulder as he passed by it toward the door.
‘I won’t have it,’ the stout, red-cheeked man said when the opened door revealed him. He wore brilliant blue robes shot with rich yellow and a copper torc of office. Not for the first time, Cehmai thought Baarath would have been better placed in life as the overseer of a merchant house or farm than within the utkhaiem. ‘You poets think that because you have the andat, you have everything. Well, I’ve come to tell you it isn’t so.’
Cehmai took a pose of welcome and stepped back, allowing the man in.
‘I’ve been expecting you, Baarath. I don’t suppose you’ve brought any food with you?’
‘You have servants for that,’ Baarath said, striding into the wide room, taking in the shelves of books and scrolls and maps with his customary moment of lust. The andat looked up at him with its queer, slow smile, and then turned back to the board.
‘I don’t like having strange people wandering though my library,’ Baarath said.
‘Well, let’s hope our friend from the Dai-kvo won’t be strange.’
‘You are an annoying, contrary man. He’s going to come in here and root through the place. Some of those volumes are very old, you know. They won’t stand mishandling.’
‘Perhaps you should make copies of them.’
‘I am making copies. But it’s not a fast process, you know. It takes a great deal of time and patience. You can’t just grab some half-trained scribes off the street corners and set them to copying the great books of the Empire.’
‘You also can’t do the whole job by yourself, Baarath. No matter how much you want to.’
The librarian scowled at him, but there was a playfulness in the man’s eyes. The andat shifted a white marker forward and the noise in Cehmai’s head murmured. It had been a good move.
‘You hold an abstract thought in human form and make it play tricks, and you tell me what’s not possible? Please. I’ve come to offer a trade. If you’ll—’
‘Wait,’ Cehmai said.
‘If you’ll just—’
‘Baarath, you can be quiet or you can leave. I have to finish this.’
Stone-Made-Soft sighed as Cehmai took his seat again. The white stone had opened a line that had until now been closed. It wasn’t one he’d seen the andat play before, and Cehmai scowled. The game was still over, there was no way for the andat to clear his files and pour the white markers to their target squares before Cehmai’s dark stones had reached their goal. But it would be harder now than it had been before the librarian came. Cehmai played through the next five moves in his mind, his fingertips twitching. Then, decisively, he pushed the black marker forward that would block the andat’s fastest course.
‘Nice move,’ the librarian said.
‘What did you want with me? Could you just say it so I can refuse and get about my day?’
‘I was going to say that I will give this little poet-let of the Daikvo’s full access if you’ll let me include your collection here. It really makes m
ore sense to have all the books and scrolls cataloged together.’
Cehmai took a pose of thanks.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Now go away. I have to do this.’
‘Be reasonable! If I choose—’
‘First, you will give Maati Vaupathai full access because the Dai-kvo and the Khai Machi tell you to. You have nothing to bargain with. Second, I’m not the one who gave the orders, nor was I consulted on them. If you want barley, you don’t negotiate with a silversmith, do you? So don’t come here asking concessions for something that I’m not involved with.’
A flash of genuine hurt crossed Baarath’s face. Stone-Made-Soft touched a white marker, then pulled back its hand and sank into thought again. Baarath took a pose of apology, his stance icy with its formality.
‘Don’t,’ Cehmai said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a farmer’s wife about the thing, but you’ve come at a difficult time.’
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