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 Mach] 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 hoard. 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 StoneMade-Soft a terrible player.
The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. StoneMade-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-checked man said when the opened door
revealed him. He wore brilliant blue robes shot with rich yellow and a
copper tore 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, l
et'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 hooks
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
Dai-kvo's full access if you'll let me include your collection here. It
really makes more 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 he a farmer's wife
about the thing, but you've come at a difficult time."
"Of course. This children's game upon which all our fates depend. No,
no. Stay. I'll see myself out."
"We can talk later," Cehmai said to the librarian's hack.
The door closed and left Cchmai and his captive, or his ward, or his
other self, alone together.
"He isn't a very good man," Stone-Made-Soft rumbled.
"No, he's not," Cehmai agreed. "But friendship falls where it falls. And
may the gods keep us from a world where only the people who deserve love
get it."
"Well said," the andat replied, and pushed forward the white stone
Cehmai knew it would.
The game ended quickly after that. Cehmai ate a breakfast of roast lamb
and boiled eggs while Stone-Made-Soft put away the game pieces and then
sat, warming its huge hands by the fire. There was a long day before
them, and after the morning's struggle, Cchmai was dreading it. They
were promised to go to the potter's works before midday. A load of
granite had come from the quarries and required his services before it
could be shaped into the bowls and vases for which Machi was famed.
After midday, he was needed for a meeting with the engineers to consider
the plans for House Pirnat's silver mine. The Khai Machi's engi neers
were concerned, he knew, that using the andat to soften the stone around
a newfound seam of ore would weaken the structure of the mine. House
Pirnat's overseer thought it worth the risk. It would be like sitting in
a child's garden during a mud fight, but it had to be done. Just
thinking of it made him tired.
"You could tell them I'd nearly won," the andat said. "Say you were too
shaken to appear."
"Yes, because my life would be so much better if they were all afraid of
turning into a second Saraykeht."
"I'm only saying that you have options," the andat replied, smiling into
the fire.
The poet's house was set apart from the palaces of the Khai and the
compounds of the utkhaiem. It was a broad, low building with thick stone
walls nestled behind a small and artificial wood of sculpted oaks. The
snows of winter had been reduced to gray-white mounds and frozen pools
in the deep shadows where sunlight would not touch them. Cehmai and the
andat strode west, toward the palaces and the Great "rower, tallest of
all the inhuman buildings of Machi. It was a relief to walk along
streets in sunlight rather than the deep network of tunnels to which the
city resorted when the drifts were too high to allow even the snow doors
to open. Brief days, and cold profound enough to crack stone, were the
hallmarks of the Machi winter. The terrible urge to he out in the
gardens and streets marked her spring. The men and women Cehmai passed
were all dressed in warm robes, but their faces were bare and their
heads uncovered. The pair paused by a firekeeper at his kiln. A singing
slave stood near enough to warm her hands at the fire as she filled the
air with traditional songs. The palaces of the Khai loomed before
them-huge and gray with roofs pitched sharp as axe blades-and the city
and the daylight stood at their backs, tempting as sugar ghosts on
Candles Night.
"It isn't too late," the andat murmured. "Manat Doru used to do it all
the time. He'd send a note to the Khai claiming that the weight of
holding me was too heavy, and that he required his rest. We would go
down to a little teahouse by the river that had sweetcakes that they
cooked in oil and covered with sugar so fine it hung in the air if you
blew on it."
"You're lying to me," Cehmai said.
"No," the andat said. "No, it's truth. It made the Khai quite angry
sometimes, but what was he to do?"
The singing slave smiled and took a pose of greeting to them that Cehmai
returned.
"We could stop by the spring gardens that Idaan frequents. If she were
free she might be persuaded to join us," the andat said.
"And why would the daughter of the Khai tempt me more than sweetcakes?"
"She's well-read and quick in her mind," the andat said, as if the
question had been genuine. "You find her pleasant to look at, I know.
And her demeanor is often just slightly
inappropriate. If memory serves,
that might outweigh even sweetcakes."
Cehmai shifted his weight from foot to foot, then, with a commanding
gesture, stopped a servant boy. The boy, seeing who he was, fell into a
pose of greeting so formal it approached obeisance.
"I need you to carry a message for one. To the Master of'I'ides."
"Yes, Cehmai-cha," the boy said.
"Tell him I have had a bout with the andat this morning, and find myself
too fatigued to conduct business. And tell him that I will reach him on
the morrow if I feel well enough."
The poet fished through his sleeves, pulled out his money pouch and took
out a length of silver. The boy's eyes widened, and his small hand
reached out toward it. Cehmai drew it back, and the boy's dark eyes
fixed on his.
"If he asks," Cehmai said, "you tell him I looked quite ill."
The boy nodded vigorously, and Cehmai pressed the silver length into his
palm. Whatever errand the boy had been on was forgotten. He vanished
into the austere gloom of the palaces.
"You're corrupting me," Cehmai said as he turned away.
"Constant struggle is the price of power," the andat said, its voice
utterly devoid of humor. "It must be a terrible burden for you. Now
let's see if we can find the girl and those sweetcakes."
"They tell me you knew my son," the Khai Machi said. The grayness of his
skin and yellow in his long, hound hair were signs of something more
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