A Shadow In Summer(67)

"I should go," Amat said.

Maj didn't turn. Amat rose, the chair creaking and groaning. She took her cane.

"When I call for you, will you come?"

The silence was thick. Amat's impulse was to speak again, to make her case. To beg if she needed to, but her training from years of negotiations was to wait. The silence demanded an answer more eloquently than words could. When Maj spoke, her voice was hard.

"I'll come."

SARAYKEHT RECEDED. The wide mouth of the seafront thinned; wharves wide enough to hold ten men standing abreast narrowed to twigs. Otah sat at the back rail of the ship, aware of the swell and drop of the water, the rich scent of the spray, but concentrating upon the city falling away behind him. He could take it all in at once: the palaces of the Khai on the top of the northern slope grayed by distance; the tall, white warehouses with their heavy red and gray tiles near the seafront; the calm, respectable morning face of the soft quarter. Coast fishermen resting atop poles outside the city, lines cast into the surf. They passed east. The rivermouth, wide and muddy, and the cane fields. And then over the course of half a hand, the wind pressing the wide, low ship's sails took them around a bend in the land, and Saraykeht was gone. Otah rested his chin on the oily wood of the railing.

They were all back there—Liat and Maati and Kirath and Tuui and Epani who everyone called the cicada behind his back. The streets he'd carted bales of cotton and cloth and barrels of dye and the teahouses he'd sung and drunk in. The garden where he'd first kissed Liat and been surprised and pleased to find her kissing him back. The firekeeper, least of the utkhaiem, who'd taken copper lengths to let him and his cohort roast pigeons over his kiln. He remembered when he'd first come to it, how foreign and frightening it had been. It seemed a lifetime ago.

And before him was a deeper past. He had never been to the villiage of the Dai-kvo, never seen the libraries or heard the songs that were only ever sung there. It was what he might have been, what he had refused. It was what his father had hoped he would be, perhaps. How he might have returned to Machi one day and seen which of his memories were true. He hadn't known, that day marching away from the school, that the price he'd chosen was so dear.

"I hate this part," an unfamiliar voice said.

Otah looked up. The man standing beside him wore robes of deep green. A beard shot with white belied an unlined, youthful face, and the bright, black eyes seemed amused but not unfriendly.

"What do you mean?" Otah asked.

"The first three or four days on shipboard," the man said. "Before your stomach gets the rhythm of it. I have these drops of sugared tar that are supposed to help, but they never seem to. It doesn't seem to bother you, though, eh?"

"Not particularly," Otah said, adopting one of his charming smiles.

"You're lucky. My name's Orai Vaukheter," the man said. "Courier of House Siyanti bound at present from Chaburitan to Machi—longest damn trip in the cities, and timed to put me on muleback in the north just in time for the first snows. And you? I don't think I've met you, and I'd have guessed I knew everyone."

"Itani Noyga," Otah said, the lie still coming naturally to his lips. "Going to Yalakeht to visit my sister."

"Ah. But from Saraykeht?"

Otah took a pose of acknowledgment.

"Rumor has it's difficult times there. Probably a good time to get out."

"Oh, I'll be going back. It's just to see the new baby, and then I'll be going back to finish my indenture."

"And the girl?"

"What girl?"

"The one you were thinking about just now, before I interrupted you."

Otah laughed and took a pose of query.

"And how are you sure I was thinking about a girl?"

The man leaned against the railing and looked out. His smile was quick enough, but his complexion was a little green.

"There's a certain kind of melancholy a man gets the first time he chooses a ship over a woman. It fades with time. It never passes, but it fades."

"Very poetic," Otah said, and changed the subject. "You're going to Machi?"

"Yes. The winter cities. Funny, too. I'm looking forward to it now, because it's all stone and doesn't bob around like a cork in a bath. When I get there, I'll wish I were back here where my piss won't freeze before it hits the ground. Have you been to the north?"

"No," Otah said. "I've spent most of my life in Saraykeht. What's it like there?"

"Cold," the man said. "Blasted cold. But it's lovely in a stern way. The mines are how they make their trade. The mines and the metalworkers. And the stonemasons who built the place—gods, there's not another city like Machi in the world. The towers . . . you've heard about the towers?"