An Autumn War(13)

Dread touched Otah's belly, and a moment's resentment. It had been such a long day, and here waiting for him like a stalking cat was another problem, another need he was expected to meet. The thought must have expressed itself in his body, because Kiyan sighed and rolled just slightly away.

"You think it's wrong of me," Kiyan said.

"Not wrong," Otah said. "Unnecessary isn't wrong."

"I know. At her age, you were living on the streets in the summer cities, stealing pigeons off firekeeper's kilns and sleeping in alleys. And you came through just fine."

"Oh," Otah said. "Have I told that story already?"

"Once or twice," she said, laughing gently. "It's just that she seems so distant. I think there's something bothering her that she won't say. And then I wonder whether it's only that she won't say it to me."

"And why would she talk to me if she won't she talk to you?"

When he felt Kiyan shrug, Otah opened his eyes and rolled to his side. "There were tears shining in his lover's eyes, but her expression was more amused than sorrowful. He touched her cheek with his fingertips, and she kissed his palm absently.

"1 don't know. Because you're her father, and I'm only her mother? It was just ... a hope. The problem is that she's half a woman," Kiyan said. "When the sun's up, I know that. I remember when I was that age. My father had me running half of his wayhouse, or that's how it felt back then. Up before the clients, cooking sausages and barley. Cleaning the rooms during the day. He and Old Mani would take care of the evenings, though. They wanted to sell as much wine as they could, but they didn't want a girl my age around drunken travelers. I thought they were being so unfair."

Kiyan pursed her lips.

"But maybe I've told that story already," she said.

"Once or twice," Otah agreed.

"There was a time I didn't worry about the whole world and everything in it, you know. I remember that there was. It doesn't make sense to me. One had season, an illness, a fire-anything, really, and I could have lost the wayhouse. But now here I am, highest of the Khaiem, a whole city that will bend itself in half to hand me whatever it thinks I want, and the world seems more fragile."

"We got old," Otah said. "It's always the ones who've seen the most who think the world's on the edge of collapse, isn't it? And we've seen more than most."

Kiyan shook her head.

"It's more than that. Losing a wayhouse would have made the world harder for me and Old Mani. There are more people than I can count here in the city, and all the low towns. And you carry them. It makes it matter more."

"I sit through days of ceremony and let myself be hectored over the things I don't do the way other people prefer," Otah said. "I'm not sure that anything I've done here has actually made any difference at all. If they stuffed a robe with cotton and posed the sleeves ..."

"You care about them," Kiyan said.

"I don't," he said. "I care about you and Eiah and I)anat. And Maati. I know that I'm supposed to care about everyone and everything in Machi, but love, I'm only a man. "l'hey can tell me I gave tip my own name when I took the chair, but really the Khai Machi is only what I do. I wouldn't keep the work if I could find a way out."

Kiyan embraced him with one arm. Her hair was fragrant with lavender oil.

"You're sweet," she said.

"Am I? I'll try to confess my incompetence and selfishness more often."

"As long as it includes me," she said. "Now go let those poor men change your clothes and get hack to beds of their own."

The servants had become accustomed to the Khai's preference for brief ablutions. Otah knew that his own father had managed somehow to enjoy the ceremony of being dressed and bathed by others. But his father had been raised to take the chair, had followed the traditions and forms of etiquette, and had never that Otah knew stepped outside the role he'd been horn to. Otah himself had been turned out, and the years he had spent being a simple, free man, reliant upon himself had ruined him for the fawning of the court. He endured the daily frivolity of having foods brought to him, his hands cleaned for him, his hair combed on his behalf. He allowed the body servants to pull off his formal robes and swathe him in a sleeping shift, and when he returned to his bed, Kiyan's breath was already deep, slow, and heavy. He slipped in beside her, pulling the blankets up over himself, and closed his eyes at last.

Sleep, however, did not come. His body ached, his eyes were tired, but it seemed that the moment he laid his head back, Utah's mind woke. I Ic listened to the sounds of the palace in night: the almost silent wind through a distant window, the deep and subtle ticking of cooling stone, the breath of the woman at his side. Beyond the doors to the apartments, someone coughed-one of the servants set to watch over the Khai Machi in case there was anything he should desire in the night. Utah tried not to move.