The Price Of Spring(9)

Maati took the tea from the fire and filled his bowl. It was bitter and overbrewed and scalded his tongue. He drank it anyway. Eiah was looking at him, waiting for him to speak. The fire danced over the graying lumps of coal.

"The women's grammar won't matter if the world's already passed us by," Eiah said softly. "If it takes us five more years to capture an andat, there will already be a half-Galt child on its way to becoming Emperor. There will already be half-Galt children born to every family with any power, anywhere in the cities. Will an andat undo that? Will an andat unmake the love these fathers feel for their new children?"

If it's the right one, yes, Maati thought but didn't say. He only stared down into his bowl of tea, watching the dark leaves staining its depth.

"He is remaking the world without us," Eiah went on. "He's giving his official seal to the thought that if a woman can't bear a child, she doesn't matter. He's doing the wrong thing, and once a wound has healed badly, Uncle, it's twice as hard to put right."

Everything she said made sense. The longer it took to bring back the andat, the harder it would be to repair the damage he'd done. And if the world had changed past recognition before his work was complete, he wasn't sure what meaning the effort would have. His jaw ached, and he realized he'd been clenching it.

"So what then?" Maati said, taking a pose that made his words a challenge. "What do you want me to do I'm not doing already?"

Eiah sat back, her head in her hands. She looked like Otah when she did it. It was always unnerving when he caught a glimpse of her father in her. He knew what she would say before she spoke. It was, after all, what she'd been steering him toward from the conversation's start. It was the subject they had been arguing for months.

"Let me try my binding," Eiah said. "You've seen my outlines. You know the structure's sound. If I can capture Returning-to-NaturalEquilibrium ..."

She let the words trail away. Returning-to-NaturalEquilibrium, called Healing.

"I don't know that," Maati said, half-ashamed by the peevishness in his voice. "I only said that I didn't see a flaw in them. I never said there wasn't one, only that I couldn't see it. And besides which, it might be too near something that's been done before. I won't lose you because some minor poet in the Second Empire bound Making-Things-Right or Fix-the-Broken or some idiotically broad concept like that."

"Even if they did, they hadn't trained as physicians. I know how flesh works in ways they wouldn't have. I can bring things back the way they're meant to be. The women that Sterile broke, I can make whole again. If we could only-"

"You're too important."

Eiah went silent. When she spoke again, her voice was heavy and bitter.

"You know you've just called all the others unimportant," Eiah said.

"Not unimportant," Maati said. "They're all important. They only aren't all irreplaceable. Wait, Eiah-kya. Be patient. Once we have a grammar that we know can work, I won't stop you. But let someone else be first."

"There isn't time," Eiah said. "We have a handful of months before the trade starts in earnest. Maybe a year."

"Then we'll find a way to move them faster," Maati said.

The question of how that might be done, however, haunted him the rest of the night. He lay on his cot, the night candle hissing almost inaudibly and casting its misty light on the stone ceiling. The women, his students, had all retired to what quarters Eiah had quietly arranged for them. Eiah herself had gone back to the palaces of the Emperor, the great structures dedicated to Otah, while Maati lay in the near-dark under a warehouse, sleep eluding him and his mind gnawing at questions of time.

Maati's father had died younger than he was now. Maati had been an aspiring poet at the village of the Dai-kvo at the time. When the word came, he had not seen the man in something near a decade. The news had stung less than he would have anticipated, not a fresh loss so much as the reminder of one already suffered. A slowing of blood had taken the man, the message said, and Maati had never looked into the matter more deeply. Lately he'd found himself wondering whether his father had done all that he'd wished, if the son he'd given over to the poets had made him proud, what regrets had marked that last illness.

The candle had almost burned itself to nothing when he gave up any hope of sleep. Outside, songbirds were greeting the still-invisible dawn, but Maati took no joy in them. He lit a fresh candle and sat on the smooth-worn stone steps and considered the small wooden box that carried the only two irreplaceable things he owned. One was a painting he had done from memory of Nayiit Chokavi, the son he should have had, the child he had helped, however briefly, to raise, the boy whom Otah-Otah to whom no rules applied-had brought into the world in Saraykeht and taken out of it in Machi. The other was a book bound in black leather.