The Price of Spring

2

Ten years almost to the day before word of Otah's pact with the Galts reached him, Maati Vaupathai had learned of his son's death at the hands of Galtic soldiers. A fugitive only just abandoned by his only companion, he had made his way to the south like a wounded horse finding its way home. It had not been the city itself he had been looking for, but a woman.

Liat Chokavi, owner and overseer of House Kyaan, had received him. Twice, they had been lovers, once as children, and then again just before the war. She had told him of Nayiit's stand, of how he had been cut down protecting the Emperor's son, Danat, as the final assault on Machi began. She spoke with the chalky tones of a woman still in pain. If Maati had held hopes that his once-lover might take him in, they did not survive that conversation. He left her house in agony. He had not spoken to her since.

Two years after that, he took his first student, a woman named Halit. Since then, his life had become a narrow, focused thing. He had remade himself as a teacher, as an agent of hope, as the Dai-kvo of a new age.

It was less glamorous than it sounded.

All that morning he had lain in the small room that was presently his home, squinting at the dirty light that made its way through the oiledparchment window and thinking of the andat. Thinking of thoughts made flesh, of ideas given human form and volition. Little gods, held tight to existence by the poets who knew them best and, by knowing, bound them. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues, called Seedless. WaterMoving-Down, called Rain or Seaward. Stone-Made-Soft who had no other name. And his own-Corrupting-the-Generative, called Sterile, whom Maati had not quite bound, and who had remade the world.

The lessons he had learned as a boy, the conversations he had had as a man and a poet, they all came back to him dimly. Fragments and moments, insights but not all the steps that had led him there. A mosquito whined in the gloom, and Maati waved it away.

Teaching his girls was like telling the story of his life and finding there were holes in it. He knew things-structures of grammar and metaphor, anecdotes of long-dead poets and the bindings they had made, occult relationships between abstractions like shapes and numbers and the concrete things of the world-without remembering how he'd learned them. Every lecture he gave, he had to half-invent. Every question he answered, he had to solve in his mind to be sure. On one hand, it was as awkward as using a grand palace as a lesson on how to build scaffolding. And on the other, it was making him a better poet and a better teacher than he would ever have been otherwise.

He sat up, the canvas cot groaning as his weight shifted. The room was tiny and quiet; the stone walls wept and smelled of fungus. Halfaware of his surroundings and half in the fine points of ancient grammars, Maati rose and trundled up the short flight of stairs. The warehouse stood empty, the muted daylight and the sound of light rain making their way through the high, narrow windows. His footsteps echoed as he crossed to the makeshift lecture hall.

Benches of old, splintering wood squatted near a length of wall smooth enough to take chalk. The markings of the previous evening still shone white against the stone. Maati squinted at them.

Age was a thief. It took his wind, it made his heart race at odd times, and it stole his sleep. But the worst of all the little indignities was his sight. He hadn't thought about the blessing that decent vision was until his eyes started to fail. It made his head ache a bit, but he found the diagram he'd been thinking of, traced it with his fingertips, considered, and then took a rag from the pail of water beside his little podium and washed the marks away. He could start there tonight, with the four categories of being and their relationships. It was a subtle point, but without it, the girls would never build a decent binding.

There were five of them now: Irit, Ashti Beg, Vanjit, Small Kae, and Large Kae. Half a year ago, there had been seven, but Umnit had tried her binding, failed, and perished. Lisat had given up and left him. Just as well, really. Lisat had been a good-hearted girl, but slow-witted as a cow. And so, five. Or six, if he counted Eiah.

Eiah had been a gift from the gods. She spent her days in the palaces of Utani, playing the daughter of Empire. He knew it was a life she disliked, but she saw to it that food and money found their way to Maati. And being part of the court let her keep an ear out for gossip that would serve them, like a dispute over the ownership of a low-town warehouse that left both claimants barred from visiting the building until judgment was passed. The warehouse had been Maati's for two months now. It was beginning to feel like his own. He dropped the rag back into its pail, found the thick cube of chalk, and started drawing the charts for the evening's lecture. He wondered whether Eiah would be able to join them. She was a good student, when she could slip away from her life at the palace. She asked good questions.

The crude iron bolt turned with a sound like a dropped hammer, and the small, human-size door beside the great sliding walls intended for carts and wagons opened. A woman's figure was silhouetted against the soft gray light. It was neither of the Kaes, but his eyes weren't strong enough to make out features. When she came in, closing the door behind her, he recognized Vanjit by her gait.

"You're early, Vanjit-cha," Maati said, turning back to the wall and chalk.

"I thought I might be able to help," she said. "Are you well, Maaticha?"

Vanjit had been with him for almost a year now. She had come to his covert school, as all the others had, through a series of happy accidents. Another of his students-Umnit-had fallen into conversation with her, and something had sparked between them. Umnit had presented Vanjit as a candidate to join in their work. Reluctantly, Maati had accepted her.

The girl had a brilliant mind, no question. But she had been a child in Udun, the only one of her family to survive when the Galts had come, and the memory of that slaughter still touched her eyes from time to time. She might laugh and talk and make music, but she bore scars on her body and in her mind. In the months he had spent working with her, Maati had come to realize what had first unnerved him about the girl: of all the students he had taught, she was most like him.

He had lost his family in the war as well-his almost-son Nayiit, his lover Liat, and the man he had once thought his dearest friend. Otah, Emperor of the Khaiem. Otah, favored of the gods, who couldn't fall down without landing on rose petals. They had not all died, but they were all lost to him.

"Maati-cha?" Vanjit said. "Did I say something wrong?"

Maati blinked and took a pose of query.

"You looked angry," she said.

"Nothing," Maati said, shifting the chalk to his other hand and shaking the ache from his fingers. "Nothing, Vanjit-kya, my mind was just wandering. Come, sit. There's nothing that you need to do, but you can keep me company while I get ready."

She sat on the bench, one leg tucked under her. He noticed that her hair and robe were wet from the rain. There was mud on her boots. She'd been walking out in the weather. Maati hesitated, chalk halfway back to the stone.

"Or," he said slowly, "perhaps I should ask if you've been well?"

She smiled and took a pose that dismissed his concerns.

"Bad dream again," she said. "That's all."

"About the baby," Maati said.

"I could feel him inside of me," she said. "I could feel his heartbeat. It's strange. I hate dreaming about him. The nightmares that I'm back in the war-I may scream myself awake, but at least I'm pleased that the dream's ended. When I dream about him, I'm happy. I'm at peace. And then…"

She gestured at the childless world around them.

"It's worse, wishing I could sleep and dream and never awake."

Maati's heart rang in sympathy, like a crystal bowl taking up the ringing of a great bell. How many times had he dreamed that Nayiit lived? That the world had not been broken, or, if it had, not by him?

"We'll bring him," Maati said. "Have faith. Every week, we come closer. Once the grammar is built solidly enough, anything will be possible."

"Are we coming closer?" she asked. "Be honest, Maati-cha. Every week we spend on this, I think we're on the edge, and every week, there's more after it."

He tucked the chalk into his sleeve and sat at the girl's side. She leaned forward, and he thought there was something in her expressionnot despair and not shame, but something related to both.

"We are coming near, and we are close," he said. "I know it isn't something you can see, but each of you knows more about the andat and the bindings right now than I did after a year with the Dai-kvo. You're smart and dedicated and talented. And together, we can make this work. It sounds terrible, I know, but as soon as Siimat failed her binding and paid the price… I won't say I was pleased. I can't say that. She was a brave woman, and she had a wonderful mind. I miss her. But that she and all the others died means we are very close."

Ten bindings, ending in ten failures and ten corpses. His fallen soldiers, Maati thought. His girls who had sacrificed themselves. And here, wet as a canal rat and sad to her bones, Vanjit impatient to make her own try, risk her own life. Maati took her small hand in his own. The girl smiled at the wall.

"This will happen," he said.

"I know it," she said, her voice soft. "It's just so hard to wait when the dream keeps coming."

Maati sat with her for a moment, only the tapping of raindrops and the songs of birds between them. He stood, fished the chalk from his sleeve, and went back to the wall.

"If you'd like, you could light a fire in the office grate," Maati said. "We could surprise the others with some fresh tea."

It wasn't called for, but it gave the girl something to do. He squinted at the figure he'd drawn until the lines came into focus. Ah, yes. Four categories of being.

The rain slackened as the others arrived. Large Kae checked the coverings over the windows, careful that no stray light betray their presence, as Irit fluttered sparrowlike lighting the lanterns. Small Kae and Ashti Beg adjusted the seats and benches, the younger woman's light voice contrasting with her elder's dry one.

The scents of wood smoke and tea made their warehouse classroom seem less furtive. Vanjit poured bowls for each of his students as they took their places. The soft light darkened the stone so that the chalk marks almost seemed written on air. Maati took a moment to himself to think of his teachers, of their lectures. He willed himself to become one of their number.

"The world," Maati began, "has two essential structures. There's the physical"-he slapped the stone wall behind him-"and there's the abstract. Two and two are always four, regardless of whether you're talking about grains of sand or racing camels. Twelve could always be broken into two sets of six or three sets of four long before anybody noticed the fact. Abstract structure, you see?"

They bent toward him like flowers toward the sun. Maati saw the hunger in their faces and the set of their shoulders.

"Now," Maati said. "Does the physical require the abstract? Come on. Think! Can you have something physical that doesn't have abstract structure?"

There was a moment's silence.

"Water?" Small Kae asked. "Because if you put two drops of water together with two drops of water, you just get one big drop."

"You're ahead of yourself," Maati said. "That's called the doctrine of least similarity. You're not ready for that. What I mean is this: is there anything real that can't be described by its abstract structure? Any of you? No one has a thought about this? I answered that one correctly before I'd seen ten summers."

"No?" suggested Irit.

"No. How many of you think she's right? Go on! Take a stand about it one way or the other! Good. Yes. Irit's right," Maati said and spat at the floor by his feet. "Everything physical has abstract structure, but not everything abstract need be physical. That's what we're doing here. That's the asymmetry that lets the andat exist."

In all their faces, turned to his, there was the same expression. Hunger, he thought, or desperation. Or longing halfway forged into something stronger. It gave him hope.

After the lecture, he made them run through grammar exercises, and then, as the moon rose and the lanterns smoked and the rats came out to chuff and chitter at them from the shadows, they considered the failed bindings of the women who had gone before them. Slowly, they were developing a sense of what it was to capture an andat, to take a thought and translate it into a different form. To give it volition and a human shape. To keep the binding present in your mind for the rest of your life, holding the spirit back from its natural state of nothingness like holding a stone over a well: slip once, and it is gone. Maati could see the knowledge growing in the set of their poses and hear it in the questions they asked. He had almost reached the end of his night's plan when the small door to the street flew open again.

Eiah strode in, her breath labored. She wore a drab cloak over a silk robe rich with all the colors of sunset. The others fell silent. Maati, standing before a wall now covered in white, ghostly notations and graphs, took a pose that expressed his alarm and asked the cause of hers.

"Uncle Maati," she said between gasps, "there's news from Galt. My father."

Maati shifted toward several poses at once, managing none of them. Eiah's expression was grim.

"That's all for tonight," he said. "Come back tomorrow."

He had intended to assign exercises, translation puzzles for them to work in their time away from class. He abandoned the idea and shooed them out the door. All of them left except Eiah, sitting on a low chair in the warehouse office, her face lit by the shifting flames in the grate.

The letters had arrived by fast courier. Against all expectation, the Emperor's benighted mission to Galt had borne fruit. Danat was to be married to a daughter of the Galtic High Council. Terms were being arranged for the transport of a thousand Galtic women of childbearing age to the cities of the Khaiem. Applications would be taken for a thousand men to leave their lives among the cities of the Khaiem and move to Galt. It was, Eiah said, intended to be the first exchange of many.

There were protests and anger in only a few cities. Nantani and Yalakeht, hit hard by the war, were sending petitions of condemnation. In the low towns, the anger burned brighter. Galt was still the enemy, and there were rumors of plots to kill whomever of them dared set foot on Khaiate soil: talk and rumor, drunken rhetoric likely to come to nothing.

The greater mass of the utkhaiem were already gathering their best robes and most garish jewelry in preparation for the journey south to Saraykeht to greet the returning fleet and see this Galtic girl who would one day be Empress. Maati listened to it all, his frown deepening until his mouth began to ache.

"It doesn't change anything," he said. "Otah can sell us to our enemies if he wants. It doesn't affect our work here. Once we have the grammar worked through and the andat back in the world-"

"It changes everything," Eiah said. "Danat is marrying a Galt. The utkhaiem are either going to line up like sailors at a comfort house to follow the example or resist and restart a war we'll never win. Or worse, both. Perhaps he'll divide the utkhaiem so deeply that we turn on each other."

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-Natural-Equilibrium, 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.

He opened the cover and considered the first page, squinting to bring the letters clear. He could not help but think of another book-that one brown-which had been his gift from Heshai-kvo and Seedless. Heshai's handwriting had been clearer than Maati's own, his gift for language more profound. I, Maati Vaupathai, am one of the two men remaining in the world who has wielded the power of the andat. As the references from which I myself learned are lost, I shall endeavor to record here what I know Q f grammar and of the forms of thought by which the andat may be bound and the abstract made physical. And, with that, my own profound error from which the world is still suffering.

Half-reading, he flipped through the pages, caught occasionally by a particular turn of phrase of which he was fond or tripped by a diagram or metaphor that was still not to his best liking. Though his eyes strained, he could still read what he'd written, and when the ink seemed to blur, he had the memory of what he had put there. He reached the blank pages sooner than he expected, and sat on his stairs, fingertips moving over the smooth paper with a sound like skin against skin. There was so much to say, so many things he'd thought and considered. Often, he would come back from a particularly good lecture to his students full of fire and intentions, prepared to write a fresh section. Sometimes his energy lasted long enough to do so. Sometimes not.

It will be a sad legacy to die with this half-finished, he thought as he let the cover close.

He needed a real school, the school needed a teacher, and he himself could manage only so much. There wasn't time to lecture all his students and write his manual and slink like a criminal through the dark corners of the Empire. If he'd been younger, perhaps-fifty, or better yet forty years old-he might have made the attempt, but not now. And with this mad scheme of Otah's, time had grown even dearer.

"Maati-cha?"

Maati blinked. Vanjit came toward him, her steps tentative. He tucked his book into its box and took a pose of welcome.

"The door wasn't bolted," she said. "I was afraid something had happened?"

"No," Maati said, rising and hoisting himself up the stairs. "I forgot it last night. An old man getting older is all."

The girl took a pose that was both an acceptance and a denial. She looked exhausted, and Maati suspected there were dark smudges under his own eyes to match hers. The scent of eggs and beef caught his attention. A small lacquer box hung at Vanjit's side.

"Ah," Maati said. "It that what I hope it is?"

She smiled at that. The girl did have a pleasant smile, when she used it. The eggs were fresh; whipped and steamed in bright orange blocks. The beef was rich and moist. Vanjit sat beside him in the echoing, empty space of the warehouse as the morning light pressed in at the high, narrow windows, blue then yellow then gold. They talked about nothing important: the wayhouse where she was staying, his annoyance with his failing eyes, the merits of their present warehouse as compared to the half-dozen other places where Maati had taken up his chalk. Vanjit asked him questions that built on what they'd discussed the night before: How did the different forms of being relate to time? How did a number exist differently than an apple or a man? Or a child?

Maati found himself holding forth on matters of the andat and the poets, his time with the Dai-kvo, and even before that at the school. Vanjit sat still, her gaze on him, and drank his words like water.

She had lost her family when she was barely six years old. Her mother, father, younger sister, and two older brothers cut down by the gale of Galtic blades. The pain of it had faded, perhaps. It had never gone. Maati felt, as they sat together, that perhaps she had begun, however imperfectly, to build a new family. Perhaps she would have sat at her true father's knee, listening to him with this same intensity. Perhaps Nayiit would have treated him with the same attention that Vanjit did now. Or perhaps their shared hunger belonged to people who had lost the first object of their love.

By the time Eiah and the others arrived in the late morning, Maati had reached the decision that he'd fought against the whole night. He took Eiah aside as soon as she came in.

"I have need of you," Maati said. "How much can you spirit away without our being noticed? We'll need food and clothing and tools. Lots of tools. And if there's a servant or slave you can trust…"

"There isn't," Eiah said. "But things are in disarray right now. Half the court in Nantani would chew their tongues out before offering hospitality to a Galt. The other half are whipped to a froth trying to get to Saraykeht before the rest. A few wagonloads here and there would be easy to overlook."

Maati nodded, more than half to himself. Eiah took a pose of query.

"You're going to build me a school. I know where there's one to be had, and with the others helping, it shouldn't take terribly long to have it in order. And we need a teacher."

"We have a teacher, Maati-kya," Eiah said.

Maati didn't answer, and after a moment, Eiah looked down.

"Cehmai?" she asked.

"He's the only other living poet. The only one who's truly held one of the andat. He could do more, I suspect, than I can manage."

"I thought you two had fallen out?"

"I don't like his wife," Maati said sourly. "But I have to try. The two of us agreed on a way to find one another, if the need arose. I can hope he's kept to it better than I have."

"I'll come with you."

"No," Maati said, putting a hand on Eiah's shoulder. "I need you to prepare things for us. There's a place-I'll draw you a map to it. The Galts attacked it in the war, killed everyone, but even if they dropped bodies down the well, the water'll be fresh again by now. It's off the high road between Pathai and Nantani…"

"That school?" Eiah said. "The place they sent the boys to train as poets? That's where you want to go?"

"Yes," Maati said. "It's out of the way, it's built for itinerant poets, and there may be something there-some book or scroll or engravings on the walls-that the twice-damned Galts overlooked. Regardless, it's where it all began. It's where we are going to take it all back."