Seasons of War

mask of self-righteous anger, and, to his surprise, he recognized the expression as one he himself had worn in a thousand fantasies. In his dreams, he had been facing Otah, and Otah had been the one to beg forgiveness.
    Like a voice speaking in his ear, he knew why his hands would not take an apologetic pose. She is here to see you abased. Do it now, and you have nothing left to offer her . Maati pulled his shoulders back, lifted his chin, and took a pose that requested an audience. Its nuances didn’t claim his superiority as a teacher to a student but neither did they cede it. Vanjit’s eyes narrowed. Maati waited, his breath short and anxiety plucking at him.
    Vanjit took a pose appropriate to a superior granting a servant or slave an indulgence. Maati didn’t correct her, but neither did he respond. Vanjit looked down as if the andat had cried out or perhaps spoken, then shifted her hands and her body to a pose of formal invitation appropriate for an evening’s meal. Only then did Maati accept, shifting afterward to a pose of query. Vanjit indicated the balcony on which she stood, and then made a gesture that implied either intimacy or solitude.
    Meet me here. In my territory and on my terms. Come alone.
    Maati moved to an accepting pose, smiling to himself as much as to the girl in the palaces. With a physical sensation like that of a gnat flying into his eye, Maati’s vision blurred back to merely human acuity. He turned his attention back to Danat.
    The boy looked half-frantic. He held his blade as if prepared for an attack, his gaze darting from tree to wall as if he could see the things that Maati had seen. The moons that passed around the wandering stars, the infinitesimal animals that made their home in a drop of rain, or the girl on her high balcony halfway across the city. Maati had no doubt she was still watching them.
    ‘Come along, then,’ he said. ‘We’re done here.’
    ‘You saw her,’ Danat said.
    ‘I did.’
    ‘Where is she? What did she want?’
    ‘She’s at the palaces, and there’s no point in rushing over there like a man on fire. She can see everything, and she knows to watch. We could no more take her by surprise than fly.’
    Maati took a deep breath and turned back along the path they’d just come. There was no reason to follow Otah’s route now, and Maati wanted to sit down for a while, perhaps drink a bowl of wine, perhaps speak to Eiah for a time. He wanted to understand better why the dread in his breast was mixed with elation, the fear with pleasure.
    ‘What does she want?’ Danat asked, trotting to catch up to Maati.
    ‘I suppose that depends upon how you look at things,’ Maati said. ‘In the greater scheme, she wants what any of us do. Love, a family, respect. In the smaller, I believe she wants to see me beg before I die. The odd thing is that even if she had that, it wouldn’t bring her any lasting peace.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    Maati stopped. It occurred to him that if he had taken the wrong pose, made the wrong decision just now, he and the boy would be trying to find their way back to camp by smell. He put a hand on Danat’s shoulder.
    ‘I’ve asked Vanjit to meet with me tonight. She’s agreed, but it can only be the two of us,’ Maati said. ‘I believe that once it’s done I’ll be able to tell you whether the world is still doomed.’

29
    ‘ N o,’ Otah said. ‘Absolutely not.’
    ‘All respect,’ Maati said. ‘You may be the Emperor, but this isn’t your call to make. I don’t particularly need your permission, and Vanjit’s got no use for it at all.’
    ‘I can have you kept here.’
    ‘You won’t,’ Maati said. The poet was sure of himself, Otah thought, because he was right.
    When Danat and Maati had returned early, he had known that something had happened. The quay they had adopted as the center of the search had been quiet since the end of the afternoon meal. Ana and Eiah sat in the shadow of a low stone wall, sleeping or talking when Eiah wasn’t going through the shards of her ruined binding, arranging the shattered wax in an approximation of the broken tablets. The boatman and his second had taken apart the complex mechanism connecting boiler to wheel and were cleaning each piece, the brass and bronze, iron and steel laid out on gray tarps and shining like jewelry. The voices of the remaining armsmen joined with the low, constant lapping of the river and the songs of the birds. At another time, it might have