Shadow and Betrayal

legible as a boy’s. Amat wondered at how he could be so closed and careful with business and so clumsy with his own heart and hers. If she let it continue, he’d be offering her work in Galt next. And a part of her, despite it all, would be sorry to refuse.
    ‘Keep it for now,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it from you later.’
    ‘When?’ he asked as she rose.
    She answered gently, making the words not an insult, but a moment of shared sorrow. There were, after all, ten thousand things that had been lost in this. And each one of them real, even this.
    ‘After the war, perhaps. Give it to me then.’
     
    Dreaming, Otah found himself in a public place, part street corner, part bathhouse, part warehouse. People milled about, at ease, their conversations a pleasant murmur. With a shock, Otah glimpsed Heshai-kvo in the crowd, moving as if alive, speaking as if alive, but still dead. In the logic of sleep, that fleeting glimpse carried a weight of panic.
    Gasping for breath, Otah sat up, his eyes open and confused by the darkness. Only as his heart slowed and his breath grew steady, did the creaking of the ship and rocking of waves remind him where he was. He pressed his palms into his closed eyes until pale lights appeared. Below him, Maj murmured in her sleep.
    The cabin was tiny - too short to stand fully upright and hardly long enough to hang two hammocks one above the other. If he put his arms out, he could press his palms against the oiled wood of each wall. There was no room for a brazier, so they slept in their robes. Carefully, he lifted himself down and without touching or disturbing the sleeper, left the close, nightmare-haunted coffin for the deck and the moon and a fresh breeze.
    The three men of the watch greeted him as he emerged. Otah smiled and ambled over despite wanting more than anything a moment of solitude. The moment’s conversation, the shared drink, the coarse joke - they were a small price to pay for the good will of the men to whom he had entrusted his fate. It was over quickly, and he could retreat to a quiet place by the rail and look out toward an invisible horizon where haze blurred the distinction between sea and sky. Otah sat, resting his arms on the worn wood, and waited for the wisps of dream to fade. As he had every night. As he expected he would for some time still to come. The changing of watch at the half-candle brought another handful of men, another moment of sociability. The curious glances and concern that Otah had seen during his first nights on deck were gone. The men had become accustomed to him.
    Otah would have guessed the night candle had nearly reached its three-quarters mark when she came out to join him, though the night sea sometimes did strange things to time. He might also have been staring at the dark ripples and broken moonlight for sunless weeks.
    Maj seemed almost to glow in the moonlight, her skin picking up the blue and the cold. She looked at the landless expanse of water with an almost proprietary air, unimpressed by vastness. Otah watched her find him, watched her walk to where he sat. Though Otah knew that at least one of the sailors on watch spoke Nippu, no one tried to speak with her. Maj lowered herself to the deck beside him, her legs crossed, her pale eyes almost colorless.
    ‘The dreams,’ she said.
    Otah took a pose of acknowledgment.
    ‘If we had hand loom, you should weave,’ she said. ‘Put your mind to something real. Is unreal things that eat you.’
    ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said.
    ‘You are homesick. I know. I see it.’
    ‘I suppose,’ Otah said. ‘And I wonder now if we did the right thing.’
    ‘You think no?’
    Otah turned his gaze back to the water. Something burst up from the surface and vanished again into the darkness, too quickly for Otah to see what shape it was.
    ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘That’s to say I think we did the best that we could. But that doing that thing was right . . .’
    ‘Killing him,’ Maj said. ‘Call it what it is. Not that thing. Killing him. Hiding names give them power.’
    ‘That killing him was right . . . bothers me. At night, it bothers me.’
    ‘And if you can go back - make other choice - do you?’
    ‘No. No, I’d do the same. And that disturbs me, too.’
    ‘You live too long in cities,’ Maj said. ‘Is better for you to leave.’
    Otah disagreed but said nothing. The night moved on. It was another week at least before they would reach Quian, southernmost of the eastern