Shadow and Betrayal

islands. The hold, filled now with the fine cloths and ropes of Saraykeht, the spices and metalworks of the cities of the Khaiem, would trade first for pearls and shells, the pelts of strange island animals, and the plumes of their birds. Only as the weeks moved on would they begin taking on fish and dried fruits, trees and salt timber and slaves. And only in the first days of spring - weeks away still and ten island ports at least - would they reach as far north as Nippu.
    Years of work on the seafront, all the gifts and assistance Maati had given him for the journey to the Dai-kvo, everything he had, he had poured into two seasons of travel. He wondered what he would do, once he reached Nippu, once Maj was home and safe and with the people she knew. Back from her long nightmare with only the space where a child should have been at her side.
    He could work on ships, he thought. He knew enough already to take on the simple, odious tasks like coiling rope and scrubbing decks. He might at least make his way back to the cities of the Khaiem . . . or perhaps not. The world was full of possibility, because he had nothing and no one. The unreal crowded in on him, as Maj had said, because he had abandoned the real.
    ‘You think of her,’ Maj said.
    ‘What? Ah, Liat? No, not really. Not just now.’
    ‘You leave her behind, the girl you love. You are angry because of her and the boy.’
    A prick of annoyance troubled him but he answered calmly enough.
    ‘It hurt me that they did what they did, and I miss him. I miss them. But . . .’
    ‘But it also frees you,’ Maj said. ‘It is for me, too. The baby. I am scared, when I first go to the cities. I think I am never fit in, never belong. I am never be a good mother without my own itiru to tell me how she is caring for me when I am young. All this worry I make. And is nothing. To lose everything is not the worst can happen.’
    ‘It’s starting again, from nothing, with nothing,’ Otah said.
    ‘Is exactly this,’ Maj agreed, then a moment later, ‘Starting again, and doing better.’
    The still-hidden sun lightened water and sky as they watched it in silence. The milky, lacework haze burned off as the fire rose from the sea and the full crew hauled up sails, singing, shouting, tramping their bare feet. Otah rose, his back aching from sitting so long without moving, and Maj brushed her robes and stood also. As the work of the day entered its full activity, he descended behind her into the darkness of their cabin where he hoped he might cheat his conscience of a few hours’ sleep. His thoughts still turned on the empty, open future before him and on Saraykeht behind him, a city still waking to the fact that it had fallen.

BOOK TWO: A BETRAYAL IN WINTER

PROLOGUE
    ‘T here’s a problem at the mines,’ his wife said. ‘One of your treadmill pumps.’
    Biitrah Machi, the eldest son of the Khai Machi and a man of forty-five summers, groaned and opened his eyes. The sun, new-risen, set the paper-thin stone of the bedchamber windows glowing. Hiami sat beside him.
    ‘I’ve had the boy set out a good thick robe and your seal boots,’ she said, carrying on her thought, ‘and sent him for tea and bread.’
    Biitrah sat up, pulling the blankets off and rising naked with a grunt. A hundred things came to his half-sleeping mind. It’s a pump - the engineers can fix it or Bread and tea? Am I a prisoner? or Take that robe off, love - let’s have the mines care for themselves for a morning . But he said what he always did, what he knew she expected of him.
    ‘No time. I’ll eat once I’m there.’
    ‘Take care,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to hear that one of your brothers has finally killed you.’
    ‘When the time comes, I don’t think they’ll come after me with a treadmill pump.’
    Still, he made a point to kiss her before he walked to his dressing chamber, allowed the servants to array him in a robe of gray and violet, stepped into the sealskin boots, and went out to meet the bearer of the bad tidings.
    ‘It’s the Daikani mine, most high,’ the man said, taking a pose of apology formal enough for a temple. ‘It failed in the night. They say the lower passages are already half a man high with water.’
    Biitrah cursed, but took a pose of thanks all the same. Together, they walked through the wide main hall of the Second Palace. The caves shouldn’t have been filling so quickly, even with a failed pump. Something else had gone wrong. He tried to