Shadow and Betrayal

well.
    Cehmai was frowning down warily at Otah-kvo. Maati put his hand on the young man’s shoulder.
    ‘I have to speak with him,’ Maati said. ‘Alone.’
    ‘You don’t think he’s a threat?’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. I still need to speak with him.’
    ‘Maati-kvo, please take one of the armsmen. Even if you keep him at the far end of the yard, you can . . .’
    Maati took a pose that refused this, and saw something shift in the young man’s eyes. Respect, Maati thought. He thinks I’m being brave. How odd that I was that young once.
    ‘Take me there,’ Maati said.
     
    Otah sat in the garden, his back and neck tight from riding and from fear, and remembered being young in the summer cities. In one of the low towns outside Saraykeht, there had been a rock at the edge of a cliff that jutted out over the water so that, when the tide was just right, a boy of thirteen summers might step out to its edge and peer past his toes at the ocean below him and feel like a bird. There had been a band of them - the homeless young scraping by on pity and small labor - who had dared each other to dive from that cliff. The first time he had made the leap himself, he had been sure the moment his feet left the rough, hot stone that he would die. That pause, divorced from earth and water, willing himself back up, trying to force himself to fly and take back that one irrevocable moment, had felt very much like sitting quiet and alone in this garden. The trees shifted like slow dancers, the flowers trembled, the stone glowed where the sun struck it and faded to gray where it did not. He rubbed his fingers against the gritty bench to remind himself where he was, and to keep the panic in his breast from possessing him.
    He heard the door slide open with a whisper, and then shut again. He rose, forcing his body to move deliberately and took a pose of greeting even before he looked up. Maati Vaupathai. Time had thickened him, and there was a sorrow in the lines of his face that hadn’t been there even in the weary days when he had stood between his master Heshai-kvo and the death that had eventually come. Otah wondered whether that change had sprung from Heshai’s murder, and whether Maati had ever guessed that Otah had been the one who drew the cord across the old poet’s throat.
    Maati took a pose of welcome appropriate for a student to a teacher.
    ‘It wasn’t me,’ Otah said. ‘My brother. You. I had nothing to do with any of it.’
    ‘I had guessed that,’ Maati said. He did not come nearer.
    ‘Are you going to call the armsmen? There must be half a dozen out there. Your student could have been more subtle in calling them.’
    ‘There’s more than that, and he isn’t my student. I don’t have any students. I don’t have anything.’ A strange smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. ‘I have been something of a disappointment to the Dai-kvo. Why are you here?’
    ‘Because I need help,’ Otah said, ‘and I hoped we might not be enemies.’
    Maati seemed to weigh the words. He walked to the bench, sat, and leaned forward on clasped hands. Otah sat beside him, and they were silent. A sparrow landed on the ground before them, cocked its head, and fluttered madly away again.
    ‘I came back because it was controlling me,’ Otah said. ‘This place. These people. I’ve spent a lifetime leaving them, and they keep coming back and destroying everything I build. I wanted to see it. I wanted to look at the city and my brothers and my father.’
    He looked at his hands.
    ‘I don’t know what I wanted,’ Otah said.
    ‘Yes,’ Maati said, and then, awkwardly, ‘It was foolish, though. And there will be consequences.’
    ‘There have been already.’
    ‘There’ll be more.’
    Again, the silence loomed. There was too much to say, and no order for it. Otah frowned hard, opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again.
    ‘I have a son,’ Maati said. ‘Liat and I have a son. His name’s Nayiit. He’s probably just old enough now that he’s started to notice that girls aren’t always repulsive. I haven’t seen them in years.’
    ‘I didn’t know,’ Otah said.
    ‘How would you? The Dai-kvo said that I was a fool to keep a family. I am a poet, and my duty is to the world. And when I wouldn’t renounce them, I fell from favor. I was given duties that might as well have been done by an educated slave. And you know, there was an odd kind of pride about it for a while. I was given clothing, shelter, food