Shadow and Betrayal

Maati said. ‘Yes, I think I do. You’ve friends. You’ve a place. You’ve possibilities. And . . .’
    ‘And?’
    Even in the darkness, Otah could see Maati blush. He took a pose of apology as he spoke.
    ‘You have Liat,’ Maati said. ‘She’s beautiful.’
    ‘She is lovely. But there are any number of women at court. And you’re the poet’s student. There must be girls who’d take you for a lover.’
    ‘There are, I think. Maybe. I don’t know, but . . . I don’t understand them. I’ve never known any - not at the school, and then not with the Dai-kvo. They’re different.’
    ‘Yes,’ Otah said. ‘I suppose they are.’
    Liat. He’d seen her a handful of nights since the audience before the Khai. Since his discovery by Maati. She was busy enough preparing the woman Maj for the sad trade that she hadn’t made an issue of his absence, but he had seen something growing in her questions and in her silence.
    ‘Things aren’t going so well with Liat,’ Otah said, surprised that he would admit it even as he spoke. Maati sat straight, pulling himself to some blurry attention. His look of concern was almost a parody of the emotion. He took a pose of query. Otah responded with one that begged ignorance, but let it fall away. ‘It isn’t her. I’ve been . . . I’ve been pulling away from her, I think.’
    ‘Why?’ Maati asked. His incredulity was clear.
    Otah wondered how he’d been drawn into this conversation. Maati seemed to have a talent for it, bringing him to say things he’d hardly had the courage to think through fully. It was having someone at last who might understand him. Someone who knew him for what he was, and who had suffered some of the same flavors of loss.
    ‘I’ve never told Liat. About who I am. Do you think . . . Maati, can you love someone and not trust them?’
    ‘We’re born to odd lives, Otah-kvo,’ Maati said, sounding suddenly older and more sorrowful. ‘If we waited for people we trusted, I think we might never love anyone.’
    They were silent for a long moment, then Maati rose.
    ‘I’m going to get some water from the keep, and then find some place to leave him a little of my own,’ he said, breaking the somber mood. Otah smiled.
    ‘Then we should go.’
    Maati took a pose that was both regret and agreement, then walked off with a gait for the most part steady. Otah stood, stretching his back and his legs, pulling his blood into action. He tossed a single length of silver onto the bench where they’d sat. It would more than cover their drinks and the bread and cheese they’d eaten. When Maati returned, they struck out for the north, toward the palaces. The streets of the city were moonlit, pale blue light except where a lantern burned at the entrance to a compound or a firekeeper’s kiln added a ruddy touch. The calls of night birds, the chirping of crickets, the occasional voice of some other city dweller awake long after the day had ended accompanied them as they walked.
    It was all as familiar as his own cot or the scent of the seafront, but the boy at his side also changed it. For almost a third of his life, Otah had been in Saraykeht. He knew the shapes of its streets. He knew which firekeepers could be trusted and which could be bought, which teahouses served equally to all their clientele and which saved the better goods for the higher classes. And he knew his place in it. He would no more have thought about it than about breathing. Except for Maati.
    The boy made him look at everything again, as if he were seeing it for the first time. The city, the streets, Liat, himself. Especially himself. Now the thing that he had measured his greatest success - the fact that he knew the city deeply and it did not know him - was harder and emptier than it had once been. And odd that it hadn’t seemed so before.
    And the memories curled and shifted deep in his mind; the unconnected impressions of a childhood he had thought forgotten, of a time before he’d been sent to the school. There was a face with dark hair and beard that might have been his father. A woman he remembered singing and bathing him when his body had been small enough for her to lift with one arm. He didn’t know whether she was his mother or a nurse or a sister. But there had been a fire in the grate, and the tub had been worked copper, and he had been young and amazed by it.
    And over the days and nights, other half-formed things had joined together in his mind. He remembered his