Daniel Abraham - Price of Spring

"What list?" he asked.

There was a moment's silence, and then uproar. The circle of chairs was abandoned, and Maati found himself the subject of a half-dozen embraces. The dread and anger and despair that had dogged his steps lightened if it didn't vanish. He let Vanjit lead him to an empty chair, and the others gathered around him, their eyes bright, their smiles genuine. It was like coming home. When Eiah returned to his question, he had forgotten it. It took a moment to understand what she was saying.

"It's a list of questions for you," she said. "After we came and put the place more or less to rights, we started… well, we started holding class without you."

"It wasn't really the same," Small Kae said with an apologetic pose. "We only didn't want to forget what we'd learned. We were only talking about it."

"After a few nights it became clear we were going to need some way to keep track of the parts that needed clarifying. It's become rather a long list. And some of the questions…"

Maati took a pose that dismissed her concerns, somewhat hampered by the bowl of curried rice in his hand.

"It's a good thought," he said. "I would have recommended it myself, if I'd been thinking clearly. Bring me the list tonight, and perhaps we can start going over it in the morning. If you are all prepared to begin working in earnest?"

The roar of agreement drowned out his laughter. Only Eiah didn't join in. Her smile was soft, almost sad, and she took no pose to explain it. Instead, she poured a bowl of water for him.

"Is Cehmai-kvo here?" Large Kae asked.

Maati took a bite of the rice, chewing slowly, letting the spices burn his tongue a little before answering.

"I didn't find him," Maati said. "There was a message, but it was outof-date. I searched as long as there seemed some chance of finding him, but there was no sign. I left word where I could, and it may very well reach him. He might join us at any time. My job is to have you all prepared in case he does."

It was kinder than the truth. If Maati's failure had been only that he hadn't found help, it left them the hope that help might still arrive. It was no great lie to give them an image of the future in which something good might come. And it was easier for him if he didn't have to say he'd been refused. Only Eiah knew; he could hear it in her silence. She would follow his lead.

Maati's mule was seen to, his things hauled into the room they had prepared for him, and a bath drawn in a wide copper tub set before a fire grate. It reminded him of nothing so much as his days living in court, servants available at any moment to cater to his needs. It was strange to recall that he had lived that way once. It seemed both very recent and very long ago. And also, the slaves and servants that had driven the life in the palaces of Machi hadn't been women he knew and cared for. Slipping into the warm water, feeling his travel-abused joints ache just a degree less, letting his eyes rest, Maati wondered what it would have been like to receive so much female attention when he'd been younger. There would have been a time when the simple sensual pleasures of food and a warm bath might have suggested something more sexual. It might still, if bone-deep weariness hadn't held him.

But no, that wasn't true. He wasn't dead to lust, but it had been years since it had carried the urgency that he remembered from his youth. He wondered if that wasn't part of why women had been barred from the school and the village of the Dai-kvo. Would any poet have been able to focus on a binding if half his mind was on a woman his body was aching for? Or perhaps there was something in that mind-set itself that would affect the binding. So much of the andat was a reflection of the poet who bound it, it would be easy to imagine andat fashioned by younger poets in the forms of wantons and whores. Apart from the profoundly undignified nature of such a binding, it might actually make holding the andat more difficult as decades passed and a man's fires burned less brightly. He wondered if there was an analogy with women.

The scratch at the door brought him back. He'd half fallen asleep there in the water. He rose awkwardly, reaching for his robe and trying not to spill so much water that it flowed into the fire grate and killed the flames.

"Yes, yes," he called as he fastened the robe's ties. "I'm not drowned yet. Come in."

Eiah stepped through the doorway. There was something in her arms, held close to her. Between the unsteady light of the fire and his own age-blunted sight, he couldn't tell more than it looked like a book. Maati took a pose of welcome, his sleeves water-stuck to his arms.

"Should I come back later?" she asked.

"No, of course not," Maati said, pulling a chair toward the fire for her. "I was only washing the road off of me. Is this the famed list?"

"Part of it is," she said as she sat. She was wearing a physician's robe of deep green and gold. "Part of it's something else."

Maati settled himself on the tub's wide lip and took a pose that expressed curiosity and surprise. Eiah handed him a scroll, and he unfurled it. The questions were all written in a large hand, clearly, and each with a small passage to give some context. He read three of them. Two were simple enough, but the third was more interesting. It touched on the difficulties of generating new directionals, and the possibility of encasing absolute structures within relative ones. It gave the grammar an odd feeling, as if it were suggesting that fire was hot rather than asserting it.

It was interesting.

"Are they all like this?" he asked.

"The questions? Some of them, yes," Eiah said. "Vanjit's especially were beyond anything we could find a plausible answer for."

Maati pursed his lips and nodded. An absolute made relative. What would that do? He found himself smiling without knowing at first what he was smiling about.

"I think," he said, "leaving you to your own company may have been the best thing I've done."

The firelight caught Eiah's answering smile.

"I wasn't going to say so," she said. "It's been fascinating. At first, it was as if we were sneaking pies from the kitchens. Everyone wanted to do the thing, but it seemed… wrong? I don't know if that's the word. It seemed like something we shouldn't do, and more tempting because of it. And then once we started talking with each other, it was like being on a loose cart. We couldn't stop or even slow down. Half the time I didn't know if we were going down the wrong road, but…"

She shrugged, nodding at the scroll in his hands.

"Well, even if you were, some of this may be quite useful."

"I'd hoped so," Eiah said. "And that brings me to something else. I found some books at court. I brought them."

Maati blinked, the scroll forgotten in his hands.

"Books? They weren't all burned?" he said.

"Not that sort. These aren't ours," she said. "They're Westlands'. Books from physicians. Here."

She took back the scroll and put a small, cloth-bound book in his hand. One of the sticks in the fire grate broke, sending out embers like fireflies. Maati leaned forward.

The script was small and cramped, the ink pale. It would have been difficult in sunlight; by fire and candle, it might as well not have been written. Frustrated, Maati turned the pages and an eye stared back at him from the paper. He turned back and went more slowly. All the diagrams were of eyes, some ripped from their sockets, some pierced by careful blades. Comments accompanied each orb, laying, he assumed, its secrets open.

"Sight," Eiah said. "The author is called Arran, but it was more likely written by dozens of people who all used the same name. The wardens in the north had a period four or five generations ago when there was some brilliant work done. We ignored it, of course, because it wasn't by us. But these are very, very good. Arran was brilliant."