Shadow and Betrayal, Page 2

  ‘Much the same as last year. They have seen through the veil and now lead their brothers toward knowledge,’ Milah said, but his hands were in a pose of gentle mockery. ‘They are petty tyrants to a man. Any andat strong enough to be worth holding would eat them before their hearts beat twice.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Hardly a surprise. And yours?’

  Tahi chewed for a moment at his lower lip and leaned forward. He could feel Milah’s gaze on him.

  ‘Otah Machi disgraced himself,’ Tahi said. ‘But he accepted the punishment well. The Dai-kvo thinks he may have promise.’

  Milah shifted. When Tahi looked over, the teacher had taken a pose of query. Tahi considered the implicit question, then nodded.

  ‘There have been some other signs,’ Tahi said. ‘I think you should put a watch over him. I hate to lose him to you, in a way.’

  ‘You like him.’

  Tahi took a pose of acknowledgment that held the nuance of a confession of failure.

  ‘I may be cruel, old friend,’ Tahi said, dropping into the familiar, ‘but you’re heartless.’

  The fair-haired teacher laughed, and Tahi couldn’t help but join him. They sat silent then for a while, each in his own thoughts. Milah rose, shrugged off his thick woolen top robe. Beneath it he still wore the formal silks from his audience yesterday with the Dai-kvo. Tahi poured them both bowls of rice wine.

  ‘It was good to see him again,’ Milah said sometime later. There was a melancholy note in his voice. Tahi took a pose of agreement, then sipped his wine.

  ‘He looked so old,’ Tahi said.

  Otah’s plan, such as it was, took little preparation, and yet nearly three weeks passed between the moment he understood the parable of the spirits who stood aside and the night when he took action. That night, he waited until the others were asleep before he pushed off the thin blankets, put on every robe and legging he had, gathered his few things, and left his cohort for the last time.

  The stone hallways were unlit, but he knew his way well enough that he had no need for light. He made his way to the kitchen. The pantry was unlocked - no one would steal food for fear of being found out and beaten. Otah scooped double handfuls of hard rolls and dried fruit into his satchel. There was no need for water. Snow still covered the ground, and Tahi-kvo had shown them how to melt snow with the heat of their own bodies walking without the cold penetrating to their hearts.

  Once he was provisioned, his path led him to the great hall - moonlight from the high windows showing ghost-dim the great aisle where he had held a pose of obeisance every morning for the last three years. The doors, of course, were barred, and while he was strong enough to open them, the sounds might have woken someone. He took a pair of wide, netted snowshoes from the closet beside the great doors and went up the stairs to the listening room. There, the narrow windows looked out on a world locked in winter. Otah’s breath plumed already in the chill.

  He threw the snowshoes and satchel out the window to the snow-cushioned ground below, then squeezed through and lowered himself from the outer stone sill until he hung by his fingertips. The fall was not so far.

  He dusted the snow from his leggings, tied the snowshoes to his feet by their thick leather thongs, took up the bulging satchel and started off, walking south toward the high road.

  The moon, near the top of its nightly arc, had moved the width of two thick-gloved hands toward the western horizon before Otah knew he was not alone. The footsteps that had kept perfect time with his own fell out of their pattern - as intentional a provocation as clearing a throat. Otah froze, then turned.

  ‘Good evening, Otah Machi,’ Milah-kvo said, his tone casual. ‘A good night for a walk, eh? Cold though.’

  Otah did not speak, and Milah-kvo strode forward, his hand on his own satchel, his footsteps nearly silent. His breath was thick and white as a goose feather.

  ‘Yes,’ the teacher said. ‘Cold, and far from your bed.’

  Otah took a pose of acknowledgment appropriate for a student to a teacher. It had no nuance of apology, and Otah hoped that Milah-kvo would not see his trembling, or if he did would ascribe it to the cold.

  ‘Leaving before your term is complete, boy. You disgrace yourself.’

  Otah switched to a pose of thanks appropriate to the end of a lesson, but Milah-kvo waved the formality aside and sat in the snow, considering him with an interest that Otah found unnerving.

  ‘Why do it?’ Milah-kvo asked. ‘There’s still hope of redeeming yourself. You might still be found worthy. So why run away? Are you so much a coward?’

  Otah found his voice.

  ‘It would be cowardice that kept me, Milah-kvo.’

  ‘How so?’ The teacher’s voice held nothing of judgment or testing. It was like a friend asking a question because he truly did not know the answer.

  ‘There are no locks on hell,’ Otah said. It was the first time he had tried to express this to someone else, and it proved harder than he had expected. ‘If there aren’t locks, then what can hold anyone there besides fear that leaving might be worse?’

  ‘And you think the school is a kind of hell.’

  It was not a question, so Otah did not answer.

  ‘If you keep to this path, you’ll be the lowest of the low,’ Milah said. ‘A disgraced child without friend or ally. And without the brand to protect you, your older brothers may well track you down and kill you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have someplace to go?’

  ‘The high road leads to Pathai and Nantani.’

  ‘Where you know no one.’

  Otah took a pose of agreement.

  ‘This doesn’t frighten you?’ the teacher asked.

  ‘It is the decision I’ve made.’ He could see the amusement in Milahkvo’s face at his answer.

  ‘Fair enough, but I think there’s an alternative you haven’t considered.’

  The teacher reached into his satchel and pulled out a small cloth bundle. He hefted it for a moment, considering, and dropped it on the snow between them. It was a black robe.

  Otah took a pose of intellectual inquiry. It was a failure of vocabulary, but Milah-kvo took his meaning.

  ‘Andat are powerful, Otah. Like small gods. And they don’t love being held to a single form. They fight it, and since the forms they have are a reflection of the poets who bind them . . . The world is full of willing victims - people who embrace the cruelty meted out against them. An andat formed from a mind like that would destroy the poet who bound it and escape. That you have chosen action is what the black robes mean.’

  ‘Then . . . the others . . . they all left the school too?’

  Milah laughed. Even in the cold, it was a warm sound.

  ‘No. No, you’ve all taken different paths. Ansha tried to wrestle Tahi-kvo’s stick away from him. Ranit Kiru asked forbidden questions, took the punishment for them, and asked again until Tahi beat him asleep. He was too sore to wear any robe at all for weeks, but his bruises were black enough. But you’ve each done something. If you choose to take up the robe, that is. Leave it, and really, this is just a conversation. Interesting maybe, but trivial.’

  ‘And if I take it?’

  ‘You will never be turned out of the school so long as you wear the black. You will help to teach the normal boys the lesson you’ve learned - to stand by your own strength.’

  Otah blinked, and something - some emotion he couldn’t put a name to - bloomed in his breast. His flight from the school took on a new meaning. It was a badge of his strength, the proof of his courage.

  ‘And the andat?’

  ‘And the andat,’ Milah-kvo said. ‘You’ll begin to learn of them in earnest. The Dai-kvo has never taken a student who wasn’t first a black robe at the school.’

  Otah stooped, his fingers numb with cold, and picked up the robe. He met Milah-kvo’s amused eyes and couldn’t keep from grinning. Milah-kvo laughed, stood and put an arm around Otah’s shoulder. It was the first kind act
Otah could remember since he had come to the school.

  ‘Come on, then. If we start now, we may get back to the school by breakfast.’

  Otah took a pose of enthusiastic agreement.

  ‘And, while this once I think we can forgive it, don’t make a habit of stealing from the kitchen. It upsets the cooks.’

  The letter came some weeks later, and Milah was the first to read it. Sitting in an upper room, his students abandoned for the moment, he read the careful script again and felt his face grow tight. When he had gone over it enough to know he could not have misunderstood, he tucked the folded paper into the sleeve of his robe and looked out the window. Winter was ending, and somehow the eternal renewal that was spring felt like an irony.

  He heard Tahi enter, recognizing his old friend’s footsteps.

  ‘There was a courier,’ Tahi said. ‘Ansha said there was a courier from the Dai-kvo . . .’

  Milah looked over his shoulder. His own feelings were echoed in Tahi’s round face.

  ‘From his attendant, actually.’

  ‘The Dai-kvo. Is he . . .’

  ‘No,’ Milah said, fishing out the letter. ‘Not dead. Only dying.’

  Tahi took the proffered pages, but didn’t look at them.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Time.’

  Tahi read the written words silently, then leaned against the wall with a sharp sigh.

  ‘It . . . it isn’t so bad as it could be,’ Tahi said.

  ‘No. Not yet. He will see the school again. Twice, perhaps.’

  ‘He shouldn’t come,’ Tahi snapped. ‘The visits are a formality. We know well enough which boys are ready. We can send them. He doesn’t have to—’

  Milah turned, interrupting him with a subtle pose that was a request for clarification and a mourning both. Tahi laughed bitterly and looked down.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Still. I’d like the world better if we could carry a little of his weight for him. Even if it was only a short way.’

  Milah started to take a pose, but hesitated, stopped, only nodded.

  ‘Otah Machi?’ Tahi asked.

  ‘Maybe. We might have to call him for Otah. Not yet, though. The robes have hardly been on him. The others are still learning to accept him as an equal. Once he’s used to the power, then we’ll see. I won’t call the Dai-kvo until we’re certain.’

  ‘He’ll come next winter whether there’s a boy ready or not.’

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps he’ll die tonight. Or we will. No god made the world certain.’

  Tahi raised his hands in a pose of resignation.

  It was a warm night in late spring; the scent of green seemed to permeate the world. Otah and his friends sprawled on the hillside east of the school. Milah-kvo sat with them, still talking, still telling stories though their lectures for the day were done. Stories of the andat.

  ‘They are like . . . thoughts made real,’ Milah said, his hands moving in gestures which were not formal poses, but evoked a sense of wonder all the same. ‘Ideas tamed and given human shape. Take Water-Moving-Down. In the Old Empire, she was called Rain, then when Diit Amra recaptured her at the beginning of the War, they called her Seaward. But the thought, you see, was the same. And if you can hold that, you can stop rivers in their tracks. Or see that your crops get enough water, or flood your enemies. She was powerful.’

  ‘Could someone catch her again?’ Ansha - no longer Ansha-kvo to Otah - asked.

  Milah shook his head.

  ‘I doubt it. She’s been held and escaped too many times. I suppose someone might find a new way to describe her, but . . . it’s been tried.’

  There was a chill that even Otah felt at the words. Stories of the andat were like ghost tales, and the price a failed poet paid was always the gruesome ending of it.

  ‘What was her price?’ Nian Tomari asked, his voice hushed and eager.

  ‘The last poet who made the attempt was a generation before me. They say that when he failed, his belly swelled like a pregnant woman’s. When they cut him open, he was filled with ice and black seaweed.’

  The boys were quiet, imagining the scene - the poet’s blood, the dark leaves, the pale ice. Dari slapped a gnat.

  ‘Milah-kvo?’ Otah said. ‘Why do the andat become more difficult to hold each time they escape?’

  The teacher laughed.

  ‘An excellent question, Otah. But one you’d have to ask of the Dai-kvo. It’s more than you’re ready to know.’

  Otah dropped into a pose of correction accepted, but in the back of his mind, the curiosity remained. The sun dipped below the horizon and a chill came into the air. Milah-kvo rose, and they followed him, wraith-children in their dark robes and twilight. Halfway back to the high stone buildings, Ansha started to run, and then Riit, and then Otah and then all of them, pounding up the slope to the great door, racing to be first or at least to not be last. When Milah arrived, they were red-faced and laughing.

  ‘Otah,’ Enrath, an older, dark-faced boy from Tan-Sadar said. ‘You’re taking the third cohort out tomorrow to turn the west gardens?’

  ‘Yes,’ Otah said.

  ‘Tahi-kvo wanted them finished and washed early. He’s taking them for lessons after the meal.’

  ‘You could join the afternoon session with us,’ Milah suggested, overhearing.

  Otah took a pose of gratitude as they entered the torch-lit great hall. One of Milah-kvo’s lessons was infinitely better than a day spent leading one of the youngest cohorts through its chores.

  ‘Do you know why worms travel in the ground?’ Milah-kvo asked.

  ‘Because they can’t fly?’ Ansha said, and laughed. A few other boys laughed with him.

  ‘True enough,’ Milah-kvo said. ‘But they are good for the soil. They break it up so that the roots can dig deeper. So in a sense, Otah and the third cohort are doing worm work tomorrow.’

  ‘But worms do it by eating dirt and shitting it out,’ Enrath said. ‘Tahi-kvo said so.’

  ‘There is some difference in technique,’ Milah-kvo agreed dryly to the delight of them all, including Otah.

  The black robes slept in smaller rooms, four to each, with a brazier in the center to keep it warm. The thaw had come, but the nights were still bitterly cold. Otah, as the youngest in his room, had the duty of tending the fire. In the dark of the mornings, Milah-kvo would come and wake them, knocking on their doors until all four voices within acknowledged him. They washed at communal tubs and ate at a long wooden table with Tahi-kvo at one end and Milah-kvo at the other. Otah still found himself uncomfortable about the round-faced teacher, however friendly his eyes had become.

  After they had cleared their plates, the black robes divided; the larger half went to lead the cohorts through the day’s duties, the smaller - rarely more than five or six - would go with Milah-kvo for a day’s study. As Otah walked to the great hall, he was already planning the day ahead, anticipating handing the third cohort over to Tahi-kvo and joining the handful most favored by Milah-kvo.

  In the great hall, the boys stood in their shivering ranks. The third cohort was one of the youngest - a dozen boys of perhaps eight years dressed in thin gray robes. Otah paced before them, searching for any improper stance or scratching.

  ‘Today, we are turning the soil in the west gardens,’ Otah barked. Some of the smaller boys flinched. ‘Tahi-kvo demands the work be finished and that you be cleaned by midday. Follow!’

  He marched them out to the gardens. Twice, he stopped to be sure they were in the proper order. When one - Navi Toyut, son of a high family of the utkhaiem in Yalakeht - was out of step, Otah slapped him smartly across the face. The boy corrected his gait.

  The west gardens were brown and bare. Dry sticks - the winter corpses of last year’s crop - lay strewn on the ground, the pale seedlings of weeds pushing up through them. Otah led them to the toolshed where the youngest boys brushed spider webs off the shovels and spades.

  ‘Begin at the north end!’ Otah shouted, and the coh
ort fell into place. The line was ragged, some boys taller than others and all unevenly spaced, leaving gaps in the line like missing milk teeth. Otah walked along, showing each boy where to stand and how to hold his shovel. When they were all in their places, Otah gave the sign to begin.

  They set to, their thin arms working, but they were small and not strong. The smell of fresh earth rose, but only slowly. When Otah walked the turned soil behind them, his boots barely sank into it.

  ‘Deeper!’ he snapped. ‘Turn the soil, don’t just scrape it. Worms could do better than this.’