He smiled in reply. This that she offered was, he suspected, a life
worth living.
CEHMAI TYAN'S DREAMS, WHENEVER THE TIME. CAME TO RENEW HIS LIFE'S
struggle, took the same form. A normal dream-meaningless, strange, and
trivial-would shift. Something small would happen that carried a weight
of fear and dread out of all proportion. This time, he dreamt he was
walking in a street fair, trying to find a stall with food he liked,
when a young girl appeared at his side. As he saw her, his sleeping mind
had already started to rebel. She held out her hand, the palm painted
the green of summer grass, and he woke himself trying to scream.
Gasping as if he had run a race, he rose, pulled on the simple brown
robes of a poet, and walked to the main room of the house. The worked
stone walls seemed to glow with the morning light. The chill spring air
fought with the warmth from the low fire in the grate. The thick rugs
felt softer than grass against Cehmai's bare feet. And the andat was
waiting at the game table, the pieces already in place before it-black
basalt and white marble. The line of white was already marred, one stone
disk shifted forward into the field. Cehmai sat and met his opponent's
pale eyes. There was a pressure in his mind that felt the way a
windstorm sounded.
"Again?" the poet asked.
Stone-Made-Soft nodded its broad head. Cehmai Tyan considered the board,
recalled the binding-the translation that had brought the thing across
from him out of formlessness-and pushed a black stone into the empty
field of the hoard. The game began again.
The binding of Stone-Made-Soft had not been Cehmai's work. It had been
done generations earlier, by the poet Manat Doru. The game of stones had
figured deeply in the symbolism of the binding-the fluid lines of play
and the solidity of the stone markers. The competition between a spirit
seeking its freedom and the poet holding it in place. Cehmai ran his
fingertip along his edge of the board where Manat Doru's had once
touched it. He considered the advancing line of white stones and crafted
his answering line of black, touching stones that long-dead men had held
when they had played the same game against the thing that sat across
from him now. And with every victory, the binding was renewed, the andat
held more firmly in the world. It was an excellent strategy, in part
because the binding had also made StoneMade-Soft a terrible player.
The windstorm quieted, and Cehmai stretched and yawned. StoneMade-Soft
glowered down on its failing line.
"You're going to lose," Cehmai said.
"I know," the andat replied. Its voice was a deep rumble, like a distant
rockslide-another evocation of flowing stone. "Being doomed doesn't take
away from the dignity of the effort, though."
"Well said."
The andat shrugged and smiled. "One can afford to be philosophical when
losing means outliving one's opponent. This particular game? You picked
it. But there are others we play that I'm not quite so crippled at."
"I didn't pick this game. I haven't seen twenty summers, and you've seen
more than two hundred. I wasn't even a dirty thought in my grandfather's