palaces. "There were fewer singing slaves, more stretches where the
gravel of the path had scattered and not yet been raked back into place,
and the men and women of the utkhaiem who he passed seemed to carry
themselves with less than their full splendor. It was as if a terrible
wind had blown through a garden and disarrayed those blossoms it did not
destroy.
The path led into the shade of the false forest that separated the
poet's house from the palaces. "There were old trees among these, thick
trunks speaking of generations of human struggle and triumph and failure
since their first tentative seedling leaves had pushed away this soil.
Moss clothed the bark and scented the air with green. Birds fluttered
over Nlaati's head, and a squirrel scolded him as he passed. In winter,
with these oaks bare, you could see from the porch of the poet's house
out almost to the palaces. In summer, the house might have been in a
different city. The door of the poet's house was standing open, and
Maati didn't bother to scratch or knock.
Cehmai's quarters suffered the same marks as his own-books, scrolls,
codices, diagrams all laid out without respect to author or age or type
of binding. Cehmai, sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, held a
book open in his hand. With the brown robes of a poet loose around his
frame, he looked, Nlaati thought, like a young student puzzling over an
obscure translation. Cehmai looked up as Maati's shadow crossed him, and
smiled wearily.
"Have you eaten?" hlaati asked.
"Some bread. Some cheese," Cehmai said, gesturing to the back of the
house with his head. ""There's some left, if you'd like it."
It hadn't occurred to Maati just how hungry he was until he took up a
corner of the rich, sweet bread. He knew he'd had dinner the night
before, but he couldn't recall what it had been or when he'd eaten it.
He reached into a shallow ceramic howl of salted raisins. They tasted
rich and full as wine. Ile took a handful and sat on the chair beside
Cchmai to look over the assorted results of their labor.
"What's your thought?" Cehmai said.
"I've found more than I expected to," Nlaati said. "'T'here was a
section in Vautai's Fourth Meditations that actually clarified some
things I hadn't been certain of. If we were to put together all the
scraps and rags from all of the hooks and histories and scrolls, it
might be enough to support binding a fresh andat."
Cehmai sighed and closed the hook he'd been holding.
"That's near what I've come to," the younger poet agreed. Then he looked
up. "And how long do you think it would take to put those scraps and
rags into one coherent form?"
"So that it stood as a single work? I'm likely too old to start it,"
Maati said. "And without the full record from the Dai-kvo, there would
be no way to know whether a binding was dangerously near one that had
already been done."
"I hated those," Cehmai said.
"'They went hack to the beginning of the First Empire," Nlaati said.
"Some of the descriptions are so convoluted it takes reading them six