crops. The gelding of its men. The destruction of its women's wombs.
Once he had seen the trick of it, the binding had flowed from his pen.
It had been as if some small voice at the back of his mind was
whispering the words, and he'd only had to write them down. Even now,
squatting on this damnable cushion, his hack aching, his feet cold,
waiting for Cehmai to read over the last of the changes, he felt half
drunk from the work. He was a poet. All the things that had happened in
his life to bring him to this place at this time had built toward these
days, and the dry pages that hissed and shushed as Cehmai slid them
across each other. Maati bit his lip and did not interrupt.
It seemed like days, but Cehmai came to the final page, fingertips
tracing the lines Maati had written there, paused, and set it down with
the others. Maati leaned forward, his hands taking a querying pose.
Cehmai frowned and gently shook his head.
"No?" Maati asked. Something between rage and dismay shot through his
belly, only to vanish when Cehmai spoke.
"It's brilliant," he said. "It's a first draft, but it's a very, very
good one. I don't think there are many things we'd have to adjust. A few
to make it easier to pass on, perhaps. But we can work with those. No,
Maatikvo, I think this is likely to work. It's just ..."
"Just?„
Cehmai's frown deepened. His fingertips tapped cautiously on the pages,
as if he were testing an iron pot, afraid it would be hot enough to
burn. He sighed.
"I've never seen an andat fashioned to be a weapon," he said. There was
a hook that the Dal-kvo had that dated from the fall of the Second
Empire, but he never let anyone look at it. I don't know."
"There's a war, Cehmai-kya," Maati said. "They killed the Dai-kvo and
everyone in the village. The gods only know how many other men they've
slaughtered. How many women they're raped. What's on those pages,
they've earned."
"I know," Cehmai said. "I do know that. It's just I keep thinking of
Stone-:Made-Soft. It was capable of terrible things. I can't count the
times I had to hold it hack from collapsing a mine or a building. It had
no respect for the lives of men. But there was no particular malice in
it either. This ... Sterile ... it seems different."
Nlaati clamped his jaw. He was tired, that was all. "They both were. It
was no reason to be annoyed with Cehmai, even if his criticism of the
binding was something less than useful. Nlaati smiled the way he
imagined a teacher at the school smiling. Or the I)ai-kvo. lie took a
pose that offered instruction.
"Cutting shears and swords are both sharp. Before the war, you and I and
the men like us? We made cutting shears," he said, and gestured to the
papers. ""That's our first sword. It's only natural that you'd feel
uneasy with it; we aren't men of violence. If we were, the I)ai-kvo
would never have chosen us, would he? But the world's a different place
now, and so we have to be willing to do things that we wouldn't have
before."
""Then it makes you uneasy too?" Cehmai asked. Nlaati smiled. It didn't