perhaps that was merely accurate. He had lost everything now except
perhaps Eiah. Irit was gone, and the wisest of them all for fleeing. He
couldn't imagine Large Kae and Small Kae would return to him. Ashti Beg
had left once already. And then Vanjit. All of his little family was
gone now.
His family. Ashti Beg's voice returned to him. Vanjit and
Clarity-ofSight and the need for family.
"Oh," he said, almost before he knew what he meant. And then, "Oh."
Maati made his unsteady way to the bow, touching crates with his
fingertips to keep from stumbling. Otah and Danat turned at the sound of
his approach, but said nothing. Maati reached them short of breath and
oddly elated. His smile seemed to surprise them.
"I know where she's gone," he said.
27
Udun had been a river city. A city of birds.
Otah remembered the first time he'd come to it, a letter of introduction
from a man he had known briefly years before limp in his sleeve. After
years of life in the eastern islands, it was like walking into a dream.
Canals laced the city, great stone quays as busy as the streets. Great
humped bridges with stairs cut in each side rose up to let even the
tallest boats pass. On the shores, tree branches bent under the brightly
colored burden of wings and beaks and a thousand kinds of song. The
street carts sold food and drink as they did everywhere, but with each
paper basket of lemon fish, every bowl of rice and sausage, there would
be a twist of colored cloth.
Open the cloth, and seeds would spill out, and then within a heartbeat
would come the birds. Fortunes were told by which birds reached you.
Finches for love, sparrows for pain, and so on, and so on. Wealth,
birth, death, love, sex, and mystery all spelled out in feathers and
hunger for those wise enough to see or credulous enough to believe.
The palaces of the Khai Udun had spanned the wide river itself, barges
disappearing into the seemingly endless black tunnel and then emerging
again into the light. Beggars sang from rafts, their boxes floating at
the side. The firekeepers' kilns had all been enameled the green of the
river water and a deep red Otah had never seen elsewhere. And at a
wayhouse with a little garden, there had been a keeper with a foxsharp
face and threads of white in her black hair.
He had entered the gentleman's trade there, become a courier and
traveled through the world, bringing his messages back to House Siyanti
and sleeping at Kiyan's wayhouse. He knew all the cities and many of the
low towns as they had been back then, but Udun had been something precious.
And then the Galts had come. There were tales afterward that the river
downstream from the ruins stank of corpses for a year. Thousands of men
and women and children had died in the bloodiest slaughter of the war.
Rich and poor, utkhaiem and laborer, none had been spared. What
survivors there were had abandoned their city's grave, leaving it to the
birds. Udun had died, and with it-among unnumbered others-the poet
Vanjit's parents and siblings and some part of her soul.
And so, Maati argued, it was where she would return now.