heard stories of Westlands women coming to marry among the low towns,
thinking their wombs would make them of greater value here than in their
own lands. Instead, they were recognized as a slower kind of invasion.
Driven out with threats or stones. The men who had had the temerity to
marry outside their own kind punished in ways to rival the prices paid
by failed poets. Joints broken, drowned in night pots, necks snapped,
and bodies thrown into creeks to drown in half a hand's depth of water.
And yet, the stories might only be stories. The more Maati traveled, the
less certain he was.
Twice, great belching steam wagons had passed him on the trail. The men
at the controls had been locals, but the machines themselves were
Galtic, remnants of the war. Once he had seen plumes of smoke and steam
rising from the river itself, a flat barge sitting low to the water and
driven by the same chuffing, tarnished bulb as the wagons. Even the
fields below him now were cultivated in a pattern he had never seen
before the Galts came. Perhaps Otah's betrayal of the cities colored all
of Maati's perceptions now, but it felt as if the Galts were invading
again, only slowly this time, burrowing under the ground and changing
all they touched in small, insidious ways.
Something tickled his arm. Maati plucked out the tick and cracked it
between his thumbnails. He was wasting time. His feet ached from walking
and his robe stuck to his back and legs, but the sooner this meeting
happened, the sooner he would know where he stood. He emptied the last
of the seeds into his hand, ate them, then put the pouch back in his
sleeve and untied his mule.
Seven years before, he and Cehmai had parted for the last time at a
wayhouse three days' walk northwest of the farms and the river and
catalpa-shaded hill. It had not been an entirely friendly parting, but
they had agreed to leave letters of their whereabouts at that house,
should the need ever arise to find each other.
Maati had found the place easily. In the intervening years, the kitchens
had burned, and the two huge trees in the courtyard. The boy who stabled
the horses had grown to be a man. The bricks that had been brown and
yellow had been painted white and blue. And the box they had paid the
keeper to hold for them had a letter in it, sewn and sealed, with
ciphered directions that would lead to the farmhouse Cehmai had taken
under his new false name. Jadit Noygu.
Jadit Noygu, and his wife Sian.
Maati took the letter out again, consulting the deciphered text he'd
marked in between the lines written in Cehmai's clean, clear hand.
Forward down the track until he passed the ruin of an old mill, then the
first east-turning pathway, and half a hand's walk to a low
mud-and-straw farmhouse with a brick cistern in front. Maati clucked at
the mule and resumed his walk.
He arrived in the heat of the afternoon; even the shade beneath the
trees sweltered. Maati helped himself to a bowl of water from the
cistern, and then another bowl for the mule. No one came out to greet
him, but the shutters on the windows looked recently painted and the
track that led around the side of the house was well-tended. There was