younger, and we can't hire on hands to help us. There aren't any."
"Then we'll leave," Cehmai said. "We'll do something else, only not that."
"Why not?" Maati asked.
"Because I don't want to kill any more people," Cehmai said. "Not the
girls you're encouraging to try this, not the foreigners who would try
to stop us, not whatever army came in the next autumn's war."
"It doesn't have to be like that," Maati said.
"It does," Cehmai said. "We held the power of gods, and the world envied
us and turned against us, and they always will again. I can't say I
think much of where we stand now, but I remember what happened to bring
us here, and I don't see how making poets of women instead of men will
make a world any different or better than the one we had then."
"It may not," Maati said, "but it will be better than the one we have
now. If you won't help me, then I'll do without you, but I'd thought
better of you, Cehmai. I'd thought you had more spine."
"Rice is getting cold," Idaan said. Her voice was controlled rage.
"Perhaps we should eat it before it goes bad."
They finished the meal alternating between artificially polite
conversation and strained silence. After, Cehmai took the bowls away to
clean and didn't return. Idaan led Maati to a small room near the back
with a straw pallet and a night candle already burning. Maati slept
poorly and found himself still upset when he woke. He left in the dark
of the morning without speaking again to either of his hosts, one from
disappointment and shame and the other, though he would never have said
it, from fear.
Nantani was the nearest port to the lands of Galt, but the scars of war
were too fresh there and too deep. Instead, the gods had conspired to
return Otah to the city of his childhood: Saraykeht.
The fastest ships arrived several days before the great mass of the
fleet. They stood out half a hand's travel from the seafront, and Otah
took in the whole city. He could see the masts at the farthest end of
the seafront, berthed in order to leave the greatest space for the
incoming traffic. Bright cloth hung from every window Otah could see,
starting with the dock master's offices nearest the water to the towers
of the palaces, high and to the north where the vibrant colors were
grayed by humidity.
Crowds filled the docks, and he heard a roar of voices and snatches of
drum and flute carried by the breeze. The air itself smelled different:
rank and green and familiar in a way he hadn't expected.
The Emperor of the Khaiem had been away from his cities for eight
months, almost nine, and his return with the high families of Galt in
tow was the kind of event seen once in history and never again. This was
the day that every man and woman at the seafront or watching from the
windows above the streets would recall until death's long fingers
touched them. The day that the new empress, the Galtic empress, arrived
for the first time.
There were stories Otah had read in books that had been ashes for almost
as long as this new Empress had been alive, about an emperor's life
mirroring the state of his empire. An emperor with many children meant