The shapes of the hills grew familiar, and the pauses he took grew
longer. Here was the dry streambed where he and the other black-robed
boys had sat in the evenings and told one another stories of the
families they had already half-forgotten. There, a grouping of stumps
showed where the stand of trees they had climbed had been felled by
Galtic axes and burned. A cave under an outcropping of rock where they'd
made the younger boys slither into the darkness to hunt snakes. The air
was as rich with memory as the scent of dust and wildflowers. His life
had been simpler then, or if not simpler, at least a thing that held
promise.
He managed to postpone his arrival at the school itself until the sun
was lowering before him. The grand stone buildings looked smaller than
he remembered them, but the great bronze door that had once been
reserved for the Dai-kvo was just as grand. The high, narrow windows
were marked black at the tops, the remnants of some long-dead fire. The
wall of one of the sleeping chambers had fallen, stones strewn on the
ground. The gardens were gone, marked only by low mounds where stones
had once formed their borders. Time and violence had changed the place,
but not yet beyond recognition. Another decade of rain washing mortar
from between the stones, another fire, and perhaps the roofs would
collapse. The ground would reclaim its own.
Maati tied his mule to a low, half-rotten post and made his way in. The
grand room where he and the other boys had stood in rows each morning
before marching off to their duties and classes. The wide corri dors
beyond it, lit only by the reddish rays of the evening sun. Where were
the bodies of the boys who had been here on the day the armies of Galt
arrived? Where had those bones been buried? And where, now, were Maati's
own students? Had something gone awry?
When he reached the inner courtyard, his concerns eased. The flagstone
paths were clear of dirt and dust, the weeds and grass had been pulled
from between the stones. And there, in the third window that had once
been the teachers' quarters, a lantern glowed already against the
falling night.
The door that opened to the wide central hall had been fitted with a new
leather hinge. The walls and floors, freshly washed, shone in the light
of a hundred candles. The scent of curry and the sound of women's voices
raised in conversation came through the air as if the one were part of
the other. Maati found himself disoriented for a moment, as if he'd
walked down a familiar street only to find it opening upon some unknown
city. He walked forward slowly, drawn in by the voices as if they were
music. There was Ashti Beg's dry voice, Large Kae's laughter. As he drew
nearer, the pauses between the louder voices were filled with the softer
voices of Vanjit and Irit. The first words he made out were Eiah's.
"Yes," she said, "but how would you fit that into a grammatic structure
that doesn't already include it? Or am I talking in a circle?"
"I think you may be," Small Kae replied. "Maati-kvo said that binding an
andat involves all kinds of inclusions. I don't see why this one would
be any different."
There was a pause, a sound that might have been the ghost of a sigh.