what it would have been like to receive so much female attention when
he'd been younger. There would have been a time when the simple sensual
pleasures of food and a warm bath might have suggested something more
sexual. It might still, if bone-deep weariness hadn't held him.
But no, that wasn't true. He wasn't dead to lust, but it had been years
since it had carried the urgency that he remembered from his youth. He
wondered if that wasn't part of why women had been barred from the
school and the village of the Dai-kvo. Would any poet have been able to
focus on a binding if half his mind was on a woman his body was aching
for? Or perhaps there was something in that mind-set itself that would
affect the binding. So much of the andat was a reflection of the poet
who bound it, it would be easy to imagine andat fashioned by younger
poets in the forms of wantons and whores. Apart from the profoundly
undignified nature of such a binding, it might actually make holding the
andat more difficult as decades passed and a man's fires burned less
brightly. He wondered if there was an analogy with women.
The scratch at the door brought him back. He'd half fallen asleep there
in the water. He rose awkwardly, reaching for his robe and trying not to
spill so much water that it flowed into the fire grate and killed the
flames.
"Yes, yes," he called as he fastened the robe's ties. "I'm not drowned
yet. Come in."
Eiah stepped through the doorway. There was something in her arms, held
close to her. Between the unsteady light of the fire and his own
age-blunted sight, he couldn't tell more than it looked like a book.
Maati took a pose of welcome, his sleeves water-stuck to his arms.
"Should I come back later?" she asked.
"No, of course not," Maati said, pulling a chair toward the fire for
her. "I was only washing the road off of me. Is this the famed list?"
"Part of it is," she said as she sat. She was wearing a physician's robe
of deep green and gold. "Part of it's something else."
Maati settled himself on the tub's wide lip and took a pose that
expressed curiosity and surprise. Eiah handed him a scroll, and he
unfurled it. The questions were all written in a large hand, clearly,
and each with a small passage to give some context. He read three of
them. Two were simple enough, but the third was more interesting. It
touched on the difficulties of generating new directionals, and the
possibility of encasing absolute structures within relative ones. It
gave the grammar an odd feeling, as if it were suggesting that fire was
hot rather than asserting it.
It was interesting.
"Are they all like this?" he asked.
"The questions? Some of them, yes," Eiah said. "Vanjit's especially were
beyond anything we could find a plausible answer for."
Maati pursed his lips and nodded. An absolute made relative. What would
that do? He found himself smiling without knowing at first what he was
smiling about.
"I think," he said, "leaving you to your own company may have been the
best thing I've done."