Tens of thousands of women, cut free from the lives they were entitled
to, now to be forgotten.
He wondered if a man who could do that still had enough humanity left to
enjoy a falling star or the song of a nightingale.
He hoped not.
Eiah left the next morning. The high road was still in good repair, and
travel along it was an order of magnitude faster than the tracking Maati
had done between the low towns. When Maati and the others saw her off,
she was wearing simple robes and the leather satchel hung at her side.
She could have been mistaken for any traveling physician. Maati might
have imagined it, but he thought that Vanjit held her parting stance
longer than the others, that her eyes followed Eiah more hungrily.
When the horse and cart had gone far enough that even the dust from the
hooves and wheels was invisible, they turned back to the business at
hand. Until midday, they scraped soot and a decade's fallen leaves out
from the shell of one of the gutted buildings. Irit found the bones of
some forgotten boy who had been caught in that long-cooled fire, and
they held a brief ceremony in remembrance of the slaughtered poets and
student boys in whose path they all traveled. Vanjit especially was
sober and pale as Maati finished his words and committed the bones to a
fresh-made, hotter blaze that would, he hoped, return the old bones to
their proper ash.
As they made their way back from the pyre, he made a point to walk at
her side. Her olive skin and well-deep eyes reminded him of his first
lover, Liat. The mother of the child who should have been his own. Even
before she spoke, his breast ached like a once-broken arm presaging a
shift of weather.
"I was thinking of my brother," Vanjit said. "He was near that boy's
age. Not highborn, of course. They didn't take normal people here then,
did they?"
"No," Maati said. "Nor women, for that."
"It's a strange thought. It already seems like home to me. Like I've
always been here," the girl said, then shifted her weight, her shoulders
turning a degree toward Maati even as they walked side by side. "You've
always known Eiah-cha, haven't you?"
"As long as she's known anything," Maati said with a chuckle. "Possibly
a bit longer. I was living in Machi for years and years before the war."
"She must be very important to you."
"She's been my salvation, in her way. Without her, none of us would be
here."
"You would have found a way," Vanjit said. Her voice was odd, a degree
harder than Maati had expected. Or perhaps he had imagined it, because
when she went on, there was no particular bite to the words. "You're
clever and wise enough, and I'm sure there are more people in places of
influence that would have given you aid, if you'd asked."
"Perhaps," Maati said. "But I knew from the first I could trust Eiah.
That carries quite a bit of weight. Without trust, I don't know if I
would have hit on the idea of coming here. Before, I always kept to
places I could leave easily."