"Perfect. I've been able to write every evening. I may actually manage
to complete this before I die."
He'd meant it as a joke, but Vanjit's reply was grim, almost scolding.
"Don't say that. Don't talk about death lightly. It isn't something to
laugh at."
Maati took an apologetic pose, and a moment later the darkness seemed to
leave the girl's eyes. She shifted the andat again, freeing one hand to
take an apologetic pose.
"No," Maati said. "You're right. You're quite right."
He steered the conversation to safer waters-meals, weather,
reconstructing the finer points of Vanjit's successful binding.
Contentment seemed to come from the girl like heat from a fire. He
regretted leaving her there, and yet, walking down the wide stone
corridors, he was also pleased.
The years he had spent scrabbling in the shadows like a rat had been so
long and so thick with anger and despair, Maati had forgotten what it
was to feel simple happiness. Now, with the women's grammar proved and
the andat returned to the world, his flesh itself felt different. His
shoulders had grown straighter, his heart lighter, his joints looser and
stronger and sure. He had managed to ignore his burden so long he had
mistaken it for normalcy. The lifting of it felt like youth.
Eiah sat cross-legged on the floor of one of the old lecture halls,
untied codices, opened books, unfurled scrolls laid out around her like
ripples on the surface of a pond. He glanced at the pages-diagrams of
flayed arms, the muscles and joints laid bare as if by the most
meticulous butcher in history; Westlands script with its whorls and dots
like a child's angry scribble; notations in Eiah's own hand, outlining
the definitions and limitations and structure of violence done upon
flesh. Wounded. The andat at its origin. And all of it, he could make
out from where he stood without squinting or bending close.
Eiah looked up at him with a pose equal parts welcome and despair. Maati
lowered himself to the floor beside her.
"You look tired," he said.
Eiah gestured to the careful mess before her, and then sighed.
"This was simpler when I wasn't allowed to do it," she said. "Now that
my own turn has come, I'm starting to think I was a fool to think it
possible."
Maati touched one of the books with his outstretched fingers. The paper
felt thick as skin.
"There is a danger to it," Maati said. "Even if your binding is
perfectly built, there might have been another done that was too much
like it. These books, they were written by men. Your training was done
by men. The poets before Vanjit were all men. Your thinking could be too
little like a man's."
Eiah smiled, chuckling. Maati took a pose of query.
"Physicians in the Westlands tend to be women," she said. "I don't think
I have more than half-a-dozen texts that I could say for certain were
written by men. The problem isn't that."
"No?"