was never confined like this, and certainly my father was strict about the dignity of the women of his household. It's just that I'm accustomed to being in the market. It's so dull, being stuck inside the walls all the time.'
'You have plenty of company.'
'That counts for something, certainly, but many of the women will marry and go off to establish their own households. So we must hope. Priya is always with me. And there's a sweet girl my age among the ones we're hoping will marry the soldiers. I like her, she reminds me of my sister Ti, but she is not a deep thinker, Miravia, if 1 may say so. As Ti would say, I think I would die die die if I couldn't see you.'
Miravia pressed her hand softly.
In pregnancy, Mai's thoughts had begun to wander down strange paths unknown to her before, or perhaps it was the long journey she had undergone, from being Father Mei's favored pet in Kartu Town across months of travel through desert and hills and mountains to the fragile peace she had grasped for herself in this new land. Her thoughts, once confined by the limits of Kartu Town, had roamed into a wilderness she did not at all comprehend.
'Is it strange to say,' she said hesitantly, 'that even so quickly, I felt when you and I met that we knew each other already?'
'Not strange at all. Souls are reborn, and in their new lives they move toward the souls they have loved in previous lives.'
'Is that what the Ri Amarah believe?'
'What we believe? It is the truth. Perhaps you and I were sisters in another time.'
'I hope not among your people, for I think I will go mad with these restrictions!'
'Yes. Your husband is out on his own business.'
Growing up in the Mei clan, where her father ruled with a whip hand and his wives by turns quarreled and cooperated, had not prepared Mai for her own married life. Nothing could have prepared her for Anji. He was indeed the very prince both dangerous and lovely who walked through the sentimental stories she had loved as a girl. The songs hinted of stolen pleasure, the sensuous delights of the bed, but in the Mei clan she had observed discontented or quietly abused women who had to accept every whim or cruelty laid on them by their husbands and masters. She had supposed her own husband would offer a similar service, the Gandi-li boy of whom she had never heard a bad word except that he was an obedient son of a wealthy family determined to increase its stature in town.
Anji was nothing like the colorless, uninteresting men of Kartu Town.
'You're blushing,' said Miravia with a smile. 'Is he very good to you?'
Grandmother Mei, disappointed throughout her life, had had sharp words for any person who admitted to happiness. She would crush a flower before she would see a child rejoice in its fresh beauty. Yet why allow Grandmother Mei's bullying ways to dictate her own
path? If boasting was bad, surely it was because it demeaned the hopes of others, and embittered your own modest spirit.
'He is good to me. So is it wrong of me to be a little angry that he gets to go out, and I must be confined?'
'He's out on militia business.' She gestured toward her brother. 'It's not only women who aren't allowed to go where they wish.'
Priya, wearing a humble cotton robe, and Eliar, with his butter-yellow turban wrapped tightly to conceal his hair, were bent over a scroll. Eliar was holding the ends open while Priya used a hair pin to point out the words as she followed them from top to bottom.
'To arrive on the far shore. Six virtues carry you, as ships ferry passengers across a turbulent sea. Generosity, which is communication. Discipline, which is openness. Patience, which is space. Energy, which is joy. Contemplation with the inner eye, which is awareness. The highest of these is knowledge, a sword with two edges to cut through the knot of confusion and trouble, the obstacles that confine us and stand as barriers to our liberation.'
Miravia continued as Priya paused in her reading. 'Eliar wanted to join the militia, but he was consigned to escort me, since he is my only brother of age, so you can see there are strictures laid upon men as well. Eliar is wild to go on some adventure. But no one will let him. It would be easier for me to go.' She made a face to show she didn't mean it.
'You can conceal yourself under the veil and go anywhere you wish,' said Mai, 'and no one would recognize you. We could go out together, veiled in that way.'
'Everyone who saw us knowing we were Silvers!' She spoke the common word for her people with a biting lilt. 'Afterward we would have to face my grandmother, and your husband, dear friend. I do not have the courage to attempt that.'
The glamour of twilight passed; night settled, and with it the daytime sounds of rumbling cart wheels and casual traffic. Water burbled through the complicated system of pipes that fed the fountains of the compound. Now and again they heard the fire watch clapping through the streets, or a swell of singing from one of the temples, and once they heard a man's startled shout.
Eliar said, 'The waters represent death? And the far shore is the existence we hope for after death?'
'No,' said Priya. 'To arrive on the far shore is to follow the path of awakening.'
'There was still a light burning in your office when I came in,' said Miravia.
'That was Keshad. He never stops working. I don't think he sleeps.'
'Your factor?'
'One of them. He's young, but knowledgeable. I don't know if any of the Ri Amarah ever had dealings with him. He was a slave to Master Feden.'
'Any merchant in Olossi knows better than to send slave factors to deal with my people. It would be terribly insulting.'
Mai glanced again at Priya. Would Miravia hate Mai if she knew Mai had slaves of her own? Surely Miravia already knew, and looked the other way. And yet, Mai could not see the harm in it. Everyone kept slaves, who could afford to do so. Slavery was what happened to people when they had lost everything. Yet that did not mean slaves were not human. When folk mistreated their slaves or forced themselves upon slaves who had no recourse but to accept unwanted attentions, that was cruel.
'Cruelty is always wrong,' she said.
'Yes, of course,' said Miravia with a surprised look. 'Slavery is cruel because it deprives a person of their own life and of their honor. It is always wrong to permit slavery.'
This was treacherous ground.
Mai said, 'Anji means to take a boat across the sea to look at the work being done in the Barrens, on our new estate, which I might remind you I have not seen-'
'Not that it isn't a hundred mey away from any kind of lively markets!'
'Don't remind me!' Mai laughed. 'I will visit there twice a year to check on the herds. It sounds very much like Kartu Town, all dust, only with no market to liven the day. Many women who hope to marry the soldiers will be sent to live there the year around. Can you imagine!' She took a segment of sunfruit and considered its moist flesh, then popped it in her mouth and sighed as the sweet juices cooled her throat. 'After the attack on Tarn and Seren, Anji decided to increase the recruitment for the militia on the Olo'o
Plain. He rode upriver with a company. He is sure another attack will come.'
'From the empire? Or the northern army? Surely the leaders of the northern army know who was responsible for their defeat.'
'Anji has many enemies.' So the hero always did, in the tales and songs. Sometimes he won and lived, and sometimes he lost and died. And often he won, and died anyway.
'Captain Anji is a very clever man, I am sure from everything you and Eliar and my father and uncles say, not that I will ever be allowed to speak to him conversationally. I am sure he knows what he is doing.'
'I am also sure of it, but that doesn't mean he isn't in danger. And it's doubly worse because Seren did not see who stabbed him, and was then overtaken by the poison so he never saw what happened to Tam.'
She shuddered. Anji had arrived in time to see Tarn's ghost, but of course he could not hear the speech of ghosts, and the spirit had departed with the setting of the sun. If only Shai had been here!
A dog barked, answered by another. In a nearby district, drums beat a rhythm uncannily like the thunder of
