There was little more talk. Seeing that Xulai’s fingers had stopped conveying cakes from dish to mouth and that the others seemed satisfied, Lok-i-xan reached for her hand. “Shall we go on to the citadel now?”
They went on as before, around the back of the hill, up toward the front again, and so, having made one complete upward-spiraling circuit, they came to the gate of the citadel, directly in line with the boulevard below. From where they stood, a long, steep, and completely empty flight of stairs descended all the way to the bottom, where the people still stood, still smiling, still silent. Lok-i-xan turned, raised his arms, and bowed. Every person in the far-flung crowd returned the bow, still silent as ghosts.
Lok-i-xan called out something Xulai couldn’t quite catch the meaning of. With myriad voices but one phrase, the crowd replied. While some of them stayed where they were, others broke away into little groups and wandered off, talking among themselves, laughing, a cheerful babble rising from people who had enjoyed the whole experience.
“What did you say to them?” she asked.
“I told them you said thank you for the welcome. They said, ‘Be one of us.’ Here, we feel silence is the best greeting. Any bird or monkey can chatter, any wagon can make a noise upon a street, but to stand silent, to observe, to remember, that is recognition, don’t you think so? Of course, with children, concentration takes some teaching. Children too young to be quiet stay at home on these occasions.”
“Quiet makes fewer demands on the ones they’re looking at,” she agreed, suddenly thankful that the crowd had not cheered and waved things at them. “It allowed us to see them, really see them, more easily than if everyone had been shouting. I will remember the tea ladies’ robes. They were beautiful. I will remember the cakes, and the children, the young man who ran to the tea kiosk, the dancers. Everything was . . . elegant.”
“We admire and revere elegance,” said her grandfather. “Even in simple things.”
They turned and went inside to more elegance. Abasio noted both the lack of ostentation and the very high level of craftsmanship. He also saw, with some surprise and considerable interest, that the doors seemed to sink into sockets that would very probably make them waterproof. The four of them were escorted to rooms at the end of a corridor where sliding doors could shut off the corridor itself to make the area completely private. Their baggage had already been brought from the ship by some quicker way, unpacked, and put away. Lok-i-xan left them in their common room to get settled.
Two walls of the common room opened into bedrooms, two on each side. Each had an adjoining bath with a small, gently steaming tub and all the other accoutrements Xulai had come to think of as being essentially Tingawan. The third wall, across from the door to the corridor, held floor-to-ceiling windows that separated them from a walled garden. Xulai leaned against the window to look out at the gnarled tree at the garden’s center. It looked old enough to have lived a few thousand years. A bird’s nest rested on an ancient, twisted bough. Old and new. Water flowed into a pool rimmed with sparkling sand. Wet and dry. The rock at the roots of the tree was covered with thick, green moss. Hard and soft. There were probably a dozen other oppositions brought into harmony in the garden; she would no doubt find all of them in time, and she would be told the garden had the word “harmony” in its name. The Garden of Harmonious Waters. Something like that. Very Tingawan. She returned to her bedroom, hers by virtue of her own belongings having been hung in the beautifully carved wooden wardrobe or folded into drawers or otherwise appropriately distributed.
Her room adjoined the next one, and as she stared accusingly at the adjoining door, Abasio opened it from the other side. “You’re . . . peeved?” he asked, looking from her to the door and back.
“It just seems that everyone assumes . . .”
“I don’t think so. The two rooms on each side simply have joining doors. I can ask Precious Wind to trade with me.”
“I don’t want you to have another room, I just think . . . everyone knows everything about me, you, us.”
“They probably do,” he said cheerfully.
She moved fretfully away from him. “It’s . . . I feel I don’t have any private things, not even my thoughts!”
He took a deep breath and sat down on the bed, bouncing a little. Very comfortable. After a moment’s consideration, he said, “Let’s see. We’ve talked about many things on this journey, but we never talked religion. Do you believe in a deity?”
“One who fiddles with people, you mean? One who saves this one while condemning a thousand others to painful death? That kind of deity?”
“I was supposing a much more benign one. My question really is: if you did believe in a deity, would you be annoyed at the deity knowing you?”
“Presumably the deity would have created me, so it would know me. There’d be no point in my being upset about it.”
“Exactly.” He put his arms around her rigid form and held her lightly until the steel framework she had summoned relaxed and she felt rather like flesh again. “Exactly,” he repeated when she leaned into him, breathing against his throat.
“You mean the ones who know all about me did make me?”
“Not quite from scratch, but I think it very likely they had a part in your design. I also think they’ve had a very large part in bringing me into your life, and I absolutely refuse to be even slightly upset about that. It would be the basest sort of ingratitude.”
“I have to go back to the port,” Precious Wind announced vehemently from
