The voyage returning Otah to the cities of the Khaiem took weeks to prepare, and if the ships that had left Saraykeht all those months before had looked like an invading fleet, the ones returning were a city built on the water. The high-masted Galtic ships with their great billowing sails dyed red and blue and gold took to the sea by the dozens. Every great family of Galt seemed bent on sending a ship greater than the others. The ships of the utkhaiem-lacquered and delicate and low to the water-seemed small and awkward beside these, their newest seafaring cousins. Birds circled above them, screaming confusion as if a part of the coast itself had set out for foreign lands. The trees and hills of Otah's onetime enemies fell away behind them. That first night, the torches and lanterns made the sea appear as full of stars as the sky.
One of the small gifts the gods had granted Otah was a fondness for travel by ship. The shifting of the deck under his feet, the vast scent of the ocean, the call of the gulls were like visiting a place he had once lived. He stood at the prow of the great Galtic ship given him by the High Council for his journey home and looked out at the rising sun.
He had spent years in the eastern islands as a boy. He'd been a middling fisherman, a better midwife's assistant, a good sailor. He had come close to marrying an island woman, and still bore the first half of the marriage tattoo on his breast. The ink had faded and spread over the years as if he were a parchment dropped in water. With the slap of waves against wood, the salt-laden air, the morning light dancing gold and rose on the water, he remembered those days.
This late in the morning, he would already have cast his nets. His fingers would have been numbed by the cold. He would have been eating the traditional breakfast of fish paste and nuts from an earthenware jar. The men he had known would be doing the same today, those who were still alive. In another life, another world, he might be doing it still.
He had lived so many lives: half-starved street child; petty thief; seafront laborer; fisherman; assistant midwife; courier; Khai; husband; father; war leader; emperor. Put in a line that way, he could see how another person might imagine his life to be an unending upward spiral, but it didn't feel that way to him. He had done what he'd had to at the time. One thing had led to another. A man without particular ambition had been placed atop the world, and likewise the world had been placed atop him. And against all probability, he found himself here, wearing the richest robes in the cities, with a private cabin larger than some boats he'd worked, and thinking fondly of fish paste and nuts.
Lost in thought, he heard the little ship's boat hail-a booming voice speaking Galtic words-before he knew it was approaching. The watchman of his own vessel replied, and then the landsman's chair descended. Otah watched idly as a man in the colors of House Dasin was winched up, swung over, and lowered to the deck. A knot of Otah's own clerks and servants formed around the newcomer. Otah pulled his hands up into his sleeves and made his way back.
The boy was a servant of some sort-the Galts had a system of gradation that Otah hadn't bothered to memorize-with hair the color of beach sand and a greenish tint to his face. Seeing Otah, the servant took a pose of abject obeisance poorly.
'Most High,' he said, his words heavily inflected, 'Councilman Dasin sends his regards. He and his wife extend the invitation to a dinner and concert aboard the Avenger tomorrow evening.'
The boy gulped and looked down. There had, no doubt, been a more formal and flowery speech planned. Nausea led to brevity. Otah glanced at his Master of Tides, a youngish woman with a face like a hatchet and a mind for detail that would have served her in any trade. She took a pose that deferred to Otah's judgment, gave permission, and offered to make excuse all with a single gesture. Dasin's servant wouldn't have seen a third of her meanings. Otah glanced over at the shining water. The sun's angle had already shifted, the light already changed its colors and the colors of the ocean that bore them. He allowed himself a small sigh.
Even here there would be no escape from it. Etiquette and court politics, parties and private audiences, favors asked and given. There was no end of it because of course there wasn't. No more than a farmer could stop planting fields, a fisherman stop casting nets, a tradesman close up warehouses and stalls and spend long days singing in teahouses or soaking in baths.
'I should be pleased,' he said. 'Please convey my gratitude to Farrercha and his family.'
The boy bowed his thanks rather than make a formal pose, then, blushing, adopted a pose of gratitude and retreated back to the landsman's chair. With a great shouting and the creak of wood and leather, the chair rose, swung out over the water, and descended. Otah watched the boy vanish over the rail, but didn't see him safely to the boat. The invitation was a reminder of all that waited for him in his cabin below decks. Otah took a long, deep breath, feeling the salt and the sunlight in his lungs, and descended to the endless business of Empire.
Letters had arrived from Yalakeht outlining a conspiracy by three of the high families of the utkhaiem still bitter from the war to claim independence and name a Khai Yalakeht rather than acknowledge a Galtic empress. Chaburi-Tan had suffered another attack by pirates. Though the invaders had been driven off, it was becoming clear that the Westlands mercenary company hired to protect the city was also in negotiation with the raiders; the city's economy was on the edge of collapse.
There was some positive news from the palaces at Utani. Danat wrote that the low farms around Pathai, Utani, and Lachi were all showing a good crop, and the cattle plague they'd feared had come to nothing, so those three cities, at least, wouldn't be starving for at least the next year.
Otah read until the servants brought his midday meal, then again for two and a half hands. He slept after that in a suspended cot whose oiled chains shifted with the rocking ship but never let out so much as a whisper. He woke with the low sunlight of evening sloping in the cabin window and the dull thunder of feet above him announcing the change of watch as clearly as the drum and flute. He lay there for a moment, his mind pleasantly emptied by his rest, then swung his legs over, dropped to the deck, and composed two of the seven letters he would send ahead of the massive, celebratory fleet.
When, the next evening, his Master of Tides sent to remind him of the engagement he'd agreed to, Otah had indeed forgotten it. He allowed servants to dress him in robes of emerald silk and cloth of gold, his long, white hair to be bound back. His temples were anointed with oils smelling of lavender and sandalwood. Decades now he had been Emperor or else Khai Machi, and the exercise still struck him as ridiculous. He had been slow to understand the value of ceremony and tradition. He still wasn't entirely convinced.
The boat that bore him and his retinue across to the Dasins' ship, the Avenger, was festooned with flowers and torches. Blossoms fell into the water, floating there with the reflections of flame. Otah stood, watching as the oarsmen pulled him toward the great warship. His footing was as sure as a seaman's, and he was secretly proud of the fact. The high members of the utkhaiem who had joined him-Auna Tiyan, Piyat Saya, and old Adaut Kamau-all kept to their benches. The Avenger itself glowed with candlelight, the effect lessened by the last remnant of the glorious sunset behind it. When full darkness came, the ship would look like something from a children's story. Otah tried to appreciate it for what it would become.
The landsman's chair took each of them up in turn, Otah last out of respect for his rank. The deck of the Avenger was as perfect and controlled as any palace ballroom, any Khaiate garden, any high chamber of the Galts. Chairs that seemed made of silver filigree and breath were scattered over the fresh-scrubbed boards in patterns that looked both careless and perfect. Musicians played reed organ and harp, and a small chorus of singers sat in the rigging, as if the ship itself had joined the song. Swinging down in the landsman's chair, Otah saw half-a-dozen men he knew, including, his face upturned and amused, Balasar Gice.
Farrer Dasin stood with his wife Issandra and the young woman-the girl-Ana. Otah let himself be drawn up from the chair by his servants, and stepped forward to his hosts. Farrer stood stiff as cast iron, his smile never reaching his eyes. Issandra's eyes still had the reddened rims that Otah recalled, but there was also pleasure there. And her daughter…
Ana Dasin, the Galt who would one day be Empress of the Khaiem, reminded Otah of a rabbit. Her huge, brown eyes and small mouth looked perpetually startled. She wore a gown of blue as pale as a robin's egg that didn't fit her complexion and a necklace of raw gold that did. She would have seemed meek, except that there was something of her mother in the line of her jaw and the set of her shoulders.
All he knew of her had come from court gossip, Balasar Gice's comments, and the trade of formal documents that had flowed by the crate once the agreements were made. It was difficult to believe that this was the girl who had beaten her own tutor at numbers or written a private book of etiquette that had been the scandal of its season. She was said to have ridden horses from the age of four; she was said to have insulted the son of an ambassador
