But no, that wasn't true. He wasn't dead to lust, but it had been years since it had carried the urgency that he remembered from his youth. He wondered if that wasn't part of why women had been barred from the school and the village of the Dai-kvo. Would any poet have been able to focus on a binding if half his mind was on a woman his body was aching for? Or perhaps there was something in that mind-set itself that would affect the binding. So much of the andat was a reflection of the poet who bound it, it would be easy to imagine andat fashioned by younger poets in the forms of wantons and whores. Apart from the profoundly undignified nature of such a binding, it might actually make holding the andat more difficult as decades passed and a man's fires burned less brightly. He wondered if there was an analogy with women.
The scratch at the door brought him back. He'd half fallen asleep there in the water. He rose awkwardly, reaching for his robe and trying not to spill so much water that it flowed into the fire grate and killed the flames.
'Yes, yes,' he called as he fastened the robe's ties. 'I'm not drowned yet. Come in.'
Eiah stepped through the doorway. There was something in her arms, held close to her. Between the unsteady light of the fire and his own age-blunted sight, he couldn't tell more than it looked like a book. Maati took a pose of welcome, his sleeves water-stuck to his arms.
'Should I come back later?' she asked.
'No, of course not,' Maati said, pulling a chair toward the fire for her. 'I was only washing the road off of me. Is this the famed list?'
'Part of it is,' she said as she sat. She was wearing a physician's robe of deep green and gold. 'Part of it's something else.'
Maati settled himself on the tub's wide lip and took a pose that expressed curiosity and surprise. Eiah handed him a scroll, and he unfurled it. The questions were all written in a large hand, clearly, and each with a small passage to give some context. He read three of them. Two were simple enough, but the third was more interesting. It touched on the difficulties of generating new directionals, and the possibility of encasing absolute structures within relative ones. It gave the grammar an odd feeling, as if it were suggesting that fire was hot rather than asserting it.
It was interesting.
'Are they all like this?' he asked.
'The questions? Some of them, yes,' Eiah said. 'Vanjit's especially were beyond anything we could find a plausible answer for.'
Maati pursed his lips and nodded. An absolute made relative. What would that do? He found himself smiling without knowing at first what he was smiling about.
'I think,' he said, 'leaving you to your own company may have been the best thing I've done.'
The firelight caught Eiah's answering smile.
'I wasn't going to say so,' she said. 'It's been fascinating. At first, it was as if we were sneaking pies from the kitchens. Everyone wanted to do the thing, but it seemed… wrong? I don't know if that's the word. It seemed like something we shouldn't do, and more tempting because of it. And then once we started talking with each other, it was like being on a loose cart. We couldn't stop or even slow down. Half the time I didn't know if we were going down the wrong road, but…'
She shrugged, nodding at the scroll in his hands.
'Well, even if you were, some of this may be quite useful.'
'I'd hoped so,' Eiah said. 'And that brings me to something else. I found some books at court. I brought them.'
Maati blinked, the scroll forgotten in his hands.
'Books? They weren't all burned?' he said.
'Not that sort. These aren't ours,' she said. 'They're Westlands'. Books from physicians. Here.'
She took back the scroll and put a small, cloth-bound book in his hand. One of the sticks in the fire grate broke, sending out embers like fireflies. Maati leaned forward.
The script was small and cramped, the ink pale. It would have been difficult in sunlight; by fire and candle, it might as well not have been written. Frustrated, Maati turned the pages and an eye stared back at him from the paper. He turned back and went more slowly. All the diagrams were of eyes, some ripped from their sockets, some pierced by careful blades. Comments accompanied each orb, laying, he assumed, its secrets open.
'Sight,' Eiah said. 'The author is called Arran, but it was more likely written by dozens of people who all used the same name. The wardens in the north had a period four or five generations ago when there was some brilliant work done. We ignored it, of course, because it wasn't by us. But these are very, very good. Arran was brilliant.'
'Whether he existed or not,' Maati said. He meant it as a joke.
'Whether he existed or not,' Eiah agreed with perfect seriousness. 'I've been working with these. And with Vanjit. We have a draft. You should look at it.'
Maati handed her back the book and she pulled a sheaf of papers from her sleeve. Maati found himself almost hesitant to accept them. Vanjit, and her dreamed baby. Vanjit, who had lost so much in the war. He didn't want to see any of his students pay the price of a failed binding, but especially not her.
He took the papers. Eiah waited. He opened them.
The binding was an outline, but it was well-considered. The sections and relationships sketched in with commentary detailing what would go in each, often with two or three notes of possible approaches. The andat would be Clarity-of-Sight, and it would be based in the medical knowledge of Westlands physicians and the women's grammar that Maati and Eiah had been creating. Even if some Second Empire poet had managed to hold the andat before, this approach, these descriptions and sensibilities, was likely to be wholly different. Wholly new.
'Why Vanjit?' he asked. 'Why not Ashti Beg or Small Kae?'
'You think she isn't ready?'
'I… I wouldn't go so far as that,' Maati said. 'It's only that she's young, and she's had a harder life than some. I wonder whether
…'
'None of us are perfect, Maati-kya,' Eiah said. 'We have to work with the people we have. Vanjit is clever and determined.'
'You think she can manage it? Bind this andat?'
'I think she has the best hope of any of us. Except possibly me.'
Maati sighed, nodding as much to himself as to her. Dread thickened his throat.
'Let me look at this,' he said. 'Let me think about it.'
Eiah took a pose that accepted his command. Maati looked down again.
'Why didn't he come?' Eiah asked.
'Because,' Maati began, and then found he wasn't able to answer as easily as he'd thought. He folded the papers and began to tuck them into his sleeve, remembered how wet the cloth was, and tossed them instead onto his low, wood-framed bed. 'Because he didn't want to,' he said at last.
'And my aunt?'
'I don't know,' Maati said. 'I thought for a time that she might take my side. She didn't seem pleased with how they were living. Or, no. That's not right. She seemed to care more than he did about how they would live in the future. But he wouldn't have any of it.'
'He's given up,' Eiah said.
Maati recalled the man's face, the lines and weariness. The authenticity of his smile. When they'd first met, Cehmai had been little more than a boy, younger than Eiah was now. This was what the world had done to that boy. What it had done to them all.
'He has,' Maati said.
'Then we'll do without him,' Eiah said.
'Yes,' Maati said, hoisting himself up. 'Yes we will, but if you'll forgive me, Eiah-kya, I think the day's worn me thin. A little rest, and we'll begin fresh tomorrow. And where's that list of questions? Ah, thank you. I'll look over all of this, and we'll decide where best to go from here, eh?'
She took his hand, squeezing his knuckles gently.
'It's good to have you back,' she said.
