Light hurt. Moving hurt. There wasn’t any part of him that didn’t hurt once he tried to move, particularly his head, and the smell of food wasn’t at all attractive. But a second shake came at his shoulder, and Tano leaned over him, he was sure it was Tano, though his eyes wouldn’t focus, quite, and light hurt.
“You’d better eat, nand’ paidhi.”
“God.”
“Come on.” Pitilessly, Tano began plumping up the cushions about his head and shoulders—which made his head ache and made him uncertain about his stomach.
He rested there, figuring that for enough cooperation to satisfy his tormentors, and saw Algini in the doorway to the bath and the servants’ quarters, talking to Jago, the two of them speaking very quietly, in voices that echoed and distorted. Tano came back with a bowl of soup and some meal wafers. “Eat,” Tano told him, and he didn’t want it. He wanted to tell Tano go away, but his servants didn’t go away, Tabini hired them, and he had to do what they said.
Besides, white wafers was what you ate when your stomach was upset and you wanted not to be sick—he flashed on Mospheira, on his own bedroom, and his mother—but it was Tano holding his head, Tano insisting he have at least half of it, and he nibbled a crumb at a time, while the room and everything tilted on him, and kept trying to slide off into the echoing edges of the world.
He rested his eyes after that, and waked to the smell of soup. He didn’t want it, but he took a sip of it, when Tano put the cup to his lips, and burned his mouth. It tasted like the tea. He wanted to stop right there, but Tano kept trying to feed it to him, insisting he had to, that it was the only way to flush the tea out of his system. So he put an arm into the cold air, located the cup handle with his own hand, let Tano prop his head with pillows, and drank at the cup without dropping it, until his stomach decided it absolutely couldn’t tolerate any more.
He rested the cup in both hands, then, exhausted, unable to decide whether he wanted to put his arm back under the covers to get warm or whether the heat from the porcelain was better. Stay where he was, he thought. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want to do anything but breathe.
Then Banichi walked in, dismissed Tano and stood over his bed with arms folded.
“How are you feeling, nand’ paidhi?”
“Very foolish,” he muttered. He remembered, if he was not hallucinating, the aiji-dowager, a pot of tea, smashed in the fireplace. And a man, Banichi’s very image.
Who was standing in the doorway.
His heart jumped.
Cenedi walked in when he saw him looking his way, and stood on the other side of his bed.
“I wish to apologize,” Cenedi said. “Professionally, nand’ paidhi. I should have known about the tea.”
“I should have known. I will know, after this.” The taste of the tea was still in his mouth. His head ached if he blinked. He was upset that Banichi allowed this stranger into the room, and he asked himself whether Banichi was playing some angle he didn’t understand, pretending to believe Cenedi. It only made sense to keep his answers moderate, and to be polite, and not to offend anyone unnecessarily.
“They compound the aiji-dowager’s tea,” Banichi said, “from a very old local recipe. There’s a strong stimulant involved, which the dowager considers healthful, or at least bracing. With humans’ small body weight and adverse reaction to alkaloids—”
“God.”
“The compound is a tea called dajdi, which I counsel you to avoid in future.”
“The cook requests assurances of your good will,” Cenedi said from the other side of his bed. “He had no idea a human would be in the company.”
“Assure him, please.” His head was going in circles. He lay back against the pillow, and almost spilled the half cup of soup. “No ill will. My damn fault.”
“These are human manners,” Banichi said. “He wishes to emphasize his confidence it was an accident, nadi.”
There was silence. He knew he hadn’t said what he hoped to have said, and he shouldn’t swear doing it, but his head hurt too much. “No wish to offend,” he murmured, which was the universal way out of confusing offenses. “Only good will.” His head was beginning to hurt again. Banichi rescued the soup and set it aside with a clank on the table that sounded like thunder.
“The aiji-dowager wants her doctor to examine the paidhi,” Cenedi said, “if you would stand by as a witness for both sides in this affair, Banichi-ji.”
“Thank the aiji-dowager,” Banichi said. “Yes.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” Bren said. He didn’t want to have the dowager’s doctor near him. He only wanted a little while to rest, lie in the pillows, and let the soup settle.
But no one paid any attention to his wishes. Cenedi went out with Jago, came back with an elderly ateva with a bag full of equipment, who threw back the warm furs, exposed his skin to chill, listened to his heart, looked into his eyes, took his pulse, and discussed with Banichi what he’d been given, how many cups of tea he’d had… “One,” he insisted, but no one listened to the victim.
Finally the doctor came and stared down at him like a specimen in a collection, asked if he had a residual taste in his mouth, or smelled something like tea, and residual taste did describe it.
“Milk,” the doctor said, “a glass every three hours. Warm or cold.”
“Cold,” he said, shuddering.
When it came, it was heated, it tasted of the tea, and he complained of it; but Banichi tasted it, swore it was only the taste in his mouth and said that when it went away it would tell him he was free of the substance.
Meanwhile Algini, the one without a sense of humor, kept bringing him fruit juice and insisting he drink, until he had to make repeated trips to what Maigi termed, delicately, the accommodation.
And meanwhile Banichi disappeared, again, and Algini didn’t know a thing about his mail, couldn’t authorize a power outlet…
“This is an historical monument, nand’ paidhi. It’s my understanding that any change to these walls has to be submitted to the Preservation Commission. We can’t even remove a hanging picture to put up our schedule board, on the very same pins.”
It didn’t sound encouraging.
“What are my chances,” he asked, “of going back to the City any time soon?”
“I can certainly present your request, nand’ paidhi. I have to say, I don’t think so. I’m sure the same considerations that brought you here, still apply.”
“What considerations?”
“The protection of your life, nand’ paidhi.”
“It doesn’t seem safe here, does it?”
“We’ve warned the kitchen to ask if you’re in any party it serves. The cook is extremely concerned. He assures you of his caution in the future.”
He sulked, childlike, and, feeling Algini’s frustration, struggled to mend his expression—but he felt like a child, hemmed about, decided for, and talked past by towering people with motives too dark and hushed to share with him. It inspired him to do childish things, like sending Algini for something complicated so he could sneak downstairs and out the front door and down the road to town.
But he sat still in bed like a good adult, and tried not to be surly with the staff, and drink the damned milk—“Cold!” he insisted to Algini, deciding he couldn’t manage the rest of it.
Whereupon the kitchen, evidently never having heard of such a procedure, sent it over ice.
The milk at last stopped tasting of the tea, the fruit juice had run through him until he had fruit juice running in his veins, he said as much to Djinana, who thought that was exceptionally, originally funny.
He didn’t. He asked for books on Maidingi, read about Malguri castle, out of books liberal in color pictures of his apartments, with notes on what century which piece dated from.
The bed, for instance, was seven hundred years old. There were tours into this section of the castle, if there happened to be no guest in residence. He imagined tourists walking through, children gazing fearfully at the bed, and the guide talking about the paidhi, who’d died in Malguri castle, said to walk the halls at night, haunting the kitchens, looking for a cup of tea…
But it was all history that humans hadn’t had access to—he knew: he’d read every writing of his predecessors. He wanted to make a note, to request Annals of Maidingi by Tagisi of Maidingi township, of Polgini clan, Carditi-Aigorana house, for the paidhiin’s permanent research library in Mospheira… and then remembered the power outlet that it wasn’t possible to have. And nobody, of course, could remove an historic damned lightbulb to put in a tap. It might pull down the historic damned wiring right off its track across the historic wooden rafters.
Solar recharger, he thought. He wondered if the nearby town had any such thing compatible with his computer, and if he could charge his account via the local bank—certainly Banichi could.
Meanwhile… paper and pen. He got up and searched the desks in the study, and found paper. No pen. He searched for the one he’d used to sign the guest register. Gone.
Maddening. He rang for the servants, told Djinana he wanted one immediately, and got the requisite pen from the servants’ quarters. It skipped and it spat, but it wrote; and he wrapped himself in a warm robe, put stockings on his cold feet, and sat and wrote morbid notes to his successor.
… If, he added glumly, this ever gets to human eyes. I’ve a gun under my mattress. Whom shall I shoot? Algini, who can’t get his schedule board hung? Cenedi, who probably didn’t have a clue about the tea being lethal to humans?
Tabini-aiji sent me here for my protection. So far, I’ve come far nearer dying at the hands of Malguri’s kitchen than Shejidan’s assassins…
Some things he didn’t write, fearing his room wasn’t immune to search, if only by the servants and his own security, who were probably one and the same—but he asked himself about the aiji-dowager, and asked himself twice what Tabini had had on his mind with that throw-away comment, “Grandmother’s in residence.”
Not in the least likely, of course, that Tabini had foreseen his invitation to a fatal tea: even for the aiji-dowager, it was too serendipitous and too strange, over all—even if one grew extremely suspicious when accidents happened in the presence of persons of twice-denied ambition.
The obvious thought, of course, was that Ilisidi didn’t like humans.
But what if—a poisoned, delirious brain could form very strange ideas—what if Tabini’s sending him here hadn’t been to send him here, but to get Banichi and Jago inside Malguri, past Ilisidi’s guard?
A try on Ilisidi?
Thinking about it made his head hurt.
His appetite was still off, at supper. He didn’t feel up to formal dinner, and ordered simply a bowl of soup and wafers—which tasted better than they had yesterday, and he decided he felt up to a second bowl of it, in his televisionless, fellowless, phoneless exile.
Mealtimes had become a marker in the day, which thus far, lacking even a clock, he measured in paces of his quarters, in pages turned, in the slow progress of clouds across the sky, or boats across the wind-wrinkled lake.
He forced himself to drink an ordinary tea, and lingered over a sweet milk pudding, in which there was only one questionable and lumpy substance, exceedingly bitter to the taste—but one could, with dexterity, pick the bits out.
Food became an amusement, a hobby, an adventure despite cook’s assurances. The book he had open beside his plate was an absorbing enough account of lingering and resentful spirits of Malguri’s murdered and accident-prone dead. The lake also was given to be haunted by various restless fishermen and by one ill-fated lord of Malguri who leapt in full armor from the cliffs, thus evading what the book called ‘a shameful marriage.’
Curious idea. He resolved to ask someone about that, and to find out the doubtless prurient details.
He discarded the last bitter bit in the pudding, and had his final spoonful as Djinana came in, to take the dishes, as he supposed.
“I’ll have another cup of tea,” he said. He was feeling much better. Djinana laid a tiny silver scroll-case, with great ceremony, beside his plate.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“I don’t know, nand’ paidhi. Nadi Cenedi conveyed it.”
“Would you open it?”
“It’s the dowager’s own…” Djinana protested.
“Nadi. Would you open it?”
Djinana frowned and took it up—broke the seal and spread out the paper.
He took it, once Djinana had proven it only the scroll it seemed to be. But he was thinking of the Bu-javid post office, and Jago’s comment about needles in the mail.
It was almost as welcome. An invitation. From the aiji-dowager. For an early breakfast.
The hospitality of an aiji of any degree was not easy to refuse. He had to share a roof with this woman. She’d nearly killed him. Refusal could convey a belief it wasn’t an accident. And that could mean hostilities. “Tell Banichi I need to talk to him.”
“I’ll try, nadi.”
“What,‘try?’ Where is he, nadi?”
“I believe he and nadi Jago drove somewhere.”
“Somewhere.” He’d become reluctantly well acquainted with the vicinity, at least the historical sites within driving distance of Malguri. There wasn’t anywhere to drive to, except the airport and the town just outside. “Then I need to talk to Tano.”
“I don’t know where he is, either, nand’ paidhi. I rather thought he’d gone with your security staff.”
“Algini, then.”
“I’ll look for him, nand’ paidhi.”
“They wouldn’t have left me here.”
“I would think not, nand’ paidhi. But I assure you Maighi and I are perfectly well at your service.”
“Then what would you advise?” He handed Djinana the scroll, case and all. Djinana scanned it, and frowned.
“It’s unusual,” Djinana said. “The aiji-dowager doesn’t receive many people.”
Fine, he thought. So she’s making an extraordinary gesture. The stakes go up.
“So what do I answer, nadi? Is it safe?”
Djinana’s face assumed a very official serenity. “I couldn’t possibly advise the paidhi.”
“Then can we find Algini? I take it there’s some urgency to respond to this.”
“A certain amount. I believe nand’ Cenedi elected to wait—”
“He knows Banichi’s not here.”
“I’m not sure, nadi.” The facade cracked. Worry did come through. “Perhaps I can find Algini.”
Djinana left on that errand. He poured himself another cup of tea. He had to answer the summons, one way or the other. The thought unworthily crossed his mind that the aiji-dowager might indeed have waited until Banichi and Jago were otherwise occupied, although what might legitimately have drawn the whole damned staff to the airport when Tabini had said he was in their charge, he didn’t know. He carefully rolled up the little scroll, shoved it into the case, and capped it. And waited until Djinana came back, and bowed, with a worried look. “Nadi, I don’t know—”
“—where Algini is,” he said.
“I’m sorry, nand’ paidhi. I truly don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine. I’ve made inquiries in the kitchen and with nand’ Cenedi—”
“Is he still waiting?”
“Yes, nand’ paidhi, I’ve told him—you wished to consult protocols.”
Tell Cenedi he was indisposed? That might save him—if the dowager wasn’t getting her own reports from the staff.
Which he couldn’t at all guarantee.
“Nadi Djinana. If your mother had a gun, and your mother threatened me—whose side would you take?”
“I—assure you, nadi, my mother would never…”
“You’re not security. I don’t come under your man’chi.”
“No, nadi. I work for the Preservation Commission. I’m a caretaker. Of the estate, you understand.”
If there was one ateva in the world telling him the truth, he believed it by that one moment of absolute shock in Djinana’s eyes, that minute, dismayed hesitation.
He hadn’t phrased it quite right, of course, not, at least, inescapably. Banichi would have said, You’re within my duty, nand’ paidhi. And that could have meant anything.
But, caretaker of Malguri? One knew where Djinana stood. Firmly against the hanging of schedule boards and the importation of extension cords and the sticking of nails in Malguri’s walls. He knew that—but he didn’t know even that much about Banichi at the present moment. Certainly Banichi hadn’t been wholly forthcoming with him, either that, or Banichi had been damned lax—which wasn’t Banichi’s style as he knew it.
Unless something truly catastrophic had happened. Something like an attempt on Tabini himself.
That surmise upset his stomach.
Which, dammit, he didn’t need to happen to him when he had just gotten his stomach used to food again. No, Tabini wasn’t in danger. Tabini had far better security than he did; Tabini had the whole damned City to look out for him, while his staff was down at the airport, leaving him to Cenedi, who could walk in here and blow him and Djinana to small bits, if Cenedi were so inclined to disregard biichi-ji and stain the historic carpets.
“Appropriate paper and pen.”
“With your own scroll-case, nadi?”
“The paidhi doesn’t know where his staff put it. They don’t let him in on such matters. Try some appropriate drawer. If you don’t find it, it can go bare.—And if Banichi isn’t back by tomorrow morning, you’ll go with me.”
“I—” Djinana began a protest. And made a bow, instead. “I have some small skill at protocols. I’ll look for the scroll-case. Or provide one from the estate. Would the paidhi wish advice in phrasing?”
“Djinana, tell me. Am I frightening? Am I so foreign? Would I give children bad dreams?”
“I—” Djinana looked twice distressed.
“Do I disturb you, nadi? I wouldn’t want to. I think you’re an honest man. And I’ve met so few.”
“I wish the paidhi every good thing.”
“You are skilled in protocol. Do you think you can get me there and back tomorrow unpoisoned?”
“Please, nand’ paidhi. I’m not qualified—”
“But you’re honest. You’re a good man. You’d defend your mother before you’d defend me. As a human, I find that very honest. You owe your mother more than you do me. As I owe mine, thank you. And in that particular, you could be human, nadi, which I don’t personally consider an outrageous thing to be.”
Djinana regarded him with a troubled frown. “I truly don’t understand your figure of speech, nadi.”
“Between Malguri, and your mother, nadi—if it were the ruin of one or the other—which would you choose?”
“That of my mother, nadi. My man’chi is with this place.”
“For Malguri’s reputation—would you die, nadi-ji?”
“I’m not nadi-ji. Only nadi, nand’ paidhi.”
“Would you die, nadi-ji?”
“I would die for the stones of this place. So I would, nadi-ji. I couldn’t abandon it.”
“We also,” he said, in a strange and angry mood, “we human folk, understand antiquities. We understand preserving. We understand the importance of old stories. Everything we own and know—is in old stories. I wish we could give you everything we know, nadi, and I wish you could give us the same, and I wish we could travel to the moon together before we’re both too old.”
“To the moon!” Djinana said, with an anxious, uncertain laughter. “What would we do there?”
“Or to the old station. It’s your inheritance, nadi-ji. Itshould be.” The paidhi was vastly upset, he discovered, and saying things he ordinarily reserved for one man, for Tabini, things he dared not bring out in open council, because there were interests vested in suspicion of humans and of everything the paidhi did and said, as surely misguidance and deception of atevi interests.
So he told the truth to a caretaker-servant, instead.
And was angry at Banichi, who probably, justifiably, was angry with the paidhi. But the paidhi saw things slipping away from him, and atevi he’d trusted turning strange and distant and withholding answers from him at moments of crisis they might have foreseen.
He’d puzzled Djinana, that was certain. Djinana simply gathered up the dessert dish and, when he couldn’t find the scroll-case, brought him an antique one from the estate, and pen and paper and sealing-wax.
He wrote, in his best hand, Accepting the aiji-dowager’s most gracious invitation for breakfast at the first of the clock, the paidhi-aiji, Bren Cameron, with profound respect…
It was the form—laying it on, perhaps, but not by much. And he trusted that the dowager wouldn’t have her mail censored. He passed the text by Djinana’s doubtless impeccable protocol-sense, then sealed it with his seal-ring and dismissed him to give it to Cenedi, who was probably growing very annoyed with waiting.
After that, with Djinana handling those courtesies, he composed another letter, to Tabini.
I am uneasy, aiji-ma. I feel that there must be duties in the City which go wanting, as there were several matters pending. I hope that your staff will provide me necessary briefings, as I would be distressed to fall out of current with events. As you may know, Malguri is not computerized, and phone calls appear out of the question.
Please accept my warm regards for auspicious days and fortunate outcome. Baji-naji be both in your favor. The paidhi-aiji Bren Cameron with profound respect and devotion to the Association and to Tabini-aiji in the continuance of his office, the…
He had to stop and count up the date on his fingers, figuring he had lost a day. Or two. He became confused—decided it was only one, then wrote it down and sealed the letter with only a ribbon seal, but with the wax directly on the paper.
That one was for Banichi to take on his next trip to the airport, and, one presumed, to the post.
Then, in the case that one never made it, he wrote a copy.
Djinana came back through the room, reporting he’d delivered the scroll, and asking would the paidhi need the wax-jack further.
“I’ve a little correspondence to take care of,” he said to Djinana. “I’ll blow out the wick and read awhile after, thank you, nadi. I don’t think I’ll need anything. Is the dowager’s gentleman out?”
“The door is locked for the night, nand’ paidhi, yes.”
“Banichi has a key.”
“He does, yes. So does nadi Jago. But they’ll most probably use the kitchen entry.”
The kitchen entry. Of course there was one. The food arrived, not from the stairs, but from the back halls, through the servants’ quarters, his bedroom, and the sitting room, before it reached his dining table.
“I’ll be fine, then. Good night, nadi Djinana. Thank you. You’ve been extremely helpful.”
“Good night, nand’ paidhi.”
Djinana went on back to his quarters, then. He finished his paraphrase of the note, and added:
If this is found, and no note of similar wording has reached you before this, Tabini-ji, suspect the hand that should have delivered the first message. After one poisoned cup, from the dowager, I am not reassured of anyone in Malguri, even my own staff.
He put it in the guest book, figuring that the next occupant would find it, if he didn’t remove it himself. It wasn’t a book Banichi would necessarily read.
And, as he had just written, he was far from certain of anything or anyone in Malguri. tonight.
Thunder rumbled outside, and lightning lit rain-drops on the night-dark window glass, flared brief color from the stained glass borders.
Bren read, late, in no mood to sleep, or to share a bed with his morbid thoughts. He looked at pictures, when the words began to challenge his focus or his acceptance of atevi attitudes. He read about old wars. Betrayals. Poisonings.
Banichi arrived on a peal of thunder, walked in and stood by the fire. A fine mist glistened on his black, silver-trimmed uniform, and he seemed not pleased. “Nadi Bren, I wish you’d consult before decisions.”
The silence hung there. He looked at Banichi without speaking, without an expression on his face, and thought of saying, Nadi, I wish you’d consult before leaving.
But Banichi, for what he cared, could guess what he was thinking, the way he was left to guess what Banichi was thinking, or where Jago was, or why the so-called servants they’d brought for him from the City were absent or unavailable.
And maybe it wasn’t justified that he be angry, and maybe Banichi’s business at the airport or wherever he’d just been was entirely justified and too secret to tell him, but, damn, he was angry, a peculiar, stinging kind of anger that, while Banichi was standing there, added up to a hurt he hadn’t realized he felt so keenly, a thoroughly unprofessional and foolish and human hurt, which began with Tabini and extended to the two atevi besides Tabini that he’d thought he understood.
Heaving up his insides on a regular basis probably had something to do with it. Mineral balance. Vitamins. Unaccustomed foods that could leach nutrients out of you instead of putting them in, or chemically bind what you needed… he could think of a dozen absolutely plausible excuses for calculatedly self-destructive behavior, half of them dietary and the other half because, dammit, his own hard-wiring or his own culture wanted to like some single one of the people he’d devoted his life to helping.
“I don’t have to be the paidhi,” he said, finally, since Banichi persisted in saying nothing. “I don’t have to leave my family and my people and live where I’m not welcome with nine tenths of the population.”
“How do they choose you?” Banichi asked.
“It’s a study. It’s something you specialize in. If you’re the best, and the paidhi quits, you take the job. That’s how. It’s something you do so there’ll be peace.”
“You’re the best at what you do.”
“I try to be,” he retorted. “I do try, Banichi. Evidently I’ve done something amiss. Possibly I’ve offended the aiji-dowager. Possibly I’ve gotten myself into a dangerous situation. I don’t know. That’s an admission of failure, Banichi. I don’t know. But you weren’t here to ask. Jago wasn’t here. I couldn’t raise Algini. Tano wasn’t on duty. So I asked Djinana, who didn’t know what maybe you could have told me. If you’d been here.”
Banichi frowned, darkly.
“Where were you, Banichi? Or should I ask? If you intended to answer my questions, you’d have told me you were leaving, and if you didn’t intend me to worry you wouldn’t trail the evidence past me and refuse my reasonable questions, when I rely on you for protection the Treaty doesn’t let me provide for myself.”
Banichi said nothing, nor moved for the moment. Then he removed his elbow from the fireplace stonework and stalked off toward the bedroom.
Bren snapped the book shut. Banichi looked back in startlement, he had that satisfaction. Banichi’s nerves were that tightly strung.
“Where’s Jago?” Bren asked.
“Outside. Refusing your reasonable questions, too.”
“Banichi, dammit!” He stood up, little good it did—he still had to look up to Banichi’s face, even at a distance. “If I’m under arrest and confined here,—tell me. And where’s my mail? Don’t regular planes come to Maidingi? It looked like an airport to me.”
“From Shejidan, once a week. Most of the country, nadi, runs at a different speed. Be calm. Enjoy the lake. Enjoy the slower pace.”
“Slower pace? I want a solar recharge, Banichi. I want to make a phone call. Don’t tell me this place doesn’t have a telephone.”
“In point of fact, no, there isn’t a telephone. This is an historical monument. The wires would disfigure the—”
“Underground lines, Banichi. Pipes overhead. The place has plenty of wires.”
“They have to get here.”
“There’s gas. There’s light. Why aren’t there plug-ins? Why can’t someone go down to the town, go to a hardware and get me a damned power extension and a screw-in plug? I could sacrifice a ceiling light. The historic walls wouldn’t suffer defacement.”
“There isn’t a hardware. The town of Maidingi is a very small place, nadi Bren.”
“God.” His head was starting to hurt, acutely. His blood pressure was coming up again and he was dizzy, the light and warmth and noise of the fire all pouring into his senses as he groped after the fireplace stonework. “Banichi, why is Tabini doing this?”
“Doing what, nadi? I don’t think the aiji-ji has a thing to do with hardwares in Maidingi.”
He wasn’t amused. He leaned his back against the stones, folded his arms and fixed Banichi with an angry stare, determined to have it put, one way or the other. “You know,‘doing what.’ I could feel better if I thought it was policy. I don’t feel better thinking it might be something I’ve done, or trouble I’ve made for Tabini—I like him, Banichi. I don’t want to be the cause of harm to him, or to you, or to Jago. It’s my man’chi. Humans are like that. We have unreasonable loyalties to people we like, and you’re going far past the surface of my politeness, Banichi.”
“Clearly.”
“And I still like you, damn you. You don’t shake one of us, you don’t fling our liking away because your man’chi says otherwise, you can’t get rid of us when we like you, Banichi, you’re stuck with me, so make the best of it.”
There wasn’t a clear word for like. It meant a preference for salad greens or iced drinks. But love was worse. Banichi would never forgive him that.
Banichi’s nostrils flared, once, twice. He said, in accented Mosphei’, “What meaning? What meaning you say, nand’ paidhi?”
“It means the feeling I have for my mother and my brother and my job, I have for Tabini and for you and for Jago.” Breath failed him. Self-control did. He flung it all out. “Banichi, I’d walk a thousand miles to have a kind word from you. I’d give you the shirt from my back if you needed it; if you were in trouble, I’d carry you that thousand miles. What do you call that? Foolish?”
Another flaring of Banichi’s nostrils. “That would be very difficult for you.”
“So is liking atevi.” That got out before he censored it. “Baji-naji. It’s the luck I have.”
“Don’t joke.”
“I’m not joking. God, I’m not joking. We have to like somebody, we’re bound to like somebody, or we die, Banichi, we outright die. We make appointments with grandmothers, we drink the cups strangers offer us, and we don’t ask for help anymore, Banichi, what’s the damned point, when you don’t see what we need?”
“If I don’t guess what you like, you threaten to ruin my reputation. Is this accurate?”
The headache was suddenly excruciating. Things blurred. “Like, like, like—get off the damned word, Banichi. I cross that trench every day. Can’t you cross it once? Can’t you cross to where I am, Banichi, just once, to know what I think? You’re clever. I know you’re hard to mislead. Follow, Banichi, the solitary trail of my thoughts.”
“I’m not a cursed dinner-course!”
“Banichi-ji.” The pain reached a level and stayed there, tolerable, once he’d discovered the limits of it. He had his hand on the stonework. He felt the texture of it, the silken dust of age, the fire-heated rock, broken from the earth to make this building before humans ever left the home-world. Before they were ever lost, and desperate. He composed himself—he remembered he was the paidhi, the man in the middle. He remembered he’d chosen this, knowing there wouldn’t be a reward, believing, at the time, that of course atevi had feelings, and of course, once he could find the right words, hit the right button, find the clue to atevi thought—he’d win of atevi everything he was giving up among humankind.
He’d been twenty-two, and what he’d not known had so vastly outweighed what he’d known.
“Your behavior worries me,” Banichi said.
“Forgive me.” There was a large knot interfering with his speech. But he was vastly calmer. He chose not to look at Banichi. He only imagined the suspicion and the anger on Banichi’s face. “I reacted unprofessionally and intrusively.”
“Reacted to what, nand’ paidhi?”
A betraying word choice. He was slipping, badly. The headache had upset his stomach, which was still uncertain. “I misinterpreted your behavior. The mistake was mine, not yours. Will you attend my appointment with me in the morning, and guard me from my own stupidity?”
“What behavior did you misinterpret?”
Straight back to the attack. Banichi refused the bait he cast. And he had no ability to argue, now, or to deal at all in cold rationality.
“I explained that. It didn’t make sense to you. It won’t.” He stared into the hazy corners beyond the firelight, and remembered the interpretation Banichi had put on his explanation. “It wasn’t a threat, Banichi. I would never do that. I value your presence and your good qualities. Will you go with me tomorrow?”
Back to the simplest, the earliest and most agreed-upon words. Cold. Unfreighted.
“No, nadi. No one invites himself to the dowager’s table. You accepted.”
“You’re assigned—”
“My man’chi is to Tabini. My actions are his actions. The paidhi can’t have forgotten this simple thing.”
He was angry. He looked at Banichi, and went on looking, long enough, he hoped, for Banichi to think in what other regard his actions were Tabini’s actions. “I haven’t forgotten. How could I forget?”
Banichi returned a sullen stare. “Ask regarding the food you’re offered. Be sure the cook understands you’re in the party.”
The door in the outermost room opened. Banichi’s attention was instant and wary. But it was Jago coming through, rain-spattered as Banichi, in evident good humor until the moment she saw the two of them. Her face went immediately impassive. She walked through to his bedroom without comment.
“Excuse me,” Banichi said darkly, and went after her.
Bren glared at his black-uniformed back, at a briskly swinging braid—the two of Tabini’s guards on their way through his bedroom, to the servant quarters; he hit his fist against the stonework and didn’t feel the pain until he walked away from the fireside.
Stupid, he said to himself. Stupid and dangerous to have tried to explain anything to Banichi: Yes, nadi, no, nadi, clear and simple words, nadi.
Banichi and Jago had gone on to the servants’ quarters, where they lodged, separately. He went through to his own bedroom and undressed, with an eye to the dead and angry creature on the wall, the expression of its last, cornered fight.
It stared back at him, when he was in the bed. He picked up his book and read, because he was too angry to sleep, about ancient atevi battles, about treacheries and murders.
About ghost ships on the lake, and a manifestation that haunted the audience hall on this level, a ghostly beast that sometimes went snuffling up and down the corridors, looking for something or someone.
He was a modern man. They were atevi superstitions. But he took one look and then evaded the glass, glaring eyes of the beast on the wall.
Thunder banged. The lights all went out, except the fire in the next room, casting its uncertain glow, that didn’t reach all the corners of this one, and didn’t at all touch the servants’ hall.
He told himself lightning must have hit a transformer.
But the place was eerily quiet after that, except for a strange, distant thumping that sounded like a heartbeat coming through the walls.
Then far back in the servants’ hall, beyond the bath, steps moved down the corridor toward his bedroom.
He slid off the bed, onto his knees.
“Nand’ paidhi,” Jago’s voice called out. “It’s Jago.”
He withdrew his hand from beneath the mattress, and slithered up onto the bed, sitting and watching as an entire brigade of staff moved like shadows through his room and outward. He couldn’t see faces. He saw the spark of metal on what he thought was Banichi’s uniform.
One lingered.
“Who is it?” he asked, anxiously.
“Jago, nadi. I’m staying with you. Go to sleep.”
“You’re joking!”
“It’s most likely only a lightning strike, nand’ paidi. That’s the auxiliary generator you hear. It keeps the refrigeration running in the kitchen, at least until morning.”
He got up, went looking for his robe and banged his knee on a chair, making an embarrassing scrape.
“What do you want, nadi?”
“My robe.”
“Is this it?” Jago located it instantly, at the foot of his bed, and handed it to him. Atevi night vision was that much better, he reminded himself, and took not quite that much comfort from knowing it. He put the robe on, tied it about him and went into the sitting room, as less provocative, out where the fireplace provided one kind of light and a whiter, intermittent flicker of lightning came from the windows.
A padding, metal-sparked shadow followed him. Atevi eyes reflected a pale gold. Atevi found it spooky that human eyes didn’t, that humans could slip quietly through the dark. Their differences touched each others’ nightmares.
But there was no safer company in the world, he told himself, and told himself also that the disturbance was in fact nothing but a lightning strike, and that Banichi was going to be wet, chilled, and in no good mood when he got back in.
But Jago wasn’t in her night-robe. Jago had been in uniform and armed, and so had Banichi been, when the lights had gone.
“Don’t you sleep?” he asked her, standing before the fire.
The twin reflections of her eyes eclipsed, a blink, then vanished as she came close enough to rest an elbow against the stonework mantel. Her shadow loomed over him, and fire glistened on the blackness of her skin. “We were awake,” she said.
Business went on all around him, with no explanations. He felt chilled, despite the robe, and thought how desperately he needed his sleep—in order to deal with the dowager in the morning.
“Are there protections around this place?” he asked.
“Assuredly, nadi-ji. This is still a fortress, when it needs to be.”
“With the tourists and all.”
“Tourists. Yes.—There is a group due tomorrow, nadi. Please be prudent. They needn’t see you.”
He felt himself more and more fragile, standing shivering in front of the fire in his night-robe. “Do people ever… slip away from the tour, slip out of the guards’ sight?”
“There’s a severe fine for that,” Jago said.
“Probably one for killing the paidhi, too,” he muttered. His robe had no pockets. You could never convince an atevi tailor about pockets. He shoved his hands up the sleeves. “A month’s pay, at least.”
Jago thought that was funny. He heard her laugh, a rare sound. That was her reassurance.
“I’m supposed to be at breakfast with Tabini’s grandmother,” he said. “Banichi’s mad at me.”
“Why did you accept?”
“I didn’t know I could refuse. I didn’t know what trouble it would make—”
Jago made a soft, derisive sound. “Banichi said it was because you thought he was a dessert.”
He couldn’t laugh for a moment. It was too grim, and on the edge of pain; and then it was funny, Banichi’s glum perplexity, his human desperation to find a focus for his orphaned affections. Jago’s sudden, unprecedented willingness to converse.
“I take it this was confused in translation,” Jago said.
“I expressed my extreme respect for him,” he said. Which was cold, and distant, and proper. The whole futile argument loomed up, insurmountable barriers again. “Respect. Favor. It’s all one thing.”
“How?” Jago asked—a completely honest question. The atevi words didn’t mean what he tried to make them mean. They couldn’t, wouldn’t ever. The whole atevi hardwiring was different, the experts said so. The dynamics of atevi relationships were different… in ways no paidhi had ever figured out, either, possibly because paidhiin invariably tried to find words to fit into human terms—and then deceived themselves about the meanings, in self-defense, when the atevi world grew too much for them.
God, why did she decide to talk tonight? Was it policy? An interrogation?
“Nadi,” he said wearily, “if I could say that, you’d understand us ever so much better.”
“Banichi speaks Mosphei’. You should say it to him in Mosphei’”
“Banichi doesn’t feel Mosphei’.” It was late. He was extremely foolish. He made a desperate, far-reaching attempt to locate abstracts. “I tried to express that I would do favorable things on his behalf because he seems to me a favorable person.”
It at least threw it into the abstract realm, that perception of luck in charge of the universe, which somewhat passed for a god in Ragi thinking.
“Midei,” Jago declared in seeming surprise. It was a word he’d not heard before, and there weren’t many, in ordinary usage, that he hadn’t. “Dahemidei. You’re midedeni.”
That was three in a row. He was too tired to take notes and the damned computer was down. “What does that mean?”
“Midedeni believe luck and favor reside in people. It was a heresy, of course.”
Of course it was. “So it was a long time ago.”
“Oh, half of Adjaiwaio still believes something like that, in the country, anyway—that you’re supposed to Associate with everybody you meet.”
An entire remote Association where people liked other people? He both wanted to go there and feared there were other essential, perhaps Treaty-threatening, differences.
“You really believe in that?” Jago pursued the matter. And it was indeed dangerous, how scattered and longing his thoughts instantly grew down that track, how difficult it was to structure logical arguments against the notion, the very seductive notion that atevi could understand affection. “The lords of technology truly think this is the case?”
Jago clearly thought intelligent people weren’t expected to think so.
Which made him question himself, in the paidhi’s internal habit, whether humans were somehow blind to the primitive character of such attachments.
Then the dislocation jerked him the other direction, back into belief humans were right. “Something like that,” he said. The experts said atevi couldn’t think outside hierarchical structure. And Jago said they could? His heart was pounding. His common sense said hold back, don’t believe it, there’s a contradiction here. “So you can feel attachment to one you don’t have man’chi for.”
“Nadi Bren,—are you making a sexual proposition to me?”
The bottom dropped out of his stomach. “I—No, Jago-ji.”
“I wondered.”
“Forgive my impropriety.”
“Forgive my mistaken notion. What were you asking?”
“I—” Recovering objectivity was impossible. Or it had never existed. “I’d only like to read about midedeni, if you could find a book for me.”
“Certainly. But I doubt there’d be one here. Malguri’s library is mostly local history. The midedeni were all eastern.”
“I’d like a book to keep, if I could.”
“I’m sure. I have one, if nothing else, but it’s in Shejidan.”
He’d made a thorough mess. And left a person who was probably reporting directly to Tabini with the impression humans belonged to some dead heresy they probably didn’t even remotely match.
“It probably isn’t applicable,” he said, trying to patch matters. “Exact correspondence is just too unlikely.” Jago had a brain. A very quick one; and he risked something he ordinarily would have said only to Tabini. “It’s the apparent correspondences that can be the most deceptive. We want to believe them.”
“At very least, we’re polite in Shejidan. We don’t shoot people over philosophical differences. I wouldn’t take such a contract.”
God help him. He thought that was a joke out of Jago. The second for the evening. “I wouldn’t think so.”
“I hope I don’t offend you, nadi.”
“I like you, too.”
In atevi, it was very funny. It won Jago’s rare grin, a duck of the head, a flash of that eerie mirror-luminance of her eyes, quite, quite sober.
“I haven’t understood,” she said. “It eludes me, nadi.”
The best will in the world couldn’t bridge the gap. He looked at her in a sense of isolation he hadn’t felt since his first week on the mainland, his first unintended mistake with atevi.
“But you try, Jago-ji. Banichi tries, too. It makes me less—” There was no word for lonely. “Less single.”
“We share a man’chi,” Jago said, as if she had understood something he was saying. “To Tabini’s house. Don’t doubt us, paidhi-ji. We won’t desert you.”
Off the meaning again. There was nothing there, nothing to make the leap of logic. He stared at her, asking himself how someone so fundamentally honest, and kind, granted the license she had—could be so absolutely void of what it might take to make that leap of emotional need. It just didn’t click into place. And it was a mistake to pin anything on the Adjaiwaio and any dead philosophy.
Philosophy was the keyword: intellectual, not emotional structure. And a human being, having embraced it, went away empty and in pain.
He said, “Thank you, nadi-ji,” and walked away from the fire to the window, which showed nothing but rain-spots against the dark.
Something banged, or popped. It echoed off the walls, once, twice.
That was no loose shutter. It was off somewhere outside the walls, to the southwest, he thought, beyond the driveway.
The house seemed very still, except the rain and the sound of the fire on the hearth.
“Get away from the window,” Jago said, and he stepped back immediately, his shoulder to solid stone, his heart beating like a hammer as he expected Jago to leave him and rush off to Banichi’s aid. His imagination leapt to four and five assassins breaching the antique defenses of the castle, enemies already inside the walls.
But Jago only stood listening, as it seemed. There was no second report. Her pocket-com beeped—he had not seen it on her person, but of course she had it; she lifted it and thumbed on to Banichi’s voice, speaking in verbal code.
“Tano shot at shadows,” she translated, glancing at him. She was a black shape against the fire. “It’s all right. He’s not licensed.”
Understandable that Tano would make a mistake in judgement, she meant. So Tano, at least, and probably Algini, was out of Tabini’s house guard—licensed for firearms, for defense, but not for their use in public places.
“So was it lightning?” he asked. “Is it lightning they’re shooting at out there?”
“Nervous fingers,” Jago said easily, and shut the com off. “Nothing at all to worry about, nadi-ji.”
“How long until we have power?”
“As soon as the crews can get up here from Maidingi. Morning, I’d say, before we have lights. This happens, nadi. The cannon on the wall draw strikes very frequently. So, unfortunately, does the transformer. It’s not at all uncommon.”
Breakfast might be cancelled, due to the power failure. He might have a reprieve from his folly.
“I suggest you go to bed,” Jago said. “I’ll sit here and read until the rest of us come in. You’ve an appointment in the morning.”
“We were discussing man’chi,” he said, unnerved, be it the storm or the shot or his own failures. He’d gotten far too personal with Jago, right down to her assumption he was trying to approach her for sex, God help him. He was tangling every line of communication he had, he was on an emotional jag, he felt entirely uneasy about the impression he’d left with her, an impression she was doubtless going to convey to Banichi, and both of them to Tabini: the paidhi’s behaving very oddly, they’d say. He propositioned Jago, invited Djinana to the moon, and thinks Banichi’s a dessert.
“Were we?” Jago left the fire and walked over to him, taking his arm. “Let’s walk back to your bedroom, nand’ paidhi, you’ll take a chill—” She outright snatched him past the window, bruising his arm, he so little expected it.
He walked with her, then, telling himself if she were really concerned she’d have made him crawl beneath it—she only wanted him away from a window that would glow with conspicuous light from the fire, and cast their shadows. There were the outer walls, between that window and the lake.
But was it lightning hitting the cannon that she feared?
“Go to bed,” Jago said, delivering him to the door of his bedroom. “Bren-ji. Don’t worry. They’ll be assessing damage. We’ll need to call down to the power station with the information. And of course we take special precautions when we do lose power. It’s only routine. You may hear me go out. You may not. Don’t worry for your safety.”
So one could call the airport on the security radio. One would have thought so. But it was the first he’d heard anyone admit it. And having security trekking through his room all night didn’t promise a good night’s sleep.
But he sat down on the bed and Jago walked back to the other room, leaving him in the almost dark. He took off his robe, put himself beneath the skins, and lay listening, watching the faint light from the fireplace in the other room make moving shadows on the walls and glisten on the glass eyes of the beast opposite his bed.
They say it’s perfectly safe, he thought at it. Don’t worry.
It made a sort of sense to talk to it, the two of them in such intimate relationship. It was a creature of this planet.
It had died mad, fighting atevi who’d enjoyed killing it. Nobody needed to feel sorry for anybody. It wasn’t the last of its species. There were probably hundreds of thousands of its kind out there in the underbrush as mad and pitiless as it was.
Adapted for this earth. It didn’t make attachments to its young or its associates. It didn’t need them. Nature fitted it with a hierarchical sense of dominance, survival positive, proof against heartbreak.
It survived until something meaner killed it and stuck its head on a wall, for company to a foolish human, who’d let himself in for this—who’d chased after the knowledge and then the honor of being the best. Which had to be enough to go to bed with on nights like this. Because there damned sure wasn’t anything else, and if he let himself—
But he couldn’t. The paidhi couldn’t start, at twenty-six atevi years of age, to humanize the people he dealt with. It was the worst trap. All his predecessors had battled it. He knew it in theory.
He’d been doing all right while he was an hour’s flight away from Mospheira. While his mail arrived on schedule, twice a week. While…
While he’d believed beyond a doubt he was going to see human faces again, and while things were going outstandingly well, and while Tabini and he were such, such good friends.
Key that word, Friend.
The paidhi had been in a damned lot of trouble, right there. The paidhi had been stone blind, right there.
The paidhi didn’t know why he was here, the paidhi didn’t know how he was going to get back again, the paidhi couldn’t get the emotional satisfaction out of Banichi and Jago that Tabini had been feeding him, laughing with him, joking with him, down to the last time they’d met.
Blowing melons to bits. Tabini patting him on the back—gently, because human backs fractured so easily—and telling him he had real talent for firearms. How good was Tabini, more to the point? How good at reading the paidhi was the atevi fourth in line of his side of the bargain?
Tipped off, perhaps, by his predecessor, that the paidhiin had a soft spot for personal attachments?
That the longer you knew them, the greater fools they became, and the more trusting, and the easier to get things from?
There was a painful lump in his throat, a painful, human knot interfering with his rational assessment of the situation. He’d questioned, occasionally, how long he was good for, whether he could adjust. Not every paidhi made it the lifelong commitment they’d signed on for, the pool of available advice had dried up—Wilson hadn’t been a damned bit of help, just gotten strange and so short-fused the board had talked about replacing him against Tabini’s father’s expressed refusal to have him replaced. Wilson had had his third heart attack the first month he was back on Mospheira, maintained a grim, passionless demeanor in every meeting the two of them had had, never told him a damned thing of any use.
The board called it burn-out. He’d taken their word for it and tried not to think of Wilson as a son of a bitch. He’d met Tabini on his few fill-ins for Wilson’s absences, a few days at a time, the two last years of Valasi’s administration—he’d thought Tabini’s predecessor Valasi a real match for Wilson’s glum mood, but he’d liked Tabini—that dangerous word again—but, point of fact, he’d never personally believed in Wilson’s burn-out. A man didn’t get that strange, that unpleasant, without his own character contributing to it. He’d not liked Wilson, and when he’d asked Wilson what his impression was of Tabini, Wilson had said, in a surly tone, ‘The same as the rest of them.“
He’d not liked Wilson. He had liked Tabini. He’d thought it a mistake on the board’s part to have ever let Wilson take office, a man with that kind of prejudice, that kind of attitude.
He was scared tonight. He looked down the years he might stay in office and the years he might waste in the foolishness he called friendship with Tabini, and saw himself in Wilson’s place, never having had a wife, never having had a child, never having had a friend past the day Barb would find some man on Mospheira a better investment: life was too short to stay at the beck and call of some guy dropping into her life with no explanations, no conversation about his job—a face that began to go dead as if the nerves of expression were cut. He could resign. He could go home. He could ask Barb to marry him.
But he had no guarantee Barb wanted to marry him. No questions, no commitment, no unloading of problems, a fairy-tale weekend of fancy restaurants and luxury hotels… he didn’t know what Barb really thought, he didn’t know what Barb really wanted, he didn’t know her in any way but the terms they’d met on, the terms they still had. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even close friendship. When he tried to think of the people he’d called friends before he went into university… he didn’t know where they were now, if they’d left the town, or if they’d stayed.
He hadn’t been able to turn the situation over to Deana Hanks for a week. Where did he think he was going to find it in him to turn the whole job over to her and walk out—irrevocably, walk out on what he’d prepared his whole life to do?
Like Wilson—a man seventy years old, who’d just seen Valasi assassinated, who’d just come home, because his career ended with Valasi—with nothing to show for forty-three years of work but the dictionary entries he’d made, a handful of scholarly articles, and a record number of vetoes on the Transmontane Highway Project. No wife, no family. Nothing but the university teaching post waiting for him, and he couldn’t communicate with the students.
Wilson couldn’t communicate with the human students.
He was going to write a paper when he got out of this, however damning it was, a paper about Wilson, and the atevi interface, and the talk he’d had with Jago, and why Wilson, with that face, with that demeanor, with that attitude, couldn’t communicate with his classes.
Thunder crashed, outside his wall. He jumped, and lay there with his heart doing double beats and his ears still ringing.
The cannon, Jago said. Common occurrence.
He lay there and shook, whether because of the noise, or the craziness of the night. Or because he couldn’t understand any longer why he was here, or why a Bu-javid guard like Tano drew a gun and fired, when they were out there looking at transformers.
Looking at lightning-struck transformers, while the lightning played over their heads and the rain fell on them.
Like hell, he thought, like hell, Jago. Shooting at shadows. What shadows, Jago, is Tano expecting out there in the rain?
Shadows that fly in on scheduled airliners… and the tightest security on the planet, except ours, doesn’t know who it is and where they are?
Like hell again, Jago.