Where the breeze was too weak to reach.
He was not going to sleep until the wind shifted. He could watch television. If it worked. He doubted it would. The outages usually stayed through the shift, when they happened. He watched the curtain, he tried to think about the council business… but his mind kept circling back to the hall this morning, Tabini making that damnable announcement of feud, which he didn’t want—certainly didn’t want public.
And the damned gun—had they transferred that, when they moved his bed?
He couldn’t bear wondering if anyone had found it. He got up and felt under the mattress.
It was there. He let go a slow breath, put a knee on the mattress and slid back under the sheets, to stare at the darkened ceiling.
Many a moment in the small hours of the morning he doubted what he knew. Close as he was to Tabini in certain functions, he doubted he had ever made Tabini understand anything Tabini hadn’t learned from his predecessor in office. He did his linguistic research. The paper that had gotten him on the track to the paidhi’s office was a respectable work: an analysis of set-plurals in the Ragi atevi dialect, of which he was proud, but it was no breakthrough, just a conclusion to which he’d been unable to add, since, thanks to Tabini’s patient and irreligious analysis.
But at times he didn’t understand, not Tabini, not Taigi and Moni, God knew what he would figure about the glum-faced servants Banichi and Jago foisted off on him, but that was going to be another long effort. He was in a damned mess, was what he’d made for himself—he didn’t catch the nuances, he’d gotten involved in something he didn’t understand. He was in danger of failing. He’d imagined once he had the talent to have done what the first paidhi had done: breach the linguistic gap from conceptual dead zero and in the heart of war…
In the years when humans had first come down here, few at first, then in greater and greater numbers as it seemed so easy… they’d been equally confident they understood the atevi—until one spring day, twenty-one years into the landings, with humans venturing peacefully onto the continent, when that illusion had—suddenly and for reasons candidates for his job still argued among themselves—blown up in their faces.
Short and nasty, what atevi called the War of the Landing—all the advanced technology on the human side, and vast numbers and an uncanny determination on the part of the atevi, who had, in that one year, driven humans from Ragi coastal land and back onto Mospheira, attacked them even in the valley the bewildered survivors held as their secure territory. Humanity on this world had come that close to extinction, until Tabini-aiji’s fourth-removed predecessor had agreed, having met face-to-face with the man who would be the first paidhi, to cede Mospheira and let humans separate themselves from atevi completely, on an island where they’d be safe and isolated.
Mospheira and a cease-fire, in exchange for the technology the atevi wanted. Tabini’s fourth-removed predecessor, being no fool, had seen a clear choice staring him in the face: either strike a deal with humanity and become indispensable to them, or see his own allies make his lands a battlefield over the technology his rivals hoped to lay their hands on, killing every last human and potentially destroying the source of the knowledge in the process.
Hence the Treaty which meant the creation of the paidhi’s office, and the orderly surrender of human technology to the atevi Western Association, at a rate—neither Tabini’s ancestor nor the first paidhi had been fools—that would maintain the atevi economy and the relative power of the aijiin of various Associations in the existing balance.
Meaning, all of the rivals, the humans and the technology securely in the hands of Tabini’s ancestor. The War had stopped… Mospheira’s atevi had resettled on the Ragi aiji’s coastal estate-lands, richer than their own fields by far, a sacrifice of vast wealth for the Ragi aiji, but a wise, wise maneuver that secured the peace—and every damned thing the Mospheira atevi and the Ragi atevi wanted.