And, having achieved something of a Place in the dowager’s party, he hoped hereafter simply to enjoy the sun and the mountain—the very height of the mountain, the world spread out below in a spectacular view.
They rode in tall, windswept grass, and yellow, ragged flowers that abounded along the ridge, with an unobstructed view across the lake to the mountains on the other side. The breaths he drew were freighted with rich smells of the earth and the grass and crushed flowers, the oiled leather of the harness, and the dusty, musky smell of the mecheiti themselves. The grass and the pebbly rubble at the roots brought back vividly the last time he and Tabini had hunted at Taiben, slogging afoot through the dusty hills—
Tabini trying to show him the finer points of hunting and stalking—
Everything came back to him so very clearly: that day, that exact time, as if the realities of the countryside and the reality of the city compartmentalized themselves so thoroughly they maintained separate time-streams, so that, entering one… he took up where he had left off, with no events between. Time slipped wildly on him, turned treacherous. Today’s foolish hazard had slid unawares to chancy, intoxicating success, the paidhi riding a thousand, two thousand miles from the safety of Mospheira and enjoying the sights and smells and sounds no human had ever experienced. The mechetti of the machimi plays had turned real as the dust and the flowers and the sun.
And strangest of all to his ears came the silence that wasn’t silence, but the total absence, for the first time in his life that he was ever aware, of machine sounds. The sounds that reached his ears were rich enough, the wind and the creak of leather and jingle of harness and bridle rings, the scuff of gravel, the sighing of the grass along the hill—but he’d never been anywhere, even Taiben, where he couldn’t see power lines, or hear, however faintly, the sound of aircraft, or a passing train, or just the generalized hum of machinery working—and he’d never known it existed, until he heard its absence.
Below them, the miniaturized walls of Malguri, as few atevi surely ever were privileged to view them. There wasn’t a road, wasn’t a rail, wasn’t a trace of habitation apparent in all the hills and the lake shore, except those walls.
Time slipped again. He imagined the wind-stirred banners of the machimi plays, the meetings of treachery and connivance in the hills, the fortress destined for attack—how to get the lord into the open, or assassins within the walls, engaging single individuals, instead of armies… saving lives, saving resources, saving the land from future feuds.
And always, in such plays, the retainer with an ancestral grudge, the trusted assassin with the unevident man’chi, the thing the aiji on the windy ridge or the aiji within the fortress should have known and didn’t. One could all but hear the banners cracking in the wind, hear the rattle of armor… atevi civilization, atevi history that flourished now only in the machimi, on television—where human history flourished not at all.
There was something unexpectedly seductive about the textures… from the brightness of blood on the kill to the white and brown fur of the animal, from the casual drop of dung to the smell of flowers and the scent of crushed grass and the lazy switch of mecheita ears. It wasn’t the same reality as in the halls of the Bu-javid. It certainly wasn’t Mospheira. It was the atevi world as humans might never see it, neighboring, as they did, only the smoke-stacks and steam-engines of Shejidan.
It was a world that, given a hundred years, atevi themselves might never see again, or never understand, because the future that might have naturally grown from Malguri’s past—never would grow at all in a solely atevi way, now that Mospheira had given atevi the railroads and communications satellites, now that jets sped atevi travellers across the country too high and too fast to see a place like Malguri.
He argued with Tabini about meat, and seasons, and thought atevi ways… inconvenient.
But that argument was the same thing as the jets and the satellites. Another little piece of Malguri under attack.