He lit his pipe. “Oh, well, we all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present—do we not?”
And yet Pangyui had lied to her. He had used her to further his own secret ends.
She returns to work, knowing she has many hours ahead, and also, perhaps, to try to keep herself from remembering more.
*
It was two months into term when she met him again. She was in the library, reading about the political exploits of Sagresha, lieutenant to the Kaj and celebrated war hero, when she noticed someone had sat down at the table by the window.
His head was bowed, his curly, red-gold hair eclipsing his brow. He never seemed to sit in a chair right: he was sideways and almost on his back, with a tome in his lap about Thinadeshi, the engineer who had introduced the railways to the Continent.
Shara glared at him. She thought for a second, then stood up, gathered her books, sat down opposite him, and simply watched.
He did not look up. He turned a page and after a moment said, “And what would you want?”
“Why did you say that to me?” she asked.
He looked up at her through his curtain of messy hair. Though Shara was no drinker, she could tell by his puffy lids that he had what the masters at Fadhuri called a “morning head.” “What?” he asked. “From the tournament?”
She nodded.
“Oh, well.” He winced as if embarrassed and returned to his book. “Maybe to get a rise out of you. You seemed such a serious thing, after all. I hadn’t seen you smile all day, despite your admirable record.”
“But what did you mean?”
This provoked a long, confused stare. “Are you, erm, serious?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think I meant when I asked you for … a fuck?” he asked, slowly and uncertainly.
“No, not that.” Shara waved her hand. “The part about me … not being a girl.”
“That’s what you’re mad about? That?”
Shara simply glared back.
“Well, I mean,” he said. “Well, here. I have seen girls before. Many girls. You can be a girl at any age, you know. Girls at forty. Girls at fifty. There’s a kind of flightiness to them, just like how a man at forty can have the impatience and belligerence of a five-year-old boy. But you can also be a woman at any age. And you, my dear, have probably been the spiritual equivalent of a fifty-three or fifty-four-year-old woman since you were six years old. I can tell. You are not a girl.” He again returned to his book. “You are very much a woman. Probably an old one.”
Shara considered this. Then she took out her own study materials and began to read opposite him, feeling confused, outraged, and strangely flattered.
“That biography of Thinadeshi is shit, just so you know,” she said.
“Is it?”
“Yes. The writer has an agenda. And his references are suspect.”
“Ah. His references. Very important.”
“Yes.”
He flipped a page.
“Incidentally,” he asked, “did you ever give much thought to the thing I said about fucking?”
“Shut up.”
He smiled.
*
They started meeting in the library nearly every day, and their relationship felt like a continuation of their Batlan game: a long, exhausting conflict in which little ground was ever ceded or gained. Shara was aware throughout that they were playing reversed roles, considering their nationalities: for she was the staunch, mistrustful conservative, zealously advocating the proper way of living and building a disciplined, useful life; and he was the permissive libertine, arguing that if someone wished to do something, and if it hurt no one, and moreover if they had the money to pay for it, then why should anyone interfere?
But both of them agreed that their nations were in a bad, dangerous state: “Saypur has grown fat and weak off of commerce,” Shara said to him once. “We believe we can buy our safety. The idea that we must fight for it, fight for it every day, never crosses our minds.”
Vohannes rolled his eyes. “You paint your world in such drab cynicisms.”
“I am right,” she insisted. “Saypur got to where it is through military strength. Its civilian leadership is far too permissive.”
“What would you do? Have Saypuri children learn yet another oath, another pledge to Mother Saypur?” Vohannes laughed. “My dear Shara, do you not see that what makes your country so great is that it allows its people to be human in a way the Continent never did?”
“You admire Saypur? As a Continental?”
“Of course I do! Not just because I wouldn’t catch leprosy here, which I can’t say of the Continent. But here, you allow people … to be people. Do you not know how rare a thing that is?”
“I thought you would wish for discipline and punishment,” says Shara. “Faith and self-denial.”
“Only Kolkashtani Continentals think that,” Vohannes said. “And it’s a bastard way to live. Trust me.”