She found herself back at her apartments - feet sore, back aching - before the sun had touched the peaks to the west. As she approached her door, a young man rose from the step. For a moment, her mind tricked her into thinking Nayiit had returned. But no, this boy was too thin through the shoulders, his hair too long, his robes the black of a palace servant. He took a pose of greeting as she approached, and Liat made a brief response.
‘Liat Chokavi?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kiyan Machi, first wife of the Khai Machi, extends her invitation. If you would be so kind, I will take you to her.’
‘Now?’ Liat asked, but of course it was now. She waved away the question even before the servant boy could recover from the surprise of being asked in so sharp a tone. When he turned, spine straight and stiff with indignation, she followed him.
They found Otah’s wife standing on a balcony overlooking a great hall. Her robes were delicate pink and yellow, and they suited her skin. Her head was turned down, looking at the wide fountain that took up the hall below, the sprays of water reaching up almost to the high domed ceiling above. The servant boy took a pose of obeisance before her, and she replied with one that both thanked and dismissed him. Her greeting of Liat was only a nod and a smile, and then Kiyan’s attention turned back to the fountain.
There were children playing in the pool - splashing one another or running, bandy-legged, through water that reached above their knees and would only have dampened half of Liat’s own calves. Some wore robes of cotton that clung to their tiny bodies. Some wore loose canvas trousers like a common laborer’s. They were, Liat thought, too young to be utkhaiem yet. They were still children, and free from the bindings that would hold them when there was less fat in their cheeks, less joy in their movement. But that was only sentiment. The children of privilege knew when they were faced with a child of the lower orders. These dancing and shouting in the clean, clear water could dress as they saw fit because they were all of the same ranks. These were the children of the great houses, brought to play with the one boy, there, in the robe. The one deep in disagreement with the petulant-looking girl. The one who had eyes and mouth the same shape as Otah’s.
Liat looked up and found Kiyan considering her. The woman’s expression was unreadable.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Kiyan said over the sounds of falling water and shrieking children.
‘Of course,’ Liat said. She nodded down at the boy. ‘That’s Danat-cha?’
‘Yes. He’s having a good day,’ she said. Then, ‘Please, come this way.’
Liat followed her through a doorway at the balcony’s rear and into a small resting room where Kiyan sat on a low couch and motioned Liat to do the same. The sounds of play were muffled enough to speak over, but they weren’t absent. Liat found them oddly comforting.
‘I heard that Nayiit-cha chose to go with the men,’ Kiyan said.
‘Yes,’ Liat said, and then stopped, because she didn’t know what more there was to say.
‘I can’t imagine that,’ Kiyan said. ‘It’s hard enough imagining Otah going, but he’s my husband. He’s not my son.’
‘I understand why he went. Nayiit, I mean. But his father asked the Khai to take care of him.’
Kiyan looked up, confused for a moment, then nodded.
‘Maati, you mean?’
‘Of course,’ Liat said.
‘Do we have to keep up that pretense?’
‘I think we do, Kiyan-cha.’
‘I suppose,’ she said. And then a moment later, ‘No. You’re right. You’re quite right. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
Liat considered Otah’s wife - thin face, black hair shot with threads of white, so little paint on her cheeks that Liat could see where the lines that came with age had been etched by pain and laughter. There was an intelligence in her face and, Liat thought, a sorrow. Kiyan took a deep breath and seemed to pull herself back from whatever place her mind had gone. She smiled.
‘Otah has left the city with a problem,’ she said. ‘With so many men gone, the business of things is bound to suffer. There are crops that need bringing in and others that need planting. Roofs need the tiles repaired before autumn comes. There are still parts of the winter quarters that haven’t been cleaned out since we’ve all resurfaced. And the men who coordinate those things or else who oversee the men who do are all off with Otah playing at war.’
‘That is a problem,’ Liat agreed, unsure why Kiyan had brought her here to tell her this.
‘I’m calling a Council of wives,’ Kiyan said. ‘I think we’re referring to it as an afternoon banquet, but I mean it to be more than light gossip and sweet breads. I’m going to take care of Machi until Otah comes back. I’ll see to it that we have food and coal to see us through the winter.’
If, Kiyan didn’t need to say, we all live that long. Liat looked at her hands and pressed the dark thoughts away.
‘That seems wise,’ she said.
‘I want you to come to the Council, Liat-cha. I want your help.’
Liat looked up. Kiyan’s whole attention was on her. It made her feel awkward, but also oddly flattered.
‘I don’t know what I could do—’
‘You’re a woman of business. You understand schedules and how to coordinate different teams in different tasks so that the whole of a thing comes together the way it should. I understand that too, but frankly most of these women would be totally lost. They’ve bent their minds to face paints and robes and trading gossip and bedroom tricks,’ Kiyan said, and then immediately took a pose that asked forgiveness. ‘I don’t mean to make them sound dim. They aren’t. But they’re the product of a Khai’s court, and the things that matter there aren’t things that matter, if you see what I mean?’
‘Quite well,’ Liat said with a chuckle.
Kiyan leaned forward and scooped up Liat’s hand as if it were the most natural thing to do.
‘You helped Otah when he asked it of you. Will you help me now?’
The assent came as far as Liat’s lips and then died there. She saw the distress in Kiyan’s eyes, but she couldn’t say it.
‘Why?’ Liat whispered. ‘Why me? Why, when we are what we are to each other.’
‘When we’re what to each other?’
‘Women who’ve loved the same man,’ Liat said. ‘Mothers of . . . of our sons. How can you put that aside, even only for a little while?’
Kiyan smiled. It was a hard expression. Determined. She did not let go of Liat’s hand, but neither did she hold it captive.
‘I want you with me because we can’t have other enemies now,’ she said. ‘And because you and I aren’t so different. And because I think perhaps the distraction is something you need as badly as I do. There’s war enough coming. I want there to be peace between us.’
‘I have a price,’ Liat said.
Kiyan nodded that she continue.
‘When Nayiit comes back, spend time with him. Talk with him. Find out who he is. Know him.’
‘Because?’
‘Because if you’re going to have me fall in love with your boy, you owe it to fall a little in love with mine.’
Kiyan grinned, tears glistening in her eyes. Her hand squeezed Liat’s. Liat closed her grip, fierce as a drowning man holding to a rope. She hadn’t understood until this moment how deep her fear ran or the loneliness that even Maati couldn’t assuage. She couldn’t say whether she had pulled Kiyan to her or if she herself had been pulled, but she found herself sobbing into the other woman’s shoulder. Otah’s wife wrapped fierce arms around her, embracing her as if she would protect Liat from the world.
‘They would never understand this,’ Liat managed when her breath was her own again.
‘They’re men,’ Kiyan said. ‘They’re simpler.’
13
For years, Otah had been a traveler by profession. He had worked the gentleman’s trade, traveling as a courier for a merchant house with business in half the cities of the Khaiem. He h
ad spent days on horseback or hunkered down in the backs of wagons or walking. He remembered with fondness the feeling of resting at the end of a day, his limbs warm and weary, sinking into the woolen blanket that only half protected him from the ticks. He remembered looking up at the wide sky with something like contentment. It seemed fourteen years sleeping in the best bed in Machi had made a difference.
‘Is there something I can bring you, Most High?’ the servant boy asked from the doorway of the tent. Otah pulled open the netting and turned over in his cot, twisting his head to look at him. The boy was perhaps eighteen summers old, long hair pulled back and bound by a length of leather.
‘Do I seem like I need something?’
The boy looked down, abashed.
‘You were moaning again, Most High.’
Otah let himself lie back on the cot. The stretched canvas creaked under him like a ship in a storm. He closed his eyes and cataloged quietly all his reasons for moaning. His back ached like someone had kicked him. His thighs were chafed half raw. They were hardly ten days out from Machi, and it was becoming profoundly clear that he didn’t know how to march a military column across the rolling, forested hills that stretched from Machi almost to the mountains north of the Dai-kvo. The great Galtic army that had massed in the South was no doubt well advanced, and the Dai-kvo was in deadly danger, if he hadn’t been killed already. Otah closed his eyes. Right now, the throbbing sting of his abused thighs bothered him most.
‘Go ask the physicians to send some salve,’ he said.
‘I’ll call for the physician.’
‘No! Just . . . just get some salve and bring it here. I’m not infirm. And I wasn’t moaning. It was the cot.’
The boy took a pose of acceptance and backed out of the tent, shutting the door behind him. Otah let the netting fall closed again. A tent with a door. Gods.
The first few days hadn’t been this bad. The sense of release that came from taking real action at last had almost outweighed the fears that plagued him and the longing for Kiyan at his side, for Eiah and Danat. The northern summer was brief, but the days were long. He rode with the men of the utkhaiem, trotting on their best mounts, while the couriers ranged ahead and the huntsmen foraged. The wide, green world smelled rich with the season. The North Road ran only among the winter cities - Amnat-Tan, Cetani, Machi. There was no good, paved road direct from Machi to the village of the Dai-kvo, but there were trade routes that jumped from low town to low town. Mud furrows worn by carts and hooves and feet. Around them, grasses rose high as the bellies of their horses, singing a dry song like fingertips on skin when the wind stirred the blades. The feeling of the sure-footed animal he rode had been reassuring at first. Solid and strong.
But the joy of action had wearied while the dread grew stronger. The steady movement of the horse had become wearisome. The jokes and songs of the men had lost something of their fire. The epics and romances of the Empire included some passages about the weariness and longing that came of living on campaign, but they spoke of endless seasons and years without the solace of home. Otah and his men hadn’t yet traveled two full weeks. They were still well shy of the journey’s halfway mark, and already they were losing what cohesion they had.
With every day, most men were afoot while huntsmen and scouts and utkhaiem rode. Horsemen were called to the halt long before the night should have forced them to make camp, for fear that those following on foot would fail to reach the tents before darkness fell. And even so, men continued to straggle in long after the evening meals had been served, leaving them unrested and fed only on scraps when morning came. The army, such as it was, seemed tied to the speed of its slowest members. He needed speed and he needed men at his side, but there was no good way to have both. And the fault, Otah knew, was in himself.
There had to be answers to this and the thousand other problems that came of leading a campaign. The Galts would know. Sinja could have told him, had he been there and not out in some Westlands garrison waiting for a flood of Galts that wasn’t coming. They were men that had experience in the field, who had more knowledge of war than the casual study of a few old Empire texts fit in between religious ceremonies and high court bickering.
The scratch came at the door, soft and apologetic. Otah swung his legs off the cot and sat up. He called out his permission as he parted the netting, but the one who came in wasn’t the servant boy. It was Nayiit.
He looked tired. His robes had been blue once, but from the hem to the knee they were stained the pale brown of the mud through which they had traveled. Otah considered the weight of their situation - the young man’s dual role as Maati’s son and his own, the threat he posed to Danat and the promise to Machi, the aid he might be in this present endeavor to prevent harm to the Dai-kvo - and dismissed it all. He was too tired and pained to chew everything a hundred times before he swallowed.
He took a pose of welcome, and Nayiit returned one of greater formality. Otah nodded to a camp chair and Nayiit sat.
‘Your attendant wasn’t here. I didn’t know what the right etiquette was, so I just came through.’
‘He’s running an errand. Once he’s back, I can have tea brought,’ Otah said. ‘Or wine.’
Nayiit took a pose of polite refusal. Otah shrugged it away.
‘As you see fit,’ Otah said. ‘And what brings you?’
‘There’s grumbling in the ranks, Most High. Even among some of the utkhaiem.’
‘There’s grumbling in here, for that,’ Otah said. ‘There’s just no one here to listen to me. Are there any suggestions? Any solutions that the ranks have seen that escaped me? Because, by all the gods that have ever been named, I’m not too proud to hear them.’
‘They say you’re driving them too hard, Most High,’ Nayiit said. ‘That the men need a day’s rest.’
‘Rest? Go slower? That’s the solution they have to offer? What kind of brilliance is that?’
Nayiit looked up. His face was long, like a Northerner’s. Like Otah’s. His eyes were Liat’s tea-with-milk brown. His expression, however, owed to neither of them. Where Liat would have kept her eyes down or Otah would have made himself charming, Nayiit’s face belonged on a man bearing a heavy load. Whatever was in his mind, in this moment it was clear that he would press until the world was the way he wanted it or it crushed him. It was something equal parts weariness and joy, like a man newly acquainted with certainty. Otah found himself curious.
‘They aren’t wrong, Most High. These men aren’t accustomed to living on the road like this. You can’t expect the speed of a practiced army from them. And the walkers have been rising early to drill.’
‘Have they?’
‘They have the impression their lives may rest on it. And the lives of their families. And, forgive me, Most High, but your life too.’
Otah leaned forward, his hands taking a questioning pose.
‘They’re afraid of failing you,’ Nayiit said. ‘It’s why no one would come to you and complain. I’ve been keeping company with a man named Saya. He’s a blacksmith. Plow blades, for the most part. His knees are swollen to twice their normal size, and he wakes before dawn to tie on leather and wool and swing sticks with the others. And then he walks until he can’t. And then he walks farther.’
Nayiit’s voice was trembling now, but Otah couldn’t say if it was with weariness or fear or anger.
‘These aren’t soldiers, Most High. And you’re pushing them too hard.’
‘We’ve been moving for ten days—’
‘And we’re coming near to halfway to the Dai-kvo’s village,’ Nayiit said. ‘In ten days. And drilling, and sleeping under thin blankets on hard ground. Not couriers and huntsmen, not men who are accustomed to this. Just men. I’ve spoken to the provisioners. We left Machi three thousand strong. Do you know how many have turned back? How many have deserted you?’
Otah blinked. It wasn’t a question he’d ever thought to ask.
‘How many?’
‘None.’
Otah felt something loosen in his chest. A warmth like the first drink of wine spread through him, and he felt tears beginning to well up in his eyes. If he had been less exhausted, it would never have pierced his reserve, and still . . . none.
‘With every low town we pass, we take on a few more,’ Nayiit was saying. ‘They’re afraid. The word has gone out that all the andat are gone, that the Galts are going to invade or are invading. It’s the thing every man had convinced himself would never happen. I hear the things they say.’
‘The things they say?’
‘That you were the only one who saw the danger. You were training men even before. You were preparing. They say that you’ve traveled the world when you were a boy, that you understand it better than any other Khai. Some of them are calling you the new Emperor.’
Seasons of War Page 23