Seasons of War

by Daniel Abraham

‘I’ve seen other things too,’ Vanjit said. ‘The greater the change, the more difficult it is at first.’

  Maati nodded. He could see the individual hairs on her head. The crags where tiny flakes of dead skin peeled from the living tissue beneath. An insect the shape of a tick but a thousand times smaller clung to the root of her eyelash. He closed his eyes.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Could I put upon you to undo some part of that? It’s distracting . . .’

  He heard her robe rustle and go silent. When he opened his eyes again, his vision was clear but no longer inhumanly so. He smiled.

  ‘Once I’ve made the change, I forget that it doesn’t fall back on its own,’ she said.

  ‘Stone-Made-Soft was much the same,’ Maati said. ‘Once it had changed the nature of a rock, it remained weakened until Cehmai-kvo put an effort into changing it back. Then there was Water-Moving-Down, who might stop a river only so long as its poet gave the matter strict attention. The question rests on the innate capacity for change within the object affected. Stone by nature resists change, water embraces it. I suspect that whatever eyes you improve will still suffer the normal effects of age.’

  ‘The change may be permanent, but we aren’t,’ she said.

  ‘Well put,’ Maati said.

  The courtyard in which they sat showed only small signs of the decade of ruin it had suffered. The weeds had all been pulled or cut, the broken stones reset. Songbirds flitted between the trees, lizards scurried through the low grass, and far above, invisible to him now, a hawk circled in the high, distant air.

  Maati could imagine that it wasn’t the school that he had suffered in his boyhood: it had so little in common with the half-prison he recalled. A handful of women instead of a shifting cadre of boys. A cooperative struggle to achieve the impossible instead of cruelty and judgment. Joy instead of fear. The space itself seemed remade, and perhaps the whole of the world along with it. Vanjit seemed to guess his thoughts. She smiled. The thing at her hip grumbled, fixing its black eyes on Maati, but did not cry.

  ‘It’s unlike anything I expected,’ Vanjit said. ‘I can feel him. All the time, he’s in the back of my mind.’

  ‘How burdensome is it?’ Maati asked, sitting forward.

  Vanjit shook her head.

  ‘No worse than any baby, I’d imagine,’ she said. ‘He tires me sometimes, but not so much I lose myself. And the others have all been kind. I don’t think I’ve cooked a meal for myself since the binding.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Maati said. ‘That’s excellent.’

  ‘And you? Your eyes?’

  ‘Perfect. I’ve been able to write every evening. I may actually manage to complete this before I die.’

  He’d meant it as a joke, but Vanjit’s reply was grim, almost scolding.

  ‘Don’t say that. Don’t talk about death lightly. It isn’t something to laugh at.’

  Maati took an apologetic pose, and a moment later the darkness seemed to leave the girl’s eyes. She shifted the andat again, freeing one hand to take an apologetic pose.

  ‘No,’ Maati said. ‘You’re right. You’re quite right.’

  He steered the conversation to safer waters - meals, weather, reconstructing the finer points of Vanjit’s successful binding. Contentment seemed to come from the girl like heat from a fire. He regretted leaving her there, and yet, walking down the wide stone corridors, he was also pleased.

  The years he had spent scrabbling in the shadows like a rat had been so long and so thick with anger and despair, Maati had forgotten what it was to feel simple happiness. Now, with the women’s grammar proved and the andat returned to the world, his flesh itself felt different. His shoulders had grown straighter, his heart lighter, his joints looser and stronger and sure. He had managed to ignore his burden so long he had mistaken it for normalcy. The lifting of it felt like youth.

  Eiah sat cross-legged on the floor of one of the old lecture halls, untied codices, opened books, unfurled scrolls laid out around her like ripples on the surface of a pond. He glanced at the pages - diagrams of flayed arms, the muscles and joints laid bare as if by the most meticulous butcher in history; Westlands script with its whorls and dots like a child’s angry scribble; notations in Eiah’s own hand, outlining the definitions and limitations and structure of violence done upon flesh. Wounded. The andat at its origin. And all of it, he could make out from where he stood without squinting or bending close.

  Eiah looked up at him with a pose equal parts welcome and despair. Maati lowered himself to the floor beside her.

  ‘You look tired,’ he said.

  Eiah gestured to the careful mess before her, and then sighed.

  ‘This was simpler when I wasn’t allowed to do it,’ she said. ‘Now that my own turn has come, I’m starting to think I was a fool to think it possible.’

  Maati touched one of the books with his outstretched fingers. The paper felt thick as skin.

  ‘There is a danger to it,’ Maati said. ‘Even if your binding is perfectly built, there might have been another done that was too much like it. These books, they were written by men. Your training was done by men. The poets before Vanjit were all men. Your thinking could be too little like a man’s.’

  Eiah smiled, chuckling. Maati took a pose of query.

  ‘Physicians in the Westlands tend to be women,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I have more than half-a-dozen texts that I could say for certain were written by men. The problem isn’t that.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, it’s that no matter what’s between your thighs, a cut is a cut, a burn is a burn, and a bruise is a bruise. Break a bone now, and it snaps much the way it did in the Second Empire. Vanjit’s binding was based on a study of eyes and light that didn’t exist back then. Nothing I’m working from is new.’

  There was frustration in her voice. Perhaps fear.

  ‘There is another way,’ Maati said. Eiah shifted, her gaze on his. Maati scratched his arm.

  ‘We have Clarity-of-Sight,’ he said. ‘It proves that we can do this thing, and that alone gives us a certain power. If we send word to Otah-kvo, tell him what we’ve done and that he must turn away from his scheme with the Galts, he would do it. He would have to. We could take as much time as you care to take, consult as many scholars as we can unearth. Even Cehmai would have to come. He couldn’t refuse the Emperor.’

  It wasn’t something he’d spoken aloud before. It was hardly something he’d allowed himself to think. Before Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, the idea of returning to the courts of the Khaiem - to Otah - in triumph would have been only a sort of torture of the soul. It would have been like wishing for his son to be alive, or Liat at his side, or any of the thousand regrets of his past to be unmade.

  Now it was not only possible but perhaps even wise. Another letter, sent by fast courier, announcing that Maati had succeeded and made himself the new Dai-kvo, and Otah would have no choice but to honor him. He could almost hear the apology now, sweeter for coming from the lips of an emperor.

  ‘It’s a kind thought, but no,’ Eiah said. ‘It’s too big a risk.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ Maati said, frowning.

  ‘Vanjit’s one woman, and binding an andat doesn’t mean that a good man and a sharp knife can’t end you,’ Eiah said. ‘And she may slip, at which point half the world will want our heads on sticks, just to be sure it doesn’t happen again. Once we’ve managed a few more, it will be safe. And Wounded can’t wait.’

  ‘If you heal all the women of the cities, they’ll know we’ve bound an andat,’ Maati said. ‘It will be just as clear a message as sending a letter. And by your argument, just as dangerous.’

  ‘If they wait until after I’ve given back the chance of bearing children, the Galts can kill me,’ Eiah said. ‘It will be too late to matter.’

  ‘You don’t believe that,’ Maati said, aghast. Eiah smiled and shrugged.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ she agreed. ‘Say rather, if I’m going to die, I’d rather it
was after I’d finished this.’

  Maati put a hand on her shoulder, then let his arm fall to his side. Eiah described the issues of the binding that troubled her most. To pull a thought from abstraction into concrete form required a deep understanding of the idea’s limits and consequences. To bind Wounded, Eiah needed to find the common features of a cut finger and a burned foot, the difference between a tattooing quill and a rose thorn, the definitions that kept the thought small enough for a single mind to encompass.

  ‘Take Vanjit’s work,’ Eiah said. ‘Your eyes were never burned. No one cut them or bruised them. But they didn’t see as well as when you were young. So there must have been some damage to them. So are the changes of age wounds? White hair? Baldness? When a woman loses her monthly flow, is it because she’s broken?’

  ‘You can’t consider age,’ Maati said. ‘For one thing, it muddies the water, and for another, I will swear to you that more than one poet has reached for Youth-Regained or some such.’

  ‘But how can I make that fit?’ Eiah said. ‘What makes an old man’s failing hip different from a young girl’s bruised one? The speed of the injury?’

  ‘The intention,’ Maati said, and touched a line of symbols. His finger traced the strokes of ink, pausing from time to time. He could feel Eiah’s attention on him. ‘Here. Change ki to toyaki. Wounds are either intentional or accident. Toyaki includes both senses.’

  ‘I don’t see what difference it makes,’ Eiah said.

  ‘Ki also includes a nuance of proper function. Behavior that isn’t misadventure or conscious intention, but a product of design,’ Maati said. ‘If you remove that . . .’

  He licked his lips, his fingers closing in the air above the page. Once, many years before, he had been asked to explain why the poets were called poets. He remembered his answer vaguely. That the bindings were the careful shaping of meaning and intention, that makers or thought-weavers were just as apt. It had been a true answer for as far as it went.

  And also, sometimes, the grammar of a binding would say something unexpected. Something half-known, or half-acknowledged. A profound melancholy touched him.

  ‘You see, Eiah-cha,’ he said, softly, ‘time is meant to pass. The world is meant to change. When people fade and die, it isn’t a deviation. It’s the way the world is made.’

  He tapped the symbol ki.

  ‘And that,’ he said, ‘is where you make that distinction.’

  Eiah was silent for a moment, then drew a pen from her sleeve and a small silver ink box. With a soft pressure, gentler than rain on leaves, she added the strokes that remade the binding.

  ‘You accept my argument, then?’ Maati asked.

  ‘I have to,’ Eiah said. ‘It’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Sterile didn’t add anything to the world, it only broke the way humanity renews itself. I’ve seen enough decline and death to recognize its proper place. I’m not here to stop time or death. Just to put back the balance so that new generations can come up fresh.’

  Maati nodded. When Eiah spoke, her voice sounded tired.

  ‘I miss him,’ she said. He knew that she meant her father. ‘The last time I saw him, he looked so old. I still picture him with dark hair. It hasn’t been like that in years, but it’s what’s in my mind.’

  ‘We’re doing the right thing,’ Maati said. His voice was little more than a whisper.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Eiah said. ‘He’s turned his back on a generation of women as if their suffering were insignificant. Sexual indenture used to be restricted to bed slaves, and he would make an industry of it if he could. He would haul women across like bales of cotton. I hate everything about the scheme, but I miss him.’

  ‘I do too,’ Maati said.

  ‘You also hate him,’ she said. There was no place in this room for half-truths.

  ‘That too,’ Maati agreed.

  Dinner that night was a brace of quail Large Kae had trapped. The flesh was soft and rich. Maati sat at the head of the long table, Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight at the far end, and plucked the delicate bones. The bright chattering voices of Small Kae and Irit seemed distant, the dry wit of Ashti Beg grim. Eiah also seemed subdued, but it might only have been that she was thinking of the binding. The meal seemed to last forever, and yet he found himself surprised when Ashti Beg gathered up the bowls and the talk shifted to cleanup chores.

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ Vanjit said, her voice apologetic. ‘I assumed that we had changed the rotation.’

  ‘We skipped you last time, if that’s what you mean,’ Ashti Beg said. ‘I don’t know if that’s the same as agreeing to wait on you.’

  There was laughter in the older woman’s voice, but it had teeth. Small Kae was smiling a fixed smile and staring at the table. If he hadn’t been so distracted, Maati would have seen this coming before it arrived.

  ‘I don’t think I can, though,’ Vanjit said, still firmly in her seat. The thing on her lap shifted its gaze from the poet to Ashti Beg and back as if fascinated.

  ‘I seem to recall my mother keeping the house even when she had a babe on her hip,’ Ashti Beg said. ‘But she always was unusually talented.’

  ‘I have the andat. That’s more work than washing dishes,’ Vanjit said. ‘At court, poets are forgiven other duties, aren’t they, Maati-kvo?’

  ‘The smallest brat of the utkhaiem is forgiven their duties,’ Ashti Beg said before Maati could frame a reply. ‘That’s why it’s court. Because some people set themselves above others.’

  The air was suddenly heavy. Maati stood, unsure what he was about to say. Irit’s sudden chirp saved him.

  ‘Oh, it isn’t much. No need to fuss about it. I’ll be happy to do the thing. No, Vanjit-cha, don’t get up. If you don’t feel up to doing it, you ought not strain yourself.’

  The last words rose at the end as if they were a question. Maati nodded as if something had been decided, then walked out of the hall. Vanjit followed without speaking, and took herself and her small burden down a side hall and out to the gardens. Maati could hear the voices of the others as they cleaned away the remnants of the small, fallen birds.

  They met as they always did, sitting in a rough circle and discussing the fine points of binding the andat. There was no sign of the earlier conflict; Vanjit and Ashti Beg treated each other with their customary kindness and respect. Eiah explained the difference between accident, intention, and consequence of design to Irit and Small Kae and, Maati thought, learned by the experience. By the warm, soft light of the lanterns, they might have been talking of anything. By the end, there was even real laughter.

  It should have been a good evening, but as he went back toward his bed, Maati was troubled and couldn’t quite say why. It had to do with Otah-kvo and Eiah, Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight. The Galts and his own unsettling if unsurprising insight into the nature of time and decay.

  He opened his book, reading his own handwriting by the light of the night candle. Even the quality of his script had changed since Vanjit had sharpened his vision. The older entries had been . . . not sloppy, never that. But not so crisp as he was capable of now. It had been an old man’s handwriting. Now it was something different. He picked up his pen, touched nib to ink, but found nothing coherent to say.

  He wiped the pen clean and put the book aside. Somewhere far to the south, Otah was dining with the men who had destroyed the Khaiem. He was sleeping on a bed of silk and drinking wine from bowls of beaten gold, while here in the dry plains his own daughter prepared to risk her life to make right what he had done.

  What they had done together. Otah, Cehmai, and Maati himself. One was crawling into bed with the enemy, another turning away and hiding his face. Only Maati had even tried to make things whole again. Vanjit’s success meant it had not been wasted effort. Eiah’s fear reminded him that it was not yet finished.

  He made his way down the corridors in the near darkness. Only candles and a half-moon lit his way. He was unsurprised to see Vanjit sitting alone in the gardens. Unlike
the courtyard where they had spoken before, the gardens were bleak and bare. They had come too late to plant this season. Eiah’s occasional journeys to Pathai provided food enough, and they didn’t have the surplus of spare hands that had once held up the school. The wilderness encroached on the high stone walls here, young trees growing green and bold in plots where Maati had sown peas and harvested pods.

  She heard him approaching and glanced back over her shoulder. She shifted, adjusting her robes, and Maati saw the small, black eyes of the andat appear from among the folds of cotton. She had been nursing it. It shocked him for a moment, though on reflection it shouldn’t have. The andat had no need of milk, of course, but it was a product of Vanjit’s conceptions. Stone-Made-Soft had been involved with the game of stones. Three-Bound-as-One had been fascinated by knots. The relationship of poet and andat was modeled on mother and child as it had never been before in all of history. The nursing was, Maati supposed, the physical emblem of it.