Seasons of War

by Daniel Abraham

  Issandra pressed her hand to his mouth. One of the guards shifted, but Otah gestured him back. It wasn’t everyone who could gag the Emperor of the Khaiem, but he was too curious to disrupt things over a point of etiquette. Besides which, he didn’t truly care.

  Another of the doors shifted and creaked open. Danat stepped out. Being discovered crouched in the ivy, eavesdropping on their own children might be the least dignified thing possible, so Otah tried to be very, very still. When Danat spoke, the sound carried perfectly.

  ‘I received your message. I’m here.’

  ‘And I received your poem,’ Ana said.

  It was too dark to actually see how deeply Danat blushed, but Otah recognized the discomfort in his son’s body.

  ‘Ah. That,’ he said.

  Otah tapped Issandra on the shoulder and mouthed the word poem? Issandra pointed back down to their children.

  ‘I am not a toy,’ Ana said. ‘If this is another scheme of your father’s or my mother’s, you can carry word back to them that it didn’t work. I know better than to trust you.’

  ‘You think I’ve lied?’ Danat said. ‘What have I said to you that wasn’t true?’

  ‘As if you’d let yourself be caught out,’ Ana said.

  Danat sat, one leg tucked under him, the other bent. He looked up at her like a player in some ancient epic. In the dim light, his expression seemed bemused.

  ‘Ask anything,’ he said. ‘Do it now. I won’t lie to you.’

  Ana crossed her arms, looking down on Danat like a low-town judge. Her brows were furrowed.

  ‘Are you trying to seduce me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Danat said. His voice was calm and solid as stone.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think you are worth seducing,’ Danat said.

  ‘Only that? Not to please your father or my mother?’

  Danat chuckled. One of the guards at Otah’s side shifted his weight, the leaves beneath him crackling. Neither of the children below had ears for it.

  ‘It began that way, I suppose,’ Danat said. ‘A political alliance. A world to remake. All of that has its appeal, but it didn’t write that poem.’

  Ana fumbled at her belt for a moment and drew out a folded sheet of paper. Danat hesitated, then reached up and accepted it from her. They were quiet. Otah sensed the tension in Issandra’s crouched body. Ana was refusing the token. And then the girl spoke, and her mother relaxed.

  ‘Read it,’ Ana said. ‘Read it to me.’

  Otah closed his eyes and prayed to all the gods there were that neither he nor Issandra nor either of the guards would sneeze or cough. He had never lived through a more excruciatingly awkward scene. Below, Danat cleared his throat and began to declaim.

  It wasn’t good. Danat’s command of Galtic didn’t extend to the subtlety of rhyme. The images were simple and puerile, the sexuality just under the surface of the words ham-fisted and uncertain, and worst of all of it, Danat’s tone as he spoke was as sincere as a priest at temple. His voice shook at the end of the last stanza. Silence fell in the garden. One of the guards shook once with suppressed laughter and went still.

  Danat folded the paper slowly, then offered it up to Ana. It hesitated there for a moment before the girl took it.

  ‘I see,’ she said. Against all reason, her voice had softened. Otah could hardly believe it, but Ana appeared genuinely moved. Danat rose to stand a hand’s breadth nearer to her than before. The lanterns flickered. The two children gazed at each other with perfect seriousness. Ana looked away.

  ‘I have a lover,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve made that quite clear,’ Danat replied, amusement in his voice.

  Ana shook her head. The shadows hid her expression.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘You are a fine man, Danat. More an emperor than your father. But I’ve sworn. I’ve sworn before everyone . . .’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ Danat said. ‘I’ve hardly known you, Ana-kya, and I don’t believe the gods themselves could stop you from something if it was truly what you wanted. Say you won’t have me, but don’t tell me you’re refusing me out of fear.’

  Ana began to speak, stumbled on the words, and went silent. Danat rose, and the girl took a step toward him.

  And a moment later, ‘Does Hanchat know you’re here?’

  Ana was still, and then almost imperceptibly she shook her head. Danat put a hand on her shoulder and gently turned her to face him. Otah might have been imagining it, but he thought the girl’s head inclined a degree toward that hand. Danat kissed Ana’s forehead and then her mouth. Her hand, palm against Danat’s chest, seemed too weak to push him away. It was Danat who stepped back.

  He murmured something too low to hear, then bowed in the Galtic style, took his lantern, and left her. Ana slowly lowered herself to the ground. They waited, one girl alone in the night and four hidden spies with legs and backs slowly beginning to cramp. Without word or warning, Ana sobbed twice, rose, scooped up her own lantern, and vanished through the door she’d first come from. Otah let out a pained sigh and made his uncomfortable way out from beneath the willow. There were green streaks on his robe where his knees had ground into the ivy. The armsmen had the grace to move away a few paces, expressionless.

  ‘We’re doing well,’ Issandra said.

  ‘I didn’t hear a declaration of marriage,’ Otah said. He felt disagreeable despite the evidence of Ana’s changing heart. He felt dishonest, and it made him sour.

  ‘So long as nothing comes to throw her off, it will come. In time. I know my daughter. I’ve seen this all before.’

  ‘Really? How odd,’ Otah said. ‘I know my son, and I never have.’

  ‘Then perhaps Ana is a lucky woman,’ Issandra said. He was surprised to hear something wistful in the woman’s voice. The moon passed behind a high cloud, deepening the darkness around them, and then was gone. Issandra stood before him, her head high and proud, her mouth in a half-smile. She was, he thought, an interesting woman. Not beautiful in the traditional sense, and all the more attractive for that.

  ‘A marriage is what you make of it,’ she said.

  Otah considered the words, then took a pose that both agreed and expressed a gentle sorrow. He did not know how much of his meaning she understood. She nodded and strode off, leaving him with his armsmen.

  Otah suffered through the rest of the banquet and returned to his apartments, sure he would not sleep. The night air had cooled. The fire in the grate warmed his feet. The fear that had dogged him all these last months didn’t vanish, but its hold upon him faded. Somewhere under the stars just then, Danat and Ana were playing out their drama in touches and whispers; Issandra and Farrer Dasin in silences and the knowledge of long association. Idaan was hunting, Ashua Radaani was hunting, Sinja was hunting. And he was alone and sleepless with nothing to do.

  He closed his eyes and tried to feel Kiyan’s presence, tried to bring some sense of her out of the scent of smoke and the sound of distant singing. He tricked himself into thinking that she was here, but not so well that he could forget it was a trick.

  Tomorrow, there would be another wide array of men and women requesting his time. Another schedule of ritual and audience and meeting. Perhaps it would all go as well as today had, and he would end the day in his rooms, feeling old and maudlin despite his success. There were so many men and women in the court - in the world - who wanted nothing more than power. Otah, who had it, had always known how little it changed.

  He slept deeply and without dreams. When he woke, every man and woman of Galt had gone blind.

  16

  It had been raining for two full days. Occasionally the water changed to sleet or hail, and small accumulations of rotten ice had begun to form in the sheltered corners of the courtyard. Maati closed his shutters against the low clouds and sat close to the fire, the weather tapping on wood like fingers on a table. It might almost have been pleasant if it hadn’t made his spine stiffen and ache.

  The cold coupl
ed with Eiah’s absence had turned life quiet and slow, like a bear preparing to sleep through the winter. Maati went down to the kitchen in the morning and ate with the others. Large Kae and Irit had started rehearsing old songs together to pass the time. They sang while they cooked, and the harmonies were prettier than Maati would have imagined. When Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight were there, the andat would grow restive, its eyes shifting from one singer to the next and back again until Vanjit started to fidget and took her charge away. Small Kae had no ear for music, so instead spent her time reading the old texts that Clarity-of-Sight had been built from and asking questions about the finer points of their newly re-created grammar.

  Most of the day, Maati spent alone in his rooms, or dressed in several thick robes, walking through the halls. He would not say it, but the space had begun to feel close and restricting. Likely it was only the sense of winter moving in.

  With the journey to Pathai and back, along with the trading and provisioning, he couldn’t expect Eiah’s return for another ten days. He hadn’t expected to feel that burden so heavily upon him, and so both delight and dread touched him when Small Kae interrupted his half-doze.

  ‘She’s come back. Vanjit’s been watching from the classroom, and she says Eiah’s come back. She’s already turned from the high road, and if the path’s not too muddy, she’ll be here by nightfall.’

  Maati rose and opened the shutters, as if by squinting at the gray he could match Vanjit’s sight. A gust of cold and damp pulled at the shutter in his hand. He was half-tempted to find a cloak of oiled silk and go out to meet her. It would be folly, of course, and gain him nothing. He ran a hand through the thin remnants of his hair, wondering how many days it had been since he’d bathed and shaved himself, and then realized that Small Kae was still there, waiting for him to speak.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘whatever we have that’s best, let’s cook it up. Eiahcha’s going to have fresh supplies, so there’s no point in saving it.’

  Small Kae grinned, took a pose that accepted his instruction, and bustled out. Maati turned back to the open window. Ice and mud and gloom. And set in it, invisible to him, Eiah and news.

  There was no sunset; Eiah arrived shortly after the clouds had faded into darkness. In the light of hissing torches, the cart’s wheels were beige with mud and clay. The horse trembled with exhaustion, driven too hard through the wet. Large Kae, clucking her tongue in disapproval, took the poor beast off to be rubbed down and warmed while the rest of them crowded around Eiah. She wrung the water from her hair with pale fingers, answering the first question before it was asked.

  ‘Ashti Beg’s left. She said she didn’t want to come back. We were in a low town just south of here off the high road. She said we could talk about it, but when I got up in the morning, she’d already gone.’ She looked at Maati when she finished. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He took a pose that forgave and also diminished the scale of the thing, then waved her in. Vanjit followed, and then Irit and Small Kae. The meal was laid out and waiting. Barley soup with lemon and quail. Rice and sausage. Watered wine. Eiah sat near the brazier and ate like a woman starved, talking between mouthfuls.

  ‘We never reached Pathai. There was a trade fair halfway to the city. Tents, carts, the wayhouse so full they were renting out space on the kitchen floor. There was a courier there gathering messages from all the low towns.’

  ‘So the letters were sent?’ Irit asked. Eiah nodded and scooped up another mouthful of rice.

  ‘Ashti Beg,’ Maati said. ‘Tell me more about her. Did she say why she left?’

  Eiah frowned. Color was coming back to her cheeks, but her lips were still pale, her hair clinging to her neck like ivy.

  ‘It was me,’ Vanjit said, the andat squirming in her lap. ‘It’s my doing.’

  ‘Perhaps, but it wasn’t what she said,’ Eiah replied. ‘She said she was tired, and that she felt we’d all gone past her. She didn’t see that she would ever complete a binding of her own, or that her insights were particularly helping us. I tried to tell her otherwise, give her some perspective. If she’d stayed on until the morning, perhaps I could have.’

  Maati sipped his wine, wondering how much of what Eiah said was true, how much of it was being softened because Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight were in the room. It seemed more likely to him that Ashti Beg had taken offense at Vanjit’s misstep and been unable to forgive it. He recalled the woman’s dry tone, her cutting humor. She had not been an easy woman or a particularly apt pupil, but he believed he would miss her.

  ‘Was there other news? Anything of the Galts?’ Vanjit asked. There was something odd about her voice, but it might only have been that Clarity-of-Sight had started its wordless, wailing complaint. Eiah appeared to notice nothing strange in the question.

  ‘There would have been if I’d reached Pathai, I’d expect,’ she said. ‘But since there would have been nothing to do about it and our business was done early, I wanted to come back quickly.’

  ‘Ah,’ Vanjit said. ‘Of course.’

  Maati tugged at his fingers. There was something near disappointment in the girl’s tone. As if she had expected someone that had not arrived.

  ‘You’re ready to work again?’ Small Kae said. Irit flapped a cloth at her, and Small Kae took a pose that unasked the question. Eiah smiled.

  ‘I’ve had a few thoughts,’ she said. ‘Let me look them over tonight after we unload the cart, and we can talk in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no more work for you tonight,’ Irit said. ‘You’ve been on the road all this time. We can hand a few things down from a cart.’

  ‘Of course,’ Vanjit said. ‘You should rest, Eiah-kya. We’ll be happy to help.’

  Eiah put down her soup and took a pose that offered gratitude. Something in the cant of her wrists caught Maati’s attention, but the pose was gone as quickly as it had come and Eiah was sitting back, drinking wine and leaning her still-wet hair toward the fire. Large Kae rejoined them, smelling of wet horse, and Eiah told the whole story again for her benefit and then left for her rooms. Maati felt the impulse to follow her, to speak in private, but Vanjit took him by the hand and led him out to the cart with the others.

  The supplies were something less than Maati had expected. Two chests of salted pork, a few jars of lard and flour and sweet oil. Bags of rice. It wasn’t inconsiderable - certainly there was enough to keep them all well-fed for weeks, but likely not months. There were few spices, and no wine. Large Kae made a few small remarks about the failures of low-town trade fairs, and the others chuckled their agreement. The rain slackened, and then, as Vanjit balanced the last bag of rice on one hip and Clarity-of-Sight on the other, snow began to fall. Maati went back to his rooms, heated a kettle over his fire, and debated whether to try to boil enough water for a bath. Immersion was the one way he was sure he could chase the cold from his joints, but the effort required seemed worse than enduring the chill. And there was an errand he preferred to complete.

  Light glowed through the cracks around Eiah’s door. Dim and flickering, it was still more than a single night candle would have made. Maati scratched at the door. For a moment, nothing happened. Perhaps Eiah had taken to her cot. Perhaps she was elsewhere in the school. A soft sound, no more than a whisper, drew him back to the door.

  ‘Eiah-kya?’ he said, his voice low. ‘It’s me.’

  Her door opened. Eiah had changed into a simple robe of thick wool, her hair tied back with a length of twine. She looked powerfully like her mother. The room she brought Maati into had once been a storage pantry. Her cot and brazier and a low table were all the furnishings. There was no window, and the air was thick with the heat and smoke from the coals.

  Papers and scrolls lay on the table beside a wax tablet half-whitened by fresh notes. Medical texts in the languages of the Westlands, Eiah’s own earlier drafts of the binding of Wounded. And also, he saw, the completed binding they had all devised for Clarity-of-Sight. Eiah sat on the cot, the frail structure
creaking under her. She didn’t look up at him.

  ‘Why did she leave?’ Maati asked. ‘Truth, now.’

  ‘I told her to,’ Eiah said. ‘She was frightened to come back. I told her that I understood. What happens if two poets come into conflict? If one poet has something like Floats-in-Air and the other has something like Sinking?’

  ‘Or one poet can blind, and the other heal injury?’

  ‘As an example,’ Eiah said.

  Maati sighed and lowered himself to sit beside her. The cot complained. He laced his fingers together, looking at the words and diagrams without seeing them.

  ‘I don’t entirely know. It hasn’t happened in my lifetime. It hasn’t happened in generations.’

  ‘But it has happened,’ Eiah said.

  ‘There was the war. The one that ended the Second Empire. That was . . . what, ten generations ago? The andat are flesh because we’ve translated them into flesh, but they are also concepts. Abstractions. It might simply be that the poets’ wills are set against each other’s. A kind of wrestling match mediated through the andat. Whoever has the greater strength of mind and the andat more suited to the struggle gains the upper hand. Or it could be that the concepts of the two andat don’t coincide, and any struggle would have to be expressed physically. In the world we inhabit. Or . . .’