Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  ‘Three bowls, then,’ Maati said. ‘Just give me a moment.’

  He walked back to his apartments, feeling something very much like relief. The afternoon trapped with old scrolls and codices, books and frail maps was banished. He was saved from it. He threw the waxed paper with the remaining onions into a corner where the servants would clean it, took a thick earthenware jug of wine off his shelves, and dropped three small wine bowls into his sleeve. On his way back out to the steps, where he was certain no one could see him, he trotted.

  Danat’s cough had returned.

  Otah had filled his day playing Khai Machi. He had reviewed the preparations for the Grand Audience he was already past due holding. There was an angry letter from the Khai Tan-Sadar asking for an explanation of Otah’s decision not to take his youngest daughter as one of his wives that he responded to with as much aplomb as he could muster. His Master of Stone - responsible for keeping the books of the city - had discovered that two of the forms from which silver lengths were struck had been tampered with and reported the progress of his investigation into the matter. The widow of Adaiit Kamau demanded an audience, insisting again that her husband had been murdered and demanding justice in his name. The priests asked for money for the temple and the procession of the beasts. A young play-wright, son of Oiad How of House How, had composed an epic in the honor to the Khai Machi, and asked permission to perform it. Permission and funding. The representative of the tinsmiths petitioned for a just distribution of coal, as the ironworkers had been taking more than their share. The ironworkers’ explaining that they worked iron, not - sneering and smiling as if Otah would understand - tin. And on and on and on until Otah was more than half tempted to grab a passing servant, put him on the black lacquer chair, and let the city take its chances. And at the end, with all the weight of the city and the impending death of Galt besides, the thing that he could not face was that Danat’s cough had returned.

  The nursery glowed by the light of the candles. Kiyan sat on the raised bed, talking softly to their son. Great iron statues of strange, imagined beasts had been kept in the fire grates all day and pulled out when night fell, and as he quietly walked forward, Otah could feel the heat radiating from them. The physician’s assistant - a young man with a serious expression - took a respectful pose and walked quietly from the room, leaving the family alone.

  Otah stepped up to the bedside. Danat’s eyes, half closed in drowse, shifted toward him and a smile touched Otah’s mouth.

  ‘I got sick again, Papa-kya,’ he said. His voice was rough and low; the familiar sign of a hard day.

  ‘Don’t talk, sweet,’ Kiyan said, smoothing Danat’s forehead with the tips of her fingers. ‘You’ll start it again.’

  ‘Yes,’ Otah said, sitting across from his wife, taking his son’s hand. ‘I heard. But you’ve been sick before, and you’ve gotten better. You’ll get better again. It’s good for boys to be a bit ill when they’re young. It gets all the hardest parts out of the way early. Then they can be strong old men.’

  ‘Tell me a story?’ Danat asked.

  Otah took a breath, his mind grasping for a children’s story. He tried to recall being in this room himself or one like it. He had been, when he’d been Danat’s age. Someone had held him when he’d been ill, had told him stories to distract him. But everything in his life before he’d been disowned and sent to the school existed in the blur of half-memory and dream.

  ‘Papa-kya’s tired, sweet,’ Kiyan said. ‘Let Mama tell you about . . .’

  ‘No!’ Danat cried, his face pulling in - mouth tight, brows thunderously low. ‘I want Papa-kya—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Otah said. ‘I’m not so tired I can’t tell my own boy a story.’

  Kiyan smiled at him, her eyes amused and apologetic both. I tried to spare you.

  ‘Once, back before the Empire, when the world was very new,’ Otah said, then paused. ‘There, ah. There was a goat.’

  The goat - whose name was coincidentally also Danat - went on to meet a variety of magical creatures and have long, circuitous conversations to no apparent point or end until Otah saw his son’s eyes shut and his breath grow deep and steady. Kiyan rose and silently snuffed all but the night candle. The room filled with the scent of spent wicks. Otah let go of his son’s hand and quietly pulled the netting closed. In the near-darkness, Danat’s eyelids seemed darker, smudged with kohl. His skin was smooth and brown as eggshell. Kiyan touched Otah’s shoulder and motioned with her gaze to the door. He laced his fingers in hers and together they walked to the hallway.

  The physician’s assistant sat on a low stool, a bowl of rice and fish in his hands.

  ‘I will be here for the night, Most High,’ the assistant said as Otah paused before him. ‘My teacher expects that the boy will sleep soundly, but if he wakes, I will be here.’

  Otah took a pose expressing gratitude. It was a humbling thing for a Khai to do before a servant, even one as skilled as this. The physician’s assistant bowed deeply in response. The walk to their own rooms was a short one - down one hallway, up a wide flight of stairs worked in marble and silver, and then the gauntlet of their own servants. The evening’s meal was set out for them - quail glazed with pork fat and honey, pale bread with herbed butter, fresh trout, iced apples. More food than any two people could eat.

  ‘It isn’t in his chest,’ Kiyan said as she lifted the trout’s pale flesh from delicate, translucent bones. ‘His color is always good. His lips never blue at all. The physician didn’t hear any water when he breathes, and he can blow up a pig’s bladder as well as I could.’

  ‘And all that’s good?’ Otah said. ‘He can’t run across a room without coughing until his head aches.’

  ‘All that’s better than the alternative,’ Kiyan said. ‘They don’t know what it is. They give him teas that make him sleep, and hope that his body’s wise enough to mend itself.’

  ‘This has been going on too long. It’s been almost a year since he was really well.’

  ‘I know it,’ Kiyan said, and the weariness in her voice checked Otah’s frustration. ‘Really, love, I’m quite clear.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kiyan-kya,’ he said. ‘It’s just . . .’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Hard feeling powerless?’ she said gently. Otah nodded. Kiyan sighed softly, a sympathy for his pain. Then, ‘A goat?’

  ‘It was what came to mind.’

  After the meal, after their hands had been washed for them in silver bowls, after Otah had suffered yet another change of robes, Kiyan kissed him and retreated to her rooms. Otah stepped down from his palace, instructed the retinue of servants that he wished to be left alone, and made his way west, toward the library. The sun had long since slipped behind the mountains, but the sky remained a bright gray, the clouds touched with rose and gold. Spring would soon give way to summer, the long, bright days and brief nights. Still, it was not so early in the season that lanterns didn’t glow from the windows that he passed. Stars glittered in the east as the night rose. The library itself was dark, but candles burned in Maati’s apartments, and Otah made his way down the path.

  Voices came to him, raised in laughter. A man’s and a woman’s, and both familiar as memory. They sat on chairs set close together. In the yellow candlelight, Maati’s cheeks looked rosy. Liat’s hair had escaped its bun, locks of it tumbling across her brow, down the curve of her neck. The air smelled of mulling spices and wine, and Eiah lay on a couch, one long, thin arm cast over her eyes. Liat’s eyes went wide when she caught sight of him, and Maati turned toward the door to see what had startled her.

  ‘Otah-kvo!’ he said, waving him forward. ‘Come in. Come in. It’s my fault. I’ve kept your daughter too long. I should have sent her home sooner. I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Otah said, stepping in. ‘I’ve come for your help actually.’

  Maati took a pose of query. His hands were not perfectly steady, and Liat stifled a giggle. Both of them were more than a
little drunk. A bowl of warmed wine sat on the edge of the brazier, a silver serving cup hooked to the rim. Otah glanced at it, and Maati waved him on. There were no bowls, so Otah drank from the serving cup.

  ‘What can I do, Most High?’ Maati asked with a grin that was for the most part friendly.

  ‘I need a book. Something with children’s stories in it. Fables, or light epics. History, if it’s well enough written. Danat’s asking me to tell stories, and I don’t really know any.’

  Liat chuckled and shook her head, but Maati nodded in understanding. Otah sat beside his sleeping daughter while Maati considered. The wine was rich and deep, and the spices alone made Otah’s head swim a little.

  ‘What about the one from the Dancer’s Court?’ Liat said. ‘The one with the stories about the half-Bakta boy who intrigued for the Emperor.’

  Maati pursed his lips.

  ‘They’re a bit bloody, some of them,’ he said.

  ‘Danat’s a boy. He’ll love them. Besides, you read them to Nayiit without any lasting damage,’ Liat said. ‘Those and the green book. The one that was all political allegories where people turned into light or sank into the ground.’

  ‘The Silk Hunter’s Dreams,’ Maati said. ‘That’s a thought. I have a copy of that one too, where I can put my hand on it. Only, Otah-kvo, don’t tell him the one with the crocodile. Nayiit-kya wouldn’t sleep for days after I told him that one.’

  ‘I’ll trust you,’ Otah said.

  ‘Wait,’ Maati said, and with a grunt he pulled himself to standing. ‘You two stay here. I’ll be back with it in three heartbeats.’

  An uncomfortable silence fell on Otah and Liat. Otah turned to consider Eiah’s sleeping face. Liat shifted in her chair.

  ‘She’s a lovely girl,’ Liat said softly. ‘We spent the day together, the three of us, and I was sure she’d wear us thin by the end of it. Still, we’re the ones that lasted longest, eh?’

  ‘She doesn’t have a head for wine yet,’ Otah said.

  ‘We didn’t give her wine,’ Liat said, then chuckled. ‘Well, not much anyway.’

  ‘If the worst she does is sneak away to drink with the pair of you, I’ll be the luckiest man alive,’ Otah said. As if hearing him, Eiah sighed in her sleep and shifted away, pressing her face to the cushions.

  ‘She looks like her mother,’ Liat said. ‘Her face is that same shape. The eyes are your color, though. She’ll be stunning when she’s older. She’ll break hearts. But I suppose they all do. Ours if no one else’s.’

  Otah looked up. Liat’s expression had darkened, the shadows of lantern-light gathering on the curves of her face. It had been another lifetime, it seemed, when Otah had first known her. Only four years older than Eiah was now. And he’d been younger than Nayiit. Babies, it seemed. Too young to know what they were doing, or how precarious the world truly was. It hadn’t seemed that way at the time, though. Otah remembered it all with a terrible clarity.

  ‘You’re thinking of Saraykeht,’ she said.

  ‘Was it that obvious?’

  ‘Yes,’ Liat said. ‘How much have you told them? About what happened?’

  ‘Kiyan knows everything. A few others.’

  ‘They know how Seedless was freed? And Heshai-kvo, how he was killed?’

  For a sick moment, Otah was back in the filthy room, in the stink of mud and raw sewage from the alley. He remembered the ache in his arms. He remembered the struggle as the old poet fought for air with the cord biting into his throat. It had seemed the right thing, then. Even to Heshai. The andat, Seedless, had come to Otah with the plan. Aid in Heshai-kvo’s suicide - for in many ways that was what it had been - and Liat would be saved. Maati would be saved. A thousand Galtic babies would stay safely in their mother’s wombs, the power of the andat never turned against them.

  Otah wondered when things had changed. When he had stopped being someone who would kill a good man to protect the innocent, and become willing to let a nation die if it meant protecting his own. Likely it had been the moment he’d first seen Eiah squirming on Kiyan’s breast.

  ‘Do you know?’ Otah asked. ‘How it happened, I mean.’

  ‘Only guesses,’ Liat said. ‘If you wanted to tell me . . .’

  ‘Thank you,’ Otah said with a sigh, ‘but maybe it’s best to leave that buried. It’s all finished now, and there’s no undoing any of it.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  ‘We will need to talk about Nayiit,’ Otah said. ‘Not now. Not with . . .’ He nodded to the sleeping girl.

  ‘I understand,’ Liat said and brushed her hair back from her eyes. ‘I don’t mean any harm, ’Tani. I wouldn’t hurt you or your family. I didn’t come here . . . I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t had to.’

  The door swung open, a gust of cool air coming from it, and Maati stood triumphantly in the frame. He held a small book bound in blue silk as if it were a trophy of war.

  ‘Got the bastard!’ he said, and walked over to Otah, presenting it over one arm like a sword. ‘For you, Most High, and your son.’

  Over Maati’s shoulder, Otah could see Liat look away. Otah only took the book, adopted a pose of thanks, and turned to gently shake Eiah’s shoulder. She grunted, her brow furrowing.

  ‘It’s time to come home, Eiah-kya,’ Otah said. ‘Come along.’

  ‘’M’wake,’ Eiah protested, but slowly. Rubbing her eyes with the back of one hand, she rose.

  They said their good nights, and Otah led his daughter out, closing the door to Maati’s apartments behind them. The night had grown cool, and the stars had occupied the sky like a conquering army. Otah laid his arm across Eiah’s shoulder, hers under it, around his ribs. She leaned into him as they walked. Night-blooming flowers scented the air, soft as rain. They were just coming in sight of the entrance of the First Palace when Eiah spoke, her voice still abstracted with sleep.

  ‘Nayiit-cha’s yours, isn’t he, Papa-kya?’

  Liat woke in dim moonlight; the night candle had gone out or else they hadn’t bothered to light it. She couldn’t recall which. Beside her, Maati mumbled something in his sleep, as he always had. Liat smiled at the dim profile on the pillow beside her. He looked younger in sleep, the lines at his mouth softened, the storm at his brow calmed. She resisted the urge to caress his cheek, afraid to wake him. She had taken lovers in the years since she’d returned to Saraykeht. A half-dozen or so, each a man whose company she had enjoyed, and all of whom she could remember fondly.

  She thought, sometimes, that she’d reversed the way women were intended to love. Butterfly flirtations, flitting from one man to another, taking none seriously, were best kept by the young. Had she taken her casual lovers as a girl, they would have been exciting and new, and she would have known too little to notice that they were empty. Instead, Liat had lost her heart twice before she’d seen twenty summers, and if those loves were gone - even this one, sleeping now at her side - the memory of them was there. Once, she had told herself the world was nothing if she didn’t have a man who loved her. A man of importance and beauty, a man whom she might, through her gentle guidance, save.

  She had been another woman, then. And who, she wondered, had she become now?

  She rose quietly, parting the netting, and stepped out onto the cool floor. She found her outer robe and wrapped it around herself. Her inner robes and her sandals she could reclaim tomorrow. Now she wanted her own bed, and pillows less thick with memories.

  She slipped out the door, pulling it closed behind her. So far North and without an ocean to hold the warmth of the day, Machi’s nights were cold, even now with spring at its height. Gooseflesh rose on her legs and arms, her belly and breasts, as she trotted along the wide, darkened paths to the apartments that Itani or Otah or the Khai Machi had given to her and her son.

  More than a week had passed since he had come to Maati’s apartments, gathering up a children’s book and a daughter halfway to womanhood and leaving behind a lasting unease. Liat had not spoken with hi
m since, but the dread of the coming conversation weighed heavy. As Nayiit had grown, she’d seen nothing in him but himself. Even when people swore that the boy had her eyes, her mouth, her way of sighing, she’d never seen it. Perhaps when there was no space between a mother and her child, the sameness becomes invisible. Perhaps it merely seemed normal. She would have admitted that her son looked something like his father. It was only in seeing them together, seeing the simple, powerful knowing in Otah’s wife’s expression, that Liat understood the depth of her error in letting Nayiit come.

  And with that came her understanding of how it could not be undone. Her first impulse had been to send him away at once, to hide him again the way a child caught with a forbidden sweet might stuff it away into a sleeve as if unseen now might somehow mean never seen at all. Only the years of running her house had counseled her otherwise. The situation was what it was. Attempting any subterfuge would only make the Khai wary, and his unease might mean Nayiit’s death. As long as her son lived, he posed a threat to Danat, and she knew enough to understand that a babe held from its first breath meant something that a man full-grown never could. If Otah were forced to choose, Liat had no illusions what that choice would be.