Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  But he had seen forty-eight summers now. There were likely fewer seasons before him than there were behind. He’d fathered three children and raised two. He could no longer hold himself apart from the world. It was his to see that the city was a place that Danat and Eiah and children like them could live safe and cared for until they too grew old and uncertain.

  He looked at the swirl of red at the bottom of his bowl. Too much wine, and too much memory. It was making him maudlin. He stopped at his private chambers and allowed the servants to switch his robes to something less formal. Kiyan lay on a couch, her eyes closed, her breath deep and regular. Otah didn’t wake her, only slid one of the books from his bedside table into the sleeve of his robe and kissed her temple as he left.

  The physician’s assistant was seated outside Danat’s door. The man took a pose of greeting. Otah responded in kind and then nodded to the closed door.

  ‘Is he asleep?’ he whispered.

  ‘He’s been waiting for you.’

  Otah slipped into the room. Candles flickered above two great iron statues that flanked the bed - hunting cats with the wings of hawks. Soot darkened their wings from a day spent in the fire grates, and they radiated the warmth that kept the cool night breeze at bay. Danat sat up in his bed, pulling aside the netting.

  ‘Papa-kya!’ he said. He didn’t cough, didn’t sound frail. It was a good day, then. Otah felt a tightness he had not known he carried loosen its grip on his heart. He pulled his robes up around his knees and sat on his son’s bed. ‘Did you bring it?’ Danat asked.

  Otah drew the book from his sleeve, and the boy’s face lit so bright, he might have almost read by him.

  ‘Now, you lie back,’ Otah said. ‘I’ve come to help you sleep, not keep you up all night.’

  Danat plopped down onto his pillow, looking like the farthest thing from sleep. Otah opened the book, turning through the ancient pages until he found his place.

  ‘In the sixteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Adani Beh, there came to court a boy whose blood was half Bakta, his skin the color of soot, and his mind as clever as any man who has ever lived . . .’

  ‘This is spring?’ Nayiit said as they walked. The wind had blown away even the constant scent of forge smoke, and brought in a mild chill. Mild, at least, to Maati. Nayiit wore woolen robes, thick enough that they had hardly rippled. Maati’s own were made for summer, and pressed against him, leaving, he was sure, no doubt as to the shape of his legs and belly. He wished he’d thought to wear something heavier too.

  ‘It’s always like this,’ Maati said. ‘There’s one last death throe, and then the heat will come on. Still nothing like the summer cities, even at its worst. I remember in Saraykeht, I had a trail of sweat down my back for weeks at a time.’

  ‘We call that pleasantly warm,’ Nayiit said, and Maati chuckled.

  In truth, the chill, moonless night was hardly anything to him now. For over a decade, he’d lived through the bone-cracking cold of Machi winters. He’d seen snowdrifts so high that even the second-story doors couldn’t be opened. He’d been out on days so cold the men coated their faces with thick-rendered fat to keep their skin from freezing. There was no way to describe those brief, bitter days to someone who had never seen them. So instead, he told Nayiit of the life below ground, the tunnels of Machi, the bathhouses hidden deep below the surface, the streets and apartments and warehouses, the glitter of winter dew turning to frost on the stone of the higher passages. He spoke of the choirs who took the long, empty weeks to compose new songs and practice old ones - weeks spent in the flickering, buttery light of oil lamps surrounded by music.

  ‘I’m amazed people don’t stay down there,’ Nayiit said as they turned a corner and left the white and silver paths of the palaces behind for the black-cobbled streets of the city proper. ‘It sounds like one huge, warm bed.’

  ‘It has its pleasures,’ Maati agreed. ‘But people get thirsty for sunlight. As soon as they can stand it, people start making treks up to the streets. They’ll go up and lie naked on an ice sheet sometimes just to drink in a little more light. And the river freezes, so the children will go skating on it. There’s only about seven weeks when no one comes up. Here. This street. There’s a sweet wine they serve at this place that’s like nothing you’ve ever tasted.’

  It was less awkward than he’d expected, spending the evening with Nayiit. The first time the boy had come to the library alone - tentative and uncertain - Maati had been acutely aware of Liat’s absence. She had always been there, even in the ancient days before they had parted. Maati knew how to speak with Liat whether she was alone or with their son, and Maati had discovered quickly how much he’d relied upon her to mediate between him and the boy. The silences had been awkward, the conversations forced. Maati had said something of how pleased he was that Nayiit had come to Machi and felt in the end that he’d only managed to embarrass them both.

  It was going to the teahouses and bathhouses and epics that let them speak at last. Once there was a bit of shared experience, a toehold, Maati was able to make conversation, and Nayiit was an expert listener to stories. For several nights in a row, Maati found himself telling tales of the Dai-kvo and the school, the history of Machi and the perils he had faced years ago when he’d been sent to hunt Otah-kvo down. In the telling, he discovered that, to his profound surprise, his life had been interesting.

  The platform rested at the base of one of the lower towers, chains thick as a man’s arm clanking against it and against the stone as they rose up into the sky like smoke. Nayiit paused to stare up at it, and Maati followed his gaze. The looming, inhuman bulk of the tower, and beyond it the full moon hanging like a lantern of rice paper in the black sky.

  ‘Does anyone ever fall from up there?’ Nayiit asked.

  ‘Once every year or so,’ Maati said. ‘There’s winter storage up there, so there are laborers carrying things in the early spring and middle autumn. There are accidents. And the utkhaiem will hold dances at the tops of them sometimes. They say wine gets you drunk faster at the top, but I don’t know if that’s true. Then sometimes men kill themselves by stepping through the sky doors when the platform’s gone down. It would happen more if there were people up there more often. Otah-kvo has a plan for channeling the air from the forges up through the center of one so it would be warm enough to use in the winter, but we’ve never figured out how to make the change without bringing the whole thing down.’

  Nayiit shuddered, and Maati was willing to pretend it was the wind. He put his arm on the boy’s shoulder and steered him farther down the street to a squat stone building with a copper roof gone as green as trees with time. Inside, the air was warmed by braziers. Two old men were playing tin-and-silver flutes while a young woman kept time on a small drum and sang. Half a hundred bodies were seated at long wooden tables or on benches. The place was rich with the smell of roast lamb even though the windows were unshuttered; it was as if no one in Machi would miss the chance for fresh air. Maati sympathized.

  He and Nayiit took a bench in the back, away from singers and song. The serving boy was hardly as old as Eiah, but he knew his trade. It seemed fewer than a dozen heartbeats before he brought them bowls of sweet wine and a large worked-silver bowl filled with tender slivers of green: spring peas fresh from the vines. Maati, hands full, nodded his thanks.

  ‘And you’ve worked your whole life in House Kyaan, then?’ Maati asked. ‘What does Liat have you doing?’

  ‘Since we’ve been traveling, I haven’t been doing much at all. Before that, I had been working the needle trades,’ Nayiit said as he tucked one leg up under him. It made him sit taller. ‘The spinners, the dyers, the tailors, and the sailmakers and all like that. They aren’t as profitable as they were in the days before Seedless was lost, but they still make up a good deal of the business in Saraykeht.’

  ‘Habits,’ Maati said. ‘The cotton trade’s always been in Saraykeht. People don’t like change, so it doesn’t move away so quickly as it m
ight. Another generation and it’ll all be scattered throughout the world.’

  ‘Not if I do my work,’ Nayiit said with a smile that showed he hadn’t taken offense.

  ‘Fair point,’ Maati said. ‘I only mean that’s what you have to work against. It would be easier if there was still an andat in the city that helped with the cotton trade the way Seedless did.’

  ‘You knew it, didn’t you? Seedless, I mean.’

  ‘I was supposed to take him over,’ Maati said. ‘The way Cehmai took Stone-Made-Soft from his master, I was to take Seedless from Heshai-kvo. In a way, I was lucky. Seedless was flawed work. Dangerously flawed. Brilliant, don’t misunderstand. Heshai-kvo did brilliant work when he bound Seedless, but he made the andat very clever and profoundly involved with destroying the poet. They all want to be free - it’s their nature - but Seedless was more than that. He was vicious.’

  ‘You sound as though you were fond of it,’ Nayiit said, only half-teasing.

  ‘We were friendly enough, in our fashion,’ Maati said. ‘We wouldn’t have been if things had gone by the Dai-kvo’s plan. If I’d become the poet of Saraykeht, Seedless would have bent himself to destroying me just the way he had to Heshai-kvo.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to bind one of the andat?’

  ‘Once. When Heshai died, I had the mad thought that I could somehow retrieve Seedless. I had Heshai-kvo’s notes. Still have them, for that. I even began the ceremonies, but it would never have worked. What I had was too much like what Heshai had done. It would have failed, and I’d have paid its price.’

  ‘And then I suppose I would never have been born,’ Nayiit said.

  ‘You would have,’ Maati said, solemnly. ‘Liat-kya didn’t know she was carrying you when she stopped me, but she was. I thought about it, afterward. About binding another of the andat, I mean. I even spent part of a winter once doing the basic work for one I called Returning-to-True. I don’t know what I would have done with it, precisely. Unbent things, I suppose. I’d have been brilliant repairing axles. But my mind was too fuzzy. There were too many things I meant, and none of them precisely enough.’

  The musicians ended their song and stood to a roar of approving voices and bowls of wine bought by their admirers. One of the old men walked through the house with a lacquer begging box in his hand. Maati fumbled in his sleeve, came out with two lengths of copper, and tossed them into the box with a satisfying click.

  ‘And then, I also wasn’t in the Dai-kvo’s best graces,’ Maati continued. ‘After Saraykeht . . . Well, I suppose it’s poor etiquette to let your master die and the andat escape. I wasn’t blamed outright, but it was always hanging there. The memory of it.’

  ‘It can’t have helped that you brought back a lover and a child,’ Nayiit said.

  ‘No, it didn’t. But I was very young and very full of myself. It’s not easy, being told that you are of the handful of men in the world who might be able to control one of the andat. Tends to create a sense of being more than you are. I thought I could do anything. And maybe I could have, but I tried to do everything, and that isn’t the same.’ He sighed and ate a pea pod. Its flesh was crisp and sweet and tasted of spring. When he spoke again, he tried to make his voice light and joking. ‘I didn’t wind up doing a particularly good job of either endeavor.’

  ‘It seems to me you’ve done well enough,’ Nayiit said as he waved at the serving boy for more wine. ‘You’ve made yourself a place in the court here, you’ve been able to study in the libraries here, and from what Mother says, you’ve found something no one else ever has. That alone is more than most men manage in a lifetime.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Maati said. He wanted to go on, wanted to say that most men had children, raised them up, watched them become women and men. He wanted to tell this charming boy who stood now where Maati himself once had that he regretted that he had not been able to enjoy those simple pleasures. Instead, he took another handful of pea pods. He could tell that Nayiit sensed his reservations, heard the longing in the brevity of his reply. When the boy spoke, his tone was light.

  ‘I’ve spent all my life - well, since I’ve been old enough to think of it as really mine and not something Mother’s let me borrow - with House Kyaan. Running errands, delivering contracts. That’s how I started, at least. Mother always told me I had to do better than the other boys who worked for the house because I was her son, and if people thought I was getting favors because of it, they wouldn’t respect her or me. She was right. I can see that. At the time it all seemed monstrously unfair, though.’

  ‘Do you like the work?’ Maati asked.

  The girl with the drum began tapping a low tattoo, her voice droning in a lament. Maati shifted to look at Nayiit. The boy’s gaze was fixed on the singer, his expression melancholy. The urge to put his hand to Nayiit’s shoulder, to offer some comfort, however powerless, moved through Maati and faded. He sat still and quiet as the chant rose, the anguish in the singer’s voice growing until the air of the teahouse hummed with it, and then it faded into despair. The man with the lacquer box came past again, but Maati didn’t put in any copper this time.

  ‘You and Mother. You’re lovers again?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Maati said, surprised to feel a blush in his cheeks. ‘It happens sometimes.’

  ‘What happens when you’re called away to the Dai-kvo?’

  ‘Are we walking the same path a second time, you mean? We’re waiting to hear two things from the Dai-kvo - whether he thinks my speculations about avoiding the price of a failed binding are worth looking into and whether to act against Galt. Either one puts me someplace away from Liat. But we aren’t who we were then. I don’t pretend that we can be. And anyway, I have all the habits of being without her. I’ve missed her for more years than I spent in her company.’

  I have missed you, he thought but didn’t say. I have missed you, and it’s too late now for anything more than awkward conversations and late nights getting drunk together. Nothing will ever make that right.

  ‘Do you regret that?’ Nayiit asked. ‘If you could go back and do things again, would you want to love her less? Would you want to have gone to the Dai-kvo and been able to leave that . . . that longing behind you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Nayiit looked up.

  ‘I would hate her, if I were you. I would think she’d taken my chance to be what I was supposed to be, to do what I could have done. There you were, a poet, and favored enough that you were expected to hold the andat, and because of her you fell into disfavor. Because of her, and because of me.’ Nayiit’s jaw clenched, his eyes only a half shade darker than the pale brown of his mother’s staring at something that wasn’t there, his attention turned inward. ‘I don’t know how you stand the sight of us.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Maati said. ‘It was never like that. If it were all mine again, I would have followed her.’

  The words struck the boy hard. His gaze lost its focus; his mouth tightened like that of a man in pain.

  ‘What is it, Nayiit-kya?’

  Nayiit seemed to snap back to the room, an embarrassed grin on his face. He took a pose of apology, but Maati shook his head.

  ‘Something’s bothering you,’ Maati said.

  ‘It’s nothing. I’ve only . . . It’s not worth talking about.’

  ‘Something’s bothering you, son.’

  He had never said the word aloud. Son. Nayiit had never heard it from his lips, not since he’d been too young for it to mean anything. Maati felt his heart leap and race like a startled deer, and he saw the shock on the boy’s face. This was the moment, then, that he’d feared and longed for. He waited to hear what Nayiit would say. Maati dreaded the polite deflection, the retreat back into the roles of a pair of strangers in a tearoom, the way a man falling from a cliff might dread the ground.

  Nayiit opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, almost too low to hear over the music and the crowd, ‘I’m trying to choose between what I am
and what I want to be. I’m trying to want what I’m supposed to want. And I’m failing.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I want to be a good man, Father. I want to love my wife and my son. I want to want them. And I don’t. I don’t know whether to walk away from them or from myself. I thought you had made that decision, but . . .’

  Maati settled back on the bench, put down his bowl still half full of wine, and took Nayiit’s hand in his own. Father. Nayiit had said Father.

  ‘Tell me,’ Maati said. ‘Tell me all of it.’

  ‘It would take all night,’ the boy said with a rueful chuckle. But he didn’t pull back his hand.

  ‘Let it,’ Maati said. ‘There’s nothing more important than this.’

  Balasar hadn’t slept. The night had come, a late rain shower filling the air with the scent of water and murmur of distant thunder, and he had lain in his bed, willing himself to a forgetfulness that wouldn’t come.