Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  ‘That would be lovely,’ Liat said. ‘I’ll talk with Maati about it.’

  ‘Would you be so good as to get the stiff brushes from the back and wash them for me, Eiah-cha?’ the physician said. ‘Tamiya’s anxious to be done with us, I’m sure.’

  Eiah dropped into a pose of confirmation for less than a breath before darting off to her task. Liat watched the physician, the amusement and fondness in his expression. He shook his head.

  ‘She is a force,’ he said. ‘But the powder. I wanted to say, it can be habit-forming. You shouldn’t have it more than once in a week. So if the pain returns, we may have to find another approach.’

  ‘I’m sure this will be fine,’ Liat said as she rose. ‘And . . . thank you. For what you’ve done with Eiah, I mean.’

  ‘She needs it,’ the man said with a shrug. ‘Her father’s ridden off to die, her mother and her friend the poet are too busy trying to keep us all alive to take time to comfort her. She buries herself in this, and so even if she slows us down, how can I do anything but welcome her?’

  Liat felt her heart turn to lead. The physician’s smile slipped, and for a moment the dread showed from behind the mask. When he spoke again, it was softly and the words were as gray as stones.

  ‘And, after all, we may need our children to know how to care for the dying before all that’s coming is done.’

  Maati rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, squinted, blinked. The world was blurry: the long, rich green of the grass on which they lay was like a single sheet of dyed rice paper; the towers of Machi were reduced to dark blurs that the blue of the sky shone through. It was like fog without the grayness. He blinked again, and the world moved nearer to focus.

  ‘How long was I sleeping?’ he asked.

  ‘Long enough, sweet,’ Liat said. ‘I could have managed longer, I think. The gods all know we’ve been restless enough at night.’

  The sun was near the top of its arc, the remains of breakfast in lacquered boxes with their lids shut, the day half gone. Liat was right, of course. He hadn’t been sleeping near enough - late to bed, waking early, and with troubled rest between. He could feel it in his neck and back and see it in the slowness with which his vision cleared.

  ‘Where’s Eiah got to?’ he asked.

  ‘Back to her place with the physicians, I’d guess. I offered to wake you so that she could say her good-byes, but she thought it would be better if you slept.’ Liat smiled. ‘She said it would be restorative. Can you imagine her using that kind of language a season ago? She already sounds like a physician’s apprentice.’

  Maati grinned. He’d resisted the idea of this little outing at first, but Cehmai had joined Eiah’s cause. A half-day’s effort by a rested man might do better for them than the whole day by someone drunk with exhaustion and despair. And even now the library seemed to call to him - the scrolls he had already read, the codices laid out and put away and pulled out to look over again, the wax tablets with their notes cut into them and smoothed clear again. And in the end, he had never been able to refuse Eiah. Her good opinion was too precious and too fickle.

  Liat slid her hand around his arm and leaned against him. She smelled of grass and cherry paste on apples and musk. He turned without thinking and kissed the crown of her head as if it were something he had always done. As if there had not been a lifetime between the days when they had first been lovers and now.

  ‘How badly is it going?’ she asked.

  ‘Not well. We have a start, but Cehmai’s notes are only beginnings. And they were done by a student. I’m sure they all seemed terribly deep and insightful when he was still fresh from the school. But there’s less there than I’d hoped. And . . .’

  ‘And?’

  Maati sighed. The towers were visible now. The blades of grass stood out one from another.

  ‘He’s not a great inventor,’ Maati said. ‘He never was. It’s part of why he was chosen to take over an andat that had already been captured instead of binding something new. And I’m no better.’

  ‘You were chosen for the same thing.’

  ‘Cehmai’s clever. I’m clever too, if it comes to that, but we’re the second pressing. There’s no one we can talk with who’s seen a binding through from first principles to a completion. We need someone whose mind’s sharper than ours.’

  There were birds wheeling about the towers - tiny specks of black and gray and white wheeling though the air as if a single mind drove them. Maati pretended he could hear their calls.

  ‘Perhaps you could train someone. There’s a whole city to choose from.’

  ‘There isn’t time,’ Maati said. He wanted to say that even if there were, he wouldn’t. The andat were too powerful, too dangerous to be given to anyone whose heart wasn’t strong or whose conscience couldn’t be trusted. That was the lesson, after all, that had driven his own life and Cehmai’s and the Dai-kvo himself. It was what elevated each of the poets from boy children cast out by their parents to the most honored men in the world. And yet, if there were someone bright enough to hand the power to, he suspected he would. If it brought the army back from the field and put the world back the way it had been, the risk would be worth it.

  ‘Maybe one of the other poets will come,’ Liat said, but her voice had gone thin and weary.

  ‘You don’t have hope for the Dai-kvo?’

  Liat smiled.

  ‘Hope? Yes, I have hope. Just not faith. The Galts know what’s in play. If we don’t recapture the andat, the cities will all fall. If we do, we’ll destroy Galt and everyone in her. They’ll be as ruthless as we will.’

  ‘And Otah-kvo? Nayiit?’

  Liat’s gaze met his, and he nodded. The knot in her chest, he was certain, was much like his own.

  ‘They’ll be fine,’ Liat said, her tone asking for her own belief in the words as much as his. ‘It’s always the footmen who die in battles, isn’t it? The generals all live. And he’ll keep Nayiit safe. He said he would.’

  ‘They might not even see battle. If they arrive before the Galts and come back quickly enough, we might not lose a single man.’

  ‘And the moon may come down and get itself trapped in a teabowl,’ Liat said. ‘But it would be nice, wouldn’t it? For us, I mean. Not so much for the Galts.’

  ‘You care what happens to them?’

  ‘Is that wrong?’ Liat asked.

  ‘You’re the one who came to Otah-kvo asking that they all be killed.’

  ‘I suppose I did, didn’t I? I don’t know what’s changed. Something to do with having my boy out there, I suppose. Slaughtering a nation isn’t so much to think about. It’s when I start feeling that it all goes confused. I wonder why we do it. I wonder why they do. Do you think if we gave them our gold and our silver and swore we would never bind a fresh andat . . . do you think they’d let our children live?’

  It took a few breaths to realize that Liat was actually waiting for his answer, and several more before he knew what he believed.

  ‘No,’ Maati said. ‘I don’t think they would.’

  ‘Neither do I. But it would be good, wouldn’t it? A world where it wasn’t a choice of our children or theirs.’

  ‘It would be better than this one.’

  As if by common consent, they changed the subject, talking of food and the change of seasons, Eiah’s new half-apprenticeship with the physicians and the small doings of the women of the utkhaiem now that their men had gone. It was only reluctantly that Maati rose. The sun was two and a half hands past where it had been when he woke, the shadows growing oblong. They walked back to the library, hand in hand at first, and then only walking beside each other. Maati felt his heart growing heavier as they came down the familiar paths, paving stones turning to sand turning to crushed white gravel bright as snow.

  ‘You could come in,’ Maati said when they reached the wide front doors.

  In answer, she kissed him lightly on the mouth, gave his hand a gentle squeeze, and turned away. Maati sighed and turned
to lumber up the steps. Inside, Cehmai was sitting on a low couch, three scrolls spread out before him.

  ‘I think I’ve found something,’ Cehmai said. ‘There’s reference in Manat-kvo’s notes to a grammatic schema called threefold significance. If we have something that talks about that, perhaps we can find a way to shift the binding from one kind of significance to another.’

  ‘We don’t,’ Maati said. ‘And if I recall correctly, the three significators all require unity. There’s not a way to pick between them.’

  ‘Well. Then we’re still stuck.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cehmai stood and stretched, the popping of his spine audible from across the wide room.

  ‘We need someone who knows this better than we do,’ Maati said as he lowered himself onto a carved wooden chair. ‘We need the Dai-kvo.’

  ‘We don’t have him.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘So we have to keep trying,’ Cehmai said. ‘The better prepared we are when the Dai-kvo comes, the better he’ll be able to guide us.’

  ‘And if he never comes?’

  ‘He will,’ Cehmai said. ‘He has to.’

  16

  ‘Yes,’ Nayiit said. ‘That’s him.’

  Otah’s mount whickered beneath him as he looked up at the Daikvo’s body. It had been tied to a stake at the entrance to his high offices; the man had been dead for days. The brown-robed corpses of the poets lay at his feet, stacked like cordwood.

  They had taken it all for granted. The andat, the poets, the continuity of one generation following upon another as they always had. It grew more difficult, yes. An andat would escape and for a time the city it had left would suffer, yes. They had not conceived that everything might end. Otah looked at the slaughtered poets, and he saw the world he had known.

  The morning after the battle had been tense. He had risen before dawn and paced through the camps. Several of the scouts had vanished, and at first there was no way to know whether they had been captured by the Galts or killed or if they had simply taken their horses, set their eyes on the horizon, and fled. It was only when the reports began to filter back that the shape of things came clear.

  The Galts had fallen back, their steam wagons and horses making a fast march to the east, toward the village of the Dai-kvo. There was no pursuit, no rush to find the survivors of that bloody field and finish the work they’d begun. Otah’s army had been broken easily, and the Galts’ contempt for them was evident in the decision that they were not worth taking the time to kill.

  It was humiliating, and still Otah had found himself relieved. More of his men would die today, but only from wounds they already bore. They had given Otah a moment to rest and consider and see how deep the damage had gone.

  Four hundred of his men lay dead in the mud and grass beside perhaps a third as many Galts, perhaps less. Another half thousand were wounded or missing. A few hours had cost him a third of what he had, and more than that. The men who had survived the retreat were different from the ones he had spoken to at their cook fires before the fight. These men seemed stunned, lost, and emptied. The makeshift spears and armor that had once seemed to speak of strength and resourcefulness now seemed painfully naïve. They had come to battle armed like children and they had been killed by men. Otah found himself giving thanks to any gods that would listen for all the ones who had lived.

  The scouting party left two days later. It was made of twenty horsemen and as many on foot, Otah himself at the lead. Nayiit asked permission to come, and Otah had granted it. It might not have been keeping the boy safe the way he’d promised Maati, but as long as Nayiit blamed himself for the carnage and defeat, it was better that he be away from the wounded and the dying. The rest of the army would stay behind in the camp, tend to the men who could be helped, ease the passing of those past hope, and, Otah guessed, slip away one by one or else in groups. He couldn’t think they would follow him into battle again.

  The smaller group moved faster, and the path the Galts had left was clear as a new-built road. Churned grass, broken saplings, the damage done by thousands of disciplined feet. The wounded earth was as wide as ten men across - never more, never less. The precision was eerie. It was two days’ travel before Otah saw the smoke.

  They reached the village near evening. They found a ruin. Where glittering windows had been, ragged holes remained. The towers and garrets cut from the stone of the mountain were soot-stained and broken. The air smelled of burned flesh and smoke and the copper scent of spilled blood. Otah rode slowly, the clack of his mount’s hooves on pavement giving order to the idiot, tuneless wind chimes. The air felt thick against his face, and the place where his heart had once been seemed to gape empty. His hands didn’t tremble, he did not weep. His mind simply took in the details - a corpse in the street wearing brown robes made black with blood, a Galtic steam wagon with the wide metalwork on the back twisted open by some terrible force, a firekeeper’s kiln overturned and ashen, an arrow splintered against stone - and then forgot them. It was unreal.

  Behind him, the others followed in silence. They made their way to the grand office at the height of the village. The great hall, open to the west, caught the light of the setting sun. The white stone of the walls glowed, light where it had escaped the worst damage and a deeper, darker gold where smoke had marked it.

  And in the entrance of the hall, the Dai-kvo was tied to a stake. The hopes of the Khaiem lying dead at his feet.

  I could have stopped this, Otah thought. The Galts live because I spared them at Saraykeht. This is my fault.

  He turned to Nayiit.

  ‘Have him cut down,’ he said. ‘We can have them buried or burned. Anything but this.’

  Behind the gruesome sight squatted the remains of a great pyre. Logs as tall as a standing man had been hauled here and set to hold the flames, and had burned nearly through. The spines of ancient books lay stripped in the ashes of their pages and curled from the heat. Shredded ribbons that had held the codices closed shifted in the breeze. Otah touched his palm to the neck of his horse as if to steady it more than himself, then dismounted.

  Smoke still rose from the fire, thin gray reeking clouds. He paced the length and breadth of the pyre. Here and there, embers still glowed. He saw more than one bone laid bare and black. Men had died here. Poets and books. Knowledge that could never be replaced. He leaned against the rough bark of a half-burned tree. There had been no battle here. This had been slaughter.

  ‘Most High?’

  Ashua Radaani was at his side. Might have been at his side for some time, for all Otah could say. The man’s face was drawn, his eyes flat.

  ‘We’ve taken down the Dai-kvo,’ he said.

  ‘Five groups of four men,’ Otah said. ‘If you can find any lanterns still intact, use them. If not, we’ll make torches from something. I can’t say how deep into the mountain these hallways go, but we’ll walk through the whole thing if we have to.’

  Radaani glanced over his shoulder at the red and swollen sun that was just now touching the horizon. The others were silhouetted against it, standing in a clot at the mouth of the hall. Radaani turned back and took a pose that suggested an alternative.

  ‘Perhaps we might wait until morning—’

  ‘What if there’s a man still alive in there,’ Otah said. ‘Will he be alive when the sun’s back? If darkness is what we have to work in, we’ll work in darkness. Anyone who survived this, I want him. And books. Anything. If it’s written, bring it to me. Bring it here.’

  Radaani hesitated, then fell into a pose of acceptance. Otah put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

  We’ve failed, he thought. Of course we failed. We never had a chance.

  They didn’t make camp, didn’t cook food. The horses, nervous from the scent of death all around them, were taken back from the village. Nayiit and his blacksmith friend Saya gleaned lanterns and torches from the wreckage. The long, terrible night began. In the flickering light, the back halls and grand, destroyed
chambers danced like things from children’s stories of the deepest hells. Otah and the three men with him - Nayiit, Radaani, and a thin-faced boy whose name escaped him - called out into the darkness that they were friends. That help had arrived. Their voices grew hoarse, and only echoes answered them.

  They found the dead. In the beds, in the stripped libraries, in the kitchens and alleyways, and floating facedown in the wide wooden tubs of the bathhouse. No man had been spared. There had been no survivors. Twice Otah thought he saw a flicker of recognition in Nayiit’s eyes when they found a man lying pale and bloodless, eyes closed as if in sleep. In a meeting chamber near what Otah guessed had been the Dai-kvo’s private apartments, Otah found the corpse of Athai-kvo, the messenger who had come in the long-forgotten spring to warn him against training men to fight. His eyes had been gouged away. Otah found himself too numb to react. Another detail to come into his mind and leave it again. As the night’s chill stole into him, Otah’s fingers began to ache, his shoulders and neck growing tight as if the pain could take the place of warmth.