Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  His sword’s tip was sharp, but broad. It had been made for swinging from horseback, and so it didn’t pierce Eustin’s neck quite through. When Sinja drew back, a fountain of red poured from the man’s flesh, soaking his tunic. The steam from it rose amid falling snowflakes. Sinja didn’t feel a sense of victory so much as surprise. He hadn’t expected to win. And now he had, the arrows he’d assumed would be feathering him were also strangely absent. He stood up, his breathing heavy. He noticed that his chest hurt badly, and that there was blood on his robes. Eustin’s last cut had gone deeper than he’d thought. But he forgot it again when he saw the soldiers.

  Eight men were kneeling or fallen in the snow, alive but moaning in what seemed to be agony. Two were still in their saddles, but the bows and quivers lay abandoned. It was a moment from a dream - strange and unsettling and oddly beautiful. Sinja took a better grip on his blade and started killing them before they could recover from whatever had afflicted them. By the time he reached the fifth of the fallen men - the first four already sent to confer with their god as to the indignity of dying curled up like a weeping babe on the stone and snow of a foreign land - the Galts had started to regain themselves. The fifth one took a moment’s work to kill. The sixth and seventh actually stood together, hoping to hold Sinja at bay with the threat of the doubled swords despite the difficulty they had in standing. Sinja danced back, plucked a throwing knife from the body of their fallen comrades, and demonstrated the flaw in their theory.

  The horse archers fled as Sinja finished the two remaining men. He brushed the snow from a stone and sat, his breath ragged and hard, pluming white. When he had his wind back, he laughed until he wept.

  Nayiit, still lying by his cart, called out weakly. He wasn’t dead. Sinja limped over quickly. The man’s face was white and waxy. His lips pale.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. Something. We’re safe for the moment.’

  ‘Danat . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry about him. I’ll find the boy.’

  ‘I promised. Keep safe.’

  ‘And you’ve done it,’ Sinja said. ‘You did a fine job. Now let’s see how much it’s cost you, shall we? I’ve seen a lot of belly wounds. Some are worse than others, but they’re all tender to prod at, so expect this to hurt.’

  Nayiit nodded and screwed up his face, readying himself for the pain. Sinja opened his robes and looked at the cut. Even as such things go, this one was bad. Eustin’s blade had gone into the boy just below his navel, and cut to the left as it came out. Blood soaked the boy’s robes, freezing them to the stones he lay on. Skin on white fat. There were soft, worm-shaped loops of gut exposed to the air. Sinja laid a hand on the boy’s chest and knelt over the wound, sniffing at it. If it only smelled of blood, there might be a chance. But amid the iron and meat, there was the scent of fresh shit. Eustin had cut the boy’s bowels. That was it, then. The boy was dead.

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Not good,’ Sinja said.

  ‘Hurts.’

  ‘I’d imagine.’

  ‘Is it . . .’

  ‘It’s deep. And it’s thorough,’ Sinja said. ‘If you wanted something passed on to someone, this would be a good time to say it.’

  The boy wasn’t thinking well. Like a drunkard, it took time for him to understand what Sinja had said, and another breath to think what it had meant. He swallowed. Fear widened his eyes, but that was all.

  ‘Tell them. Tell them I died well. That I fought well.’

  They were small enough lies, and Sinja could tell the boy knew it.

  ‘I’ll tell them you died protecting the Khai’s son,’ Sinja said. ‘I’ll tell them you faced down a dozen men, knowing you’d be killed, but choosing that over surrendering him to the Galts.’

  ‘You make me sound like a good man.’ Nayiit smiled, then groaned, twisting to the side. His hand hovered above his wound, the impulse to cradle the hurt balanced by the pain his touch would cause. Sinja took the man’s hand.

  ‘Nayiit-cha,’ Sinja said. ‘I know something that can stop the pain.’

  ‘Yes,’ Nayiit hissed.

  ‘It’ll be worse for a moment.’

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated.

  ‘All right then,’ Sinja said, as much to himself as the man lying before him. ‘You did a man’s job of it. Rest well.’

  He snapped the boy’s neck and sat with him, cradling his head as he finished dying. It was quick this way. There wouldn’t be the pain or the fever. There wouldn’t be the torture of trekking back to the city just to have the physicians fill him with poppy and leave him to dream himself away. It was a better death than those. Sinja told himself it was a better death than those.

  The blood stopped flowing from the wound, and still Sinja sat. A terrible weariness crept into him, and he told himself it was only the cold. It wasn’t that he’d traveled a season with men he’d come to respect and still been willing to kill. It wasn’t watching some young idiot die badly in the snow with only a habitual traitor to care for him. It wasn’t the sickness that came over him sometimes after battles. It was only the cold. He gently put Nayiit’s head on the ground, and pushed himself up. Between the chill and his wounds, his body was starting to stiffen. The chill and his wounds and age. War and death and glory were younger men’s games. But he still had work to do.

  He heard the cry before he saw the child. It was a small sound, like the squeak of a hinge. Sinja turned. Either Danat had snuck back, preferring a known danger to an uncertain world, or else he’d never gone out of sight of the cart. His hair was wet from melted snow, plastered back against his head. His lips were pulled back, baring teeth in horror as he stared at Nayiit’s motionless body. Sinja tried to think how old he’d been when he saw his first man die by violence. Older than this.

  Danat’s shocked, empty eyes turned to him, and the child took a step back, as if to flee. Sinja only looked at him, waiting, until the boy’s weight shifted forward again. Then Sinja raised his sword, pommel to the sky, blade toward the ground in a mercenary’s salute.

  ‘Welcome to the world, Danat-cha,’ Sinja said. ‘I wish it were a better place.’

  The boy didn’t speak, but slowly his hands rose to take a pose that accepted the greeting. It was the training of some court nurse. Nothing more than that. And still, Sinja thought he saw a sorrow in the child’s eyes and a depth of understanding greater than anyone so small should have to bear. Sinja sheathed his sword.

  ‘Come on, now,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you someplace warm and dry. If I save you from the Galts and then let a fever kill you, Kiyan will have me flayed alive. I know a tunnel not far from here that should suffice.’

  The runners came at last, staggering up the stairs from the streets below, and every report echoed the trumpet calls. The Galts had aimed for the tunnels that Sinja had directed them toward, but come in wider than Otah had planned. There would be no grand ambush from the windows and alleyways, only a long, bloody struggle. One small slaughter after another as the Galts pushed their way through the city, looking for a way down.

  Otah stared out at the city, watching the tiny dots of stones drift down from the towers, hearing the clatter of men and horses echoing against the high stone walls. He wondered how long it would take ten thousand men to kill two full cities. He should have met them on the plain. He could have armed everyone; man, woman, and child. Able or infirm. They could have swarmed over them, ten and fifteen for every Galt. He sighed. He could as well have tossed babies on their swords in hopes of slowing their advance. The Galts would have slaughtered them on the plain or in the city. He’d tried his trick, and he’d failed. There was nothing to gain from regretting the strategies he hadn’t chosen.

  What he wanted now was a sword and someone to swing it at. He wanted to be part of the fight if only to keep from feeling so powerless.

  ‘Another runner,’ the Khai Cetani said, taking a pose that commanded Otah’s attention. ‘From the palaces.’

  O
tah nodded and stepped back from the roof edge. The runner was a pale-skinned boy with a constellation of moles across his nose and cheeks. Otah could see him try not to pant as the two Khaiem drew near. He took a pose of obeisance.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Otah demanded.

  ‘The Galts, Most High. They’re sending messengers. They’re abandoning the palace. It looks as if they’re forming a single group.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The old market square,’ he said.

  Three streets south of the main entrance to the tunnels. So they knew. Otah felt his belly sink. He waved the trumpeter over. The man was exhausted; Otah could see it in the flesh below his eyes and in the angle of his shoulders. His lips were cracked and bloody from the cold and his work. Otah put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

  ‘One last time,’ he said. ‘Call them all to fall back to the tunnel’s entrance. There’s nothing more we can do on the surface.’

  The trumpeter took an acknowledging pose and walked away, warming the instrument’s mouthpiece with his hand before lifting it to his bruised mouth. Otah waited as the melody sang out in the snowy air, listened to the echoes of it fade and be replaced by acknowledging calls.

  ‘We should surrender,’ Otah said. The Khai Cetani blinked at him. Beneath the red ice-pinched cheeks, the man grew pale. Otah pressed on. ‘We’re going to lose, Most High. We don’t have soldiers to stop them. All we’ll gain is a few more hours. And we’ll pay for it with lives that don’t need to end today.’

  ‘We were planning to spend those lives before,’ the Khai Cetani said, though Otah could see in the man’s eyes that he knew the argument was sound. They were two dead men, fathers of dead families, the last of their kind in the world. ‘We always knew there would be deaths.’

  ‘That was when we had hope,’ Otah said.

  One of the servants cried out and fell to her knees. Otah turned to her, thinking first that she had overheard him and been overcome by grief, and then - seeing her face - that some miraculous arrow had found its way through the air to their roof. The men around her looked at the Khaiem, embarrassed at the interruption, or else knelt by the girl to comfort her. She shrieked, and the stones themselves seemed to take up her voice. A sound rose from the city in a long, rolling unending moan. Thousands of voices, calling out in pain. Otah’s skin seemed to retreat from it, and a chill that had nothing to do with the still-falling snow ran down his sides. For a moment, the towers themselves seemed about to twist with agony. This, he thought, was what gods sounded like when they died.

  Around him, men looked nervously at the air, gazes darting into the gray and white sky. Otah caught the runner by his sleeve.

  ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Go, and tell me what’s happened.’

  Dread widened the boy’s eyes, but he took an acknowledging pose before retreating. The Khai Cetani seemed poised to ask something, but only turned away, walking to the roof’s edge himself. Otah went to the servant girl. Her face was white with pain.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Otah asked her, gently. ‘Where does it hurt?’

  She couldn’t take a formal pose, but her gesture and the shame in her eyes told Otah everything he needed to know. He’d spent several seasons as a midwife’s assistant in the eastern islands. If the girl was lucky, she had been pregnant and was miscarrying. If she hadn’t been carrying a child, then something worse was happening. He had already ordered the other servants to carry her down to the physicians when Cehmai appeared, red-faced and wide-eyed. Before he could speak, it fell into place. The girl, the unearthly shriek, the poet.

  ‘Something’s gone wrong with the binding,’ Otah said. Cehmai took a pose of confirmation.

  ‘Please,’ the poet said. ‘Come now. Hurry.’

  Otah didn’t pause to think; he went to the stairs, lifting the hem of his robes, and dropping down three steps at a time. It was four stories from the top of the warehouse to its bottom floor. Otah felt that he could hardly have gone there faster if he’d jumped over the building’s side.

  The space was eerie; shadows seemed to hang in the corners of the huge, empty room and the distant sound of voices in pain murmured and shrieked. Great symbols were chalked on the walls, and an ugly, disjointed script in Maati’s handwriting spelled out the binding. Otah knew little enough of the old grammars, but he picked out the words for womb, seed, and corruption. Three people stood in tableau at the top of the stair that led down to the tunnels. Maati stood, his hands at his sides, his expression blank. Otah’s belly went tight as sickness as he saw that the girl at Maati’s feet was Eiah. And the thing that cradled his daughter’s head turned to look at him. After a long moment, it drew breath and spoke.

  ‘Otah-kya,’ it said. Its voice was low and beautiful, heavy with amusement and contempt. The familiarity of it was dizzying.

  ‘Seedless?’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Maati said. ‘It’s not him.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ Otah asked. When Maati didn’t answer, Otah shook the man’s sleeve. ‘Maati. What’s going on?’

  ‘He’s failed,’ the andat said. ‘And when a poet fails, he pays a price for it. Only Maati-kvo is clever. He’s found a way to make it so that failure can’t touch him. He’s found a trick.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Otah said.

  ‘My protection,’ Maati said, his voice rich with despair. ‘It doesn’t stop the price being paid. It only can’t kill me.’

  The andat took a pose that agreed, as a teacher might approve of a clever student. From the stairwell, Otah heard footsteps and the voice of the Khai Cetani. The first of the servant men hurried into the room, robes flapping like a flag in high wind, before he saw them and stopped dead and silent.

  ‘What is it doing?’ Otah asked. ‘What’s it done?’

  ‘You can ask me, Most High,’ Sterile said. ‘I have a voice.’

  Otah looked into the black, inhuman eyes. Eiah whimpered, and the thing stroked her brow gently, comforting and threatening both. Otah felt the urge to pull Eiah away from the thing, as if it were a spider or a snake.

  ‘What have you done to my daughter?’ he asked.

  ‘What would you guess, Most High?’ Sterile asked. ‘I am the reflection of a man whose son is not his son. All his life, Maati-kya has been bent double by the questions of fathers and sons. What do you imagine I would do?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’ve soured her womb,’ the andat said. ‘Scarred it. And I’ve done the same to every woman in the cities of the Khaiem. Machi, Chaburi-Tan, Saraykeht. All of them. Young and old, highborn and low. And I’ve gelded every Galtic man. From Kirinton to Far Galt to right here at your doorstep.’

  ‘Papa-kya,’ Eiah said. ‘It hurts.’

  Otah knelt, drawing his daughter to him. Her mouth was thin with pain. The andat opened its hand, the long fingers gesturing him to take her. The Khai Cetani was at Otah’s side now, his breath heavy and his hands trembling. Otah took Eiah in his arms.

  ‘Your children will be theirs,’ it said. ‘The next generation will have the Khaiem for fathers and feed from Galtic breasts, or else it will not be. Your history will be written by half-breeds, or it won’t be written.’

  ‘Maati,’ Otah said, but his old friend only shook his head.

  ‘I can’t stop it,’ Maati said. ‘It’s already happened.’

  ‘You should never have been a poet,’ Sterile said, standing as it spoke. ‘You failed the tests. The strength to stand on your own, and the compassion to turn away from cruelty. Those are what the Daikvo asked of you.’

  ‘I did my best,’ Maati breathed.

  ‘You were told,’ it said and turned to Otah. ‘You went to him. When you were both boys, you warned him that the school wasn’t as it seemed. You told him it was a test. You gave the game away. And because he knew, he passed. He would have failed without you, and this could never have happened.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Otah said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you think,’ i
t said. ‘Only what he knows. Maati-kvo made an instrument of slaughter, and he made it in fear; that makes it a failure of both his lessons. A generation of women will know him as the man who stole motherhood from them. The men of Galt will hate him for unmanning them. You, Maati Vaupathai, will be the one who took their children from them.’

  ‘I did . . .’ Maati began, and his voice fell to nothing. He sat down, his legs seeming to collapse beneath him. Otah tried to speak, but his throat was dry. It was Eiah, cradled in his arms, who broke the silence.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Leave him alone. He never did anything mean to you.’