Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  Otah paused, the tip of his pen touching the brick of ink. Something with wide, pale wings the size of his hands and eyes as black and wet as river stones hovered at the window and then vanished. A soft breeze rattled the open shutters. He pulled back the sleeve of his robe, but before the bronze tip touched the paper, a soft knock came at his door.

  ‘Most High,’ the servant boy said, his hands in a pose of obeisance. ‘Balasar-cha requests an audience.’

  Otah smiled and took a pose that granted the request and implied that the guest should be brought to him here, the nuance only slightly hampered by the pen still in his hand. As the servant scampered out, Otah straightened his sleeves and stuck the pen nib-first into the ink brick.

  Once, Balasar Gice had led armies against the Khaiem, and only raw chance had kept him from success. Instead of leading Galt to its greatest hour, he had precipitated its slow ruin. That the Khaiem shared that fate took away little of the sting. The general had spent years rebuilding his broken reputation, and even now was less a force within Galt than once he had been.

  And still, he was a man to be reckoned with.

  He came into the room, bowing to Otah as he always did, but with a wry smile which was reserved for occasions out of the public eye.

  ‘I came to inquire after your health, Most High,’ Balasar Gice said in the language of the Khaiem. His accent hadn’t lessened in the years since they had met. ‘Councilman Trathorn was somewhat relieved by your absence, but he had to pretend distress.’

  ‘Well, you can tell him his distress in every way mirrors my own,’ Otah said. ‘I couldn’t face it. I’ve been too much in the world. There is only so much praise I can stand from people who’d be happy to see my head on a plate. Please, sit. I can have a fire lit if you’re cold . . .’

  Balasar sat on a low couch beside the window. He was a small man, more than half a head shorter than Otah, with the force of personality that made it easy to forget. The years had weathered his face, grooves at the corners of his eyes and mouth that spoke as much of laughter as sorrow. They had met a decade and a half ago in the snow-covered square that had been the site of the last battle in the war between Galt and the Khaiem. A war that they had both lost.

  The years since had seen his status in his homeland collapse and then slowly be rebuilt. He wasn’t a member of the convocation, much less the High Council, but he was still a man of power within Galt. When he sat forward, elbows resting on his knees, Otah could imagine him beside a campfire, working through the final details of the next morning’s attack.

  ‘Otah,’ the former general said, falling into his native tongue, ‘what is your plan if the vote fails?’

  Otah leaned back in his chair.

  ‘I don’t see why it should,’ Otah said. ‘All respect, but what Sterile did, she did to both of us. Galt is in just as much trouble as the cities of the Khaiem. Your men can’t father children. Our women can’t bear them. We’ve gone almost fifteen years without children. The farms are starting to feel the loss. The armies. The trades.’

  ‘I know all that,’ Balasar said, but Otah pressed on.

  ‘Both of our nations are going to fall. They’ve been falling, but we’re coming close to the last chance to repair it. We might be able to weather a single lost generation, but if there isn’t another after that, Galt will become Eymond’s back gardens, and the Khaiem will be eaten by whoever can get to us first. You know that Eymond is only waiting for your army to age into weakness.’

  ‘And I know there are other peoples who weren’t cursed,’ Balasar said. ‘Eymond, certainly. And the Westlands. Bakta. Obar State.’

  ‘And there are a handful of half-bred children from matches like those in the coastal cities,’ Otah said. ‘They’re born to high families that can afford them and hoarded away like treasure. And there are others whose blood was mixed. Some have borne. Might that be enough, do you think?’

  Balasar’s smile was thin.

  ‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘They won’t suffice. Children can’t be rarer than silk and lapis. So few might as well be none. And why should Eymond or Eddensea or the Westlands send their sons here to make families, when they can wait a few more years and take what they want from a nation of geriatrics? If the Khaiem and the Galts don’t become one, we’ll both be forgotten. Our land will be taken, our cities will be occupied, and you and I will spend our last years picking wild berries and stealing eggs out of nests, because there won’t be farm hands enough to keep us in bread.’

  ‘That was my thought as well,’ Otah said.

  ‘So, no fallback position, eh?’

  ‘None,’ Otah said. ‘It was raw hell getting the utkhaiem to agree to the proposal I’ve brought. I take it the vote is going to fail?’

  ‘The vote is going to fail,’ Balasar said.

  Otah sat forward, his face cradled in his palms. The slight, acrid smell of old ink on his fingers only made the darkness behind his closed lids deeper.

  Five months before, he had wrestled the last of the language in his proposed treaty with Galt into shape. A hundred translators from the high families and great trading houses had offered comment and correction, and small wars had been fought in the halls and meeting rooms of his palace at Utani, sometimes resulting in actual blows. Once, memorably, a chair had been thrown and the chief overseer of House Siyanti had suffered a broken finger.

  Otah had set forth with an entourage of hundreds - court servants, guards, representatives of every interest from Machi in the far, frozen north to the island city of Chaburi-Tan, where ice was a novelty. The ships had poured into the harbor flying brightly dyed sails and more banners and good-luck pennants than the world had ever seen. For weeks and months, Otah had made his arguments to any man of any power in the bizarre, fluid government of his old enemy. And now, this.

  ‘Can I ask why?’ he said, his eyes still closed.

  ‘Pride,’ Balasar said. Otah heard the sympathy in the softness of his voice. ‘No matter how prettily you put it, you’re talking about putting our daughters in bed under your sons.’

  ‘And rather than that, they’ll let everything die?’ Otah said, looking up at last. Balasar’s gaze didn’t waver. When the old Galt spoke, it was with a sense of reason and consideration that might almost have made a listener forget that he was one of the men he spoke of.

  ‘You don’t understand the depth to which these people have been damaged. Every man on that council was hurt by you in a profound, personal way. Most of them have been steeping in the shame of it since the day it happened. They are less than men, and in their minds, it’s because of the Khaiem. If someone had humiliated and crippled you, how would you feel about marrying your Eiah to him?’

  ‘And none of them will see sense?’

  ‘Some will,’ Balasar said, his gaze steady as stone. ‘Some of them think what you’ve suggested is the best hope we have. Only not enough to win the vote.’

  ‘So I have a week. How do I convince them?’ Otah asked.

  Balasar’s silence was eloquent.

  ‘Well,’ Otah said. And then, ‘Can I offer you some particularly strong distilled wine?’

  ‘I think it’s called for,’ Balasar said. ‘And you’d mentioned something about a fire against the cold.’

  Otah hadn’t known, when the great panoply of Khaiate ships had come with himself at the front, what his relationship with Balasar Gice would be. Perhaps Balasar had also been uneasy, but if so it had never shown. The former general was an easy man to like, and the pair of them had experienced things - the profound sorrow of commanders seeing their miscalculations lead loyal men to the slaughter, the eggshell diplomacy of a long winter in close quarters with men who had been enemies in autumn, the weight that falls on the shoulders of someone who has changed the face of the world. There were conversations, they discovered, that only the two of them could have. And so they had become at first diplomats, then friends, and now something deeper and more melancholy. Fellow mourners, perhaps, at the sickbed
s of their empires.

  The night wore on, the moon rising through the clouds, the fire in its grate flickering, dying down to embers before being fed fresh coal and coming to life again. They talked and they laughed, traded jokes and memories. Otah was aware, as he always was, of a distant twinge of guilt at enjoying the company of a man who had killed so many innocents in his war against the Khaiem and the andat. And as always, he tried to set the guilt aside. It was better to forget the ruins of Nantani and the bodies of the Dai-kvo and his poets, the corpses of Otah’s own men scattered like scythed wheat and the smell of book paste catching fire. It was better, but it was difficult. He knew he would never wholly succeed.

  He was more than half drunk when the conversation turned to his unfinished letter, still on his desk.

  ‘It’s pathetic, I suppose,’ Otah said, ‘but it’s the habit I’ve made.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s pathetic,’ Balasar said. ‘You’re keeping faith with her. With what she was to you, and what she still is. That’s admirable.’

  ‘Tends toward the maudlin, actually,’ Otah said. ‘But I think she’d forgive me that. I only wish she could write back. There were things she’d understand in an instant that I doubt I’d ever have come to. If she were here, she’d have found a way to win the vote.’

  ‘I can’t see that,’ Balasar said ruefully.

  Otah took a pose of correction that spilled a bit of the wine from his bowl.

  ‘She had a different perspective,’ Otah said. ‘She was . . . she . . .’

  Otah’s mind shifted under him, struggling against the fog. There was something. He’d just thought it, and now it was almost gone again. Kiyan-kya, his beloved wife, with her fox-sharp face and her way of smiling. Something about the ways that the world she’d seen were different from his own experience. The way talking with her had been like living twice . . .

  ‘Otah?’ Balasar said, and Otah realized it wasn’t the first time.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Otah said, suddenly short of breath. ‘Balasar-cha, I think . . . will you excuse me? There’s something I need to . . .’

  Otah put his wine bowl on the desk and walked to the door of his rooms. The corridors of the suite were dark, only the lowest of servants still awake, cleaning the carpets and polishing the latches. Eyes widened and hands fluttered as Otah passed, but he ignored them. The scribes and translators were housed in a separate building across a flagstone square. Otah passed the dry fountain in its center before the thought that had possessed him truly took form. He had to restrain himself from laughing.

  The chief scribe was so dead asleep that Otah had to shake the woman twice. When consciousness did come into her eyes, her face went pale. She took a pose of apology that Otah waved away.

  ‘How many of your best calligraphers can work in Galtic?’

  ‘All of them, Most High,’ the chief scribe said. ‘It’s why I brought them.’

  ‘How many? How many can we put to work now, tonight?’

  ‘Ten?’ she said as if it were a question.

  ‘Wake them. Get them to their desks. Then I’ll need a translator in my apartments. Or two. Best get two. An etiquette master and a trade specialist. Now. Go, now! This won’t wait for morning.’

  On the way back to his rooms, his heart was tripping over, but his mind was clearing, the alcohol burning off in the heat of his plan. Balasar was seated where Otah had left him, an expression of bleary concern on his face.

  ‘Is all well?’

  ‘All’s excellent,’ Otah said. ‘No, don’t go. Stay here, Balasar-cha. I have a letter to write, and I need you.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I can’t convince the men on the council. You’ve said as much. And if I can’t talk to the men who wield the power, I’ll talk to the women who wield the men. Tell me there’s a councilman’s wife out there who doesn’t want grandchildren. I defy you to.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Balasar said.

  ‘I need a list of the names of all the councilmen’s wives. And the men of the convocation. Theirs too. Perhaps their daughters if . . . Well, those can wait. I’m going to draft an appeal to the women of Galt. If anyone can sway the vote, it’s them.’

  ‘And you think that would work?’ Balasar asked, incredulity in his expression.

  In the event, Otah’s letter seemed for two full days to have no effect. The letters went out, each sewn with silk thread and stamped with Otah’s imperial seal, and no word came back. He attended the ceremonies and meals, the entertainments and committee meetings, his eyes straining for some hint of change like a snow fox waiting for the thaw. It was only on the morning of the third day, just as he was preparing to send a fresh wave of appeals to the daughters of the families of power, that his visitor was announced.

  She was perhaps ten years younger than Otah, with hair the gray of dry slate pulled back from an intimidating, well-painted face. The reddening at her eyelids seemed more likely to be a constant feature than a sign of recent weeping. Otah rose from the garden bench and took a pose of welcome simple enough for anyone with even rudimentary training to recognize. His guest replied appropriately and waited for him to invite her to sit in the chair across from him.

  ‘We haven’t met,’ the woman said in her native language. ‘Not formally.’

  ‘But I know your husband,’ Otah said. He had met with all the members of the High Council many times. Farrer Dasin was among the longest-standing, though not by any means the most powerful. His wife Issandra had been no more than a polite smile and another face among hundreds until now. Otah considered her raised brows and downcast eyes, the set of her mouth and her shoulders. There had been a time when he’d lived by knowing how to interpret such small indications. Perhaps he still did.

  ‘I found your letter quite moving,’ she said. ‘Several of us did.’

  ‘I am gratified,’ Otah said, not certain it was quite the correct word.

  ‘Farrer and I have talked about your treaty. The massive shipment of Galtic women to your cities as bed servants to your men, and then hauling back a crop of your excess male population for whatever girls escaped. It isn’t a popular scheme.’

  The brutality of her tone was a gambit, a test. Otah refused to rise to it.

  ‘Those aren’t the terms I put in the treaty,’ he said. ‘I believe I used the term wife rather than bed servant, for example. I understand that the men of Galt might find it difficult. It is, however, needed.’

  He spread his hands, as if in apology. She met his gaze with the bare intellect of a master merchant.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘Majesty, I am in a position to deliver a decisive majority in both the High Council and the convocation. It will cost me all the favors I’m owed, and I have been accruing them for thirty years. It will likely take me another thirty to pay back the debt I’m going into for you.’

  Otah smiled and waited. The cold blue eyes glittered for a moment.

  ‘You might offer your thanks,’ she said.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Otah said. ‘I didn’t think you’d finished speaking. I didn’t want to interrupt.’

  The woman nodded, sat back a degree, and folded her hands in her lap. A wasp hummed through the air to hover between them before it darted away into the foliage. He watched her weigh strategies and decide at last on the blunt and straightforward.

  ‘You have a son, I understand?’ Issandra Dasin said.

  ‘I do,’ Otah said.

  ‘Only one.’

  It was, of course, what he had expected. He had made no provision for Danat’s role in the text of the treaty itself, but alliances among the Khaiem had always taken the form of marriages. His son’s future had always been a tile in this game, and now that tile was in play.

  ‘Only one,’ he agreed.

  ‘As it happens, I have a daughter. Ana was three years old when the doom came. She’s eighteen now, and . . .’

  She frowned. It was the most surprising thing she’d done since her arrival. The
stone face shifted; the eyes he could not imagine weeping glistened with unspilled tears. Otah was shocked to have misjudged her so badly.

  ‘She’s never held a baby, you know,’ the woman said. ‘Hardly ever seen one. At her age, you couldn’t pull me out of the nursery with a rope. The way they chuckle when they’re small. Ana’s never heard that. The way their hair smells . . .’