Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  The mercenaries hired to protect Chaburi-Tan were ending their contract and leaving. Within a month, the city would be reduced to its citizen militia. The pirates who had been harrying the city would find them only token resistance. Their options, his agent said, were to surrender and pray for mercy or else flee the city. There would be no defense.

  Otah took the servant girl by the elbow.

  ‘Find Balasar. And Sinja. Bring them . . .’ Otah looked over his shoulder. ‘Bring them to the winter garden of the second palace. Do it now. You. Courier. You’ll wait until I have word to take back.’

  The twilight world lost its color like a face going pale. Otah paced the lush green and blossomless garden, wrenching his mind from one crisis to the next. A different servant led Balasar into the space between the willows.

  ‘Find us some light,’ Otah said. ‘And Sinja-cha. Get Sinja-cha.’

  The servant, caught between two needs, hesitated, then hurried off. Otah led Balasar to a low stone bench. The general wore a lighter jacket, silk over cotton. His breath smelled of wine, but he gave no sign of being drunk. Otah looked out at the gray sky, the dark, looming palaces with windows glimmering like stars and cursed Sinja for his absence.

  ‘Balasar-cha, I need you. The Galtic fleet has to travel to Chaburi-Tan, ’ Otah said.

  He outlined the letter he’d had, the history of increasing raids and attacks, and his half-imagined scheme to show the unity of Galt and the Khaiem. With every word, Balasar seemed to become stiller, until at the end, it was like speaking to stone.

  ‘We can only show unity where it exists,’ Balasar said. His voice was low, and in the rising darkness it seemed to come from no direction at all. ‘After what happened yesterday, the fleet’s as likely to turn on the city as the raiders.’

  ‘I don’t have the ships and men to protect Chaburi-Tan,’ Otah said. ‘Not without you. The city will fall, and thousands will be killed. If the Galtic fleet came in, the pirates would turn back without so much as an arrow flown. And it would halfway unmake yesterday’s mess.’

  ‘It can’t happen,’ Balasar said.

  ‘Then tell me what can,’ Otah said.

  The general was silent. A moth took wing, fluttering between them like a clot of shadows and dust before it vanished.

  ‘There is . . . something. It will make things here more difficult,’ Balasar said. ‘There are families who have committed to your scheme. That have already been brokering contracts and arranging alliances. I can gather them. It won’t be anything like the full force of war, but if they sent their private ships and soldiers along with whatever you can muster up, it might serve.’

  ‘At the cost of sending away what allies I have,’ Otah said.

  ‘That would be the price of it,’ Balasar said. ‘Send away your friends, and you’re left eating with your enemies. It could poison the court against us.’

  Us. At least the man had said us.

  ‘Get them,’ Otah said. ‘Get whoever you can quickly, and then send for me. I can’t let another city die.’

  It only occurred to him as he stalked back through the wide stone halls and softly glowing lanterns of the first palace that he had been speaking to the man that had killed Udun and the village of the Daikvo, the man who had maimed Nantani and Yalakeht.

  The meeting chamber was empty when he reached it; Danat and Issandra had gone. The cheese and apples and wine had been cleared away. The lanterns had blown out. Otah called for a servant to fetch him food and light. He sat, his annoyance and unease rising in his breast like the tide climbing a sea cliff.

  Ana Dasin and her petulant, self-important father were well on their way to seeing both empires chewed away one bit at a time by pirates and foreign conspiracies. And failing crops. And time. Childless years growing one upon another like a winter with no promise of spring. There were so many things to fix, so uncountably many things that had gone wrong. He was the Emperor, the most powerful man in the cities of the Khaiem, and he was tired to his heart.

  When the food arrived - pork in black sauce, spiced rice, sugared apple, wine and herbs - Otah was hardly hungry any longer. Moments after that, Sinja finally arrived.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Sinja demanded. ‘I’ve been wandering around the winter garden for half a hand looking for you.’

  ‘I should ask the same. I must have had half the servants in the palace looking for you.’

  ‘I know. Six of them found me. It got inconvenient telling them all I was busy. You need to come with me.’

  ‘You were busy?’

  ‘Otah-cha, you need to come with me.’

  He breathed deeply and took a pose that commanded obedience. Sinja’s eyebrows rose and he adopted an answering pose that held nuances of both query and affront.

  ‘I have no intention of going anywhere until I have finished eating,’ Otah said. It embarrassed him to hear the peevishness in his voice, but not so much as to unsay it. Sinja tilted his head, stepped forward, and lifted one end of the table. The plates and bowl spun to the floor. One shattered. Otah was on his feet with no memory of standing. His face felt as warm as if he were looking into a fire. His ears filled with a buzzing of rage.

  Sinja took a step back.

  ‘I can have you killed,’ Otah said. ‘You know I can have you killed.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Sinja said. ‘That passed the mark. I apologize, Most High. But you have to come with me. Now.’

  Servants came in, their eyes wide as little moons, their hands fluttering over the carnage of his dinner.

  ‘What is it?’ Otah said.

  ‘Not here. Not where someone might hear us.’

  Sinja turned and walked from the room. Otah hesitated, mumbled an obscenity that made the servants turn their faces away, and followed. As his own anger faded, he saw the tension in Sinja’s shoulders and through his neck. They were the sorts of signs he should have picked up on at once. He was tired. He was slipping.

  Sinja was quartered in apartments of the third palace, where the Khai Saraykeht’s second son would have lived, had there been a Khai Saraykeht or any sons. The walls were black marble polished until the darkness itself shone in the torchlight. Doors of worked silver still showed where gems had been wrenched from them by Galtic hands. They were beautiful all the same. Perhaps more beautiful than when they had been intact; scars created character.

  Without speaking, Sinja went to each window in turn, poking his head out into the night, then closing outer shutters and inner. Otah stood, arms in his sleeves, unease growing in his heart.

  ‘What is this?’ Otah said, but the man only took a pose that asked patience and continued in his errand. At the last, he looked out into the corridor, sent the servant there away, then closed and bolted the main door.

  ‘We have a problem, Otah-cha,’ Sinja said. He was breathing hard, like a man who’d run up stairs.

  ‘We have a hundred of them,’ Otah said.

  ‘The others may not matter,’ a woman’s voice said from the shadows of the bedchamber. Otah turned.

  Idaan was shorter than he remembered her, wider through the shoulders and the hips. Her hair was gray, her robe a cheaply dyed green and travel-stained. Otah took a step back without meaning to. His sister’s appearance chilled his heart like an omen of death, but he wouldn’t let it show.

  ‘Why are you here?’ he said.

  His exiled sister pursed her lips and shrugged.

  ‘Gratitude,’ she said. ‘You did away with my lover and his family. You took everything I had, including my true name, and sent me out into the world to survive as best I could.’

  ‘I’m not sorry,’ Otah said.

  ‘And I am? It’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me,’ Idaan said. ‘I mean that. And I’m here to repay the debt. You’re in trouble, brother mine, and I’m the only one who can warn you. The andat are coming back to the world. And this time, the poets won’t be answering to you.’

  8

  Autumn came early o
n the high plains. Even though the leaves were as green, the grasses as thick, Maati felt the change. It wasn’t a chill, but the presentiment of one: a sharpness to air that had been soft and torpid with summer heat. Another few weeks and the trees would turn to red and gold, the mornings would come late, the sunsets early. The endless change would change again. For the first time in years, Maati found himself pleased by the thought.

  The days following his return had fallen into a rhythm. In the mornings, he and his students worked on the simple tasks of maintenance that the school demanded: mending the coops for the chickens they’d brought from Utani, weeding the paths, washing the webs and dust from the corners of the rooms. At midday, they stopped, made food, and rested in the shade of the gardens or on the long, sloping hills where he had taken lessons as a boy. Afterward, he would retire for the afternoon, preparing his lectures and writing in his book until his eyes ached and then taking a short nap to revive before the evening lecture. And always, whatever the day brought, the subject drew itself back to Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight.

  ‘What about when you see things that aren’t there?’ Small Kae said.

  ‘Dreams, you mean?’ Eiah asked.

  Maati leaned forward on the podium. The classroom was larger than they required, all six of his students sitting in the first row. The high, narrow windows that had never known glass let the evening breeze disturb their lanterns. He had ended his remarks early. He found there was less need to fill the time with his knowledge than there had once been. Now a few remarks and comments would spur conversation and analysis that often led far from where he had intended. But it was rarely unproductive and never dull.

  ‘Dreams,’ Small Kae said. ‘Or when you mistake things for other things.’

  ‘My brother had a fever once,’ Ashti Beg said. ‘Saw rats coming through the walls for three days.’

  ‘I don’t think that applies,’ Eiah said. ‘The definitions we’ve based the draft on are all physicians’ texts. They have to do with the actual function of the eye.’

  ‘But if you see a thing without your eyes,’ Small Kae began.

  ‘Then you’re imagining them,’ Vanjit said, her voice calm and certain. ‘And the passages on clarity would prevent the contradiction.’

  ‘What contradiction?’ Large Kae asked.

  ‘Who can answer that?’ Maati said, leaping into the fray. ‘It’s a good question, but any of you should be able to think it through. Ashti-cha? Would you care to?’

  The older woman sucked her teeth for a moment. A sparrow flew in through one window, its wings fluttering like a pennant in the wind, and then out again.

  ‘Clarity,’ Ashti Beg said slowly. ‘The sense of clarity implies that it’s reflecting the world as it is, ne? And if you see something that’s not there to be seen, it’s not the world as it is. Even if imagining something is like sight, it isn’t like clarity.’

  ‘Very good,’ Maati said, and the woman smiled. Maati smiled back.

  The binding had progressed more quickly than Maati had thought possible. For the greatest part, the advances had been made in moments like these. Seven minds prodding at the same thought, debating the nuances and structures, challenging one another to understand the issues at hand more deeply. Someone - anyone - would find a phrase or a thought that struck sparks, and Vanjit would pull pages from her sleeve and mark down whatever had pushed her one step nearer the edge.

  It was happening less and less often. The binding, Maati knew, was coming near its final form. The certainty in Vanjit’s voice and the angle of her shoulders told him as much about her chances of success as looking over the details of her binding.

  As they ended the evening’s session, reluctant despite yawns and heavy-lidded eyes, Maati realized that the work they were doing was less like his own training before the Dai-kvo and more like the long, arduous hours he had spent with Cehmai. Somehow, during his absence, they had all become equals. Not in knowledge - he was still far and away the best informed - but in status. Where he had once had a body of students, he was working now with a group of novice poets. A lizard scampered along before him and then up the rough wall and into the darkness. A nightingale sang.

  He was exhausted, his body heavy, his mind beginning to spark and slip. And he was also elated. The wide night sky above him seemed rich with promise, the ground he walked upon eager to bear him up.

  His bed, however, didn’t invite sleep. Small pains in his knees and spine prodded him, and his mind failed to calm. The light of the half-moon cast shadows on the walls that seemed to move of their own accord. The restlessness of age, as opposed, he thought with weary amusement, to the restlessness of youth. As he lay there, small doubts began to arise, gnawing at him. Perhaps Vanjit wasn’t ready yet to take on the role of poet. Perhaps he and Eiah in their need and optimism were sending the girl to her death.

  There was no way to know another person’s heart. No way to judge. It might be that Vanjit herself was as afraid of this as he was, but held by her despair and anger and sense of obligation to the others to move forward as if she weren’t.

  Every poet that bound an andat came face-to-face with their own flaws, their own failures. Maati’s first master, Heshai-kvo, had made Seedless the embodiment of his own self-hatred, but that was only one extreme example. Kiai Jut three generations earlier had bound Flatness only to find the andat bent on destroying the family the poet secretly hated. Magar Inarit had famously bound Unwoven only to discover his own shameful desires made manifest in his creation. The work of binding the andat was of such depth and complexity, the poet’s true self was difficult if not impossible to hide within it. And what, he wondered, would Vanjit discover about herself if she succeeded? With all the hours they had spent on the mechanics of the binding, was it not also his responsibility to prepare the girl to face her imperfections?

  His mind worried at the questions like a dog at a bone. As the moon vanished from his window and left him with only the night candle, Maati rose. A walk might work the kinks from his muscles.

  The school was a different place at night. The ravages of war and time were less obvious, the shapes of the looming walls and hallways familiar and prone to stir the ancient memories of the boy Maati had been. Here, for instance, was the rough stone floor of the main hall. He had cleaned these very stones when his hands had been smooth and strong and free from the dark, liver-colored spots. He stood at the place where Milah-kvo had first offered him the black robes. He remembered both the pride of the moment and the sense, hardly noticed at the time, that it was an honor he didn’t wholly deserve.

  ‘Would you have done it differently, Milah-kvo?’ he asked the dead man and the empty air. ‘If you had known what I was going to do, would you still have made the offer?’

  The air said nothing. Maati felt himself smile without knowing precisely why.

  ‘Maati-kvo?’

  He turned. In the dim light of his candle, Eiah seemed like a ghost. Something conjured from his memory. He took a pose of greeting.

  ‘You’re awake,’ she said, falling into step beside him.

  ‘Sometimes sleep abandons old men,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘It’s the way of things. And you? I can’t think you make a practice of wandering the halls in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I’ve just left Vanjit. She sits up after the lecture is done and goes over everything we said. Everything anyone said. I agreed to sit with her and compare my memory to hers.’

  ‘She’s a good girl,’ Maati said.

  ‘Her dreams are getting worse,’ Eiah said. ‘If the situation were different, I’d be giving her a sleeping powder. I’m afraid it will dull her, though.’

  ‘They’re bad then?’ Maati said.

  Eiah shrugged. In the dim light, her face seemed older.

  ‘They’re no worse than anyone who watched her family die before her eyes. She has told you, hasn’t she?’

  ‘She was a child,’ Maati said. ‘The only one to live.’

  ‘She sa
id no more than that?’

  ‘No,’ Maati said. They passed through a stone archway and into the courtyard. Eiah looked up at the stars.

  ‘It’s as much as I know too,’ Eiah said. ‘I try to coax her. To get her to speak about it. But she won’t.’

  ‘Why try?’ Maati said. ‘Talking won’t undo it. Let her be who and where she is now. It’s better that way.’

  Eiah took a pose that accepted his advice, but her face didn’t entirely match it. He put a hand on her shoulder.