Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  ‘We each did our best,’ Otah said. ‘We did what we could.’

  He put his arm around her. She bit down on her lip and fought the sobs that shook her body like tiny earthquakes. Her fingers found his own, and squeezed as hard as a patient under a physician’s blade. He made no complaint.

  ‘How many people have I killed, Papa-kya? How many people have I killed with this?’

  ‘Hush,’ Otah said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Nothing we’ve done matters. Only what we do next.’

  ‘The price is too high,’ Eiah said. ‘I’m sorry. Will you tell them that I’m sorry?’

  ‘If you’d like.’

  Otah rocked her gently, and she allowed him to do it. The others all knew what they were saying, if not in specific, then at least the sketch of it. Otah saw Danat’s concern, and Idaan’s cool evaluating glance. He saw the armsmen turn their backs to him out of respect, and at the bow, Maati turned his back for another reason. Otah felt a flicker of his rage come back, a tongue of flame rising from old coals. Maati had done this. None of it would have happened if Maati hadn’t been so bent by his own guilt or so deluded by his optimism that he ignored the dangers.

  Or if Otah had found him and stopped him when that first letter had come. Or if Eiah hadn’t made common cause with Maati’s clandestine school. Or if Vanjit hadn’t been mad, or Balasar ambitious, or the world and everything in it made from the first. Otah closed his eyes, letting the darkness create a space large enough for the woman in his arms and his own complicated heart.

  Eiah murmured something he couldn’t make out. He made a small interrogative sound in the back of his throat, and she coughed before repeating herself.

  ‘There was no one at the school I could talk with,’ she said. ‘I got so tired of being strong all the time.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Oh, love. That, I know.’

  Otah slept deeply that night, lulled by exhaustion and the soft sounds of familiar voices and of the river. He slept as if he had been ill and the fever had only just broken. As if he was weak, and gaining strength. The dreams that possessed him faded with his first awareness of light and motion, less substantial than cobwebs, less lasting than mist.

  The air itself seemed cleaner. The early-morning haze burned off in sunlight the color of water. They ate boiled wheat and honey, dried apples, and black tea. The boatman’s second made his call, the boatman responded, and they nosed out again into the flow. Maati, sulking, kept as nearly clear of Otah as he could but kept casting glances at Eiah. Jealous, Otah assumed, of the conversation between father and daughter and unsure of her allegiance. Eiah for her part seemed to be making a point of speaking with her brother and her aunt and Ana Dasin, sitting with them, eating with them, making conversation with the jaw-clenched determination of a horse laboring uphill.

  The character of the river itself changed as they went farther north. Where the south was wide and slow and gentle, the stretch just south of Udun was narrower - sometimes no more than a hundred yards across - and faster. The boatman kept his kiln roaring, the boiler bumping and complaining. The paddle wheel spat up river water, slicking the deck nearest the stern. Otah would have been concerned if the boatman and his second hadn’t appeared so pleased with themselves. Still, whenever the boiler chimed after some particularly loud knock, Otah eyed it with suspicion. He had seen boilers burst their seams.

  The miles passed slowly, though still faster than the poet girl could have walked. Every now and then, a flicker of movement on the shore would catch Otah’s attention. Bird or deer or trick of the light. He found himself wondering what they would do if she appeared, andat in her arms, and struck them all blind. His fears always took the form of getting Danat and Eiah and Ana to safety, though he knew that his own danger would be as great as theirs and their competence likely greater.

  The spitting waterwheel slowly drove them toward the bow. Near midday, the captain of the guard brought them tin bowls of raisins and bread and cheese. They all sat in a clump, and even Maati haunted the edges of the conversation. Ana and Eiah sat hand in hand on a long, low bench; Danat, cross-legged on the deck. Otah and Idaan kept to leather and canvas stools that creaked when sat upon and resisted any attempt to rise. The cheese was rich and fragrant, the bread only mildly stale, and the topic a council of war.

  ‘If we do find her,’ Idaan said, answering Otah’s voiced concerns, ‘I’m not sure what we do with her. Can she be made to see reason?’

  ‘A month ago, I’d have said it was possible,’ Eiah said. ‘Not simple, but possible. I’m half-sorry we didn’t kill her in her sleep when we were still at the school.’

  ‘Only half?’ Danat asked.

  ‘There’s Galt,’ Eiah said. ‘As it stands now, she’s the only one who can put it back. It’s harder for her to do that dead.’

  Danat looked chagrined, and, as if sensing it, Idaan put a hand on his shoulder. Eiah squeezed Ana’s hand, then gently bent it at the wrist, as if testing something.

  ‘She’s alone. She’s hurt and she’s sad. I’m not saying that’s all certain to work in our favor,’ Maati said, ‘but it’s something.’ Otah thought he sounded petulant, but none of the others appeared to hear it that way.

  Eiah’s voice cut the conversation like a blade. Even before he took the sense of the words, Otah was halfway to his feet.

  ‘How long?’ Eiah asked.

  Her hands were around Ana’s wrists, her fingers curled as if measuring the girl’s pulses. Eiah’s face was pale.

  ‘Ah,’ Idaan said. ‘Well. Sitting those two together was a mistake.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Eiah said. ‘How far along?’

  ‘A third, perhaps,’ Ana said softly.

  ‘We hadn’t mentioned it to the men,’ Idaan said. ‘I understand the first ones don’t always take.’

  It took him less than a breath to understand.

  ‘Ah,’ Otah said, a hundred tiny signs falling into place. Ana’s weeping at the school, her avoidance of Danat, the way she’d kept to herself in the mornings and eaten with Idaan.

  ‘What?’ Danat asked, baffled.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Ana said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact, her cheeks as bright as apples with her blush. The whole boat seemed to breathe in at once.

  ‘And how long has this been going on?’ Otah demanded, shifting his gaze to the dumbstruck Danat at his feet. His son blinked up, uncomprehending. It was as if Otah had asked in an unknown language.

  ‘You’re joking,’ Idaan said. ‘You have a boy who’s just ended his twentieth summer and a girl not two years younger, an escort of professional armsmen as chaperone, and a steamcart with private quarters built on its back. What did you expect would happen?’

  ‘But,’ Otah began, then found he wasn’t sure what he intended to say. She’s blinded, or They aren’t wed, or Farrer Dasin will say it’s my fault for not keeping better watch over them. Each impulse seemed more ridiculous than the last.

  ‘I’m going to be a father,’ Danat said as if testing out the words. He turned to look up at Otah and started to grin. ‘You’re going to be a grandfather.’

  Eiah was weeping openly, her arms around Ana. A clamor of voices and a whoop from the stern said that whatever hope there might have been that the thing would be kept quiet once they returned to court was gone. Otah sat back, his stool creaking under his weight. Idaan took a pose of query that carried nuances of both pity at his idiocy and congratulations. Otah started laughing and found it hard to stop.

  It had been so long since he’d felt joy, he’d almost forgotten what it was like.

  The rest of the day was spent in half-drunken conversation. Otah was made to retell the details of Danat’s birth, and of Eiah’s. Danat grew slowly more pleased with himself and the world as the initial shock wore thin. Ana Dasin smiled, her grayed eyes taking in nothing and giving out a pleasure and satisfaction that seemed more intimate in that she couldn’t see its reflection in the faces around her.

  Stories came pouring out
as if they had only been waiting for the chance to be told. Idaan’s spectacularly failed attempts to care for a younger half-sister when she’d been little more than fourteen summers old. Otah’s work in the eastern islands as an assistant midwife, and the awkward incident of the baby born to an island mother and island father and with a complexion that sang to the stars of Obar State. Eiah spilled out every piece of secondhand wisdom she’d ever heard about keeping a new babe safe in the womb until it was ready to be born. At one point the armsmen broke into giddy song and, against Danat’s protests, lifted him onto their shoulders, the deck shifting slightly under them. The sun itself seemed to shine for them, the river to laugh.

  Maati alone seemed not to recover entirely from the first surprise. He smiled and chuckled and nodded when it fit the moment, but his eyes were reading letters in the air. He looked neither pleased nor displeased, but lost. Otah saw his lips moving as Maati spoke to himself, as if trying to explain something to his body that only his mind knew. When the poet hefted himself up and came to take Ana’s hand, it was with a formality that might have been mixed feelings on his part or only a fear that his kind thoughts would be unwelcome. Ana accepted the formal, somewhat stilted blessing, and afterward Eiah took Maati’s hand, pulling him down to sit at her side.

  Even braided together. Otah’s anger and distrust and sorrow couldn’t overcome the moment. The blood and horror of the world lifted, and a future worth having peeked through the crack.

  It was only much later, when the sun fell carelessly into the treetops of the western bank and shadows darkened the water, that the celebration faltered. The boat passed a brickwork tower standing on the riverbank, ivy almost obscuring the scars where fire had burned through timber and stripped the shutters from the empty windows. Otah watched the structure with the eerie feeling that it was watching back. The river bent, and a great stone bridge came into sight, gaps in its rail like missing teeth. Birds as bright as fire sang and fluttered, even in the autumn cold. Their songs filled the air, the familiar trills greeting Otah like the wail of a ghost.

  The ruins of the river city. The corpse of a city of birds.

  They had come to dead Udun.

  28

  Maati tramped through the overgrown streets, Idaan walking silently at his side. The hunter’s bow slung over her shoulder was meant more as protection from feral dogs than to assassinate Vanjit, though Maati knew Idaan could use it for either. To their left, an unused canal stank of stale water and rotting vine. To the right, walls stood or leaned, roofs sagged or had fallen in. Every twenty steps seemed to offer up a new display of how war and time could erase the best that humanity achieved. And above the ruins, rising like a mountain over the city, the ruined palaces of the Khai Udun were grayed by the moisture in the air. The towers and terraces of enameled brick as soft as visions.

  He had lost Eiah too.

  Squatting on the boat as they made their way upriver, he had watched her turn to Otah, watched her become his daughter again where before she had chosen the role of outcast. She had lost faith in Maati’s dream, and he understood why. She had delighted in the Galtic girl’s condition as if it weren’t the very thing that they had feared and fought against.

  Maati had wanted the past. He had wanted to make the world whole as it had been when he was a boy, none of his opportunities squandered. And she had wanted that too. They all had. But with every change that couldn’t be undone, the past receded. With every new tragedy Maati brought upon the world, with each friend that he lost, with failure upon failure upon failure, the dim light faded. With Eiah returned to her father’s cause, there was nothing left to lose. His despair felt almost like peace.

  ‘Left or right?’ Idaan asked.

  Maati blinked. The road before them split, and he hadn’t even noticed it. He wasn’t much of a scout.

  ‘Left,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘You think the canal bridge will hold?’

  ‘Right, then,’ Maati said, and turned down the road before the woman could raise some fresh objection.

  It was only a decade and a half since the war. It seemed like days ago that Maati had been the librarian of Machi. And yet the white-barked tree that split the road before them, street cobbles shattered and lifted by its roots, hadn’t existed then. The canals he walked past had run clean. There had been no moss on the walls. Udun had been alive, then. The forest and the river were eating the city’s remains, and it seemed to have happened in the space between one breath and the next. Or perhaps the library, the envoys from the Dai-kvo, the long conversations with Cehmai-kvo and Stone-Made-Soft had been part of some other lifetime.

  The sound was low and violent - something thrashing against wood or stone. Maati looked around him. The square they’d come to was paved in wide, flat stones, tall grass a yellow gray at the joints. A ruined fountain with black muck where clear water had been squatted in the center. Idaan’s bow was in her hands, an arrow between her fingers.

  ‘What was that?’ Maati asked.

  Idaan’s dark eyes swept over the ruins, and Maati tried to follow her gaze. They might have been houses or businesses or something of both. The sound came again. From his left and ahead. Idaan moved forward cat-quiet, her bow at the ready. Maati stayed behind her, but close. He remembered that he had a blade at his belt and drew it.

  The buck was in a small garden with an iron fence overgrown now with flowering ivy. Its side was cut, the fur black with dried blood and flies. The noble rack of horns was broken on one side, ending in a cruel, jagged stump. As Idaan stepped near, it moved again, lashing out at the fence with its feet, and then hung its head. It was an image of exhaustion and despair.

  And its eyes were gray and sightless.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ Idaan said. The buck raised its head, snorting. Maati gripped the handle of his blade, readying himself for something, though he wasn’t certain what. Idaan raised her bow with something akin to disgust on her face. The first arrow sunk deep into the neck of the once-proud animal. The buck bellowed and tried to run, fouling itself in the fence, the vines. It slipped to its knees as Idaan sank another arrow into its side. And then a third.

  It coughed and went still.

  ‘Well, I think we can say how your little poet girl was planning to get food,’ Idaan said, her voice acid. ‘Cripple whatever game she came across and then let it beat itself to death. She’s quite the hunter.’

  She slung the bow back over her shoulder, walking carefully into the trampled garden. Flies rose from the beast in a buzzing cloud. Idaan ignored them, putting her hand on the dead buck’s flank.

  ‘It’s a waste,’ she said. ‘If I had rope and the right knife we could at least dress him and eat something fresh tonight. I hate leaving him for the rats and the foxes.’

  ‘Why did you kill him then?’

  ‘Mercy. You were right, though. Vanjit’s in the city somewhere. That was a good call.’

  ‘I’m half-sorry I said anything,’ Maati said. ‘You’d kill her just as quickly, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You think you can romance her into taking back her curse. I’m no one to keep you from trying.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we follow the same plan each of us had. It’s the one thing we agree upon. She’s too dangerous. She has to die.’

  ‘I know what I intended. I know what Eiah and I were planning. But that was the andat’s scheme. I think there may be another way.’

  Idaan looked up, then stood. The bow was still in her hand.

  ‘Can you give her her parents back?’ she asked. ‘Can you give her the brothers and sisters she lost? Udun. Can you rebuild it?’

  Maati took a pose that dismissed her questions, but Idaan stepped close to him. He could feel her breath against his face. Her eyes were cold and dark.

  ‘Do you think that Galt died blind because of something you can remedy?’ she demanded. ‘What’s happened, happened. You can’t will her to be the woman you hoped she was. Telling yourself that you
can is worse than stupidity.’

  ‘If she puts it to rights,’ Maati said, ‘she shouldn’t have to die.’

  Idaan narrowed her eyes, tilted her head.

  ‘I’ll offer you this,’ she said. ‘If you can talk the girl into giving Galt back its eyes - and Eiah and Ashti Beg. Everyone. If you can do that and also have her release her andat, I won’t be the one who kills her.’

  ‘Would Otah let her live?’ Maati asked.

  ‘Ask him and he might,’ Idaan said. ‘Experience suggests he and I have somewhat different ideas of mercy.’

  At midday, they returned to their camp. The boat was tied up at an old quay slick with mold. The scent of the river was rich and not entirely pleasant. Two of the other scouting parties had returned before them; Danat and one of the armsmen were still in the city but expected back shortly. Otah, in a robe of woven silk under a thicker woolen outer robe, sat at a field table on the quayside, sketching maps of the city from memory. Idaan made her report, Maati silent at her side. He tried to imagine asking Otah for clemency on Vanjit’s behalf. If Maati could persuade her to restore sight to everyone she’d injured and release the andat, would Otah honor Idaan’s contract? Or, phrased differently, if Maati couldn’t save the world, could he at least do something to redeem this one girl?