Seasons of War

by Daniel Abraham

  ‘They should stop that,’ Otah said.

  ‘Most High, they’re desperate and afraid, and they want a hero out of the old epics. They need one.’

  ‘And you? What do you need?’

  ‘I need Saya to stop walking for a day.’

  Otah closed his eyes. Perhaps the right thing was to send the experienced men on ahead. They could clear spaces for the camps. Perhaps missing a single day would not be too much. And there was little point in running if it was only to be sure they came to the battle exhausted and ready for slaughter. The Dai-kvo would have gotten his warning by now. The poets might even now be in flight toward Otah and his ragtag army. He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. Letting his body collapse with it.

  ‘I’ll consider what you’ve said, Nayiit-cha,’ Otah said. ‘It wasn’t where my mind had led me, but I can see there’s some wisdom in it.’

  Nayiit took a pose of gratitude as formal as any at court. He looked nearly as spent as Otah felt. Otah raised his hands in a querying pose.

  ‘The utkhaiem didn’t feel comfortable bringing these concerns to me,’ he said. ‘Why did you?’

  ‘I think, Most High, there’s a certain . . . reluctance in the higher ranks to second-guess you again. And the footmen wouldn’t think of approaching you. I grew up with stories about you and Maati-cha, so I suppose I can bring myself to think of you as one of my mother’s friends. That, and I’m desperately tired. If you had me sent back in disgrace, I could at least get a day’s rest.’

  Otah smiled, and saw his own expression reflected back at him. He had never known this boy, had never lifted him over his head the way he had Danat. He had had no part in teaching Nayiit wisdom or folly. Even now, seeing himself in his eldest son’s movements and expressions, he could hardly think of him with the bone-deep protectiveness that shook him when he thought of Eiah and Danat. And yet he was pleased that he had accepted Nayiit’s offer to join him in this half-doomed campaign. Otah leaned forward, his hand out. It was the gesture of friendship that one seafront laborer might offer another. Nayiit only looked shocked for a moment, then clasped Otah’s hand.

  ‘Whenever they’re too nervous to tell me what I’m doing wrong, you come to me, Nayiit-cha. I haven’t got many people I can trust to do that, and I’ve left most of them back in Machi.’

  ‘If you’ll promise not to have me whipped for impertinence,’ the boy said.

  ‘I won’t have you whipped, and I won’t have you sent back.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Nayiit said, and again Otah was moved to see that the gratitude was genuine. After Nayiit had gone, Otah was left with the aches in his body and the unease that came with having a man with a wife and child thank you for leading him toward the real chance of death. The life of the Khai Machi, he thought, afforded very few opportunities to be humbled, but this was one. When the attendant returned, Otah didn’t recognize the sound of his scratching until the man’s voice came.

  ‘Most High?’

  ‘Yes, come in. And bring that ointment here. No, I can put it on myself. But bring me the captains of the houses. I’ve decided to take a day to rest and send the scouts ahead.’

  ‘Yes, Most High.’

  ‘And when you’ve done with that, there’s a man named Saya. He’s on foot. A blacksmith from Machi, I think.’

  ‘Yes, Most High?’

  ‘Ask him to join me for a bowl of wine. I’d like to meet him.’

  Maati woke to find Liat already gone. His hand traced the indentation in the mattress at his side where she had slept. The world outside his door was already bright and warm. The birds whose songs had filled the air of spring were busy now teaching their hatchlings to fly. The pale green of new leaves had deepened, the trees as rich with summer as they would ever be. High summer had come. Maati rose from his bed with a grunt and went about his morning ablutions.

  The days since the ragged, improvised army of Machi began its march to the east had been busy. The loss of Stone-Made-Soft would have sent the court and the merchant houses scurrying like mice before a flood even if nothing more had happened. Word of the other lost andat and of the massed army of Galt made what in other days would have been a cataclysm seem a side issue. For half a week, it seemed, the city had been paralyzed. Not from fear, but from the simple and profound lack of any ritual or ceremony that answered the situation. Then, first from the merchant houses below and Kiyan-cha’s women’s banquets above and then seemingly everywhere at once, the utkhaiem had flushed with action. Often disorganized, often at crossed purpose, but determined and intent. Maati’s own efforts were no less than any others.

  Still, he left it behind him now - the books stacked in distinct piles, scrolls unfurled to particular passages as if waiting for the copyist’s attention - and walked instead through the wide, bright paths of the palaces. There were fewer singing slaves, more stretches where the gravel of the path had scattered and not yet been raked back into place, and the men and women of the utkhaiem who he passed seemed to carry themselves with less than their full splendor. It was as if a terrible wind had blown through a garden and disarrayed those blossoms it did not destroy.

  The path led into the shade of the false forest that separated the poet’s house from the palaces. There were old trees among these, thick trunks speaking of generations of human struggle and triumph and failure since their first tentative seedling leaves had pushed away this soil. Moss clothed the bark and scented the air with green. Birds fluttered over Maati’s head, and a squirrel scolded him as he passed. In winter, with these oaks bare, you could see from the porch of the poet’s house out almost to the palaces. In summer, the house might have been in a different city. The door of the poet’s house was standing open, and Maati didn’t bother to scratch or knock.

  Cehmai’s quarters suffered the same marks as his own - books, scrolls, codices, diagrams all laid out without respect to author or age or type of binding. Cehmai, sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, held a book open in his hand. With the brown robes of a poet loose around his frame, he looked, Maati thought, like a young student puzzling over an obscure translation. Cehmai looked up as Maati’s shadow crossed him, and smiled wearily.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Maati asked.

  ‘Some bread. Some cheese,’ Cehmai said, gesturing to the back of the house with his head. ‘There’s some left, if you’d like it.’

  It hadn’t occurred to Maati just how hungry he was until he took up a corner of the rich, sweet bread. He knew he’d had dinner the night before, but he couldn’t recall what it had been or when he’d eaten it. He reached into a shallow ceramic bowl of salted raisins. They tasted rich and full as wine. He took a handful and sat on the chair beside Cehmai to look over the assorted results of their labor.

  ‘What’s your thought?’ Cehmai said.

  ‘I’ve found more than I expected to,’ Maati said. ‘There was a section in Vautai’s Fourth Meditations that actually clarified some things I hadn’t been certain of. If we were to put together all the scraps and rags from all of the books and histories and scrolls, it might be enough to support binding a fresh andat.’

  Cehmai sighed and closed the book he’d been holding.

  ‘That’s near what I’ve come to,’ the younger poet agreed. Then he looked up. ‘And how long do you think it would take to put those scraps and rags into one coherent form?’

  ‘So that it stood as a single work? I’m likely too old to start it,’ Maati said. ‘And without the full record from the Dai-kvo, there would be no way to know whether a binding was dangerously near one that had already been done.’

  ‘I hated those,’ Cehmai said.

  ‘They went back to the beginning of the First Empire,’ Maati said. ‘Some of the descriptions are so convoluted it takes reading them six times to understand they’re using fifty words to carry the meaning of five. But they are complete, and that’s the biggest gap in our resources.’

  Cehmai got to his feet with a grunt. His hair w
as disheveled and there were dark smudges under his eyes. Maati imagined he had some to match.

  ‘So to sum up,’ Cehmai said, ‘if the Khai fails, we might be able to bind a new andat in a generation or so.’

  ‘Unless we’re unlucky and use some construct too much like something a minor poet employed twenty generations back. In that case, we attempt the binding, pay the price, and die badly. Except that by then, we’ll likely all have been slaughtered by the Galts.’

  ‘Well,’ Cehmai said and rubbed his hands together. ‘Are there any of those raisins left?’

  ‘A few,’ Maati said.

  Maati could hear the joints in Cehmai’s back cracking as he stretched. Maati leaned over and scooped up the fallen book. It wasn’t titled, nor was the author named, but the grammar in the first page marked it as Second Empire. Loyan Sho or Kodjan the Lesser. Maati let his gaze flow down the page, seeing the words without taking in their meanings. Behind him, Cehmai ate the raisins, lips smacking until he spoke.

  ‘The second problem is solved if your technique works. It isn’t critical that we have all the histories if we can deflect the price of failing. At worst, we’ll have lost the time it took to compose the binding.’

  ‘Months,’ Maati said.

  ‘But not death,’ Cehmai went on. ‘So there’s something to be said for that.’

  ‘And the first problem can be skirted by not starting wholly from scratch.’

  ‘You’ve been thinking about this, Maati-kvo.’

  Cehmai slowly walked back across the floor. His footsteps were soft and deliberate. Outside, a pigeon cooed. Maati let the silence speak for him. When Cehmai returned and sat again, his expression was abstracted and his fingers picked idly at the cloth of his sleeves. Maati knew some part of what haunted the younger man: the danger faced by the city, the likelihood of the Khai Machi retrieving the Dai-kvo, the shapeless and all-pervading fear of the Galtic army that had gathered in the South and might now be almost anywhere. But there was another part to the question, and that Maati could not guess. And so he asked.

  ‘What is it like?’

  Cehmai looked up as if he’d half-forgotten Maati was there. His hands flowed into a pose that asked clarification.

  ‘Stone-Made-Soft,’ Maati said. ‘What is it like with him gone?’

  Cehmai shrugged and turned his head to look out the unshuttered windows. The trees shifted their leaves and adjusted their branches like men in conversation. The sun hung in the sky, gold in lapis.

  ‘I’d forgotten what it was like to be myself,’ Cehmai said. His voice was low and thoughtful and melancholy. ‘Just myself and not him as well. I was so young when I took control of him. It’s like having had someone strapped to your back when you were a child and then suddenly lifting off the burden. I feel alone. I feel freed. I’m shamed to have failed, even though I know there was nothing I could have done to keep hold of him. And I regret now all the years I could have sunk Galt into ruins that I didn’t.’

  ‘But if you could have him back, would you?’

  The pause that came before Cehmai’s reply meant that no, he would have chosen his freedom. It was the answer Maati had expected, but not the one he was ready to accept.

  ‘The Khai may be able to save the Dai-kvo,’ Cehmai said. ‘He may get there before the Galts.’

  ‘But if he doesn’t?’

  ‘Then I would rather have Stone-Made-Soft back than decorate the end of some Galtic spear,’ Cehmai said, a grim humor in his voice. ‘I have some early work. Drafts from when I was first studying him. There are places where the options . . . branched. If we used those as starting points, it would make the binding different from the one I took over, and we still wouldn’t have to begin from first principles.’

  ‘You have them here?’

  ‘Yes. They’re in that basket. There. You should take them back to the library and look them over. If we keep them here I’m too likely to do something unpleasant with them. I was half-tempted to burn them last night.’

  Maati took the pages - small, neat script on cheap, yellowing parchment - and folded them into his sleeve. The weight of them seemed so slight, and still Maati found himself uncomfortably aware of them and of the return to a kind of waking prison that they meant for Cehmai.

  ‘I’ll look them over,’ Maati said. ‘Once I have an idea what would be the best support for it, I’ll put some reading together. And if things go well, we can present it all to the Dai-kvo when he arrives. Certainly, there’s no call to do anything until we know where we stand.’

  ‘We can prepare for the worst,’ Cehmai said. ‘I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than taken unaware.’

  The resignation in Cehmai’s voice was hard to listen to. Maati coughed, as if the suggestion he wished to make fought against being spoken.

  ‘It might be better . . . I haven’t attempted a binding myself. If I were the one . . .’

  Cehmai took a pose that was both gratitude and refusal. Maati felt a warm relief at Cehmai’s answer and also a twinge of regret.

  ‘He’s my burden,’ Cehmai said. ‘I gave my word to carry Stone-Made-Soft as long as I could, and I’ll do that. I wouldn’t want to disappoint the Khai.’ Then he chuckled. ‘You know, there have been whole years when I would have meant that as a sarcasm. Disappointing the Khaiem seems to be about half of what we do as poets - no, I can’t somehow use the andat to help you win at tiles, or restore your prowess with your wives, or any of the thousand stupid, petty things they ask of us. But these last weeks, I really would do whatever I could, not to disappoint that man. I don’t know what’s changed.’

  ‘Everything,’ Maati said. ‘Times like these remake men. They change what we are. Otah’s trying to become the man we need him to be.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true,’ Cehmai said. ‘I just don’t want this all to be happening, so I forget, somehow, that it is. I keep thinking it’s all a sour dream and I’ll wake out of it and stumble down to play a game of stones against Stone-Made-Soft. That that will be the worst thing I have to face. And not . . .’

  Cehmai gestured, his hands wide, including the house and the palaces and the city and the world.

  ‘And not the end of civilization?’ Maati suggested.

  ‘Something like that.’

  Maati sighed.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘when we were young, the man who was Daikvo then chose Otah to come train as a poet. He refused, but I think he would have been good. He has it in him to do whatever needs doing.’

  Killing a man, taking a throne, marching an army to its death, Maati thought but did not say. Whatever needs doing.

  ‘I hope the price he pays is smaller than ours,’ Cehmai said.

  ‘I doubt it will be.’

  14

  Balasar had not been raised to put faith in augury. His father had always said that any god that could create the world and the stars should be able to put together a few well-formed sentences if there was something that needed saying; Balasar had accepted this wisdom in the uncritical way of a boy emulating the man he most admires. And still, the dream came to him on the night before he had word of the hunting party.

  It was far from the first time he had dreamt of the desert. He felt again the merciless heat, the pain of the satchel cutting into his shoulder. The books he had borne then had become ashes in the dream as they had in life, but the weight was no less. And behind him were not only Coal and Eustin. All of them followed him - Bes, Mayarsin, Little Ott, and the others. The dead followed him, and he knew they were no longer his allies or his enemies. They came to keep watch over him, to see what work he wrought with their blood. They were his judges. As always before, he could not speak. His throat was knotted. He could not turn to see the dead; he only felt them.

  But there seemed more now - not only the men he had left in the desert, but others as well. Some of them were soldiers, some of them simple men, all of them padding behind him, waiting to see him justify their sacrifices and his own pride. The host
behind him had grown.

  He woke in his tent, his mouth dry and sticky. Dawn had not yet come. He drank from the water flask by his bed, then pulled on a shirt and simple trousers and went out to relieve himself among the bushes. The army was still asleep or else just beginning to stir. The air was warm and humid so near the river. Balasar breathed deep and slow. He had the sense that the world itself - trees, grasses, moon-silvered clouds - was heavy with anticipation. It would be two weeks before they would come within sight of the river city Udun. By month’s end another poet would be dead, another library burned, another city fallen.

  Thus far, the campaign had proved as simple as he had hoped, though slower. He had lost almost no men in Nantani. The low towns that his army had come across in their journey to the North had emptied before them; men, women, children, animals - all had scattered before them like autumn leaves before a windstorm. The only miscalculation he had made was in how long to rely on the steam wagons. Two boilers had blown on the rough terrain before Balasar had called to let them cool and be pulled. Five men had died outright, another fifteen had been scalded too badly to continue. Balasar had sent them back to Nantani. There had been less food captured than he had hoped; the residents of the low towns had put anything they thought might be of use to Balasar and his men to fire before they fled. But the land was rich with game fowl and deer, and his supplies were sufficient to reach the next cities.