Seasons of War

by Daniel Abraham

  ‘All the years I should have done this,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Putting my boy to bed.’

  He softly closed the door to his apartments. The night was deep and dark, stars shining like diamonds on velvet, and a distant, eerie green aurora dancing far to the North. Maati stopped at the library proper, tucked the book he needed into his sleeve, and then - though the urge to find Cehmai instantly was hard to resist - made his way to the palaces, and to the apartments that Otah had given Liat.

  A servant girl showed him into the main chamber. The only light was the fire in the grate, the shadows of flame dancing on the walls and across Liat’s brow as she stared into them. Her hair was disarrayed, wild as a bird’s nest. Her hands were in claws, trembling.

  ‘I haven’t . . . I haven’t found—’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Maati said. ‘He’s in my apartments, asleep.’

  Liat’s cry startled him. She didn’t walk to him so much as flow through the air, and her arms were around Maati’s shoulders, embracing him. And then she stepped back and struck his shoulder hard enough to sting.

  ‘How long has he been there?’

  ‘Since the army came back,’ Maati said, rubbing his bruised flesh. ‘He brought books that they salvaged from the Dai-kvo. I was looking them over when—’

  ‘And you didn’t send me a runner? There are no servants in the city who you could have told to come to me? I’ve been sitting here chewing my own heart raw, afraid he was dead, afraid he was still out with Otah chasing the Galts, and he was at your apartments talking about books?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Maati said. ‘I put a blanket over him and came to you. But he’ll need food. Soup. Some wine. I thought you could take it to him.’

  Liat wiped away a tear with the back of her hand.

  ‘He’s all right?’ she asked. Her voice had gone small.

  ‘He’s exhausted and hungry. But it’s nothing a few days’ rest won’t heal.’

  ‘And . . . his heart? You talked with him. Is he . . . ?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweet. I’m not his mother. Take him soup. Talk with him. You’ll know him better than I can.’

  Liat nodded. There were tears on her cheeks, but Maati knew it was only the fear working its way through. Seeing their boy would help more than anything else.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘The poet’s house.’

  The night air was chill, both numbing his skin and making him more acutely aware of it. Summer was failing, autumn clearing its throat. The few men and women Maati passed seemed to haunt the palaces, more spirit than flesh. They took poses of deference to him, more formal or less depending upon their stations, but the stunned expressions spoke of a single thought. The news from the broken army had spread, and everyone knew that the Dai-kvo was gone, the Galts triumphant. With even the last glow of twilight long vanished, the paths were dimmer than usual, lanterns unlit, torches burned to coal. The great halls and palaces loomed, the glimmering from behind closed shutters the only sign that they had not been abandoned. Twists of dry herbs tied with mourning cloth hung from the trees as offering to the gods. The red banner that had announced the army’s arrival still hung from the high tower, grayed by the darkness. Colorless.

  Maati passed through the empty gardens, and found himself smiling. He felt separate from the city around him, untouched by its despair. Perhaps even invigorated by it. There was nothing the citizens of Machi could do, no path for them to take that might somehow make things right. That was his alone. He would save the city, if it were to be saved, and if Machi fell, it would find Maati working to the end. It was that hope and the clarity of the path that lay before him that made his steps lighter and kept his blood warm.

  He wondered if this strange elation was something like what Otah had felt, all those years he had lived under his false name. Perhaps holding himself at a distance from the world was how Otah had learned his confidence.

  But no. That thought was an illusion. However much this felt like joy, Maati’s rational mind knew it was only fear in brighter robes.

  The door of the poet’s house stood open. The candlelight from within glowed gold. Maati hauled himself up the stairs and through the doorway without scratching or calling out to announce his presence. The air within smelled of distilled wine and a deep earthy incense of the sort priests burned in the temples. He found Cehmai at the back of the house, eyes bloodshot and wine bowl cupped in his hands. He sat cross-legged on the floor contemplating a linked sigil of order and chaos - mother-of-pearl inlay in a panel of dark-stained rosewood. He glanced up at Maati and made an awkward attempt at some pose Maati could only guess at.

  ‘You’ve found religion?’ Maati asked.

  ‘Chaos comes out of order,’ Cehmai said. ‘I can’t think of a better time to contemplate the fact. And gods are all we have left now, aren’t they?’

  Maati reached out, brushing the panel with his fingers before tipping it backward. It slapped the floor with a sound like a book dropped from a table. Cehmai blinked, half shocked, half amused. Before he could speak, Maati fished in his sleeve, brought out the small brown volume, its leather covers worn soft as cloth by the years, and dropped it into Cehmai’s lap. He didn’t wait for Cehmai to pick it up before he strode back into the front room, closed the door, and dropped two fresh lumps of coal onto the fire in the grate. He found a pan, a flask of fresh water, and a brick of pressed tea leaves. That was good. They’d want that before the night was out. He also found the spent incense - ashes lighter than fresh snow on a black stone burner. He dumped them outside.

  A high slate table held their notes. Thoughts and diagrams charting the new and doomed binding of Stone-Made-Soft. Maati scooped up the pages of cramped writing and put them outside as well, with the ashes. Then he carefully smoothed the writing from the wax tablets until they were smooth again, pristine. He took up the bronze-tipped stylus and scored two long vertical lines in the wax, dividing it into three equal columns. Cehmai walked into the room, his head bent over the open book. He was already more than halfway through it.

  ‘You aren’t the only one who was ever chosen to bind one of the andat,’ Maati said. ‘I even began the binding once, a long time ago. Liat-cha talked me out of trying. She was right. It would have killed me.’

  ‘You mean this?’ Cehmai said. ‘You’re going to bind Seedless?’

  ‘It was what the Dai-kvo chose me for. Heshai wrote his binding, and his analysis of its flaws. It’s too close to the original. I know that. But with the changes we’ll need to make in order to include my scheme for avoiding the price of a failed binding and your fresh perspective, we can find another way.’

  In the first column of the wax tablet, Maati wrote Seedless.

  ‘Forgive me, Maati-kvo, but will this really help? Stone-Made-Soft could have dropped their army half into the ground. Water-Moving-Down might have flooded them. But Seedless? Removing-the-Part-That-Continues doesn’t have much power to stop an army.’

  ‘I can offer to kill all their crops,’ Maati said, writing Heshai-kvo at the top of the second column. ‘I can threaten to make every cow and pig and lamb barren. I can make every Galtic woman who’s bearing a child lose it. Faced with that, they’ll turn back.’

  His stylus paused over the head of the third column, and then he wrote his own name. He and Cehmai could outline the major points here; they could add and remove aspects of Heshai’s first vision, interpret the corrections the old poet would have made, had he been given the chance. They could remake the binding, because the binding was already half-remade. If there was time. If they could find a way. If they were clever enough to save the world from the armies of Galt.

  ‘And if they don’t turn back?’ Cehmai said.

  ‘Then we’ll all die. Their cities and ours. Check to see if that tea’s ready to brew up, will you? I need your help with this, and it will go better if you’re sober.’

  The sculpture garden of Cetani was the wonder of the city. Two bronze
men in the dress of the Emperor’s guard stood at the entrances at its northwest end, staring to the south and east, as if still looking to the Empire they had failed to protect. In their great, inhuman shadows, the finest work of the cities of the Khaiem had been gathered over the span of generations. There were hundreds of them, each astounding in its own fashion, under the wide branches of ash and oak with leaves the color of gold. The dragons of Chaos writhed along one long wall, their scales shining with red lacquer and worked silver, chips of lapis and enamel white as milk. In a shadowed niche, Shian Sho, last of the Emperors, sat worked in white marble on a high dais, his head sunk despairingly in his hands. It was a piece done after the Empire’s fall. If the Emperor had seen himself shown with such little dignity, the sculptor would have been lucky to have a fast death. But the drape of the final Emperor’s robes made the stone seem supple as linen, and the despair and thoughtfulness of the dead man’s expression spoke of a time nine generations past when the world had torn itself apart. The sculptor who had found Shian Sho in this stone had lived through that time and had put the burden of his heart into this monument; this empty sepulcher for his age. Otah suspected that no man since then had looked upon it and understood. Not until now.

  The Khai Cetani stood at the foot of a life-size bronze of a robed woman with eagle’s wings rising wide-spread from her shoulders. He was younger than Otah by perhaps five years, gray only beginning to appear in his night-black hair. His gaze flickered over Otah, giving no sign of the thoughts behind his eyes. Otah felt a moment’s self-consciousness at his travel-worn robes and incipient, moth-eaten beard. He took a pose of greeting appropriate for two people of equal status and saw the Khai Cetani hesitate for a moment before returning it. It was likely it was the first time in years anyone had approached him with so little reverence.

  ‘My counselors have told me of your suggestion, my good friend Machi,’ the Khai Cetani said. ‘I must say I was . . . surprised. You can’t truly expect us to abandon Cetani without a fight.’

  ‘You’ll lose,’ Otah said.

  ‘We are a city of fifty thousand people. These invaders of yours are at most five.’

  ‘They’re soldiers. They know what they’re doing. You might slow them, but you won’t stop them.’

  The Khai Cetani sat, crossing his legs. His smile was almost a sneer.

  ‘You think because you failed, no one else can succeed?’

  ‘I think if we had a season, perhaps two, to build an army, we might withstand them. Hire mercenaries to train the men, drill them, build walls around at least the inner reaches of the cities, and we might stand a chance. As it is, we don’t. I’ve seen what they did to the village of the Dai-kvo. I’ve had reports from Yalakeht. Amnat-Tan will fall if it hasn’t already. They will come here next. You have fifty thousand, including the infirm and the aged and children too young to hold a sword. You don’t have weapons enough or armor or experience. My proposal is our best hope.’

  It was an argument he had wrestled with through many of the long nights of his journey to the North. Force of arms would not stop the Galts. Slowing them, letting the winter come and protect them for the long, dark months in which no attacking force would survive the fields of ice and brutally cold nights, winning time for the poets to work a little miracle, bind one of the andat and save them all - it was a thin hope but it was the best they had. And slowly, during the days swaying on horseback and nights sitting by smoldering braziers, Otah had found the plan that he believed would win him this respite. Now if the Khai Cetani would simply see the need of it.

  ‘If you bring your people to Machi, we will have twice as many people who can take the field against the Galts. And if you will do what I’ve suggested with the coal and food, the Galts will be much worse for the travel than we will be.’

  ‘And Cetani will fall without resistance. We will roll over like a soft quarter whore,’ the Khai Cetani said. ‘It’s simple enough for you to sacrifice my city, isn’t it?’

  ‘None of this is easy. But simple? Yes, it’s simple. Bring your people to Machi. Bring all the food you can carry and burn what you can’t. Mix hard coal in with the soft, so that what we leave behind for the Galts will burn too hot in their steam wagons, and give me the loan of five hundred of your best men. I’ll give you a winter and the library of Machi. Between your poet and the two at my court—’

  ‘I have no poet.’

  Otah took a pose of query.

  ‘He died half a month ago, trying to regain his andat,’ the Khai Cetani said. ‘His skin went black as a new bruise and his bones all shattered. I have no poet. All I have is a city, and I won’t give it away for nothing!’

  The Khai Cetani’s words ended in a shout. His face was red with fury. And with fear. There was no more that Otah could say now that would sway him, but years in the gentleman’s trade had taught Otah something about negotiations that the Khaiem had never known. He nodded and took a pose that formally withdrew him from the conversation.

  ‘You and your men will stay here,’ the Khai Cetani said, continuing to speak despite Otah’s gesture. ‘We will make our stand here, at Cetani. We will not fall.’

  ‘You will,’ Otah said. ‘And my men will leave in the morning, with me.’

  The Khai Cetani was breathing fast, as if he had run a race. Otah took a pose of farewell, then turned and strode from the garden. To the east, clouds darkened the horizon. The scent of coming rain touched the air. Otah’s armsmen and servants fell in with him. The eyes of Cetani’s utkhaiem were on the little procession as Otah walked to the apartments granted him by the Khai. He was a curiosity - one of the Khaiem walking with the swagger of a man who’d sat too long on a horse, his retinue looking more like a mercenary captain’s crew than courtiers. And Otah suspected that martial air, however undeserved, would serve him. He scowled the way he imagined Sinja might have in his place.

  Ashua Radaani was sitting at the fire grate deep in conversation with Saya the blacksmith when Otah entered the wide hall that served as the center of the visitors’ palace. Battle and loss and the common enemy of Galt had mixed with the shared recognition of competence to make the two men something like friends. They stood and took poses of respect and welcome that Otah waved away. He sat on a low cushion by the fire and sent his servant boy to find them tea and something to eat.

  ‘It didn’t go well, I take it,’ Radaani said.

  ‘It didn’t go well and it didn’t go badly,’ Otah said. ‘He’s smart enough to be frightened. That’s good. I was afraid he’d be certain of himself. But his poet’s dead. Tried to recapture his andat and paid its price.’

  Radaani sighed.

  ‘Did he agree to your plan, Most High?’ Saya asked.

  ‘No,’ Otah said. ‘He’s determined that Cetani not fall without a fight. I’ve told him we’re leaving with him or without him. How was your hunting, Ashua-cha?’

  Radaani leaned forward. His features were thinner than they had been in Machi, and the ring he turned on his finger wasn’t so snug as it had once been.

  ‘The court’s frightened,’ he said. ‘There are a few people who came here from Yalakeht, and the stories . . . well, either they’ve grown in the telling, or it wasn’t pretty there. And the couriers from Amnat-Tan haven’t come the last two days.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ Otah said. ‘Will we have time, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ashua said. He seemed to search for more words, but in the end only shook his head.

  ‘Get the men ready,’ Otah said. ‘We’ll give Cetani tomorrow to join us. After that, we’ll head home. With enough time, we might be able to tear up some sections of the road behind us. Slow down the Galts, even if we can’t do all we hoped against them.’

  ‘What about the books?’ Saya asked. ‘If their poet’s dead, it isn’t as if they’ll have need of them. Perhaps ours would make something of them.’

  ‘I can ask,’ Otah said. ‘With luck, we’ll have the books and the people and the food stor
es.’

  ‘But the Khai refused you, Most High,’ Saya said.

  Otah smiled and shook his head. Only now that he found himself a moment to rest did the weariness drag at him. He tried to think how many days he’d been riding from first light to last. A lifetime, it felt like. He remembered the man who’d left Machi to save the Daikvo, but it no longer felt like something he’d done himself. He was changing. His heart still ached at the thought of Kiyan and Eiah and Danat. His apprehension at the struggle still before him was no less. And still, he was not the man he had once been, and to his surprise and unease, the man he was becoming seemed quite natural.

  ‘Most High?’ Saya repeated.

  ‘Walking away from a negotiation isn’t the same as ending it,’ Otah said. ‘Cetani’s proud and he’s lost, but he’s not a fool. He wants to do what we’re asking of him. He just hasn’t found the way to say yes.’

  ‘You sound sure of that,’ Saya said.