Seasons of War

by Daniel Abraham

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ana Dasin said after a pause. Her tone carried the shielded contempt of an adolescent for her elders. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing.’

  Making his way back through the crowded belly of the ship, Otah wondered what he had thought he would say to a Galtic girl who had seen forty-five fewer summers than himself. He had expected to offer some kind of wisdom, some variety of comfort, and instead it had been like trying to hold a conversation with a cat. Who would have thought a man could be as old as he was, wield the power of empire, and still be so naïve as to think his heart would be explicable to an eighteen-year-old girl?

  And, of course, as he reached the plank stairway that led up, he found what he wished he had said. He should have said that he knew what courage it took to face sacrifice. He should have said that he knew her suffering was real, and that it was in a noble cause. It made them alike, the Emperor and the Empress-to-be, that they compromised in order to make the lives of uncountable strangers better.

  More than that, he should have encouraged her to speak, and he should have listened.

  An approving roar came from the deck above him. A reed organ hummed and sang, flute and drum following a heartbeat later. Otah hesitated and turned back. He would try again. At worst, the girl would think he was ridiculous, and she likely already did that.

  As he drew near the hold, he heard her weeping again, her voice straining at words he couldn’t make out. A man’s voice answered, not her father’s. Otah hesitated, then quietly stepped forward.

  In the gloom, Ana Dasin knelt, her arms around a young man. The boy, whoever he was, wore the work clothes of a sailor, but his arms were thin and his skin was as pale as the girl’s. He returned her embrace, his arms finding their way around her as if through long acquaintance; his tear-streaked face nuzzled her hair. Ana Dasin stroked the boy’s head, murmuring reassurances.

  Ah, Otah thought as he stepped back, unnoticed. That’s how it is.

  Above deck, he smiled and nodded at Issandra and pretended to turn his attention back to the music. He wondered how many other sacrifices he had demanded in order to remake the world according to his vision, how many other lovers would be parted to further his little scheme to save two empires. He would likely never know the full price of it. As if in answer, the candles guttered in the breeze, the reed organ took a mournful turn, and the sea through which they sailed grew darker.

  4

  The midday sun beat down on the lush green; gnats and flies filled the air. The river - not the Qiit proper but one of its tributaries - threaded its way south like a snake. Maati tied his mule under the wide leaves of a catalpa and squatted down on a likely-looking boulder. Pulling a pouch of raisins and seeds from his sleeve, he looked out over the summer. The wild trees, the rough wagon track he’d followed from the farmers’ low town to the northwest, the cultivated fields to the south.

  A cluster of small farms made a loose community here, raising goats and millet and, near the water, rice. The land between the cities was dotted with low communities like this one: the rural roots that fed the great, blossoming cities of the Khaiem. The accents were rougher here, the effete taint of a high court as foreign as another language. Men might be born, grow, love, marry, and die without ever traveling more than a day’s walk, birthing bed and grave marker no more distant than a thrown pebble.

  And one of those fields with its ripe green grasses had been plowed by the only other man in all the world who knew how to bind the andat. Maati took a mouthful of raisins and chewed slowly, thinking.

  Leaving the warehouse outside Utani had proven harder than he had expected. For over a decade, he had been rootless, moving from one city or town to another, living in the shadows. One more journey - and this one heading south into the summer cities - hadn’t seemed to signify anything more than a few weeks’ time and, of course, the errand itself. But somewhere in the years since the Galtic invasion, Maati had grown accustomed to traveling with companions, and as he and his swaybacked pack mule had made their slow way down the tracks and low-town roads, he had felt their absence.

  The world had changed in the years he had been walking through it. Having no one there to talk with forced his mind back in on itself, and the nature of the changes he saw were more disturbing than he’d thought they would be.

  Many were things he had expected. The cities and towns had grown quieter, undisturbed by the laughter and games of children. The people were older, grayer. The streets felt too big, like the robes of a once-hale man who had grown thin with illness or age. And the scars of the war itself - the burned towns already half-reclaimed by foxes and saplings, the bright green swath from Utani all the way down to ruined Nantani on the southern coast where once an army had passed - had faded, but they had not disappeared.

  The distrust of the foreign was driven deep into the flesh here. He had heard stories of Westlands women coming to marry among the low towns, thinking their wombs would make them of greater value here than in their own lands. Instead, they were recognized as a slower kind of invasion. Driven out with threats or stones. The men who had had the temerity to marry outside their own kind punished in ways to rival the prices paid by failed poets. Joints broken, drowned in night pots, necks snapped, and bodies thrown into creeks to drown in half a hand’s depth of water.

  And yet, the stories might only be stories. The more Maati traveled, the less certain he was.

  Twice, great belching steam wagons had passed him on the trail. The men at the controls had been locals, but the machines themselves were Galtic, remnants of the war. Once he had seen plumes of smoke and steam rising from the river itself, a flat barge sitting low to the water and driven by the same chuffing, tarnished bulb as the wagons. Even the fields below him now were cultivated in a pattern he had never seen before the Galts came. Perhaps Otah’s betrayal of the cities colored all of Maati’s perceptions now, but it felt as if the Galts were invading again, only slowly this time, burrowing under the ground and changing all they touched in small, insidious ways.

  Something tickled his arm. Maati plucked out the tick and cracked it between his thumbnails. He was wasting time. His feet ached from walking and his robe stuck to his back and legs, but the sooner this meeting happened, the sooner he would know where he stood. He emptied the last of the seeds into his hand, ate them, then put the pouch back in his sleeve and untied his mule.

  Seven years before, he and Cehmai had parted for the last time at a wayhouse three days’ walk northwest of the farms and the river and catalpa-shaded hill. It had not been an entirely friendly parting, but they had agreed to leave letters of their whereabouts at that house, should the need ever arise to find each other.

  Maati had found the place easily. In the intervening years, the kitchens had burned, and the two huge trees in the courtyard. The boy who stabled the horses had grown to be a man. The bricks that had been brown and yellow had been painted white and blue. And the box they had paid the keeper to hold for them had a letter in it, sewn and sealed, with ciphered directions that would lead to the farmhouse Cehmai had taken under his new false name. Jadit Noygu.

  Jadit Noygu, and his wife Sian.

  Maati took the letter out again, consulting the deciphered text he’d marked in between the lines written in Cehmai’s clean, clear hand. Forward down the track until he passed the ruin of an old mill, then the first east-turning pathway, and half a hand’s walk to a low mud-and-straw farmhouse with a brick cistern in front. Maati clucked at the mule and resumed his walk.

  He arrived in the heat of the afternoon; even the shade beneath the trees sweltered. Maati helped himself to a bowl of water from the cistern, and then another bowl for the mule. No one came out to greet him, but the shutters on the windows looked recently painted and the track that led around the side of the house was well-tended. There was no sense that the farm stood empty. Maati made his way toward the back.

  A small herd of goats bleated at him from their pen, the disturbing, clever eyes consider
ing him with as little joy as he had for them. The low sound of whistling came to him from a tall, narrow building set apart from both house and pen. A slaughterhouse.

  He stepped into the doorway, blocking the light. The air was thick with smoke to drive the flies away. The body of the sacrificed goat hung from a hook, buckets of blood and entrails at the butcher’s feet. The butcher turned. Her hands were crimson, her leather apron sodden with blood. A hooked knife flashed in her hand.

  She was not the only reason that Maati and Cehmai had parted company, but she would have been sufficient. Idaan Machi, outcast sister to the Emperor. As a girl no older than Vanjit was now, Idaan had plotted the slaughter of her own family in a bloody-minded attempt to win Machi for herself and her husband. Otah had come near to being executed for her crimes, Cehmai had been seduced and used by her, and Maati still had a thick scar on his belly where her assassin had tried to gut him. Otah, for reasons that passed beyond Maati’s understanding, had spared the murderess. Even less comprehensible, Cehmai had found her, and in their shared exile, they had once again become lovers. Only Maati still saw her for what she was.

  Age had thickened her. Her hair, tied back in a ferocious knot, was more gray than black. Her long, northern face showed curiosity, then surprise, then for less than a heartbeat something like contempt.

  ‘You’ll want to see him, then,’ said Otah’s exiled sister: the woman who had once set an assassin to kill Maati. Who had blamed Otah for the murders she and her ambitious lover had committed.

  She sank the gory knife into the dead animal’s side, setting the corpse swinging, and walked forward.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me where to find him,’ Maati said. ‘I can just as well . . .’

  ‘The dogs don’t know you,’ Idaan said. ‘Follow me.’

  Once Maati saw the dogs - five wide-jawed beasts as big as ponies, lazing in the rich dirt at the back of the house - he was glad she was there to guide him. She walked with a strong galt, leading him past the house, past a low barn where chickens scattered and complained, to a wide, low field of grass, its black soil under half an inch of water. At the far side of the field, a thin figure stood. He wore the canvas trousers of a workman and a rag the color of old blood around his head. By the time the man’s face had ceased to be a leather-colored blur, they were almost upon him. There were the bright, boyish eyes, the serious mouth. The sun had coarsened his skin and complicated the corners of his eyes. He smiled and took a pose of greeting appropriate for one master of their arcane trade to another. Idaan snorted, turned, and walked back toward the slaughterhouse, leaving them alone.

  ‘It’s a dry year,’ Cehmai said. ‘You wouldn’t know it, but it’s a dry year. The last two crops, I was afraid that they’d mold in the field. This one, I’m out here every other week, opening the ditch gates.’

  ‘I need your help, Cehmai-cha,’ Maati said.

  The man nodded, squinted out over the field as if judging something Maati couldn’t see, and sighed.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Cehmai said. ‘Come on, then. Walk with me.’

  The fields were not the largest Maati had seen, and reminded him of the gardens he’d worked as a child in the school. The dark soil of the river-fed lowlands was unlike the dry, pale soil of the high plains outside Pathai, but the scent of wet earth, the buzzing of small insects, the warmth of the high sun, and the subtle cool rising from the water all echoed moments of his childhood. Not all those memories were harsh. For a moment, he imagined slipping off his sandals and sinking his toes into the mud.

  As they walked, he told Cehmai all he’d been doing in the years since they’d met. The idea of a women’s grammar was one they had discussed before, so it required little more than to remind him of it. He outlined the progress he had made, the insights that had taken the project far enough to begin the experimental bindings. They paused under the broad shade of a catalpa and Cehmai shared a light meal of dried cherries and dense honey bread while Maati recounted his losses.

  He did not mention Eiah or the school. Not yet. Not until he knew better which way his old colleague’s opinions fell.

  Cehmai listened, nodding on occasion. He asked few questions, but those he did were to the point and well-considered. Maati felt himself falling into familiar habits of conversation. When, three hands later, Cehmai rose and led the way back to the river gate, it was almost as if the years had not passed. They were the only two people in the world who shared the knowledge of the andat and the Daikvo. They had suffered through the long, painful nights of the war, working to fashion a binding that might save them. They had lived through the long, bitter winter of their failure in the caves north of Machi. If it had not made them friends, they were at least intimates. Maati found himself outlining the binding of Returning-to-Natural-Equilibrium as Cehmai turned the rough iron mechanism that would slow the water.

  ‘That won’t work,’ Cehmai said with a grunt. ‘Logic’s wrong.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Maati said. ‘The girl’s trained as a physician. She says that healing flesh is mostly a matter of letting it go back into the shape it tends toward anyway. The body actually helps the process that way, and—’

  ‘But the logic, Maati-kvo,’ Cehmai said, using the honorific for a teacher as if by reflex. ‘It’s a paradox. The natural balance of the andat is not to exist, and she wants to bind something whose essence is the return to its natural state? It’s the same problem as Freedom-From-Bondage. She should reverse it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  The river gates creaked as they closed. The flow thinned and then stopped. Cehmai squatted, elbows resting on his knees, and pointed toward the water with his chin.

  ‘Water-Moving-Down didn’t only make water move down. She also stopped it. She withdrew her influence, ne? So she could make rain fall or she could keep it in the sky. She could stop a river from flowing as easily as making it run fast. Your physician can’t bind Returning-to-Balance or however she planned to phrase it. But if she bound something like Wounded or Scarred-by-Illness, she could withdraw that from someone. She negates the opposite, achieves the same effect, and has something that isn’t so slippery to hold.’

  Maati considered, then nodded.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘That’s very good. And it’s why I need you.’

  Cehmai smiled out at the waving green field, then glanced at the house and looked down.

  ‘You’ll stay the night?’ Cehmai said.

  Maati took a pose that accepted the invitation. He kept his trepidation at the thought of sleeping under Idaan’s roof out of his stance and expression. It would have been too much to hope for that Cehmai would drop everything in his life and take to the road at once. And still, Maati had hoped for it. . . .

  Inside the thick stone walls of the farmhouse, the air was cooler and rich with the scent of dog and old curry. The afternoon faded slowly, the sun lingering in the treetops to the west, its light thick and golden and softened by Maati’s failing eyes. Cicadas set up a choir. He sat on a low stone porch, watching everything and nothing.

  Maati had known quite well that Idaan and Cehmai had been lovers once, even while Idaan had been married to another man and arranging the deaths of her family. Cehmai’s betrayal of her had been the key that brought her down, that lifted Otah into the role of Khai Machi, and from there to Emperor. Cehmai had, in his fashion, created the world as it was with the decision to expose his lover’s crimes.

  Maati had thought the man mad for still harboring feelings for the woman; she was a murderer and a traitor to her city and her family. He’d thought him mad twice over for wanting to find her again after the andat had vanished from the world and the poets had fallen from grace. She would, he had expected, kill Cehmai on sight.

  And yet.

  As a boy, Maati had taken another man’s lover as his own, and Otah had forgiven it. In gratitude or something like it, Maati had devoted himself to proving Otah’s innocence and help
ed to bring Idaan’s crimes to light. Seedless, the first andat Maati had known, had betrayed both the poet Heshai who had bound him and the Galtic house that had backed the andat’s cruel scheme. And the woman - what had her name been? - whose child died. Seedless had betrayed everyone, but had asked only Maati to forgive him.

  The accrued weight of decades pressed upon him as the sun caught in the western branches. Dead children, war, betrayal, loss. And here, in this small nameless farm days’ travel from even a low town of notable size, two lovers who had become enemies were lovers again. It made him angry, and his anger made him sad.

  As the first stars appeared, pale ghost lights in the deepening blue before sunset, Idaan emerged from the house. With her leather gear gone, she looked less like a thing from a monster tale. She was a woman, only a woman. And growing old. It was only when she met his gaze that he felt a chill. He had seen her eyes set in a younger face, and the darkness in them had shifted, but it had not been unmade.

  ‘There’s food,’ she said.

  The table was small and somehow more frail than Maati had expected. Three bowls were set out, each with rice and strips of browned meat. Cehmai was also pouring out small measures of rice wine from a bone carafe. It was, Maati supposed, an acknowledgment of the occasion and likely as much extravagance as Cehmai’s resources would allow. Maati took a pose that offered thanks and requested permission to join the table. Cehmai responded with one of acceptance and welcome, but his movements were slow. Maati couldn’t tell if it was from exhaustion or thought. Idaan added neither word nor pose to the conversation; her expression was unreadable.