Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  There was nothing to be gained. He knew all the reasons for all the choices he had made, and he could as easily explain them to a mine dog as to this proud young man who’d traveled weeks for the privilege of taking him to task. Otah sighed, turned, and took a deeply formal pose of apology.

  ‘I have distracted you from your task, Athai-cha. That was not my intention. What was it again the Dai-kvo wished of me?’

  The envoy pressed his lips bloodless. They both knew the answer to the question, but Otah’s feigned ignorance would force him to restate it. And the simple fact that Otah’s bed habits were not mentioned would make his point for him. Etiquette was a terrible game.

  ‘The militia you have formed,’ the envoy said. ‘The Dai-kvo would know your intention in creating it.’

  ‘I intend to send it to the Westlands. I intend it to take contracts with whatever forces there are acting in the best interests of all the cities of the Khaiem. I will be pleased to draft a letter saying so.’

  Otah smiled. The young poet’s eyes flickered. As insults went, this was mild enough. Eventually, the poet’s hands rose in a pose of gratitude.

  ‘There is one other thing, Most High,’ the envoy said. ‘If you take any aggressive act against the interests of another of the Khaiem, the Dai-kvo will recall Cehmai and Stone-Made-Soft. If you take arms against them, he will allow the Khaiem to use their poets against you and your city.’

  ‘Yes,’ Otah said. ‘I understood that when I heard you’d come. I am not acting against the Khaiem, but thank you for your time, Athai-cha. I will have a letter sewn and sealed for you by morning.’

  After the envoy had left, Otah sank into a chair and pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. Around him, the palace was quiet. He counted fifty breaths, then rose again, closed and latched the door, and turned back to the apparently empty room.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, and one of the panels in the corner swung open, exposing a tiny hidden chamber brilliantly designed for eavesdropping.

  The man who sat in the listener’s chair seemed both at ease and out of place. At ease because it was Sinja’s nature to take the world lightly, and out of place because his suntanned skin and rough, stained leathers made him seem like a gardener on a chair of deep red velvet and silver pins fit for the head of a merchant house or a member of the utkhaiem. He rose and closed the panel behind him.

  ‘He seems a decent man,’ Sinja said. ‘I wouldn’t want him on my side of a fight, though. Overconfident.’

  ‘I’m hoping it won’t come to that,’ Otah said.

  ‘For a man who’s convinced the world he’s bent on war, you’re a bit squeamish about violence.’

  Otah chuckled.

  ‘I think sending the Dai-kvo his messenger’s head might not be the most convincing argument for my commitment to peace,’ he said.

  ‘Excellent point,’ Sinja agreed as he poured himself a bowl of wine. ‘But then you are training men to fight. It’s a hard thing to preach peace and stability and also pay men to think what’s the best way to disembowel someone with a spear.’

  ‘I know it,’ Otah said, his voice dark as wet slate. ‘Gods. You’d think having total power over a city would give you more options, wouldn’t you?’

  Otah sipped the wine. It was rich and astringent and fragrant of late summer, and it swirled in the bowl like a dark river. He felt old. Fourteen years he’d spent trying to be what Machi needed him to be - steward, manager, ruler, half-god, fuel for the gossip and backbiting of the court. Most of the time, he did well enough, but then something like this would happen, and he would be sure again that the work was beyond him.

  ‘You could disband it,’ Sinja said. ‘It’s not as though you need the extra trade.’

  ‘It’s not about getting more silver,’ Otah said.

  ‘Then what’s it about? You aren’t actually planning to invade Cetani, are you? Because I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  Otah coughed out a laugh.

  ‘It’s about being ready,’ he said.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Every generation finds it harder to bind fresh andat. Every one that slips away becomes more difficult to capture. It can’t go on forever. There will come a time that the poets fail, and we have to rely on something else.’

  ‘So,’ Sinja said. ‘You’re starting a militia so that someday, generations from now, when some Dai-kvo that hasn’t been born yet doesn’t manage to keep up to the standards of his forebears—’

  ‘There will also be generations of soldiers ready to keep the cities safe.’

  Sinja scratched his belly and nodded.

  ‘You think I’m wrong?’

  ‘Yes. I think you’re wrong,’ Sinja said. ‘I think you saw Seedless escape. I think you saw Saraykeht suffer the loss. You know that the Galts have ambitions, and that they’ve put their hands into the affairs of the Khaiem more than once.’

  ‘That doesn’t make me wrong,’ Otah said, unable to keep the sudden anger from his voice. So many years had passed, and the memory of Saraykeht had not dimmed. ‘You weren’t there, Sinja-cha. You don’t know how bad it was. That’s mine. And if it lets me see farther than the Dai-kvo or the Khaiem—’

  ‘It’s possible to look at the horizon so hard you trip over your feet,’ Sinja said, unfazed by Otah’s heat. ‘You aren’t responsible for everything under the sky.’

  But I am responsible for that, Otah thought. He had never confessed his role in the fall of Saraykeht to Sinja, never told the story of the time he had killed a helpless man, of sparing an enemy and saving a friend. The danger and complexity and sorrow of that time had never entirely left him, but he could not call it regret.

  ‘You want to keep the future safe,’ Sinja said, breaking the silence, ‘and I respect that. But you can’t do it by shitting on the table right now. Alienating the Dai-kvo gains you nothing.’

  ‘What would you do, Sinja? If you were in my place, what would you do?’

  ‘Take as much gold as I could put on a fast cart, and live out my life in a beach hut on Bakta. But then I’m not particularly reliable.’ He drained his bowl and put it down on the table, porcelain clicking softly on lacquered wood. ‘What you should do is send us west.’

  ‘But the men aren’t ready—’

  ‘They’re near enough. Without real experience, these poor bastards would protect you from a real army about as well as sending out all the dancing girls you could find. And now that I’ve said it, girls might even slow them down longer.’

  Otah coughed a mirthless laugh. Sinja leaned forward, his eyes calm and steady.

  ‘Put us in the Westlands as a mercenary company,’ he said. ‘It gives real weight to it when you tell the Dai-kvo that you’re just looking for another way to make money if we’re already walking away from our neighboring cities. The men will get experience; I’ll be able to make contacts with other mercenaries, maybe even strike up alliances with some of the Wardens. You can even found your military tradition. But besides that, there are certain problems with training and arming men, and then not giving them any outlet.’

  Otah looked up, meeting Sinja’s grim expression.

  ‘More trouble?’ Otah asked.

  ‘I’ve whipped the men involved and paid reparations,’ Sinja said, ‘but if the Dai-kvo doesn’t like you putting together a militia, the fine people of Machi are getting impatient with having them. We’re paying them to play at soldiers while everybody else’s taxes buy their food and clothes.’

  Otah took a simple pose that acknowledged what Sinja said as truth.

  ‘Where would you take them?’

  ‘Annaster and Notting were on the edge of fighting last autumn. Something about the Warden of Annaster’s son getting killed in a hunt. It’s a long way south, but we’re a small enough group to travel fast, and the passes cleared early this year. Even if nothing comes of it, there’ll be keeps down there that want a garrison.’

  ‘How long before you could go?’

  ‘I
can have the men ready in two days if you’ll send food carts out after us. A week if I have to stay to make the arrangements for the supplies.’

  Otah looked into Sinja’s eyes. The years had whitened Sinja’s temples but had made him no easier to read.

  ‘That seems fast,’ Otah said.

  ‘It’s already under way,’ Sinja replied, then seeing Otah’s reaction, shrugged. ‘It seemed likely.’

  ‘Two days, then,’ Otah said. Sinja smiled, stood, took a rough pose that accepted the order, and turned to go. As he lifted the door’s latch, Otah spoke again. ‘Try not to get killed. Kiyan would take it amiss if I sent you off to die.’

  The captain paused in the open door. What had happened between Kiyan and Sinja - the Khai Machi’s first and only wife and the captain of his private armsmen - had found its resolution on a snow-covered field ten years before. Sinja had done as Kiyan had asked him and the issue had ended there. Otah found that the anger and feelings of betrayal had thinned with time, leaving him more embarrassed than wrathful. That they were two men who loved the same woman was understood and unspoken. It wasn’t comfortable ground for either of them.

  ‘I’ll keep breathing, Otah-cha. You do the same.’

  The door closed softly behind him, and Otah took another sip of wine. It was fewer than a dozen breaths before a quiet scratching came at the door. Rising and straightening the folds of his robes, Otah prepared himself for the next appearance, the next performance in his ongoing, unending mummer’s show. He pressed down a twinge of envy for Sinja and the men who would be slogging through cold mud and dirty snow. He told himself the journey only looked liberating to someone who was staying near a fire grate. He adopted a somber expression, held his body with the rigid grace expected of him, and called out for the servant to enter.

  There was a meeting to take with House Daikani over a new mine they were proposing in the South. Mikah Radaani had also put a petition with the Master of Tides to schedule a meeting with the Khai Machi to discuss the prospect of resurrecting the summer fair in Amnat-Tan. And there was the letter to the Dai-kvo to compose, and a ceremony at the temple at moonrise at which his presence was required, and so on through the day and into the night. Otah listened patiently to the list of duties and obligations and tried not to feel haunted by the thought that sending the guard away had been the wrong thing to do.

  Eiah took a bite of the almond cake, wiping honey from her mouth with the back of her hand, and Maati was amazed again by how tall she’d grown. He still thought of her as hardly standing high as his knees, and here she was - thin as a stick and awkward, but tall as her mother. She’d even taken to wearing a woman’s jewelry - necklace of gold and silver, armbands of lacework silver and gems, and rings on half her fingers. She still looked like a girl playing dress-up in her mother’s things, but even that would pass soon.

  ‘And how did he die?’ she asked.

  ‘I never said he did,’ Maati said.

  Eiah’s lips bent in a frown. Her dark eyes narrowed.

  ‘You don’t tell stories where they live, Uncle Maati. You like the dead ones.’

  Maati chuckled. It was a fair enough criticism, and her exasperation was as amusing as her interest. Since she’d been old enough to read, Eiah had haunted the library of Machi, poking here and there, reading and being frustrated. And now that she’d reached her fourteenth summer, the time had come for her to turn to matters of court. She was the only daughter of the Khai Machi, and as such, a rare chance for a marriage alliance. She would be the most valued property in the city, and worse for her and her parents, she was more than clever enough to know it. Her time in the library had taken on a tone of defiance, but it was never leveled at Maati, so it never bothered him. In fact, he found it rather delightful.

  ‘Well,’ he said, settling his paunch more comfortably in the library’s deep silk-covered chair, ‘as it happens, his binding did fail. It was tragic. He started screaming, and didn’t stop for hours. He stopped when he died, of course, and when they examined him afterwards, they found slivers of glass all through his blood.’

  ‘They cut him open?’

  ‘Of course,’ Maati said.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ she said. Then a moment later, ‘If someone died here, could I help do it?’

  ‘No one’s likely to try a binding here, Eiah-kya. Only poets who’ve trained for years with the Dai-kvo are allowed to make the attempt, and even then they’re under strict supervision. Holding the andat is dangerous work, and not just if it fails.’

  ‘They should let girls do it too,’ she said. ‘I want to go to the school and train to be a poet.’

  ‘But then you wouldn’t be your father’s daughter anymore. If the Dai-kvo didn’t choose you, you’d be one of the branded, and they’d turn you out into the world to make whatever way you could without anyone to help you.’

  ‘That’s not true. Father was at the school, and he didn’t have to take the brand. If the Dai-kvo didn’t pick me, I wouldn’t take it either. I’d just come back here and live alone like you do.’

  ‘But then wouldn’t you and Danat have to fight?’

  ‘No,’ Eiah said, taking a pose appropriate to a tutor offering correction. ‘Girls can’t be Khai, so Danat wouldn’t have to fight me for the chair.’

  ‘But if you’re going to have women be poets, why not Khaiem too?’

  ‘Because who’d want to be Khai?’ she asked and took another piece of cake from the tray on the table between them.

  The library stretched out around them - chamber after chamber of scrolls and books and codices that were Maati’s private domain. The air was rich with the scent of old leather and dust and the pungent herbs he used to keep the mice and insects away. Baarath, the chief librarian and Maati’s best friend here in the far, cold North, had kept it before him. Often when Maati arrived in the morning or remained long after dark, puzzling over some piece of ancient text or obscure reference, he would look up, half-wondering where the annoying, fat, boisterous, petty little man had gotten to, and then he would remember.

  The fever had taken dozens of people that year. Winter always changed the city, the cold driving them deep into the tunnels and hidden chambers below Machi. For months they lived by firelight and in darkness. By midwinter, the air itself could seem thick and stifling. And illnesses spread easily in the dark and close, and Baraath had grown ill and died, one man among many. Now he was only memory and ash. Maati was the master of the library, appointed by his old friend and enemy and companion Otah Machi. The Khai Machi, husband of Kiyan, and father to this almost-woman Eiah who shared his almond cakes, and to her brother Danat. And, perhaps, to one other.

  ‘Maati-kya? Are you okay?’

  ‘I was just wondering how your brother was,’ he said.

  ‘Better. He’s hardly coughing at all anymore. Everyone’s saying he has weak lungs, but I was just as sick when I was young, and I’m just fine.’

  ‘People tell stories,’ Maati said. ‘It keeps them amused, I suppose.’

  ‘What would happen if Danat died?’

  ‘Your father would be expected to take a new, younger wife and produce a son to take his place. More than one, if he could. That’s part of why the utkhaiem are so worried about Danat. If he died and no brothers were forthcoming, it would be bad for the city. All the most powerful houses would start fighting over who would be the new Khai. People would probably be killed.’

  ‘Well, Danat won’t die,’ Eiah said. ‘So it doesn’t matter. Did you know him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My real uncle. Danat. The one Danat’s named for?’

  ‘No,’ Maati said. ‘Not really. I met him once.’

  ‘Did you like him?’

  Maati tried to remember what it had been like, all those years ago. The Dai-kvo had summoned him. That had been the old Dai-kvo - Tahi-kvo. He’d never met the new one. Tahi-kvo had brought him to meet the two men, and set him the task that had ended with Otah on the chair and himself liv
ing in the court of Machi. It had been a different lifetime.

  ‘I don’t recall liking him or disliking him,’ Maati said. ‘He was just a man I’d met.’

  Eiah sighed impatiently.

  ‘Tell me about another one,’ she said.

  ‘Well. There was a poet in the First Empire before people understood that andat were harder and harder to capture each time they escaped. He tried to bind Softness with the same binding another poet had used a generation before. Of course it didn’t work.’

  ‘Because a new binding has to be different,’ Eiah said.