Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  To his surprise, Kiyan chuckled low and mirthless.

  ‘That’s why he calls you Emperor, isn’t it,’ Kiyan said, and Otah took a pose of query. ‘The Khai Cetani. It’s from gratitude. If you’re the leader of the age, then it stops being his burden. Everything you’re suffering, you’ve saved him.’

  Otah looked at his hands, rubbing his palms together with a long, dry sound. His throat felt tight, and something deep in his chest ached with the suspicion that she was right. When he had asked the man to abandon his city and take the role of follower, he had also been asking for the right to choose whatever happened after. And the responsibility for it. For a moment, he was on the chill, gray field of the dead, and walking the cold, lifeless ruin where poets had once conspired to bind thoughts themselves. He remembered the Dai-kvo’s dead eyes, looking at nothing. The bodies, the Galts’ and his own both, and the voices calling him Emperor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kiyan said, and he could tell from her voice that she knew how inadequate the words were. He pulled his mind back to his soft-lit room, the scent of the candles, the touch of this long-beloved hand.

  ‘They’ve lived with it,’ he said. ‘Galt and Eddensea and the Westlands. It’s always been like this for them. War and battle. We’ll learn.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m looking forward to that.’

  Otah raised her hand to his lips. Gently, she caressed his cheek. He drew her close, folding his arms around her, feeling the warmth of her body against him, smelling the familiar scent of her hair, and willing the moment to not end. If only the future could never come.

  Kiyan sensed it in the tension of his spine, the fierceness of his embrace. Something. She did not speak, but only breathed, softening against him with every exhalation, and in time he felt himself beginning to relax with her. One of the lanterns, burning the last of its oil, dimmed, spat, and went out. The smoke touched the air with a smell of endings.

  ‘I missed you,’ she said. ‘Every night, I went to bed thinking you might not come back. I kept telling the children over and over that things would be fine, that you’d be home soon. And I was sick. I was sick with it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t. Don’t apologize. Don’t be sorry. Just know it. Just know we wanted you back. Not the Khai and not the Emperor. You. Remember that you are a good man and I love you.’

  He raised her chin and kissed her, wondering how she knew so well the way to fill him with joy without asking him to abandon his sorrow.

  ‘It’s Maati’s now,’ Otah whispered. ‘If he can bind Seedless before the spring thaw, this will all be over.’

  He felt an odd relaxation in her body, as if by saying the thing, he’d freed her from some secret effort she’d been making.

  ‘And if he can’t?’ she asked. ‘If it’s all going to fall apart anyway, can we run? You and me and the children? If I take them and go, are you going to come with us, or stay here and fight?’

  He kissed her again. She rested her hands against his shoulders, leaning into him. Otah didn’t answer, and he knew from the sound of her breath that she understood.

  ‘If we take the nuance of movement-away in nurat and the symbol set you worked up for the senses of continuance,’ Maati said, ‘I think then we’ll have something we can work with.’

  Cehmai’s eyes were bloodshot, his hair wild from another long evening of combing frustrated fingers through it. Around them, the lamplight shone on a bedlam of paper. The library would have seemed a rat’s nest to any but the two of them: books laid open; scrolls unfurled and weighted by other scrolls which were themselves unfurled; loose pages of a dozen codices stacked together. The mass of information and inference, grammar and poetry and history would have been overwhelming, Maati thought, to anyone who didn’t know how profoundly little it was. Cehmai ran his fingertips down the notes Maati had made and shook his head.

  ‘It’s still the same,’ he said. ‘Nurat is modified by the fourth case of adat, and then it’s exactly the same logical structure as the one Heshai used.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Maati said, slapping the table with an open palm. ‘It’s different.’

  Cehmai took a long, slow breath, raising his hands palms-out. It wasn’t a formal gesture, but Maati understood it all the same. They were both worn raw. He sat back in his chair, feeling the knots in his back and neck. The brazier in the corner made the wide room smell warm without seeming to actually heat it.

  ‘Look,’ Maati said. ‘Let’s put it aside for the day. We need to move the library underground soon anyway. It’s going to be too cold up here to do more than watch our fingers turn blue.’

  Cehmai nodded, then looked around at the disarray. Maati could read the despair in his face.

  ‘I’ll put it back together,’ Maati said. ‘Then a dozen slaves with strong backs, and I’ll put it all together in the winter quarters in two days’ time.’

  ‘I should move the poet’s house down too,’ Cehmai said. ‘I feel like I haven’t been there in weeks.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. The place seems too big without Stone-Made-Soft anyway. Too quiet. It reminds me of . . . well, of everything.’

  Maati rose, his knees aching. His feet tingled with the pins and needles that long motionlessness brought him these days. He clapped his hand on Cehmai’s shoulder.

  ‘Meet me in three days,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the books in order. We’ll start again fresh.’

  Cehmai took a pose of agreement, but he looked exhausted. Worn thin. The younger poet began snuffing the lanterns as Maati walked back toward his apartments placing his feet carefully until normal feeling returned to them. Stepping the wrong way and breaking his ankle would be just the thing to make the winter even more miserable than it already promised to be.

  The rooms in which he spent his summers were already bare. The fire grate was empty of everything but old soot. The tapestries were gone, the couches, the tables, the cabinets. Everything had been moved to the lower city. Winter ate the middle of things in the North. The snows would come soon, blocking the doors and windows. The second-story snow doors would open out for anyone who needed to travel into the world. Below, in the warmth of the ground, all the citizens of Machi, and now of Cetani too, would huddle and talk and fight and sing and play at tiles and stones until winter lost its grip and the snows turned to meltwater and washed the black-cobbled streets. Only the metalworkers remained at the ground level, the green copper roofs of the forges free of snow and ice, the plumes of coal smoke rising almost as high as the towers all through the winter.

  At least all through this winter. This one last winter before the Galts came and butchered them all.

  If only there was some other way to phrase the idea of removing. Seedless’s true name would have been better translated as Removing-the-Part-That-Continues. Continuity was a fairly simple problem. The old grammars had several ways to conceptualize continuance. It was removal . . .

  Maati reached the thin red doorway at the back of the rooms, and started down the stairs. It was dark as night. Darker. He would need to talk with the palace servant masters about seeing that lanterns were lit here. With as many people as there were filling every available niche in the tunnels and, from what he heard, the mines as well, it seemed unlikely that no one could be spared to be sure there was a little light on his path.

  Or they might be rationing lamp oil already. There was a depressing thought.

  He descended, one hand on the smooth, cool stone of the wall to keep him steady. He moved slowly because going quickly would get him winded, and it was dark enough that he wanted to stay sure of his footing. His mind was only half concerned with walking anyway. Cehmai was right. The logical structure was the same whether he used nurat or something else. So that was another dead end.

  Removal.

  It was a concept of relative motion. Taking something enclosed and producing a distance between it and its - now previous - enclosure. Plucking out a seed, or a
baby. A gemstone from its setting. A man from his bed or his home. Removing. Heshai’s work in framing Seedless was so elegant, so simple, that it seemed inevitable. That was the curse of second and third bindings of the same andat. Finding something equally graceful, but utterly different. It made his jaw ache just thinking about it.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs and the wide upper chamber of his winter quarters. The night candle burning there was hardly to its first quarter mark, which given the lengthening nights of autumn meant the city beneath him would likely still be awake and active. Rest for him, though. His day had been full already. He took up the candle, passed down a short, close corridor, and reached the second stairway, which led down to the bedchambers.

  The air was noticeably warmer here than in the library - in part from the heat of ten thousand people in the earth below him rising up, and in part from its stillness. Servants had prepared his bed with blankets and furs. A light meal of rice and spiced pork in one of the bowls of hand-thick iron that could hold the heat for the better part of a day waited on his writing table. Maati sat, ate slowly, not tasting the food, drinking rice wine as if it were water. Even as he sucked the pepper sauce off the last bit of pork, his feet and fingers were still cold. Removing-the-Chill-From-the-Old-Man’s-Flesh. There was an andat.

  Maati closed the lid of the great iron bowl, slipped out of his robes, hefted himself into his bed, and willed himself to sleep. For a time, he lay watching the candle burn, smelling the wax as it melted and dripped, and could not get comfortable. He couldn’t get the cold out of his toes and knuckles, couldn’t make his mind stop moving. He couldn’t avoid the growing fear that when he closed his eyes, the nightmares that had begun plaguing him would return.

  The images his mind held when his eyes were closed had become more violent, more anxious. Fathers weeping for sons who were also sacks of bloodied grain and dead mice; long, sleepless hours spent searching through bodies in a charnel house hoping to find his child still living and only finding Otah’s children again and again and again; the recurring dream of a tunnel that led down past the city, deeper than the mines, and into the earth until the stone itself grew fleshy and angry and bled. And the cry that woke him - a man’s voice shouting from a great distance that demanded to know whose child this was. Whose child?

  With this mind, Maati thought as he watched the single flame of the night candle, I’m intended to bind an andat. It’s like driving nails with rotten meat.

  The night candle had burned through three of its smallest marks when he abandoned his bed, pulled on his robes, and left his private chambers for the wide, arched galleries of the tunnels below the palaces. The bathhouses were at least warm. If he wasn’t to sleep, he could at least be miserable in comfort.

  The public spaces were surprisingly full with men and women in the glorious robes of the utkhaiem. It made sense, he supposed. Cetani had not only brought its merchants and craftsmen. There would be two courts living under the palaces this winter. And so twice the social intrigue. Who precisely was sleeping with whom would be even more complex, and even the threat of their death at the hands of a Galtic army wouldn’t stop the courtiers playing for rank.

  As he passed, the utkhaiem took poses of respect and welcome, the servants and slaves ones of abasement. Maati repressed a swelling hatred of all of them. It wasn’t their fault, after all, that he had to save them. And himself. And Liat and Nayiit and Otah and all the people he had ever known, all the cities he had ever seen. His world, and everything in it.

  It was the Galts who deserved his anger. And they would feel it, by all the gods. Failed crops, gelded men, and barren women until they rebuilt everything they’d broken and given back everything they took. If he could only think of a better way to say removing.

  He brooded his way along the dim galleries and through the great chambers until the air began to thicken with the first presentiment of steam, and the prospect of hot water, and of finally warming his chilled feet, intruded on him.

  He found his way into the men’s changing rooms, where he shrugged off his robes and boots and let the servant offer him a bowl of clear, cold water to drink before he went into the public baths and sweated it all out again. When he passed through the inner door, Maati shivered at the warmth. Voices filled the dim, gray space - conversations between people made invisible by the steam rising from the water. There had been a time, Maati considered as he stepped gingerly down the submerged stairs and waded toward a low bench, when the idea of strangers wandering naked in the baths - men and women together - had held some erotic frisson. Truth often disappoints.

  He lowered himself to the thick, water-logged wood of the bench, the hot water rising past his belly, past his chest, until the small warm waves danced against the hollow of his throat. At last, his feet felt warm, and he leaned back against the warm stone, sighing with a purely physical contentment. He resolved to move down toward the warmer end before he went back to his rooms. If he boiled himself thoroughly enough, he might even carry the heat back to his bed.

  Across the bath, hidden in the mist, two men talked of grain supplies and how best to address the problem of rats. Far away toward the hotter end of the bath, someone shouted, and there was a sound of splashing. Children, Maati supposed, and then fell into a long, gnawing plan for how best to move the volumes in the library. His concentration was so profound he didn’t notice when the children approached.

  ‘Uncle Maati?’

  Eiah was practically at his side, crouched low in the water to preserve her modesty. A gaggle of children of the utkhaiem behind her at what Maati supposed must be a respectful distance. He raised hands from the water and took a pose of greeting, somewhat cramped by being held high enough to be seen.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in ages, Eiah-kya,’ he said. ‘What’s been keeping you?’

  The girl shrugged, sending ripples.

  ‘There are a lot of new people from Cetani,’ she said. ‘There’s a whole other Radaani family here now. And I’ve been studying with Loya-cha about how to fix broken bones. And . . . and Mama-kya said you were busy and that I shouldn’t bother you.’

  ‘You should always bother me,’ Maati said with a grin.

  ‘Is it going well?’

  ‘It’s a complicated thing,’ Maati said. ‘But it’s a long wait until spring. We’ll have time.’

  ‘Complicated’s hard,’ Eiah said. ‘Loya-cha says it’s always easy to fix things when there’s only one thing wrong. It’s when there’s two or three things at once that it’s hardest.’

  ‘Smart man, Loya-cha,’ Maati said.

  Eiah shrugged again.

  ‘He’s a servant,’ she said. ‘If you can’t recapture Seedless, we can’t beat the Galts, can we?’

  ‘Your father did once,’ Maati said. ‘He’s a very clever man.’

  ‘But we might not.’

  ‘We might not,’ Maati allowed.

  Eiah nodded to herself, her forehead crinkling as she came to some decision. When she spoke, her voice had a seriousness that seemed out of place from a girl still so young, hardly half-grown.

  ‘If we’re all going to die, I wanted you to know that I think you were a very good father to Nayiit-cha.’

  Maati almost coughed from surprise, and then he understood. She knew. A warm sorrow filled him. She knew that Nayiit was Otah’s son. That Maati loved the boy. That it mattered to him deeply that Nayiit love him back. And the worst of it, she knew that he hadn’t been a very good father.

  ‘You’re kind, love,’ he said, his voice thick.

  She nodded sharply, embarrassed, perhaps, to have completed her task. One of her companions yelped and dropped under the water only to come back up spitting and shaking his head. Eiah turned toward them.

  ‘Leave him be!’ Eiah shouted, then turned to Maati with an apologetic pose. He smiled and waved her away. She went back to her group with the squared shoulders of an overseer facing a recalcitrant band of laborers. Maati let his smile fade.
<
br />   A good father to Nayiit. And to be told so by Otah’s daughter. Perhaps binding the andat wasn’t so complex after all. Not when compared with other things. Fathers and sons, lovers and mother and daughters. And the war. Saraykeht and Seedless. All of it touched one edge against another, like tilework. None of it existed alone. And how could anyone expect him to solve the thing when half of everything seemed to be broken, and half of what was broken was still beautiful.

  The physician was right. It would be easy to fix one thing, if there were only one thing wrong. But there were so many ways to break something so delicate and so complex. Even the act of making one thing right seemed destined to undo something else. And he was too tired and too confused to say whether one way of being wounded was better than another.

  There were so many ways to be wrong.

  There were so many ways to break things.

  Maati felt the thought fall into place as if it were something physical. It was the moment he was supposed to shout, to stand up and wave his hands about, possessed by insight as if by a demon. But instead, he sat with it quietly, as if it was a gem only he of all mankind had ever seen.