Seasons of War

by Abraham Daniel

  Midmorning saw a thinning of the clouds, a weak, pale blue forcing its way through the very top of the sky’s dome. The horses were in harness, the carts showing their billows of mixed smoke and steam, and everything was at the ready except Idaan and Ana. The armsmen waited, ready to leave. Otah and Danat went back.

  Otah found the pair in a large room. Ana, sitting on an ancient bench, had bent forward. Tears streaked the girl’s cheeks, her hair was a wild tangle, and her hands clasped until the fingertips were red and the knuckles white. Idaan stood beside her, arms crossed and eyes as bleak as murder. Before Otah could announce himself, Idaan saw him. His sister leaned close to the Galtic girl, murmured something, listened to the soft reply, and then marched to the doorway and Otah’s side.

  ‘Is there . . . is something the matter?’ Otah asked.

  ‘Of course there is. How long have you been traveling with that girl?’

  ‘Since Saraykeht,’ Otah said.

  ‘Have you noticed yet that she isn’t a man?’ Idaan’s voice was sharp as knives. ‘Tell the armsmen to stand down. Then bring me a bowl of snow.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Otah demanded. And then, ‘Is it her time of the month? Does she need medicine?’

  Idaan looked at him as if he had asked what season came after spring: pitying, incredulous, disgusted.

  ‘Get me some snow. Or, better, some ice. Tell your men that we’ll be ready in a hand and a half, and for all the gods there ever were, keep your son away from her until we can put her back together. The last thing she needs is to feel humiliated.’

  Otah took a pose that promised compliance, but then hesitated. Idaan’s dark eyes flashed with something that wasn’t anger. When she spoke, her voice was lower but no softer.

  ‘How have you spent a lifetime in the company of women and learned nothing?’ she asked, and, shaking her head, turned back to Ana.

  True to her word, a hand and a half later, Ana and Idaan emerged from the school as if nothing strange had happened. Ana’s outer robe was changed to a dark wool, and she leaned on Idaan’s arm as she stepped up to the bed of the steamcart. Danat moved forward, but Idaan’s scowl drove him back. The two women made their slow way to the shed, where Idaan closed the door behind them.

  The men steering the carts called out to one another, voices carrying like crows’ calls in the empty landscape. The carts stuttered and lurched, and turned to the east, tracking back along the path to the high road between ruined Nantani and Pathai, from which they’d come. Otah rode down the path he’d walked as a boy, searching his mind for some feeling of kinship with his past, but the world as it was demanded too much of him. He searched for some memory deep within him of the first time he’d walked away from the school, of leaving everything he’d known, rejected, behind him.

  His mind was knotted with questions of how to find the poet, how to persuade her to do as he asked, what Idaan had meant, what was wrong with Ana, whether the steamcarts had enough fuel, and a growing ache in his spine that came from too many days riding horses he didn’t know. There was no effort to spare for the past. Whatever he didn’t remember now of his original flight from the school he likely never would. The past would be lost, as it always was. Always. He didn’t bother trying to hold it.

  They made better time than he had expected, starting as late as they had. By the time they stopped for the night, the high road was behind them. The fastest route to Utani would be overland to the Qiit, then by boat up the river. Any hope they had of overtaking Maati and Eiah would come on the roads, where the steamcarts gave Otah an advantage. They would have to sleep in the open more than if they had kept to wider roads, and the rough terrain increased the possibility of the carts breaking or getting stuck. Even of a boiler bursting and killing anyone too near it. But Idaan’s voice spoke in Otah’s mind of the next day, and the next, and the next, so he pushed them and himself.

  Four of the armsmen rode ahead in the lowering gloom of night to scout out the next day’s path. The others prepared a simple meal of pork and rice, Ashti Beg sitting with them and trading jokes. Danat’s slow circling of their camp took the name of defense but seemed more to be avoiding the still-closed shed where Idaan and Ana rested. Otah sat alone near the steamcart’s kiln, reflecting that it was very much like his son to shift between noble dedication in the morning and childish pouting as night came on. He had been much the same as a young man, or imagined that he had.

  The door opened, Ana’s laughter spilling out into the night. Idaan led the girl forward, letting Ana keep a careful grip on her. Her dark eyes and Ana’s unfocused gray ones were both light and merry. Ana’s hair had been combed and braided in the style of children in the winter cities. In the dim moonlight, it made Ana seem hardly more than a girl.

  Idaan steered the girl to the cart’s front and helped her sit beside Otah. He coughed once to make sure the girl knew he was there, but she seemed unsurprised at the sound. Idaan placed a hand on the back of the girl’s neck.

  ‘I’ll go get some food,’ Idaan said. ‘My brother here should be able to keep you out of trouble for that long.’

  Ana took a pose that offered thanks. She did a creditable job of it. Idaan snorted, patted the girl’s neck, and lowered herself to the ground. Otah heard her footsteps crushing the snow as she walked away.

  ‘Ana-cha,’ Otah said. His voice was more tentative than he liked. ‘I hope you’re well?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I’m sorry I delayed things today. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Hardly worth thinking about,’ Otah said, relieved that her infirmity had passed. Grief, he suspected, over what the poet had done to her, to her family, her nation.

  ‘I misjudged you,’ Ana said. ‘I know it seems like everything we do is another round of apology, but I am sorry for it.’

  ‘It might be simpler to agree to forgive each other in advance,’ Otah said, and Ana laughed. It was a warmer sound than he’d expected. A tension he hadn’t known he felt lessened and he smiled into the glowing coals of the kiln. ‘It is fair to ask in what manner you judged me poorly?’

  ‘I thought you were cold. Hard. You have to understand, I grew up with monster stories about the Khaiem and the andat.’

  ‘I do,’ Otah said, sighing. ‘I look back, and I suspect that more than half of the problems between Galt and the Khaiem came from ignorance. Ignorance and power are a poor combination.’

  ‘Tell me . . .’ Ana said, and then stopped. Her brow furrowed, and in the dim light he thought she was blushing. Otah put his hand over hers. She shook her head, and then turned her milky eyes to him. ‘You’ve forgiven me in advance if this is too much to ask. Tell me about Danat’s mother.’

  ‘Kiyan?’ Otah said. ‘Well. What do you want to know about her?’

  ‘Anything. Just tell me,’ the girl said.

  Otah collected himself, and then began to pluck stories. The night they’d met. The night he’d told her that he was more than a simple courier and she’d thrown him out of her wayhouse. The ways she had helped to smooth things as he learned how to become first Khai Machi and then Emperor. He didn’t tell the hard stories. The conflict over Sinja’s feelings for her, and Otah’s poor response to them. The long fears they suffered together when Danat was young and weak in the lungs. Her death. Still, he didn’t think he kept all the sorrow from his voice.

  Idaan returned halfway through one story, four bowls in her hands like a teahouse servant juggling food for a full table. Otah took one without pausing, and Idaan squatted on the boards at Ana’s feet and pressed another into the girl’s hands. Otah went on with other little stories - Kiyan’s balancing the combined populations of Machi and Cetani with Balasar Gice’s crippled army in the wake of the war. Her refusal to allow servants to bathe her. The story of when the representative of Eddensea had mistaken something she’d said and thought she’d invited him to bed with her.

  Danat arrived out of the darkness, drawn by their voices. Idaan gave him the last bowl,
and he sat at Otah’s side, then shifted, then shifted again until his back rested against Ana’s shin. He added stories of his own. His mother’s sharp tongue and wayhouse keeper’s vocabulary, the songs she’d sung, all the scraps and moments that built up a boy’s memory of his mother. It was beautiful to listen to. It wasn’t something Otah himself had ever had.

  In the end, Ana let Danat lead her back to her shelter, leaving Otah and his sister alone by the black and cooling kiln. The armsmen had prepared sleeping tents for them, but Idaan seemed content to sit up drinking watered wine in the cold night air, and Otah found himself pleased enough to join her.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d care to explain to your poor idiot brother what happened today?’ he said at length.

  ‘You haven’t put it together?’ Idaan said. ‘This Vanjit creature has destroyed the only home Ana-cha had to go to. She’s had to look long and hard at what her life could be in the place she’s found herself, crippled in a foreign land, and it shook her.’

  ‘She’s in love with Danat?’

  ‘Of course she is,’ Idaan said. ‘It would have happened in half the time if you and her mother hadn’t insisted on it. I think that’s more frightening for her than the poet killing her nation.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

  ‘She’s spent her life watching her mother linked with her father,’ Idaan said. ‘There are only so many years you can soak in the regrets of others before you start to think that all the world’s that way.’

  ‘I had the impression that Farrer-cha loved his wife deeply,’ Otah said.

  ‘And I had it that there’s more than a husband to make a marriage,’ Idaan said. ‘It isn’t her mother she fears being, it’s Farrer-cha. She’s afraid of having her love merely tolerated. I spent most of the day talking about Cehmai. I told her that if she really wanted to know what spending a life with Danat would be like, she should see what sort of man you were. If she wanted to know how Danat would see her, to find how you saw your wife.’

  Otah laughed, and he thought he saw the darkness around Idaan shift as if she had smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to know her,’ Idaan said. ‘She sounds like a good woman.’

  ‘She was,’ Otah said. ‘I miss her.’

  ‘I know you do,’ Idaan said. ‘And now Ana-cha knows it too.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Otah said. ‘All the hopes I had for building Galt and the Khaiem together are in rags around my knees. We’re on a hunt for a girl who can ruin the world. What she’s done to Galt, she could do to us. Or to all the world, if she wanted it. How do we plan for a marriage between Danat and Ana when it’s just as likely that we’ll all be starving and blind by Candles Night?’

  ‘We’re all born to die, Most High,’ Idaan said, the title sounding like an endearment in her voice. ‘Every love ends in parting or death. Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we’d slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don’t. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk as if it might all go on forever.’

  ‘You make it sound like something you’ve done,’ Otah said.

  Idaan made a sound he couldn’t interpret, part grunt, part whimper.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked the darkness.

  The silence lasted for the length of five long breaths together. When she spoke, her voice was low and rich with embarrassment.

  ‘Lambs,’ she said.

  ‘Lambs?’

  ‘I used to wrap up the newborn lambs and keep them in the house. I even had Cehmai build them a crib that I could rock them in. After a few years, we had to switch to goats. I couldn’t slaughter the lambs after all that, could I? By the end, I think we had sixty.’

  Otah didn’t know whether to laugh or put his arms around the woman. The thought of the hard-hearted killer of his own father, his own brothers, cuddling a baby lamb was as absurd as it was sorrowful.

  ‘Is it like this for everyone?’ he asked softly. ‘Does every woman suffer this? Is the need to care for something that strong?’

  ‘Strong? When it strikes, yes. But everyone? No,’ Idaan said. ‘Of course not. As it happened, it struck me. I assume Maati’s students all feel strongly enough about it to risk their lives. But not every woman needs a child, and, thank the gods, the madness sometimes passes. It did for me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be a mother now? If it were possible, you wouldn’t choose to?’

  ‘Gods, no. I’d have been terrible at it. But I miss them,’ Idaan said. ‘I miss my little lambs. And that brings us back to Ana-cha, doesn’t it?’

  Otah took a pose that asked clarification.

  ‘Who am I,’ Idaan asked, ‘to say that falling in love is ridiculous just because it’s doomed?’

  22

  The weeks spent at the school had let Maati forget the ways in which the world broadened when he was traveling, and also the ways in which it narrowed when he was traveling with company. Living in the same walls, the same gardens, and surrounded as he had been by only a few deeply familiar faces had begun to grate on him before they left, but there had still been a way to find a moment to steal away. On the road, all of them together, the chances for private conversation were few and precious.

  Since the andat had spoken, he hadn’t found himself alone with Eiah, or at least not so clearly so that he would risk speaking. He didn’t want either of the Kaes or Irit to know what had happened. He was afraid that they would say something where Vanjit could hear them. He was afraid that Vanjit would find out what the andat had said and take some terrible action in her fear and in her own defense.

  He was afraid because he was afraid, and he was half-certain that Vanjit knew he was.

  They reached the lands surrounding the river sooner than he would have wanted; if the long days and nights on the road had kept him in close quarters with the others, the days ahead sharing a boat would be worse. He had to find a way to talk with Eiah before that, and the prospect of his lessening time made him anxious.

  Cold and snow hadn’t reached the river valley yet. It was as if their journey were moving backward in time. The leaves here clung to the trees, some of them with the gold and red and yellow still struggling to push out the last hints of green. As they approached the water, farms and low towns clustered closer and closer. The roads and paths began to cling to irrigation channels, and other travelers - most merely local, but some from the great cities - appeared more and more often. Maati sat at the front of the cart, his robes wrapped close around him, staring ahead and trying not to put himself anywhere that the andat could catch his eye.

  He was, in fact, so preoccupied with the politics and dangers within his small party that he didn’t see the Galts until his horses were almost upon them.

  Three men, none of them older than thirty summers, sat at the side of the road. They wore filthy robes that had once been red or orange. The tallest had a leather satchel over his shoulder. They had stepped a few feet off the path at the sound of hooves, and the tall grass made them seem like apparitions from a children’s epic. Their eyes were blue, the pupils gray. None of them had shaved in recent memory. Their gaunt faces turned to the road from habit. There was no expression in them, not even hunger. Maati didn’t realize he had slowed the horses until he heard Eiah call out from the cart’s bed behind him. At her word, he stopped. Large Kae and Irit, taking their turns on horseback, reined in. Vanjit and Small Kae moved to the side of the cart. Maati risked a glance at Clarity-of-Sight, but it was still and silent.

  ‘Who are you?’ Eiah demanded in their language. ‘What are your names?’

  The Galtic apparitions shifted, blinking their empty eyes in confusion. The tall one with the satchel recovered first.

  ‘I’m Jase Hanin,’ he said, speaking too loudly. ‘These are my brothers. It isn’t plague. Whatever took our eyes, miss, it wasn’t plague. We aren
’t a danger.’

  Eiah muttered something that Maati couldn’t make out, then shifted a crate in the back. When he turned to look, she had her physician’s satchel on her hip and was preparing to drop down to the road. Vanjit, seeing this as well, grabbed Eiah’s sleeve.

  ‘Don’t,’ Vanjit said. The word was as much command as plea.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Eiah said. Vanjit’s grip tightened on the cloth, and Maati saw their eyes lock.

  ‘Vanjit-cha,’ Maati said. ‘It’s all right. Let her go.’

  The poet looked back at him, anger in her gaze, but she did as he’d said. Eiah slipped down to the ground and walked toward the surprised Galts.

  ‘You’re a long way from anyplace,’ Eiah said.

  ‘We were out in the low towns,’ the tall one said. ‘Something happened. We’ve been trying to get back to Saraykeht. Our mother’s there, you see. Only it seems like we’re put on the wrong path or stolen from as often as we’re helped.’