Authors: Daniel Abraham
Seasons of War (69 page)
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 helped 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.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Cehmai said. ‘Your plan. I have a few questions about it.’
‘Anything,’ Maati said.
‘Would your scheme to undo what Sterile did include restoring the Galts?’
Maati took a strip of the meat from his bowl. The flesh was pleasantly rich and well-salted. He chewed slowly to give himself time to think, but his hesitation was answer enough.
‘I don’t think I can join you,’ Cehmai said. ‘This battle I’ve . . . I’ve lost my taste for it.’
Maati felt his own frown like an ache.
‘Reconsider,’ he said, but Cehmai shook his head.
‘I’ve given too much of my life to the world already. I’d like to keep the rest of my years for myself. No more great struggles, no more cities or nations or worlds resting on what I do or don’t do. What I have here is enough.’
Maati wiped his fingers on his sleeve and took a pose of query that bordered on accusation. Cehmai’s eyes narrowed.
‘Enough for what?’ Maati demanded. ‘Enough for the pair of you? It’ll be more than enough before many years have passed. It’ll be too much. How much do you work in a day? Raising your own food, tending your crop and your animals, making food and washing your robes and gathering wood for your fires? Does it give you any time at all to think? To rest?’
‘It isn’t as easy as living in the courts, that’s truth,’ Cehmai said. His smile was the same as ever, even set in this worn face. ‘There are nights it would be good to leave the washing to a servant.’
‘It won’t get easier,’ Maati said. ‘You’ll get older. Both of you. The work will stay just as difficult, and you’ll get tired faster. When you take sick, you’ll recover slowly. One or the other of you will strain something or break an old bone or catch fever, and your children won’t be there to care for you. The next farm over? His children won’t be there for you either. Or the next. Or the next.’
‘He’s not wrong, love,’ Idaan said. Maati blinked. Of all the people in the world, Idaan was the last he’d expected support from.
‘I know all that,’ Cehmai said. ‘It doesn’t mean that I should go back to being a poet.’
‘What else would you do?’ Maati said. ‘Sell the land rights? Who is there to buy them? Take up some new trade? Who will there be to teach you? Binding the andat is the thing you’ve trained for. Your mind is built for the work. These girls . . . you should see them. The dedication, the engagement, the drive. If this thing can be done, they will do it. We can remake the world.’
‘We’ve done that once already,’ Cehmai said. ‘It didn’t go well.’
‘We didn’t have time. The Galts were at our door. We did what we had to do. And now we can correct our errors.’
‘Does my brother know about this?’ Idaan asked.
‘He refused me,’ Maati said.
‘Is that why you hate him?’
The air around the table seemed to clench. Maati stared at the woman. Idaan met his gaze with a level calm.
‘He is selling us,’ Maati said. ‘He is turning away from a generation of women whose injuries are as much his fault as ours.’
‘And is that why you hate him?’ Idaan asked again. ‘You can’t tell me that you don’t, Maati-cha. I know quite a lot about hatred.’
He let my son die to save his, Maati thought but did not say. There were a thousand arguments against the statement: Otah hadn’t been there when Nayiit died; it wasn’t Danat’s fault that his protector failed to fend off the soldiers; Nayiit wasn’t truly his son. He knew them all, and that none of them mattered. Nayiit had died, Maati had been sent into the wilderness, and Otah had risen like a star in the sky.
‘What I feel toward your brother doesn’t change what needs to be done,’ Maati said, ‘or the help I’ll need to do it.’
‘Who’s backing you?’ Idaan said.
Maati felt a flash of surprise and even fear. An image of Eiah flickered in his mind and was banished.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Someone’s feeding you,’ she said. ‘Someone’s hiding you and your students. If the word got out that you’d been found, half the world would send armsmen to cut you down for fear you’d do exactly what you’re doing now. And half of the rest would kick you to death for petty vengeance. If it’s not Otah protecting you, who is it? One of the high families of the utkhaiem? A trading house? Who?’
‘I have strong backing,’ Maati said. ‘But I won’t tell you more than that.’
‘Every danger you face, my husband faces too,’ Idaan said. ‘If you want him to take your risks, you have to tell him what protection you can offer.’
‘I have an ear in the palaces anytime I need it. Otah won’t be able to mount any kind of action against me without warning finding me. You can trust to that.’
‘You have to tell us more,’ Idaan said.
‘He doesn’t,’ Cehmai said, sharply. ‘He doesn’t have to offer me protection because I’m not going to do the work. I’m done, love. I’m finished. I want a few more years with you and a quiet death, and I’ll be quite pleased with that.’
‘The world needs you,’ Maati said.
‘It doesn’t,’ Cehmai said. ‘You’ve come a long way, Maati-kvo, and I’ve disappointed you. I’m sorry for that, but you have my answer. I used to be a poet, but I’m not anymore. I can reconsider as long as we both keep breathing, and we’ll come to the same place.’
‘We can’t stay on here,’ Idaan said. Her voice was soft. ‘I’ve loved it here too. This place, these years . . . we’ve been lucky to have them. But Maati-cha’s right. This season, and perhaps five or ten after it, we’ll make do. But eventually the work will pass us. We’re not getting younger, and we can’t hire on hands to help us. There aren’t any.’
‘Then we’ll leave,’ Cehmai said. ‘We’ll do something else, only not that.’
‘Why not?’ Maati asked.
‘Because I don’t want to kill any more people,’ Cehmai said. ‘Not the girls you’re encouraging to try this, not the foreigners who would try to stop us, not whatever army came in the next autumn’s war.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Maati said.
‘It does,’ Cehmai said. ‘We held the power of gods, and the world envied us and turned against us, and they always will again. I can’t say I think much of where we stand now, but I remember what happened to bring us here, and I don’t see how making poets of women instead of men will make a world any different or better than the one we had then.’
‘It may not,’ Maati said, ‘but it will be better than the one we have now. If you won’t help me, then I’ll do without you, but I’d thought better of you, Cehmai. I’d thought you had more spine.’
‘Rice is getting cold,’ Idaan said. Her voice was controlled rage. ‘Perhaps we should eat it before it goes bad.’
They finished the meal alternating between artificially polite conversation and strained silence. After, Cehmai took the bowls away to clean and didn’t return. Idaan led Maati to a small room near the back with a straw pallet and a night candle already burning. Maati slept poorly and found himself still upset when he woke. He left in the dark of the morning without speaking again to either of his hosts, one from disappointment and shame and the other, though he would never have said it, from fear.
5
N
antani was the nearest port to the lands of Galt, but the scars of war were too fresh there and too deep. Instead, the gods had conspired to return Otah to the city of his childhood: Saraykeht.
antani was the nearest port to the lands of Galt, but the scars of war were too fresh there and too deep. Instead, the gods had conspired to return Otah to the city of his childhood: Saraykeht.
The fastest ships arrived several days before the great mass of the fleet. They stood out half a hand’s travel from the seafront, and Otah took in the whole city. He could see the masts at the farthest end of the seafront, berthed in order to leave the greatest space for the incoming traffic. Bright cloth hung from every window Otah could see, starting with the dock master’s offices nearest the water to the towers of the palaces, high and to the north where the vibrant colors were grayed by humidity.
Crowds filled the docks, and he heard a roar of voices and snatches of drum and flute carried by the breeze. The air itself smelled different: rank and green and familiar in a way he hadn’t expected.
The Emperor of the Khaiem had been away from his cities for eight months, almost nine, and his return with the high families of Galt in tow was the kind of event seen once in history and never again. This was the day that every man and woman at the seafront or watching from the windows above the streets would recall until death’s long fingers touched them. The day that the new Empress, the Galtic Empress, arrived for the first time.
There were stories Otah had read in books that had been ashes for almost as long as this new Empress had been alive, about an emperor’s life mirroring the state of his empire. An emperor with many children meant rich, fertile land; one without heir spoke of poor crops and thin cattle. An emperor who drank himself to sleep meant an empire of libertines: one who studied and prayed, a somber land of great wisdom. He had half-believed the stories then. He had no faith in them now.
‘You would think they would have made some allowance for our arrival,’ a man’s peevish voice said from behind him. Otah looked back at Balasar Gice, dressed in formal brocade armor and shining with sweat. Otah took a pose of powerlessness before the gods.
‘The wind does what the wind does,’ he said. ‘We’ll be on land by nightfall.’
‘We will,’ Balasar said. ‘But the others will be docking and unloading all night.’
It was true. Saraykeht would likely add something near a tenth of its population in the next day, Galts filling the guest quarters and wayhouses and likely half the beds in the soft quarter. It was the second time in Otah’s life that a pale-skinned, round-eyed neighborhood without buildings had appeared in his city. Only now, it would happen without drawn blades and blood.
‘They’re sending tow galleys out for us,’ Otah said. ‘It will all be fine.’
The galleys, with their flashing banks of white oars and ornamental ironwork rails, reached the great ship just after midday. With a great clamor of voices - protests, laughter, orders, counterorders - thick cables of hemp were made fast to the ship’s deck. The sails were already down, and with the sound of a bell clanging like an alarm, Otah’s ship lurched, shifted directly into the wind, and began the last, shortest leg of his journey home.
A welcoming platform had been erected especially for the occasion. The broad beams were white as snow, and a ceremonial guard waited by a litter while a somewhat less ceremonial one kept the press of the crowds at a distance. Balasar and six of the Galtic High Council had made their way to Otah’s ship in order to disembark with him. The
Avenger
with Ana and her parents would likely come next, after which the roar of competing etiquette masters would likely drown out the ocean. Otah was more than willing to leave the fighting for position and status for the dock master to settle out.
Avenger
with Ana and her parents would likely come next, after which the roar of competing etiquette masters would likely drown out the ocean. Otah was more than willing to leave the fighting for position and status for the dock master to settle out.
The crowd’s voice rose when the ship pulled in, and again when the walk bridged the shifting gap between ship and land. His servants preceded him in the proper array and sequence, and then Otah left the sea. The noise was something physical, a wind built of sound. The ceremonial guard adopted poses of obeisance, and Otah took his ritual reply. The first of the guard to stand, grinning, was Sinja.
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