Seasons of War (47 page)
Authors: Daniel Abraham
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.
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.
He’d spent too much time with Heshai’s binding. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues had been made for the cotton trade - pulling seeds from the fiber and speeding it on its way to the spinners and the weavers and feeding all of the needle trades. But there was no reason for Maati to be restricted by that. He only needed a way to break Galt. To starve them. To see that no other generation of Galtic children ever saw the world.
It wasn’t Seedless he needed. It was only Sterile. And there were any number of ways to say that.
He sank lower into the water as the sense of relief and peace consumed him. Destroying-the-Part-That-Continues, he thought as the little waves touched his lips. Shattering-the-Part-That-Continues. Crushing it. Rotting it. Corroding it.
Corrupting
it.
it.
In his mind, Galt died. And he, Maati Vaupathai, killed it. What, he asked himself, was victory in a single battle compared with that? Otah had saved the city. Maati saw now how he could save
everything
.
everything
.
21
S
inja woke, stiff with cold, to the sound of chopping.
inja woke, stiff with cold, to the sound of chopping.
Outside the tent, someone with a hand axe was breaking the ice at the top of the barrels. It was still dark, but morning was always dark these days. He kicked off his blankets and rose. The undyed wool of his inner robes held a bit of the heat as he pulled on first one outer robe and then another with a wide leather cloak over the top that creaked when he fastened the wide bone broochwork.
Outside his tent, the army was already breaking camp. Columns of smoke and steam rose from the wagons. Horses snorted, their breath pluming white in the light of a falling moon. In the southeast, the dawn was still only a lighter shade of black. Sinja walked to the cook fire and squatted down beside it, a bowl of barley gruel sweetened with wine-packed prunes in his hands. The heat of it was better than the taste. Wine could do strange things to prunes.
The army had been marching for two and a half weeks. At a guess, there were another three before they reached Machi. If there was no storm, Sinja guessed they would lose a thousand men to frostbite, most of those in the last ten days. He squinted into the dark, implacable sky and watched the faintest stars begin to fade. There would still be over nine thousand men. And every man among them would know that this battle wasn’t for money or glory. Or even for love of the general. If by some miracle Otah turned the Galts back from the city, they would die scattered in the frozen plains of the North.
This battle would be the only time in the whole benighted war that the Galts would go in knowing they were fighting for their lives.
‘You want more?’ the cook asked, and Sinja shook his head. Around him, the members of his personal guard were moving at last. Sinja didn’t help them break down the camp. He’d left most of the company behind in Tan-Sadar. They were, after all, on a deadly stupid march that, with luck, would end with them sacking their own homes. It wasn’t duty that could be asked of a green recruit of his first campaign. Sinja had taken time handpicking this dozen to accompany him. There wasn’t a man among them he liked.
The last tent was folded, poles bound together with their leather thongs, and put on the steam wagon. The fires were all stamped out, and the sun made its tardy appearance. Sinja wrapped the leather cloak closer around his shoulders and sighed. This was a younger man’s game. If he’d been as wise as the average rat, he’d be someplace warm and close now, with a good mulled wine and a plate of venison in mint sauce. The call sounded, and he began the walk north. Cold numbed his face and made his ears ache. The air smelled of dust and smoke and horse dung - the miasma of the moving army. Sinja kept his eyes to the horizon, but the only clouds were the high white lace that did little but leach blue from the sky; there was no storm coming today. And still the dusting of snow that had fallen in the last weeks hadn’t melted and wouldn’t before spring. The world was pale except where a stone or patch of ground stood free of snow. There it was black.
He put one foot in front of the other, his mind growing empty with the rhythm. His muscles slowly warmed. The pain retreated from his ears. With enough effort, the air became almost comfortable. The sun rose quickly behind him, as if in a hurry to finish its day’s passage and return the world to darkness.
When he paused to relieve himself on a tree - his piss steaming in its puddle - he took off the leather cloak. If he got too warm, he’d start to sweat. Soaking through his inner robes was an invitation to death. He wondered how many of Balasar’s men knew that. With his sad luck, all of them.
They wouldn’t see a low town today. They had overrun one yesterday - the locals surprised to find themselves surrounded by horsemen intent on keeping any word from slipping out to the North. There would be another town in a day or two. If Sinja was lucky, it might mean fresh meat for dinner. The rations set aside by the townsmen to see them through the winter might feed the army for as much as half a day.
They paused at midday, the cooks using the furnaces of the steam wagons to warm the bread and boil water for tea. Sinja wasn’t hungry but he ate anyway. The tea was good at least. Overbrewed and bitter, but warm. He sat on the broad back of a steam wagon, and was preparing himself for the second push of the day and estimating how many miles they had covered since morning when the general arrived.
Balasar rode a huge black horse, its tack worked with silver. As small as the man was, he still managed to look like something from a painting.
‘Sinja-cha,’ Balasar Gice said in the tongue of the Khaiem. ‘I was hoping to find you here.’
Sinja took a pose of respect and welcome.
‘I’d say winter’s come,’ the general said.
‘No, Balasar-cha. If this was real winter, you could tell because we’d all be dead by now.’
Balasar’s eyes went harder, but his wry smile didn’t fade. It wasn’t anger that made him what he was. It was determination. Sinja found himself unsurprised. Anger was too weak and uncertain to have seen them all this far.
‘I’d have you ride with us,’ the general said.
‘I’m not sure Eustin-cha would enjoy that,’ Sinja said, then switched to speaking in Galtic. ‘But if it’s what you’d like, sir, I’m pleased to do it.’
‘You have a horse?’
‘Several. I’ve been having them walked. I’ve got good enough fighters among my men, but I can’t speak all that highly of them as grooms. A horse with a good lather up in this climate and with these boys to care for it is going to be tomorrow night’s dinner.’
‘I have a servant or two I could spare,’ Balasar said, frowning. Sinja took a pose that both thanked and refused.
‘I’d take the loan of one of your horses, if you have one ready to ride. Otherwise, I’ll need to get one of mine.’
‘I’ll have one sent,’ Balasar said. Sinja saluted, and the general made his way back to the main body of the column. Sinja had just washed down the last of the bread with the dregs of his tea when a servant arrived with a saddled brown mare and orders to hand it over to him. Sinja rode slowly past the soldiers, grim-faced and uncomfortable, preparing for their trek or else already marching. Balasar rode just after the vanguard with Eustin and whichever of his captains he chose to speak with. Sinja fell in beside the general and made his salute. Balasar returned it seriously. Eustin only nodded.
‘You served the Khai Machi,’ Balasar said.
‘Since before he was the Khai, in fact,’ Sinja said.
‘What can you tell me about him?’
‘He has a good wife,’ Sinja said. Eustin actually smiled at the joke, but Balasar’s head tilted a degree.
‘Only one wife?’ he asked. ‘That’s odd for the Khaiem, isn’t it?’
‘And only one son. It is odd,’ Sinja said. ‘But he’s an odd man for a Khai. He spent his boyhood working as a laborer and traveling through the eastern islands and the cities. He didn’t kill his family to take the chair. He’s been considered something of an embarrassment by the utkhaiem, he’s upset the Daikvo, and I think he’s looked on his position as a burden.’
‘He’s a poor leader then?’
‘He’s better than they deserve. Most of the Khaiem actually like the job.’
Balasar smiled and Eustin frowned. They understood.
‘He hasn’t posted scouts,’ Eustin pointed out. ‘He can’t be much of a war leader.’
‘No one would post scouts this late in the season,’ Sinja said. ‘You might as well fault him for not keeping a watch on the moon in case we launched an attack from there.’
‘And how was it that a son of the Khaiem found himself working as a laborer?’ Balasar asked, eager, it seemed, to change the subject.
As he swayed gently on the horse, Sinja told the story of Otah Machi. How he had walked away from the Dai-kvo to take a false name as a petty laborer. The years in Saraykeht, and then in the eastern islands. How he had taken part in the gentleman’s trade, met the woman who would be his wife, and then been caught up in a plot for his father’s chair. The uncertain first year of his rule. The plague that had struck the winter cities, and how he had struggled with it. The tensions when he had refused marriage to the daughter of the Khai Utani. Reluctantly, Sinja even told of his own small drama, and its resolution. He ended with the formation of the small militia, and its being sent away to the west, and to Balasar’s service.
Balasar listened through it all, probing now and again with questions or comments or requests for Sinja to amplify on some point or aspect of the Khai Machi. Behind them, the sun slid down toward the horizon. The air began to cool, and Sinja pulled his leather cloak back over his shoulders. Dark would be upon them soon, and the moon had still not risen. Sinja expected the meeting to come to its close when they stopped to make camp, but Balasar kept him near, pressing for more detail and explanation.
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