Seasons Of War Part 37

'There are worse,' he said.

Otah rose, and the general rose with him. From the servants' niches and from beyond the great archway to the south, their respective people appeared. Hard soldiers from the South, men of the utkhaiem in flowing robes from the North. Otah raised his hands in a pose of command, and let the servants go forward to prepare their way.

The furnaces were near the surface where they could be blocked off from the rest of the city if the fires ever should escape their cells. The air near them was thick with the scent of smoke and oppressive with heat. The noise of the flames was like a waterfall. Otah led Balasar and his men to the huge grates where the scrolls and codices and books were stacked. Generations of history. Philosophic essays composed by minds gone to dust a thousand years before. Maps that predated the First Empire. The surviving sc.r.a.ps of war records from before the first andat. Otah looked upon his culture, his history, the record of all that had come before and that had made the world what it was. The flames licked and leapt.

If only it could have been just the poets' books and treatises on the andat . . . but the Galt had insisted, and Otah had understood. Each history was a footprint in the path, each collection of court poems might contain a hint or reference. With time and attention, someone might put together again what had been torn apart, and it was a chance the Galt had refused to accept. Their tenuous peace required sacrifices, and sacrifice without loss didn't deserve the name.

'Forgive this,' Otah said, to no one. He walked forward, coming to the first pile. The book was leather-bound and worn from years of loving care. Otah let it fall open and looked on Heshai's careful handwriting for the last time. With a sense of sorrow, Otah cast the book into the flames, then raised his hands again, and the servants began to throw the pages into the fire. Parchment darkened and curled in the suddenly white flame. Tiny embers flew out into the air, glowing and going dark, fireflies at sunset. The horror of it all closed his throat, and with it came a strange elation.

A hand touched his arm, and Otah looked at the Galtic general. There were tears in his eyes too.

'It was necessary,' he said.

The night candles were burned down past their first quarter before Otah found his way back to his rooms. Kiyan was already asleep, her face smooth and peaceful. He resisted the urge to touch her, to pull her awake and hope that some of that calm might come with her. It wouldn't. He knew that. Instead he watched the subtle rise and fall of her breath, listened to the small sounds the tunnels made in the darkness, the soft flow of air. He thought of crawling in beside her, still in his robes, pressing his eyes closed until forgetfulness took him as well. But he needed to perform one last errand. He rose quietly and left by the back pa.s.sage, down deeper into the earth.

The physician rose when he caught sight of Otah, taking a welcoming pose so quietly that the rustle of cloth in his robes seemed loud. Otah replied with one that asked a question.

'He's well,' the physician said. 'The poppy milk makes him sleepy, but it stops the cough.'

'May I?' Otah asked.

'I think he'll never rest unless you do. But it would be best if he didn't speak overmuch.'

Danat's room was warm and close. The night candle fluttered and glowed in its gla.s.s case. Great iron statues of hunting cats and a bear risen on his back feet radiated heat from the fires in which they'd been kept all through the day. His boy sat up unsteadily, smiling. Otah went to his side.

'You should be asleep,' Otah said, smoothing the hair from Danat's brow.

'You were supposed to read to me,' the boy said. His voice was scratchy and thick, but not as bad as it had been. Otah felt tears in his eyes again. He could not bring himself to say that the books were all gone, the stories all made ash. 'Lie back,' he said. 'I'll do what I can.'

Grinning, Danat dropped to his pillows. Otah took a long, unsteady breath and closed his eyes.

'In the sixteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Adani Beh,' Otah murmured, 'there came to court a boy whose blood was half Bakta, his skin the color of soot, and his mind as clever as any man who has ever lived . . .' Danat made a small sound of pleasure and closed his eyes, his hand seeking out Otah's fingers.

Otah went on as long as he could before his memory failed him, and then he began to invent.

BOOK FOUR: THE PRICE OF SPRING.

PROLOGUE.

Eiah Machi, physician and daughter of the Emperor, pressed her fingers gently on the woman's belly. The swollen flesh was tight, veins marbling the skin blue within brown. The woman appeared for all the world to be in the seventh month of a pregnancy. She was not.

'It's because my mother's father was a Westlander,' the woman on the table said. 'I'm a quarter Westlander, so when it came, it didn't affect me like it did other girls. Even at the time, I wasn't as sick as everyone else. You can't tell because I have my father's eyes, but my mother's were paler and almost round.'

Eiah nodded, running practiced fingertips across the flesh, feeling where the skin was hot and where it was cool. She took the woman's hand, bending it gently at the wrist to see how tight her tendons were. She reached inside the woman's s.e.x, probing where only lovers had gone before. The man who stood at his wife's side looked uncomfortable, but Eiah ignored him. He was likely the least important person in the room.

'Eiah-cha,' Parit, the regular physician, said, 'if there is anything I can do . . .'

Eiah took a pose that both thanked and refused. Parit bowed slightly.

'I was very young, too,' the woman said. 'When it happened. Just six summers old.'

'I was fourteen,' Eiah said. 'How many months has it been since you bled?'

'Six,' the woman said as if it were a badge of honor. Eiah forced herself to smile.

'Is the baby well?' the man asked. Eiah considered how his hand wrapped his wife's. How his gaze bored into her own. Desperation was as thick a scent in the room as the vinegar and herb smoke.

'It's hard to say,' Eiah said. 'I haven't had the luck to see very many pregnancies. Few of us have these days. But even if things are well so far, birthing is a tricky business. Many things can go wrong.'

'He'll be fine,' the woman on the table a.s.serted; the hand not being squeezed bloodless by her man caressed the slight pooch of her belly. 'It's a boy,' she went on. 'We're going to name him Loniit.'

Eiah placed a hand on the woman's arm. The woman's eyes burned with something like joy, something like fever. The smile faltered for less than a heartbeat, less than the time it took to blink. So at least some part of the woman knew the truth.

'Thank you for letting me make the examination,' Eiah said. 'You're very kind. And I wish the best of luck to you both.'

'All three,' the woman corrected.

'All three,' Eiah said.

She walked from the room while Parit arranged his patient. The antechamber glowed by the light of a small lantern. Worked stone and carved wood made the room seem more s.p.a.cious than it was. Two bowls, one of old wine and another of fresh water, stood waiting. Eiah washed her hands in the wine first. The chill against her fingers helped wash away the warmth of the woman's flesh. The sooner she could forget that, the better.

Voices came from the examining room like echoes. Eiah didn't listen. When she put her hands into the water, the wine turned it pink. She dried herself with a cloth laid by for the purpose, moving slowly to be sure both the husband and wife were gone before she returned.

Parit was was.h.i.+ng down the slate table with vinegar and a stiff brush. It was something Eiah had done often when she'd first apprenticed to the physicians, all those years ago. There were fewer apprentices now, and Parit didn't complain.

'Well?' he asked.

'There's no child in her,' Eiah said.

'Of course not,' he said. 'But the signs she does show. The pooled blood, the swelling. The loss of her monthly flow. And yet there's no slackening in her joints, no s.h.i.+elding in her s.e.x. It's a strange mix.'

'I've seen it before,' Eiah said.

Parit stopped. His hands took a pose of query. Eiah sighed and leaned against one of the high stools.

'Desire,' Eiah said. 'That's all. Want something that you can't have badly enough, and the longing becomes a disease.'

Her fellow physician and onetime lover paused for a moment, considering Eiah's words, then looked down and continued his cleaning.

'I suppose we should have said something,' he said.

'There's nothing to say,' Eiah said. 'They're happy now, and they'll be sad later. What good would it do us to hurry that?'

Parit gave the half-smile she'd known on him years before, but didn't look up to meet her gaze.

'There is something to be said in favor of truth,' he said.

'And there's something to be said for letting her keep her husband for another few weeks,' Eiah said.

'You don't know that he'll turn her out,' he said.

Eiah took a pose that accepted correction. They both knew it was a gentle sarcasm. Parit chuckled and poured a last rinse over the slate table: the rush of the water like a fountain trailed off to small, sharp drips that reminded Eiah of wet leaves at the end of a storm. Parit pulled out a stool and sat, his hands clasped in his lap. Eiah felt a sudden awkwardness that hadn't been there before. She was always better when she could inhabit her role. If Parit had been bleeding from the neck, she would have been sure of herself. That he was only looking at her made her aware of the sharpness of her face, the gray in her hair that she'd had since her eighteenth summer, and the emptiness of the house. She took a formal pose that offered grat.i.tude. Perhaps a degree more formal than was needed.

'Thank you for sending for me,' Eiah said. 'It's late, and I should be getting back.'

'To the palaces,' he said. There was warmth and humor in his voice. There always had been. 'You could also stay here.'

Eiah knew she should have been tempted at least. The glow of old love and half-recalled s.e.x should have wafted in her nostrils like mulled wine. He was still lovely. She was still alone.

'I don't think I could, Parit-kya,' she said, switching from the formal to the intimate to pull the sting from it.

'Why not?' he asked, making it sound as if he was playing.

'There are a hundred reasons,' Eiah said, keeping her tone as light as his. 'Don't make me list them.'

He chuckled and took a pose that surrendered the game. Eiah felt herself relax a degree, and smiled. She found her bag by the door and slung its strap over her shoulder.

'You still hide behind that,' Parit said.

Eiah looked down at the battered leather satchel, and then up at him, the question in her eyes.

'There's too much to fit in my sleeves,' she said. 'I'd clank like a toolshed every time I waved.'

'That's not why you carry it,' he said. 'It's so that people see a physician and not your father's daughter. You've always been like that.'

It was his little punishment for her return to her own rooms. There had been a time when she'd have resented the criticism. That time had pa.s.sed.

'Good night, Parit-kya,' she said. 'It was good to see you again.'

He took a pose of farewell, and then walked with her to the door. In the courtyard of his house, the autumn moon was full and bright and heavy. The air smelled of wood smoke and the ocean. Warmth so late in the season still surprised her. In the north, where she'd spent her girlhood, the chill would have been deadly by now. Here, she hardly needed a heavy robe.

Parit stopped in the shadows beneath a wide shade tree, its golden leaves lined with silver by the moonlight. Eiah had her hand on the gate before he spoke.

'Was that what you were looking for?' he asked.

She looked back, paused, and took a pose that asked for clarification. There were too many things he might have meant.

'When you wrote, you said to watch for unusual cases,' Parit said. 'Was she what you had in mind?'

'No,' Eiah said. 'That wasn't it.' She pa.s.sed from the garden to the street.

A decade and a half had pa.s.sed since the power of the andat had left the world. For generations before that, the cities of the Khaiem had been protected by the poets - men who had dedicated their lives to binding one of the spirits, the thoughts made flesh. Stone-Made-Soft, whom Eiah had known as a child with its wide shoulders and amiable smile, was one of them. It had made the mines around the northern city of Machi the greatest in the world. Water-Moving-Down, who generations ago had commanded the rains to come or else to cease, the rivers to flow or else run dry. Removing-the-Part-That-Continues, called Seedless, who had plucked the seeds from the cotton harvests of Saraykeht and discreetly ended pregnancies.

Each of the cities had had one, and each city had shaped its trade and commerce to exploit the power of its particular andat to the advantage of its citizens. War had never come to the cities of the Khaiem. No one dared to face an enemy who might make the mountains flow like rivers, who might flood your cities or cause your crops to fail or your women to miscarry. For almost ten generations, the cities of the Khaiem had stood above the world like adults over children.

And then the Galtic general Balasar Gice had made his terrible wager and won. The andat left the world, and left it in ruins. For a blood-soaked spring, summer, and autumn, the armies of Galt had washed over the cities like a wave over sandcastles. Nantani, Udun, Yalakeht, Chaburi-Tan. The great cities fell to the foreign swords. The Khaiem died. The Dai-kvo and his poets were put to the sword and their libraries burned. Eiah still remembered being fourteen summers old and waiting for death to come. She had been only the daughter of the Khai Machi then, but that had been enough. The Galts, who had taken every other city, were advancing on them. And their only hope had been Uncle Maati, the disgraced poet, and his bid to bind one last andat.

She had been present in the warehouse when he'd attempted the binding. She'd seen it go wrong. She had felt it in her body. She and every other woman in the cities of the Khaiem. And every man of Galt. Corrupting-the-Generative, the last andat had been named.

Sterile.

Since that day, no woman of the cities of the Khaiem had borne a child. No man of Galt had fathered one. It was a dark joke. Enemy nations locked in war afflicted with complementary curses. Your history will be written by half-breeds, Sterile had said, or it won't be written. Eiah knew the words because she had been in the room when the world had been broken. Her own father had taken the name Emperor when he sued for peace, and Emperor he had become. Emperor of a fallen world.

Perhaps Parit was right. Perhaps she had taken to her vocation as single-mindedly as she had because she wanted to be something else. Something besides her father's daughter. As the princess of the new empire, she would have been a marriage to some foreign ward or king or lord incapable of bearing children. The degraded currency of her body would have been her definition.

Physician and healer were better roles to play. Walking through the darkened streets of Saraykeht, her robes and her satchel afforded her a measure of respect and protection. It was poor form to a.s.sault a healer, in part because of the very real chance of requiring her services one day. The toughs and beggars who haunted the alleys near the seafront might meet her eyes as she walked past, might even hail her with an obscenity or veiled threat, but they had never followed her. And so she didn't see that she had any need of the palace guard. If her work protected her, there was no reason to call upon her blood.

She stopped at the bronze statue of s.h.i.+an Sho. The last emperor gazed out wistfully over the sea, or perhaps back through the ages to a time when his name had been important. Eiah pulled her robe tight around herself and squatted at his metalwork feet, waiting for the firekeeper and his steamcart. In daytime, she would have walked the streets north and uphill to the palaces, but the seafront wasn't the worst part of Saraykeht. It was safer to wait.

To the west, the soft quarter was lit in its nightly festival. To the east, the bathhouses, the great stone warehouses, rarely more than half-filled now. Beyond that, the cohort houses of the laborers were darker, but far from unpeopled. Eiah heard a man's laugh from one direction, a woman's voice lifted in drunken song from another. The s.h.i.+ps that filled the seafront docks stood silent, their masts like winter trees, and the ocean beyond them gray with a low mist.

There was a beauty in it, and a familiarity. Eiah had made her studies in places like this, whatever city she'd been in. She'd sewn closed the flesh of wh.o.r.es and thieves as often as soothed the coughs and pains of the utkhaiem in their perfumed palaces. It was a decision she'd made early in her career, not to be a court physician, not to care only for the powerful. Her father had approved, and even, she thought, been proud of the decision. For all their differences - and there were many - it was one reason she loved him.

The steamcart appeared first as a sound: the rough clatter of iron-bound wheels against the bricks of the street, the chuff of the boiler, the low rumble of the kiln. And then, as Eiah stood and shook the dirt and grime from her robe, it turned into the wide street they called the Nantan and came down toward the statue. In the light of the kiln, she saw seven or perhaps eight figures clinging to the cart's side. The firekeeper himself sat on the top, guiding the cart with a series of levers and pedals that made the most ornate loom seem simple. Eiah stepped forward as the cart trundled past, took one of the leather grips, and hoisted herself up to the cart's side runner along with the others.

'Two coppers,' the firekeeper said without looking at her.

Eiah dug in her sleeve with her free hand, came out with two lengths of copper, and tossed them into the lacquer box at the firekeeper's feet. The man nodded rather than take any more-complex pose. His hands and eyes were occupied. The breeze s.h.i.+fted, a waft of smoke and thick steam was.h.i.+ng her in its scent, and the cart lurched, shuddered, and turned again to the north along its constant route. Eiah sighed and made herself comfortable. It would take her almost the time for the moon to move the width of her hand before she stepped down at the pathway that led to the palaces. In the meantime, she watched the night city pa.s.s by her.

The streets nearest the seafront alternated between the high roofs of warehouses and the low of the tradesmen's shops. In the right season, the clack of looms would have filled the air, even this late at night. The streets converged on wide squares where the litter of the week's market still fouled the street: cheeses dropped to the cobbles and trod into mush, soiled cabbages and yams, even a skinned rabbit too corrupt to sell and not worth hauling away. One of the men on the far side of the steamcart stepped down, s.h.i.+fting the balance slightly. Eiah watched as his red-brown cloak pa.s.sed into darkness.

There had been a time, she knew, when the streets had been safe to walk down, even alone. There had been a time beggars with their boxes would have been on the corners, filling the night with plaintive, amateur song. She had never seen it, never heard it. It was a story she knew, Old Saraykeht from long ago. She knew it like she knew Bakta, where she had never been, and the courts of the Second Empire, gone from the world for hundreds of years. It was a story. Once upon a time there was a city by the sea, and it lived in prosperity and innocence. But it didn't anymore.

The steamcart pa.s.sed into the compounds of the merchant houses, three, four, five stories tall. They were almost palaces in themselves. There were more lights here, more voices. Lanterns hung from ropes at the crossroads, spilling b.u.t.tery light on the bricks. Three more of Eiah's fellows stepped down from the cart. Two stepped on, dropping their copper lengths into the firekeeper's box. They didn't speak, didn't acknowledge one another. She s.h.i.+fted her hands on the leather grip. The palaces of the utkhaiem would be coming soon. And her apartments, and bed, and sleep. The kiln roared when the firekeeper opened it and poured in another spade's worth of coal.

The servants met her at the gateway that separated the palaces from the city, the smooth brick streets from the crushed marble pathways. The air smelled different here, coal smoke and the rich, fetid stink of humanity displaced by incense and perfume. Eiah felt relieved to be back, and then guilty for her relief. She answered their poses of greeting and obeisance with one of acknowledgment. She was no longer her work. Among these high towers and palaces, she was and would always be her father's daughter.

'Eiah-cha,' the most senior of the servants said, his hands in a pose of ritual offering, 'may we escort you to your rooms?'

'No,' she said. 'Food first. Then rest.'

Eiah suffered them to take her satchel, but refused the sable cloak they offered against the night air. It really wasn't that cold.

'Is there word from my father?' she asked as they walked along the wide, empty paths.

'No, Eiah-cha,' the servant replied. 'Nor from your brother. There have been no couriers today.'

Eiah kept her pleasure at the news from her expression.

The palaces of Saraykeht had suffered less under their brief Galtic occupation than many others had. Nantani had been nearly ruined. Udun had been razed and never rebuilt. In Saraykeht, it was clear where statues had once been and were gone, where jewels had been set into the goldwork around the doorways and been wrenched out, but all the buildings except the Khai's palace and the library still stood. The utkhaiem of the city hadn't restored the damage or covered it over. Like a woman a.s.saulted but with unbroken spirit, Saraykeht wore her scars without shame. Of all the cities of the Khaiem, she was the least devastated, the strongest, and the most arrogant in her will to survive. Eiah thought she might love the city just a little, even as it made her sad.