Seasons Of War Part 56

Farrer Dasin didn't answer except to relax his gaze, laugh, and tuck the book into his belt. Otah took a pose that ended a meeting. It had a positive nuance that Dasin was unlikely to notice, but Otah didn't mind. It was as much for himself as the Galt.

The walk back to the palaces seemed shorter, less haunted by nostalgia. He returned to his rooms, allowed himself to be changed into formal robes, and began the long, slow work of another day. The court was its customary buzz of rituals and requirements. The constant speculation on the Galtic treaty's fate made every other facet of the economic and political life of the Empire swing like a s.h.i.+p's mast in high seas. Otah did what he could to pour oil on the waters. For the most part, he succeeded.

Before the early sunset of middle autumn, Otah had seen the heads of both Galtic and Khaiate stone masons disputing a contract upon which the Galtic Council had already ruled. He had taken audiences with two other members of the High Council and three of the highest families of the utkhaiem. And, in the brightest moment of his day, a visibly unnerved representative of Obar State had arrived with gifts and a.s.surances of the good relations between his small nation and the cities of the Khaiem.

No courier came from Idaan or Eiah. Likely his sister was still on the roads between Saraykeht and Pathai. There was no reason to expect word back so soon, and yet every time a servant entered his chambers with a folded paper, his belly went tight until he broke the seal.

The night began with a banquet held in the honor of Balasar Gice and the preparation of what the Galtic Council called the second fleet and the utkhaiem, dismissively and in private, the other s.h.i.+ps. The great hall fluttered with fine robes and silk banners. Musicians and singing slaves hidden behind screens filled the air with soft music of Galtic composition. Lanterns of colored gla.s.s gave the light a feeling of belonging to some other, gentler world. Otah sat on his high dais, Balasar at his side. He caught a glimpse of Danat dressed in formal robes of black and gold, sitting among his peers of the high utkhaiem. The group included s.h.i.+ja Radaani. Though Farrer and Issandra Dasin were among the Galts present, Otah did not see Ana. He tried not to find her absence unnerving.

The food and drink had been prepared by the best cooks Otah could find: cla.s.sic Galtic dishes made if not light at least less heavy; foods designed to represent each of the cities of the Khaiem; all of it served with bowls of the best wines the world could offer.

Peace, Otah meant the celebration to say. As we send our armsmen and sailors away to fight and die together, let there be peace between us. If there cannot be peace in the world, at least let it be welcome here. It pleased him to see the youth of both countries sitting together and talking, even as it disturbed him that so many places set aside for the utkhaiem remained empty.

He did not notice that Issandra had taken her leave until the note arrived. The servant was very young, having seen no more than sixteen summers, and he approached Balasar with a small message box of worked gold. Balasar plucked the folded paper from it, read the message, then nodded and waved the boy away. The musicians nearest them s.h.i.+fted to a light, contemplative song. Balasar leaned toward Otah, as if to whisper some comment upon the music.

'This is for you,' the general murmured.

General Gice, please pa.s.s this to the Emperor with all haste discretion allows. I would prefer that it not be immediately obvious that I am communicating with him, but time may be short.

Emperor. Please forgive my note, but I believe something is going to happen in the moon garden of the third palace at the beginning of the entertainments that you would be pleased to see. Consider claiming a moment's necessity and joining me.

It was signed with Issandra Dasin's chop.

Balasar was considering him silently. Otah slipped the paper into his sleeve. It was less than half a hand before the acrobats and dancers, trained dogs and fire-eaters were to take to the floor. It wasn't much time.

'I don't like this,' Otah said, leaning toward Balasar so that no one could overhear.

'You think it's a plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate you,' Balasar said.

'Might it be?'

Balasar smiled out into the hall, his eyes flickering as if looking for concealed archers.

'She sent the message through me. That provides a witness. It isn't the sort of thing I would do if I intended to kill you,' Balasar said. 'Still, if you go, take a guard.'

Otah felt the weight of the note in his sleeve, feather-light and yet enough to command all his attention. He had almost decided to ignore it when, as the trumpets blared the first of the entertainments to the floor, he noticed that Danat had also gone. He slipped down from the back of the dais, chose two of the guards that he recognized, and made his way out to the third palace.

The moon garden had been built as a theater; great half-circles of carved stone set into a slope were covered with moss and snow ivy. At the deepest recess, three old wooden doors led to hallways where players or musicians could crouch, awaiting their entrance. The gardens were dark when he arrived, not even a lantern glowing to mark the paths. Behind him, the guards were as silent as shadows.

'Otah-cha,' a woman whispered. 'Here. Quickly.'

Issandra huddled in the darkness under an ivy-choked willow. Otah walked forward, his hands in a pose of query. Issandra didn't reply, her eyes on the guards at his back. Her expression went from disapproval to acceptance barely seen in the dim light. She motioned all of them close to her.

'What is this?' Otah asked as he crouched in the darkness.

'Hush,' Issandra said. 'They should almost be here. There now. Be quiet, all of you.'

One of the wooden doors at the base of the garden was opening, the light of a lantern spilling out onto the green of the gra.s.s, the black of the soil. Otah squinted. Ana Dasin stepped out. She wore a rough cloak over what appeared to be simple peasant robes, but her face and hair would have proclaimed her in the darkest teahouse. She looked like a girl who wanted to travel unnoticed but didn't know the trick of it. As Otah watched, she raised her lantern, scanning the wide stone curve, and then sat down.

'What is-' he whispered.

Issandra pressed her hand to his mouth. One of the guards s.h.i.+fted, but Otah gestured him back. It wasn't everyone who could gag the Emperor of the Khaiem, but he was too curious to disrupt things over a point of etiquette. Besides which, he didn't truly care.

Another of the doors s.h.i.+fted and creaked open. Danat stepped out. Being discovered crouched in the ivy, eavesdropping on their own children might be the least dignified thing possible, so Otah tried to be very, very still. When Danat spoke, the sound carried perfectly.

'I received your message. I'm here.'

'And I received your poem,' Ana said.

It was too dark to actually see how deeply Danat blushed, but Otah recognized the discomfort in his son's body.

'Ah. That,' he said.

Otah tapped Issandra on the shoulder and mouthed the word poem? Issandra pointed back down to their children.

'I am not a toy,' Ana said. 'If this is another scheme of your father's or my mother's, you can carry word back to them that it didn't work. I know better than to trust you.'

'You think I've lied?' Danat said. 'What have I said to you that wasn't true?'

'As if you'd let yourself be caught out,' Ana said.

Danat sat, one leg tucked under him, the other bent. He looked up at her like a player in some ancient epic. In the dim light, his expression seemed bemused.

'Ask anything,' he said. 'Do it now. I won't lie to you.'

Ana crossed her arms, looking down on Danat like a low-town judge. Her brows were furrowed.

'Are you trying to seduce me?'

'Yes,' Danat said. His voice was calm and solid as stone.

'Why?'

'Because I think you are worth seducing,' Danat said.

'Only that? Not to please your father or my mother?'

Danat chuckled. One of the guards at Otah's side s.h.i.+fted his weight, the leaves beneath him crackling. Neither of the children below had ears for it.

'It began that way, I suppose,' Danat said. 'A political alliance. A world to remake. All of that has its appeal, but it didn't write that poem.'

Ana fumbled at her belt for a moment and drew out a folded sheet of paper. Danat hesitated, then reached up and accepted it from her. They were quiet. Otah sensed the tension in Issandra's crouched body. Ana was refusing the token. And then the girl spoke, and her mother relaxed.

'Read it,' Ana said. 'Read it to me.'

Otah closed his eyes and prayed to all the G.o.ds there were that neither he nor Issandra nor either of the guards would sneeze or cough. He had never lived through a more excruciatingly awkward scene. Below, Danat cleared his throat and began to declaim.

It wasn't good. Danat's command of Galtic didn't extend to the subtlety of rhyme. The images were simple and puerile, the s.e.xuality just under the surface of the words ham-fisted and uncertain, and worst of all of it, Danat's tone as he spoke was as sincere as a priest at temple. His voice shook at the end of the last stanza. Silence fell in the garden. One of the guards shook once with suppressed laughter and went still.

Danat folded the paper slowly, then offered it up to Ana. It hesitated there for a moment before the girl took it.

'I see,' she said. Against all reason, her voice had softened. Otah could hardly believe it, but Ana appeared genuinely moved. Danat rose to stand a hand's breadth nearer to her than before. The lanterns flickered. The two children gazed at each other with perfect seriousness. Ana looked away.

'I have a lover,' she said.

'You've made that quite clear,' Danat replied, amus.e.m.e.nt in his voice.

Ana shook her head. The shadows hid her expression.

'I can't,' she said. 'You are a fine man, Danat. More an emperor than your father. But I've sworn. I've sworn before everyone . . .'

'I don't believe that,' Danat said. 'I've hardly known you, Ana-kya, and I don't believe the G.o.ds themselves could stop you from something if it was truly what you wanted. Say you won't have me, but don't tell me you're refusing me out of fear.'

Ana began to speak, stumbled on the words, and went silent. Danat rose, and the girl took a step toward him.

And a moment later, 'Does Hanchat know you're here?'

Ana was still, and then almost imperceptibly she shook her head. Danat put a hand on her shoulder and gently turned her to face him. Otah might have been imagining it, but he thought the girl's head inclined a degree toward that hand. Danat kissed Ana's forehead and then her mouth. Her hand, palm against Danat's chest, seemed too weak to push him away. It was Danat who stepped back.

He murmured something too low to hear, then bowed in the Galtic style, took his lantern, and left her. Ana slowly lowered herself to the ground. They waited, one girl alone in the night and four hidden spies with legs and backs slowly beginning to cramp. Without word or warning, Ana sobbed twice, rose, scooped up her own lantern, and vanished through the door she'd first come from. Otah let out a pained sigh and made his uncomfortable way out from beneath the willow. There were green streaks on his robe where his knees had ground into the ivy. The armsmen had the grace to move away a few paces, expressionless.

'We're doing well,' Issandra said.

'I didn't hear a declaration of marriage,' Otah said. He felt disagreeable despite the evidence of Ana's changing heart. He felt dishonest, and it made him sour.

'So long as nothing comes to throw her off, it will come. In time. I know my daughter. I've seen this all before.'

'Really? How odd,' Otah said. 'I know my son, and I never have.'

'Then perhaps Ana is a lucky woman,' Issandra said. He was surprised to hear something wistful in the woman's voice. The moon pa.s.sed behind a high cloud, deepening the darkness around them, and then was gone. Issandra stood before him, her head high and proud, her mouth in a half-smile. She was, he thought, an interesting woman. Not beautiful in the traditional sense, and all the more attractive for that.

'A marriage is what you make of it,' she said.

Otah considered the words, then took a pose that both agreed and expressed a gentle sorrow. He did not know how much of his meaning she understood. She nodded and strode off, leaving him with his armsmen.

Otah suffered through the rest of the banquet and returned to his apartments, sure he would not sleep. The night air had cooled. The fire in the grate warmed his feet. The fear that had dogged him all these last months didn't vanish, but its hold upon him faded. Somewhere under the stars just then, Danat and Ana were playing out their drama in touches and whispers; Issandra and Farrer Dasin in silences and the knowledge of long a.s.sociation. Idaan was hunting, Ashua Radaani was hunting, Sinja was hunting. And he was alone and sleepless with nothing to do.

He closed his eyes and tried to feel Kiyan's presence, tried to bring some sense of her out of the scent of smoke and the sound of distant singing. He tricked himself into thinking that she was here, but not so well that he could forget it was a trick.

Tomorrow, there would be another wide array of men and women requesting his time. Another schedule of ritual and audience and meeting. Perhaps it would all go as well as today had, and he would end the day in his rooms, feeling old and maudlin despite his success. There were so many men and women in the court - in the world - who wanted nothing more than power. Otah, who had it, had always known how little it changed.

He slept deeply and without dreams. When he woke, every man and woman of Galt had gone blind.

16.

It had been raining for two full days. Occasionally the water changed to sleet or hail, and small acc.u.mulations of rotten ice had begun to form in the sheltered corners of the courtyard. Maati closed his shutters against the low clouds and sat close to the fire, the weather tapping on wood like fingers on a table. It might almost have been pleasant if it hadn't made his spine stiffen and ache.

The cold coupled with Eiah's absence had turned life quiet and slow, like a bear preparing to sleep through the winter. Maati went down to the kitchen in the morning and ate with the others. Large Kae and Irit had started rehearsing old songs together to pa.s.s the time. They sang while they cooked, and the harmonies were prettier than Maati would have imagined. When Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight were there, the andat would grow restive, its eyes s.h.i.+fting from one singer to the next and back again until Vanjit started to fidget and took her charge away. Small Kae had no ear for music, so instead spent her time reading the old texts that Clarity-of-Sight had been built from and asking questions about the finer points of their newly re-created grammar.

Most of the day, Maati spent alone in his rooms, or dressed in several thick robes, walking through the halls. He would not say it, but the s.p.a.ce had begun to feel close and restricting. Likely it was only the sense of winter moving in.

With the journey to Pathai and back, along with the trading and provisioning, he couldn't expect Eiah's return for another ten days. He hadn't expected to feel that burden so heavily upon him, and so both delight and dread touched him when Small Kae interrupted his half-doze.

'She's come back. Vanjit's been watching from the cla.s.sroom, and she says Eiah's come back. She's already turned from the high road, and if the path's not too muddy, she'll be here by nightfall.'

Maati rose and opened the shutters, as if by squinting at the gray he could match Vanjit's sight. A gust of cold and damp pulled at the shutter in his hand. He was half-tempted to find a cloak of oiled silk and go out to meet her. It would be folly, of course, and gain him nothing. He ran a hand through the thin remnants of his hair, wondering how many days it had been since he'd bathed and shaved himself, and then realized that Small Kae was still there, waiting for him to speak.

'Well,' he said, 'whatever we have that's best, let's cook it up. Eiahcha's going to have fresh supplies, so there's no point in saving it.'

Small Kae grinned, took a pose that accepted his instruction, and bustled out. Maati turned back to the open window. Ice and mud and gloom. And set in it, invisible to him, Eiah and news.

There was no sunset; Eiah arrived shortly after the clouds had faded into darkness. In the light of hissing torches, the cart's wheels were beige with mud and clay. The horse trembled with exhaustion, driven too hard through the wet. Large Kae, clucking her tongue in disapproval, took the poor beast off to be rubbed down and warmed while the rest of them crowded around Eiah. She wrung the water from her hair with pale fingers, answering the first question before it was asked.

'Ashti Beg's left. She said she didn't want to come back. We were in a low town just south of here off the high road. She said we could talk about it, but when I got up in the morning, she'd already gone.' She looked at Maati when she finished. 'I'm sorry.'

He took a pose that forgave and also diminished the scale of the thing, then waved her in. Vanjit followed, and then Irit and Small Kae. The meal was laid out and waiting. Barley soup with lemon and quail. Rice and sausage. Watered wine. Eiah sat near the brazier and ate like a woman starved, talking between mouthfuls.

'We never reached Pathai. There was a trade fair halfway to the city. Tents, carts, the wayhouse so full they were renting out s.p.a.ce on the kitchen floor. There was a courier there gathering messages from all the low towns.'

'So the letters were sent?' Irit asked. Eiah nodded and scooped up another mouthful of rice.

'Ashti Beg,' Maati said. 'Tell me more about her. Did she say why she left?'

Eiah frowned. Color was coming back to her cheeks, but her lips were still pale, her hair clinging to her neck like ivy.

'It was me,' Vanjit said, the andat squirming in her lap. 'It's my doing.'

'Perhaps, but it wasn't what she said,' Eiah replied. 'She said she was tired, and that she felt we'd all gone past her. She didn't see that she would ever complete a binding of her own, or that her insights were particularly helping us. I tried to tell her otherwise, give her some perspective. If she'd stayed on until the morning, perhaps I could have.'

Maati sipped his wine, wondering how much of what Eiah said was true, how much of it was being softened because Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight were in the room. It seemed more likely to him that Ashti Beg had taken offense at Vanjit's misstep and been unable to forgive it. He recalled the woman's dry tone, her cutting humor. She had not been an easy woman or a particularly apt pupil, but he believed he would miss her.

'Was there other news? Anything of the Galts?' Vanjit asked. There was something odd about her voice, but it might only have been that Clarity-of-Sight had started its wordless, wailing complaint. Eiah appeared to notice nothing strange in the question.

'There would have been if I'd reached Pathai, I'd expect,' she said. 'But since there would have been nothing to do about it and our business was done early, I wanted to come back quickly.'

'Ah,' Vanjit said. 'Of course.'

Maati tugged at his fingers. There was something near disappointment in the girl's tone. As if she had expected someone that had not arrived.

'You're ready to work again?' Small Kae said. Irit flapped a cloth at her, and Small Kae took a pose that unasked the question. Eiah smiled.

'I've had a few thoughts,' she said. 'Let me look them over tonight after we unload the cart, and we can talk in the morning.'