An Autumn War

13

For years, Otah had been a traveler by profession. He had worked the gentleman's trade, traveling as a courier for a merchant house with business in half the cities of the Khaiem. He had spent days on horseback or hunkered down in the backs of wagons or walking. He remembered with fondness the feeling of resting at the end of a day, his limbs warm and weary, sinking into the woolen blanket that only half protected him from the ticks. He remembered looking up at the wide sky with something like contentment. It seemed fourteen years sleeping in the best bed in Machi had made a difference.

"Is there something I can bring you, Most I Iigh?" the servant boy asked from the doorway of the tent. Utah pulled open the netting and turned over in his cot, twisting his head to look at him. The boy was perhaps eighteen summers old, long hair pulled back and bound by a length of leather.

"Do I seem like I need something?"

The boy looked down, abashed.

"You were moaning again, Most High."

Otah let himself lie back on the cot. The stretched canvas creaked under him like a ship in a storm. He closed his eyes and cataloged quietly all his reasons for moaning. His hack ached like someone had kicked him. His thighs were chafed half raw. They were hardly ten days out from Machi, and it was becoming profoundly clear that he didn't know how to march a military column across the rolling, forested hills that stretched from Machi almost to the mountains North of the Daikvo. The great Galtic army that had massed in the South was no doubt well advanced, and the Dal-kvo was in deadly danger, if he hadn't been killed already. Otah closed his eyes. Right now, the throbbing sting of his abused thighs bothered him most.

"Go ask the physicians to send some salve," he said.

"I'll call for the physician."

"No! Just… just get some salve and bring it here. I'm not infirm. And I wasn't moaning. It was the cot."

The boy took a pose of acceptance and backed out of the tent, shutting the door behind him. Otah let the netting fall closed again. A tent with a door. Gods.

The first few days hadn't been this had. The sense of release that came from taking real action at last had almost outweighed the fears that plagued him and the longing for Kiyan at his side, for Eiah and Danat. The Northern summer was brief, but the days were long. He rode with the men of the utkhaiem, trotting on their best mounts, while the couriers ranged ahead and the huntsmen foraged. The wide, green world smelled rich with the season. The North Road ran only among the winter cities-Amnat-"Tan, Cetani, Machi. There was no good, paved road direct from Machi to the village of the Dai-kvo, but there were trade routes that jumped from low town to low town. Mud furrows worn by carts and hooves and feet. Around them, grasses rose high as the bellies of their horses, singing a dry song like fingertips on skin when the wind stirred the blades. The feeling of the sure-footed animal he rode had been reassuring at first. Solid and strong.

But the joy of action had wearied while the dread grew stronger. The steady movement of the horse had become wearisome. The jokes and songs of the men had lost something of their fire. The epics and romances of the Empire included some passages about the weariness and longing that came of living on campaign, but they spoke of endless seasons and years without the solace of home. Otah and his men hadn't yet traveled two full weeks. They were still well shy of the journey's halfway mark, and already they were losing what cohesion they had.

With every day, most men were afoot while huntsmen and scouts and utkhaiem rode. Horsemen were called to the halt long before the night should have forced them to make camp, for fear that those following on foot would fail to reach the tents before darkness fell. And even so, men continued to straggle in long after the evening meals had been served, leaving them unrested and fed only on scraps when morning came. The army, such as it was, seemed tied to the speed of its slowest members. He needed speed and he needed men at his side, but there was no good way to have both. And the fault, Otah knew, was in himself.

There had to he answers to this and the thousand other problems that came of leading a campaign. The Galts would know. Sinja could have told him, had he been there and not out in some Westlands garrison waiting for a flood of Galts that wasn't coming. They were men that had experience in the field, who had more knowledge of war than the casual study of a few old Empire texts fit in between religious ceremonies and high court bickering.

The scratch came at the door, soft and apologetic. Otah swung his legs off the cot and sat up. He called out his permission as he parted the netting, but the one who came in wasn't the servant boy. It was Nayiit.

He looked tired. His robes had been blue once, but from the hem to the knee they were stained the pale brown of the mud through which they had traveled. Otah considered the weight of their situation-the young man's dual role as Maati's son and his own, the threat he posed to Danat and the promise to Machi, the aid he might be in this present endeavor to prevent harm to the Dal-kvo-and dismissed it all. He was too tired and pained to chew everything a hundred times before he swallowed.

He took a pose of welcome, and Nayiit returned one of greater formality. Otah nodded to a camp chair and Nayiit sat.

"Your attendant wasn't here. I didn't know what the right etiquette was, so I just came through."

"He's running an errand. Once he's hack, I can have tea brought," Otah said. "Or wine."

Nayiit took a pose of polite refusal. Otah shrugged it away.

"As you see fit," Otah said. "And what brings you?"

"There's grumbling in the ranks, Most High. Even among some of the utkhaiem."

"There's grumbling in here, for that," Otah said. "There's just no one here to listen to me. Are there any suggestions? Any solutions that the ranks have seen that escaped me? Because, by all the gods that have ever been named, I'm not too proud to hear them."

"They say you're driving them too hard, Most High," Nayiit said. "That the men need a day's rest."

"Rest? Go slower? That's the solution they have to offer? What kind of brilliance is that?"

Nayiit looked up. His face was long, like a Northerner's. Like Otah's. His eyes were Liat's tea-with-milk brown. His expression, however, owed to neither of them. Where Liat would have kept her eyes down or Otah would have made himself charming, Nayiit's face belonged on a man hearing a heavy load. Whatever was in his mind, in this moment it was clear that he would press until the world was the way he wanted it or it crushed him. It was something equal parts weariness and joy, like a man newly acquainted with certainty. Otah found himself curious.

"They aren't wrong, Most High. These men aren't accustomed to living on the road like this. You can't expect the speed of a practiced army from them. And the walkers have been rising early to drill."

"Have they?"

"They have the impression their lives may rest on it. And the lives of their families. And, forgive me Most High, but your life too."

Otah leaned forward, his hands taking a questioning pose.

"They're afraid of failing you," Nayiit said. "It's why no one would come to you and complain. I've been keeping company with a man named Saya. He's a blacksmith. Plow blades, for the most part. I Iis knees are swollen to twice their normal size, and he wakes before dawn to tic on leather and wool and swing sticks with the others. And then he walks until he can't. And then he walks farther."

Nayiit's voice was trembling now, but Otah couldn't say if it was with weariness or fear or anger.

"These aren't soldiers, Most High. And you're pushing them too hard."

"We've been moving for ten days-"

"And we're coming near to halfway to the Dai-kvo's village," Nayiit said. "In ten days. And drilling, and sleeping under thin blankets on hard ground. Not couriers and huntsmen, not men who are accustomed to this. Just men. I've spoken to the provisioners. We left Nlachi three thousand strong. Do you know how many have turned hack? How many have deserted you?"

Otah blinked. It wasn't a question he'd ever thought to ask.

"How many?"

"None."

Otah felt something loosen in his chest. A warmth like the first drink of wine spread through him, and he felt tears beginning to well up in his eyes. If he had been less exhausted, it would never have pierced his reserve, and still… none.

"With every low town we pass, we take on a few more," Nayiit was saying. "They're afraid. The word has gone out that all the andat are gone, that the Galts are going to invade or are invading. It's the thing every man had convinced himself would never happen. I hear the things they say."

"The things they say?"

"That you were the only one who saw the danger. You were training men even before. You were preparing. They say that you've traveled the world when you were a boy, that you understand it better than any other Khai. Some of them are calling you the new Emperor."

`T 'hey should stop that," Otah said.

"Most High, they're desperate and afraid, and they want a hero out of the old epics. They need one."

"And you? What do you need?"

"I need Saya to stop walking for a day."

Otah closed his eyes. Perhaps the right thing was to send the experienced men on ahead. They could clear spaces for the camps. Perhaps missing a single day would not be too much. And there was little point in running if it was only to be sure they came to the battle exhausted and ready for slaughter. The I)ai-kvo would have gotten his warning by now. The poets might even now be in flight toward Otah and his ragtag army. IIe took in a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. Letting his body collapse with it.

"I'll consider what you've said, Nayiit-eha," Otah said. "It wasn't where my mind had led me, but I can see there's some wisdom in it."

Nayiit took a pose of gratitude as formal as any at court. He looked nearly as spent as Otah felt. Otah raised his hands in a querying pose.

"The utkhaicm didn't feel comfortable bringing these concerns to me," he said. "Why did you?"

"I think, Most High, there's a certain… reluctance in the higher ranks to second-guess you again. And the footmen wouldn't think of approaching you. I grew up with stories about you and Maati-cha, so I suppose I can bring myself to think of you as one of my mother's friends. That, and I'm desperately tired. If you had me sent back in disgrace, I could at least get a day's rest."

Otah smiled, and saw his own expression reflected back at him. He had never known this boy, had never lifted him over his head the way he had Danat. He had had no part in teaching Nayiit wisdom or folly. Even now, seeing himself in his eldest son's movements and expressions, he could hardly think of him with the hone-deep protectiveness that shook him when he thought of Eiah and Danat. And yet he was pleased that he had accepted Nayiit's offer to join him in this halfdoomed campaign. Otah leaned forward, his hand out. It was the ges ture of friendship that one seafront laborer might offer another. Nayiit only looked shocked for a moment, then clasped Otah's hand.

"Whenever they're too nervous to tell me what I'm doing wrong, you come to me, Nayiit-cha. I haven't got many people I can trust to do that, and I've left most of them hack in Mach 1.11

"If you'll promise not to have me whipped for impertinence," the boy said.

"I won't have you whipped, and I won't have you sent hack."

"I'hank you," Nayiit said, and again Otah was moved to see that the gratitude was genuine. After Nayiit had gone, Otah was left with the aches in his body and the unease that came with having a man with a wife and child thank you for leading him toward the real chance of death. The life of the Khai Machi, he thought, afforded very few opportunities to he humbled, but this was one. When the attendant returned, Otah didn't recognize the sound of his scratching until the man's voice came.

"Most High?"

"Yes, come in. And bring that ointment here. No, I can put it on myself. But bring me the captains of the houses. I've decided to take a day to rest and send the scouts ahead."

"Yes, Most High."

"And when you've done with that, there's a man named Saya. He's on foot. A blacksmith from Machi, I think."

"Yes, Most High?"

"Ask him to join me for a howl of wine. I'd like to meet him."

Maati woke to find Liat already gone. His hand traced the indentation in the mattress at his side where she had slept. The world outside his door was already bright and warm. The birds whose songs had filled the air of spring were busy now teaching their hatchlings to fly. The pale green of new leaves had deepened, the trees as rich with summer as they would ever be. High summer had come. Maati rose from his bed with a grunt and went about his morning ablutions.

The days since the ragged, improvised army of Machi began its march to the east had been busy. The loss of Stone-Made-Soft would have sent the court and the merchant houses scurrying like mice before a flood even if nothing more had happened. Word of the other lost andat and of the massed army of Galt made what in other days would have been a cataclysm seem a side issue. For half a week, it seemed, the city had been paralyzed. Not from fear, but from the simple and profound lack of any ritual or ceremony that answered the situation. Then, first from the merchant houses below and Kiyan-cha's women's ban- (lucts above and then seemingly everywhere at once, the utkhaiem had flushed with action. Often disorganized, often at crossed purpose, but determined and intent. Nlaati's own efforts were no less than any others.

Still, he left it behind him now-the books stacked in distinct piles, scrolls unfurled to particular passages as if waiting for the copyist's attention-and walked instead through the wide, bright paths of the palaces. "There were fewer singing slaves, more stretches where the gravel of the path had scattered and not yet been raked back into place, and the men and women of the utkhaiem who he passed seemed to carry themselves with less than their full splendor. It was as if a terrible wind had blown through a garden and disarrayed those blossoms it did not destroy.

The path led into the shade of the false forest that separated the poet's house from the palaces. "There were old trees among these, thick trunks speaking of generations of human struggle and triumph and failure since their first tentative seedling leaves had pushed away this soil. Moss clothed the bark and scented the air with green. Birds fluttered over Nlaati's head, and a squirrel scolded him as he passed. In winter, with these oaks bare, you could see from the porch of the poet's house out almost to the palaces. In summer, the house might have been in a different city. The door of the poet's house was standing open, and Maati didn't bother to scratch or knock.

Cehmai's quarters suffered the same marks as his own-books, scrolls, codices, diagrams all laid out without respect to author or age or type of binding. Cehmai, sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, held a book open in his hand. With the brown robes of a poet loose around his frame, he looked, Nlaati thought, like a young student puzzling over an obscure translation. Cehmai looked up as Maati's shadow crossed him, and smiled wearily.

"Have you eaten?" hlaati asked.

"Some bread. Some cheese," Cehmai said, gesturing to the back of the house with his head. "There's some left, if you'd like it."

It hadn't occurred to Maati just how hungry he was until he took up a corner of the rich, sweet bread. He knew he'd had dinner the night before, but he couldn't recall what it had been or when he'd eaten it. He reached into a shallow ceramic howl of salted raisins. They tasted rich and full as wine. Ile took a handful and sat on the chair beside Cchmai to look over the assorted results of their labor.

"What's your thought?" Cehmai said.

"I've found more than I expected to," Nlaati said. "'T'here was a section in Vautai's Fourth Meditations that actually clarified some things I hadn't been certain of. If we were to put together all the scraps and rags from all of the hooks and histories and scrolls, it might be enough to support binding a fresh andat."

Cehmai sighed and closed the hook he'd been holding.

"That's near what I've come to," the younger poet agreed. Then he looked up. "And how long do you think it would take to put those scraps and rags into one coherent form?"

"So that it stood as a single work? I'm likely too old to start it," Maati said. "And without the full record from the Dai-kvo, there would be no way to know whether a binding was dangerously near one that had already been done."

"I hated those," Cehmai said.

"'They went hack to the beginning of the First Empire," Nlaati said. "Some of the descriptions are so convoluted it takes reading them six times to understand they're using fifty words to carry the meaning of five. But they are complete, and that's the biggest gap in our resources."

Cehmai got to his feet with a grunt. Ilis hair was disheveled and there were dark smudges under his eyes. Nlaati imagined he had some to match.

"So to sum up," Cehmai said, "if the Khai fails, we might be able to hind a new andat in a generation or so."

"Unless we're unlucky and use some construct too much like something a minor poet employed twenty generations back. In that case, we attempt the binding, pay the price, and dic badly. Except that by then, we'll likely all have been slaughtered by the Galts."

"Well," Cehmai said and rubbed his hands together. "Are there any of those raisins left?"

"A few," Maati said.

Nlaati could hear the joints in Cehmai's hack cracking as he stretched. Maati leaned over and scooped up the fallen hook. It wasn't titled, nor was the author named, but the grammar in the first page marked it as Second Empire. Loyan Sho or Kodjan the Lesser. Nlaati let his gaze flow down the page, seeing the words without taking in their meanings. Behind him, Cehmai ate the raisins, lips smacking until he spoke.

"I'he second problem is solved if your technique works. It isn't critical that we have all the histories if we can deflect the price of failing. At worst, we'll have lost the time it took to compose the binding."

"Months," hlaati said.

"But not death," Cchmai went on. "So there's something to be said for that."

"And the first problem can be skirted by not starting wholly from scratch."

"You've been thinking about this, Nlaati-kvo."

Cehmai slowly walked back across the floor. His footsteps were soft and deliberate. Outside, a pigeon cooed. Nlaati let the silence speak for him. When Cehmai returned and sat again, his expression was abstracted and his fingers picked idly at the cloth of his sleeves. hlaati knew some part of what haunted the younger man: the danger faced by the city, the likelihood of the Khai Machi retrieving the I)ai-kvo, the shapeless and all-pervading fear of the Galtic army that had gathered in the South and might now be almost anywhere. But there was another part to the question, and that Maati could not guess. And so he asked.

"What is it like?"

Cehmai looked up as if he'd half-forgotten klaati was there. His hands flowed into a pose that asked clarification.

"Stone-Made-Soft," Maati said. "What is it like with him gone?"

Cehmai shrugged and turned his head to look out the unshuttered windows. The trees shifted their leaves and adjusted their branches like men in conversation. The sun hung in the sky, gold in lapis.

"I'd forgotten what it was like to be myself," Cehmai said. His voice was low and thoughtful and melancholy. "Just myself and not him as well. I was so young when I took control of him. It's like having had someone strapped to your back when you were a child and then suddenly lifting off the burden. I feel alone. I feel freed. I'm shamed to have failed, even though I know there was nothing I could have done to keep hold of him. And I regret now all the years I could have stink Galt into ruins that I didn't."

"But if you could have him back, would you?"

The pause that came before Cehmai's reply meant that no, he would have chosen his freedom. It was the answer Maati had expected, but not the one he was ready to accept.

"The Khai may be able to save the Dai-kvo," Cehmai said. "He may get there before the Galts."

"But if he doesn't?"

"Then I would rather have Stone-Made-Soft back than decorate the end of some Galtic spear," Cehmai said, a grim humor in his voice. "I have some early work. Drafts from when I was first studying him. There are places where the options… branched. If we used those as starting points, it would make the binding different from the one I took over, and we still wouldn't have to begin from first principles."

"You have them here?"

"Yes. They're in that basket. There. You should take them back to the library and look them over. If we keep them here I'm too likely to do something unpleasant with them. I was half-tempted to burn them last night."

Maati took the pages-small, neat script on cheap, yellowing parchment-and folded them into his sleeve. The weight of them seemed so slight, and still Maati found himself uncomfortably aware of them and of the return to a kind of walking prison that they meant for Cehmai.

"I'll look them over," Maati said. "Once I have an idea what would be the best support for it, I'll put some reading together. And if things go well, we can present it all to the Dai-kvo when he arrives. Certainly, there's no call to do anything until we know where we stand."

"We can prepare for the worst," Cehmai said. "I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than taken unaware."

The resignation in Cehmai's voice was hard to listen to. Maati coughed, as if the suggestion he wished to make fought against being spoken.

"It might be better… I haven't attempted a binding myself. If I were the one…"

Cehmai took a pose that was both gratitude and refusal. Maati felt a warm relief at Cehmai's answer and also a twinge of regret.

"He's my burden," Cehmai said. "I gave my word to carry StoneMade-Soft as long as I could, and I'll do that. I wouldn't want to disappoint the Khai." Then he chuckled. "You know, there have been whole years when I would have meant that as a sarcasm. Disappointing the Khaiem seems to be about half of what we do as poets-no, I can't somehow use the andat to help you win at tiles, or restore your prowess with your wives, or any of the thousand stupid, petty things they ask of us. But these last weeks, I really would do whatever I could, not to disappoint that man. I don't know what's changed."

"Everything," Maati said. "Times like these remake men. They change what we are. Otah's trying to become the man we need him to he."

"I suppose that's true," Cehmai said. "I just don't want this all to be happening, so I forget, somehow, that it is. I keep thinking it's all a sour dream and I'll wake out of it and stumble down to play a game of stones against Stone-Made-Soft. That that will be the worst thing I have to face. And not…"

Cehmai gestured, his hands wide, including the house and the palaces and the city and the world.

"And not the end of civilization?" Maati suggested.

"Something like that."

Nlaati sighed.

"You know," he said, "when we were young, the man who was Daikvo then chose Otah to come train as a poet. He refused, but I think he would have been good. He has it in him to do whatever needs doing."

Killing a man, taking a throne, marching an army to its death, Nlaati thought but did not say. Whatever needs doing.

"I hope the price he pays is smaller than ours," Cehmai said.

"I doubt it will he."