An Autumn War Read online

  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."

  14

  Balasar had not been raised to put faith in augury. His father had always said that any god that could create the world and the stars should he able to put together a few well-formed sentences if there was something that needed saying; Balasar had accepted this wisdom in the uncritical way of a boy emulating the man he most admires. And still, the dream came to him on the night before he had word of the hunting party.

  It was far from the first time he had dreamt of the desert. Ile felt again the merciless heat, the pain of the satchel cutting into his shoulder. The hooks he had home then had become ashes in the dream as they had in life, but the weight was no less. And behind him were not only Coal and Eustin. All of them followed him-Bes, NIayarsin, Little Ott, and the others. The dead followed him, and he knew they were no longer his allies or his enemies. They came to keep watch over him, to see what work he wrought with their blood. They were his judges. As always before, he could not speak. His throat was knotted. Ile could not turn to see the dead; he only felt them.

  But there seemed more now-not only the men he had left in the desert, but others as well. Some of them were soldiers, some of them simple men, all of them padding behind him, waiting to see him justify their sacrifices and his own pride. The host behind him had grown.

  He woke in his tent, his mouth dry and sticky. Dawn had not yet come. He drank from the water flask by his bed, then pulled on a shirt and simple trousers and went out to relieve himself among the bushes. The army was still asleep or else just beginning to stir. The air was warm and humid so near the river. Balasar breathed deep and slow. lie had the sense that the world itself-trees, grasses, moon-silvered clouds-was heavy with anticipation. It would he two weeks before they would come within sight of the river city Udun. By month's end another poet would be dead, another library burned, another city fallen.

  "Thus far, the campaign had proved as simple as he had hoped, though slower. He had lost almost no men in Nantani. The low towns that his army had come across in their journey to the North had emptied before them; men, women, children, animals-all had scattered before them like autumn leaves before a windstorm. The only miscalculation he had made was in how long to rely on the steam wagons. Two boilers had blown on the rough terrain before Balasar had called to let them cool and be pulled. Five men had died outright, another fifteen had been scalded too badly to continue. Balasar had sent them back to Nantani. "There had been less food captured than he had hoped; the residents of the low towns had put anything they thought might be of use to Balasar and his men to fire before they fled. But the land was rich with game fowl and deer, and his supplies were sufficient to reach the next cities.

  As dawn touched the eastern skyline, Balasar put on his uniform and walked among the men. 'l'he morning's cook fires smoked, filling the air with the scents of burning grass and wood and coal filched from the steam wagons, hot grease and wheat cakes and kafe. Captains and footmen, archers and carters, Balasar greeted them all with a smile and considered them with approving nods or small frowns. When a man lifted half a wheat cake to him, Balasar took it with thanks and squatted down beside the cook to blow it cool and cat it. Every man he met, he had made rich. Every man in the camp would stand before him on the battle lines, and only a few, he hoped, would walk behind him in his dream.

  Sinja Ajutani's camp was enfolded within the greater army's but still separate from it, like the Baktan Quarter in Acton. A city within a city, a camp within a camp. The greeting he found here was less warm. The respect he saw in these dark, almond eyes was touched with fear. Perhaps hatred. But no mistake, it was still respect.

  Sinja himself was sitting on a fallen log, shirtless, with a bit of silver mirror in one hand and a blade in the other. He looked tip as Balasar came close, made his salute, and returned to shaving. Balasar sat beside him.

  "We break camp soon," Balasar said. "I'll want ten of your men to ride with the scouting parties today."

  "Expecting to find people to question?" Sinja asked. There was no rancor in his voice.

  "'T'his close to the river, I can hope so."

  "They'll know we're coming. Refugees move faster than armies. The first news of Nantani likely reached them two, maybe three weeks ago.

  "Then perhaps they'll send someone here to speak for them," Balasar said. Sinja seemed to consider this as he pressed the blade against his own throat. There were scars on the man's arms and chest-long raised lines of white.

  "Would you prefer I ride with the scouts, or stay close to the camp and wait for an emissary?"

  "Close to camp," Balasar said. "The men you choose for scouting should speak my language well, though. I don't want to miss anything that would help us do this cleanly."

  "Agreed," Sinja said, and put the knife to his own throat again. Before Balasar could go on, he heard his own name called out. A boy no older than fourteen summers wearing the colors of the second legion came barreling into the camp. His face was flushed from running, his breath short. Balasar stood and accepted the boy's salute. In the corner of his eye, he saw Sinja put away knife and mirror and reach for his shirt.

  "General Gice, sir," the boy said between gasps. "Captain Tevor sent me. We've lost one of the hunting parties, sir."

  "Well, they'll have to catch up with us as best they can," Balasar said. "We don't have time for searching."

  "No, Sir. They aren't missing, sir. They're killed."

  Balasar felt a grotesque
recognition. The other men in his dream. This was where they'd come from.

  "Show me," he said.

  The trap had been sprung in a clearing at the end of a game trail. Crossbow bolts had taken half a dozen of the men. The others were marked with sword and axe blows. Their armor and robes had been stripped from them. "Their weapons were gone. Balasar stepped through the low grass cropped by deer and considered each face.

  The songs and epics told of warriors dying with lips curled in battle cry, but every dead man Balasar had ever seen looked at peace. However badly they had died, their bodies surrendered at the end, and the calm he saw in those dead eyes seemed to say that their work was done now. Like a man playing at tiles who has turned his mark and now sat back to ask Balasar what he would do to match it.

  "Are there no other bodies?" he asked.

  Captain "Ievor, at his elbow, shook his great woolly head.

  "There's signs that our boys did them harm, sir, but they took their dead with them. It wasn't all fast, sir. This one here, there's burn marks on him, and you can see on his wrists where they bound him tip. Asked him what he knew, I expect."

  Sinja knelt, touching the dead man's wounds as if making sure they were real.

  "I have a priest in my company," Captain "Icvor said. "One of the archers. I can have him say a few words. We'll bury them here and catch up with the main body tomorrow, sir."

  "They're coming with us," Balasar said.

  "Sir?"

  "Bring a pallet and a horse. I want these bodies pulled through the camp. I want every man in the army to see them. Then wrap them in shrouds and pack them in ashes. We'll bury them in the ruins of Udun with the Khai's skull to mark their place."

  Captain "Icvor made his salute, and it wasn't Balasar's imagination that put the tear in the old man's eye. As "I'evor barked out the orders to the men who had come with them, Sinja stood and brushed his palms against each other. A smear of old blood darkened the back of the captain's hand. Balasar read the disapproval in the passionless eyes, but neither man spoke.