An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet) Page 6

  Dread touched Otah’s belly, and a moment’s resentment. It had been such a long day, and here waiting for him like a stalking cat was another problem, another need he was expected to meet. The thought must have expressed itself in his body, because Kiyan sighed and rolled just slightly away.

  “You think it’s wrong of me,” Kiyan said.

  “Not wrong,” Otah said. “Unnecessary isn’t wrong.”

  “I know. At her age, you were living on the streets in the summer cities, stealing pigeons off firekeeper’s kilns and sleeping in alleys. And you came through just fine.”

  “Oh,” Otah said. “Have I told that story already?”

  “Once or twice,” she said, laughing gently. “It’s just that she seems so distant. I think there’s something bothering her that she won’t say. And then I wonder whether it’s only that she won’t say it to me.”

  “And why would she talk to me if she won’t she talk to you?”

  When he felt Kiyan shrug, Otah opened his eyes and rolled to his side. There were tears shining in his lover’s eyes, but her expression was more amused than sorrowful. He touched her cheek with his fingertips, and she kissed his palm absently.

  “I don’t know. Because you’re her father, and I’m only her mother? It was just…a hope. The problem is that she’s half a woman,” Kiyan said. “When the sun’s up, I know that. I remember when I was that age. My father had me running half of his wayhouse, or that’s how it felt back then. Up before the clients, cooking sausages and barley. Cleaning the rooms during the day. He and Old Mani would take care of the evenings, though. They wanted to sell as much wine as they could, but they didn’t want a girl my age around drunken travelers. I thought they were being so unfair.”

  Kiyan pursed her lips.

  “But maybe I’ve told that story already,” she said.

  “Once or twice,” Otah agreed.

  “There was a time I didn’t worry about the whole world and everything in it, you know. I remember that there was. It doesn’t make sense to me. One bad season, an illness, a fire—anything, really, and I could have lost the wayhouse. But now here I am, highest of the Khaiem, a whole city that will bend itself in half to hand me whatever it thinks I want, and the world seems more fragile.”

  “We got old,” Otah said. “It’s always the ones who’ve seen the most who think the world’s on the edge of collapse, isn’t it? And we’ve seen more than most.”

  Kiyan shook her head.

  “It’s more than that. Losing a wayhouse would have made the world harder for me and Old Mani. There are more people than I can count here in the city, and all the low towns. And you carry them. It makes it matter more.”

  “I sit through days of ceremony and let myself be hectored over the things I don’t do the way other people prefer,” Otah said. “I’m not sure that anything I’ve done here has actually made any difference at all. If they stuffed a robe with cotton and posed the sleeves…”

  “You care about them,” Kiyan said.

  “I don’t,” he said. “I care about you and Eiah and Danat. And Maati. I know that I’m supposed to care about everyone and everything in Machi, but love, I’m only a man. They can tell me I gave up my own name when I took the chair, but really the Khai Machi is only what I do. I wouldn’t keep the work if I could find a way out.”

  Kiyan embraced him with one arm. Her hair was fragrant with lavender oil.

  “You’re sweet,” she said.

  “Am I? I’ll try to confess my incompetence and selfishness more often.”

  “As long as it includes me,” she said. “Now go let those poor men change your clothes and get back to beds of their own.”

  The servants had become accustomed to the Khai’s preference for brief ablutions. Otah knew that his own father had managed somehow to enjoy the ceremony of being dressed and bathed by others. But his father had been raised to take the chair, had followed the traditions and forms of etiquette, and had never, that Otah knew of, stepped outside the role he’d been born to. Otah himself had been turned out, and the years he had spent being a simple, free man, reliant upon himself had ruined him for the fawning of the court. He endured the daily frivolity of having foods brought to him, his hands cleaned for him, his hair combed on his behalf. He allowed the body servants to pull off his formal robes and swathe him in a sleeping shift, and when he returned to his bed, Kiyan’s breath was already deep, slow, and heavy. He slipped in beside her, pulling the blankets up over himself, and closed his eyes at last.

  Sleep, however, did not come. His body ached, his eyes were tired, but it seemed that the moment he laid his head back, Otah’s mind woke. He listened to the sounds of the palace in night: the almost silent wind through a distant window, the deep and subtle ticking of cooling stone, the breath of the woman at his side. Beyond the doors to the apartments, someone coughed—one of the servants set to watch over the Khai Machi in case there was anything he should desire in the night. Otah tried not to move.

  He hadn’t asked Kiyan about Danat’s health. He’d meant to. But surely if there had been anything concerning, she would have brought it up to him. And regardless, he could ask her in the morning. Perhaps he would cancel the audiences before midday and go speak with Danat’s physicians. And speak to Eiah. He hadn’t said he would do that, but Kiyan had asked, and it wasn’t as if being present in his own daughter’s life should be an imposition. He wondered what it would have been to have a dozen wives, whether he would have felt the need to attend to all of their children as he did to the two he had now, how he would have stood watching his boys grow up when he knew he would have to send them away or else watch them slaughter one another over which of them would take his own place here on this soft, sleepless bed and fear in turn for his own sons.

  The night candle ate through its marks as he listened to the internal voice nattering in his mind, gnawing at half a thousand worries both justified and inane. The trade agreements with Udun weren’t in place yet. Perhaps something really was the matter with Eiah. He didn’t know how long stone buildings stood; nothing stands forever, so it only made sense that someday the palaces would fall. And the towers. The towers reached so high it seemed that low clouds would touch them; what would he do if they fell? But the night was passing and he had to sleep. If he didn’t the morning would be worse. He should talk with Maati, find out how things had gone between him and the Dai-kvo’s envoy. Perhaps a dinner.

  And on, and on, and on. When he gave up, slipping from the bed softly to let Kiyan, at least, sleep, the night candle was past its three-quarter mark. Otah walked to the apartment’s main doors on bare, chilled feet and found his keeper in the hall outside dozing. He was a young man, likely the son of some favored servant or slave of Otah’s own father, given the honor of sitting alone in the darkness, bored and cold. Otah considered the boy’s soft face, as peaceful in sleep as a corpse’s, and walked silently past him and into the dim hallways of the palace.

  His night walks had been growing more frequent in recent months. Sometimes twice in a week, Otah found himself wandering in the darkness, sleep a stranger to him. He avoided the places where he might encounter another person, jealously keeping the time to himself. Tonight, he took a lantern and walked down the long stairways to the ground, and then on down, to the tunnels and underground streets into which the city retreated in the deep, bone-breaking cold of winter. With spring come, Otah found the palace beneath the palace empty and silent. The smell of old torches, long gone dark, still lingered in the air, and Otah imagined the corridors and galleries of the city descending forever into the earth. Dark archways and domed sleeping chambers cut from stone that had never seen daylight, narrow stairways leading endlessly down like a thing from a children’s song.

  He didn’t consider where he intended to go until he reached his father’s crypt and found himself unsurprised to be there. The dark stone seemed to wrap itself in shadows, words of ancient language cut deep into the walls. An ornate pedestal held the pale
urn, a dead flower. And beneath it, three small boxes—the remains of Biitrah, Danat, Kaiin. Otah’s brothers, dead in the struggle to become the new Khai Machi. Lives cut short for the honor of having a pedestal of their own someday, deep in the darkness.

  Otah sat on the bare floor, the lantern at his side, and contemplated the man he’d never known or loved whose place he had taken. Here was how his own end would look. An urn, a tomb, high honors and reverence for bones and ashes. And between the chill floor and the pale urn, perhaps another thirty summers. Perhaps forty. Years of ceremony and negotiation, late nights and early mornings and little else.

  But when the time came, at least his crypt would be only his own. Danat, brotherless, wouldn’t be called upon to kill or die in the succession. There would be no second sons left to kill the other for the black chair. It seemed a thin solace, having given so much of himself to achieve something that a merchant’s son could have had for free.

  It would have been easier if he’d never been anything but this. A man born into the Khaiem who had never stepped outside wouldn’t carry the memories of fishing in the eastern islands, of eating at the wayhouses outside Yalakeht, of being free. If he could have forgotten it all, becoming the man he was supposed to be might have been easier. Instead he was driven to follow his own judgment, raise a militia, take only one wife, raise only one son. That his experience told him that he was right didn’t make bearing the world’s disapproval as easy as he’d hoped.

  The lantern flame guttered and spat. Otah shook his head, uncertain now how long he had been lost in his reverie. When he stood, his left leg had gone numb from being pressed too long against the bare stone. He took up the lantern and walked—moving slowly and carefully to protect his numbed foot—back toward the stairways that would return him to the surface and the day. By the time he regained the great halls, feeling had returned. The sky peeked through the windows, a pale gray preparing itself to blue. Voices echoed and the palaces woke, and the grand, stately beast that was the court of Machi stirred and stretched.

  His apartments, when he reached them, were a flurry of activity. A knot of servants and members of the utkhaiem gabbled like peahens, Kiyan in their center listening with a seriousness and sympathy that only he knew masked amusement. Her hand was on the shoulder of the body servant whom Otah had passed, the peace of sleep banished and anxiety in its place.

  “Gentlemen,” Otah said, letting his voice boom, calling their attention to him. “Is there something amiss?”

  To a man, they adopted poses of obeisance and welcome. Otah responded automatically now, as he did half a hundred times every day.

  “Most High,” a thin-voiced man said—his Master of Tides. “We came to prepare you and found your bed empty.”

  Otah looked at Kiyan, whose single raised brow told them that empty had only meant empty of him, and that she’d have been quite pleased to keep sleeping.

  “I was walking,” he said.

  “We may not have the time to prepare you for the audience with the envoy from Tan-Sadar,” the Master of Tides said.

  “Put him off,” Otah said, walking through the knot of people to the door of his apartments. “Reschedule everything you have for me today.”

  The Master of Tides gaped like a trout in air. Otah paused, his hands in a query that asked if the words bore repeating. The Master of Tides adopted an acknowledging pose.

  “The rest of you,” he said, “I would like breakfast served in my apartments here. And send for my children.”

  “Eiah-cha’s tutors…” one of the others began, but Otah looked at the man and he seemed to forget what he’d been saying.

  “I will be taking the day with my family,” Otah said.

  “You will start rumors, Most High,” another said. “They’ll say the boy’s cough has grown worse again.”

  “And I would like black tea with the meal,” Otah said. “In fact, bring the tea first. I’ll be in by the fire, warming my feet.”

  He stepped in, and Kiyan followed, closing the door behind her.

  “Bad night?” she asked.

  “Sleepless,” he said as he sat by the fire grate. “That’s all.”

  Kiyan kissed the top of his head where she assured him that the hair was not thinning, and stepped out of the room. He heard the soft rustle of cloth against stone and Kiyan’s low, contented humming, and knew she was changing her robes. The warmth of the fire pressed against the soles of his feet like a comforting hand, and he closed his eyes for a moment.

  No building stands forever, he thought. Even palaces fall. Even towers. He wondered what it would have been like to live in a world where Machi didn’t exist—who he might have been, what he might have done—and he felt the weight of stone pressing down upon the air he breathed. What would he do if the towers fell? Where would he go, if he could go anywhere?

  “Papa-kya!” Danat’s bright voice called. “I was in the Second Palace, and I found a closet where no one had been in ever, and look what I found!”

  Otah opened his eyes, and turned to his son and the wood-and-string model he’d discovered. Eiah arrived a hand and a half later, when the thin granite shutters glowed with the sun. For a time, at least, Otah’s own father’s tomb lay forgotten.

  THE PROBLEM with Athai-kvo, Maati decided, was that he was simply an unlikable man. There was no single thing that he did or said, no single habit or effect that made him grate on the nerves of all those around him. Some men were charming, and would be loved however questionable their behavior. And then on the other end of the balance, there was Athai. The weeks he had spent with the man had been bearable only because of the near-constant stream of praise and admiration given to Maati.

  “It will change everything,” the envoy said as they sat on the steps of the poet’s house—Cehmai’s residence. “This is going to begin a new age to rival the Second Empire.”

  “Because that ended so well,” Stone-Made-Soft rumbled, its tone amused as always.

  The morning was warm. The sculpted oaks separating the poet’s house from the palaces were bright with new leaves. Far above, barely visible through the boughs, the stone towers rose into the sky. Cehmai reached across the envoy to pour more rice wine into Maati’s bowl.

  “It is early yet to pass judgment,” Maati said as he nodded his thanks to Cehmai. “It isn’t as though the techniques have been tried.”

  “But it makes sense,” Athai said. “I’m sure it will work.”

  “If we’ve overlooked something, the first poet to try this is likely to die badly,” Cehmai said. “The Dai-kvo will want a fair amount of study done before he puts a poet’s life on the table.”

  “Next year,” Athai said. “I’ll wager twenty lengths of silver it will be used in bindings by this time next year.”

  “Done,” the andat said, then turned to Cehmai. “You can back me if I lose.”

  The poet didn’t reply, but Maati saw the amusement at the corners of Cehmai’s mouth. It had taken years to understand the ways in which Stone-Made-Soft was an expression of Cehmai, the ways they were a single thing, and the ways they were at war. The small comments the andat made that only Cehmai understood, the unspoken moments of private struggle that sometimes clouded the poet’s days. They were like nothing so much as a married couple, long accustomed to each other’s ways.

  Maati sipped the rice wine. It was infused with peaches, a moment of autumn’s harvest in the opening of spring. Athai looked away from the andat’s broad face, discomforted.

  “You must be ready to return to the Dai-kvo,” Cehmai said. “You’ve been away longer than you’d intended.”

  Athai waved the concern away, pleased, Maati thought, to speak to the man and forget the andat.

  “I wouldn’t have traded this away,” he said. “Maati-kvo is going to be remembered as the greatest poet of our generation.”

  “Have some more wine,” Maati said, clinking the envoy’s bowl with his own, but Cehmai shook his head and gestured toward the wooded path.
A slave girl was trotting toward them, her robes billowing behind her. Athai put down his bowl and stood, pulling at his sleeves. Here was the moment they had been awaiting—the call for Athai to join the caravan to the East. Maati sighed with relief. Half a hand, and his library would be his own again. The envoy took a formal pose of farewell that Maati and Cehmai returned.

  “I will send word as soon as I can, Maati-kvo,” Athai said. “I am honored to have studied with you.”

  Maati nodded uncomfortably; then, after a moment’s awkward silence, Athai turned. Maati watched until the slave girl and poet had both vanished among the trees, then let out a breath. Cehmai chuckled as he put the stopper into the flask of wine.

  “Yes, I agree,” Cehmai said. “I think the Dai-kvo must have chosen him specifically to annoy the Khai.”

  “Or he just wanted to be rid of him for a time,” Maati said.

  “I liked him,” Stone-Made-Soft said. “Well, as much as I like anyone.”

  The three walked together into the poet’s house. The rooms within were neatly kept—shelves of books and scrolls, soft couches and a table laid out with the black and white stones on their board. A lemon candle burned at the window, but a fly still buzzed wildly about the corners of the room. It seemed that every winter Maati forgot about the existence of flies, only to rediscover them in spring. He wondered where the insects all went during the vicious cold, and what the signal was for them to return.

  “He isn’t wrong, you know,” Cehmai said. “If you’re right, it will be the most important piece of analysis since the fall of the Empire.”

  “I’ve likely overlooked something. It isn’t as though we haven’t seen half a hundred schemes to bring back the glory of the past before now, and there hasn’t been one that’s done it.”

  “And I wasn’t there to look at the other ideas,” Cehmai said. “But since I was here to talk this one over, I’d say this is at least plausible. That’s more than most. And the Dai-kvo’s likely to think the same.”