Seasons of War

courtier’s face. It was unlike anything Liat had seen before, except perhaps an actor who in the midst of declaiming some epic has forgotten the words. The mask and distance of etiquette failed, and the words he spoke became genuine.
    ‘Our city’s gone. We have what we’re carrying. We need your help.’
    Only Liat was near enough to Kiyan to hear the tiny sigh that escaped before she spoke.
    ‘How could I refuse you?’ she said. ‘I am utterly unprepared, but if you will bring your people across the bridge and make them ready, I will find them places here.’
    The man took a pose of gratitude, and Kiyan turned back, Liat still at her side, and walked back to the bank where her people waited.
    ‘We’ll need something like shelter for these people,’ Kiyan said, under her breath. ‘Someplace we can keep them out of the rain until we can find . . . someplace.’
    ‘They won’t all fit,’ Liat said. ‘We can put them in the tunnels, but then there’s no place for all of us to go when winter comes. There’s too many of them, and they can’t have carried enough food to see them through until spring. And we’re stretched thin as it is.’
    ‘We’ll stretch thinner,’ Kiyan said.
    The rest of the day was a single long emergency, events and needs and decisions coming in waves and overlapping each other like the scales of a snake. Liat found herself at the large and growing camp that was forming as the refugees of Cetani reached the bridge. Thankfully, the bridge was only the width of eight men walking abreast, and it kept the flow of humanity and cattle and carts to a speed that was almost manageable. Liat only had to school herself not to look across the water to the larger, shapeless mass of people still waiting to cross. Liat motioned them to different places, the ones too frail or ill to survive another night in the open, the ones robust enough that they might be put to work. There were old men, children, babes hanging in their mothers’ exhausted arms.
    Liat felt as if she were being asked to engineer a new city of tents and cook fires. They came in the hundreds. In the thousands. Night had fallen before the last man crossed, and Liat could see fires on the far side, camps made by those who’d given up hope of crossing today. Liat sat on the smooth stone rail at the bridge’s end and let the aches in her feet and back and legs complain to her. It had been an excruciating day, and the work was far from ended. But at least the refugees were in tents sent out from Machi, safe from the cold. The food carts of Machi had also come out from the city, making their way through the crowds with garlic sausages and honeyed almonds and bowls of noodles and beef. There were even songs. Over the constant frigid rushing of the water, there was the sound of flutes and drums and voices. The temptation to close her eyes was unbearable, and yet. And yet.
    I want to be a good man , he’d said. And I’m not .
    With a sigh she began the long trek back to the city, to the palaces, to Kiyan and Maati and the bathhouses and her bed. The city, as she passed through its streets, was alive. The refugees of Cetani had not all waited in the camp. Or perhaps Kiyan had meant to start bringing them into the city. Whatever the intention had been, they had come, and Machi had poured itself out to make them welcome, to offer them food and wine and comfort, to pull news and gossip from them. The sun was gone, and the darkness was cold, and yet the city was full as a street fair. And as chaotic.
    She found Kiyan in the palaces looking as exhausted as she herself felt. Otah’s wife waved her near to the long, broad table. Wives of the utkhaiem were consulting one another, writing figures on paper, issuing orders to wide-eyed servants. It was like the middle of a trading company at the height of the cotton harvest, and Liat found it strangely comforting.
    ‘It can be done,’ Kiyan said. ‘It won’t be pleasant, but it can be done. I’ve had word from the Poinyat that we can use their mines, and I’m expecting the Daikani any time now.’
    ‘The mines?’ Liat said. The exhaustion made her slow to understand.
    ‘We’ll have to put people in them. They’re deep enough to stay warm. It’s like living in the tunnels under the city, only rougher. The ones in the plain will even have their own water. There’s food and sewage to worry about, but I’ve sent Jaini Radaani to speak with the engineers, and if she can’t