Seasons of War

the Galts had been turned back. Now, with the quarters being shared, there were two and sometimes three families sharing the space meant for one.
    There was a part of him that wanted badly to take the stairs leading up, to go out of the palaces, and into the webwork of passages and tunnels one layered upon another that were his city. He knew it was an illusion to think that seeing things would improve them, make them easier to control and make right. But it was a powerful illusion.
    He sighed and took the descending stairs. The women’s quarters - designed to accommodate a Khai’s dozen or more wives - had been changed over to smaller, more private rooms by the addition of a few planks of wood and tapestries taken from the palaces above. The utkhaiem of Cetani - husbands and wives together - found some accommodations there. It had seemed an obvious choice, and Kiyan had never particularly made use of her rooms there. And still it seemed odd to have people so close. Late in the night, he could sometimes hear the voices of people passing by.
    The great blue and gold doors to his private apartments stood closed, two guards on either side. Otah noticed as he accepted their salutes how quickly he had come to think of these men as guards where before they had only been servants. Their duties were no different, their robes just the same. It wasn’t the world that had changed. It was him.
    He found Kiyan sitting at a low table, combing her hair with a wide-toothed comb. Wordless, he took it from her, sitting beside and behind her, and did the little task himself. Her hair was coarser than it had been once, and so shot with white that it seemed almost as much silver as black. He saw the subtle curve in the shape of her cheek as she smiled.
    ‘I heard the Khai Cetani speaking today,’ she said.
    ‘Really?’
    ‘He was in one of the teahouses. And, honestly, not one of the best ones.’
    ‘I won’t ask what you were doing in a third-rate teahouse,’ Otah said, and Kiyan chuckled.
    ‘Nothing more scandalous than listening to the Khai,’ she said. ‘But that might be enough. He thinks quite highly of you.’
    ‘Oh gods,’ Otah said. ‘Did the term come up again?’
    ‘Yes, the word emperor figured highly in the conversation. He seems to think the sun shines brighter when you tell it to.’
    ‘He seems to forget that first battle where I got everyone killed. And that I didn’t manage to keep the Dai-kvo from being slaughtered. ’
    ‘He doesn’t forget. But he does say you were the only man who tried to stop the Galts, who banded cities together instead of letting them fall one at a time, and in the end the only man who put them to flight.’
    ‘He should stop that,’ Otah said, and sighed. ‘He seemed so reasonable when I first met him. Who’d have guessed he was so easily wooed.’
    ‘He may not be wrong, you know. We’ll need to do something when this is over. An emperor or a way to choose new families to act as Khaiem. A Dai-kvo. That would have to be Maati or Cehmai, wouldn’t it?’
    It was how all the conversations went now - how to rebuild, how to remake. The polite fiction that the poets were sure to succeed was the tissue that seemed to hold people together, and Otah couldn’t bring himself to break it now.
    ‘I suppose so,’ Otah said. ‘It’ll be a life’s work, though. Perhaps more. It was getting hard enough finding andat that could still be bound before this. We’ve lost so much now, going back will be harder than it was at the first. If we have a new Dai-kvo, he won’t have time for anything more than that.’
    ‘An emperor, then. One man protecting all the cities. With the poets answering to him. Even just one poet with one andat would be enough. It would protect us.’
    ‘I recommend someone else do it. I’ve decided on a beach hut on Bakta,’ Otah said, trying to make it a joke. He saw Kiyan’s expression. ‘It’s too far ahead to think about now, love. Let it pass, and we’ll solve it later if it still needs solving.’
    Kiyan turned and took his hand. The days since he’d come home hadn’t allowed them time together, not as they had had before the war. First, when he and his men had marched across the bridge to trumpets and drums and dancing, it had been a mad festival. They had come out to meet him. He had embraced her, and Eiah, and little Danat, whom he had danced around until they were both dizzy. Otah had found himself whirled from one pavilion to the next,