Seasons of War

footsteps in the snow were visible as blood on a wedding dress.
    He waited for what seemed half a day but couldn’t have been more than half a hand’s width in the arc of the fast winter sun. A figure emerged from the tunnels - thick black cloak, and wide, heavy hood. Maati was torn between poking his head out to watch it and pulling back to hide behind his boulder. In the end caution won out, and he waited blind while the sound of horse’s hooves on snow began and then grew faint. He chanced a look, and the rider had its back to him, heading back south to Machi, a twig of black on the wide field of mourning white. Maati waited until he judged the risk of being seen no greater than the risk of frostbite if he stayed still, then forced himself - all his limbs aching with the cold - to scramble the last stretch into the tunnel.
    The bolt-hole was empty. He was surprised to find that he’d half-expected it to be filled with men bearing swords, ready to take their vengeance out against him. He pulled off his gloves and lit a small fire to warm himself, and when his hands could move again without pain, he made an inventory of the place. Nothing seemed to be missing, nothing disturbed. Except this: a small wicker basket with two low stone wax-sealed jars where none had been before. Maati squatted over them, lifting them carefully. They were heavy - packed with something. And a length of scroll, curled like a leaf, had been nestled between them. Maati blew on his fingers and unfurled the scrap of parchment.
Maati-cha—
I thought you might be out in the hiding place where we were supposed to go when the Galts came, but you aren’t here, so I’m not sure anymore. I’m leaving this for you just in case. It’s peaches from the gardens. They were going to give them to the Galts, so I stole them.
Loya-cha says I’m not supposed to ride yet, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to get out again. If you find this, take it so I’ll know you were there.
It’s going to be all right.
    It was signed with Eiah’s wide, uncontrolled hand. Maati felt himself weeping. He broke the seal of one jar and with numb fingers drew out a slice of the deep orange fruit, sweet and rich and thick with the sunshine of the autumn days that had passed.
     
    The world changes. Sometimes slowly, sometimes all of an instant. But the world changes, and it doesn’t change back. A rockslide shifts the face of a mountain, and the stones never go back up to take their old places. War scatters the people of a city, and not all will return. If any.
    A child cherished as a babe, clung to as a man, dies; a mother’s one last journey with her son at her side proves to be truly the last. The world has changed. And no matter how painful this new world is, it doesn’t change back.
    Liat lay in the darkened room, as she had for days. Her belly didn’t bother her any longer. Even when it had, the pain hadn’t been deep. It was only flesh. The news of Nayiit’s death had been a more profound wound than anything the andat could do. Her boy had followed her on this last desperate adventure. He had left his own wife and child. And she had brought him here to die for a boy he hadn’t even known to be his brother.
    Or perhaps he had known. Perhaps that was what had given him the courage to attack the Galtic soldiers and be cut down. She would have asked him; she still intended to ask him, when she saw him next. Even knowing that she never could, even trying consciously to force the impulse away, she found she could not stop intending it. When I see him again still felt like the future. A time would come when it would feel like the past. When he was here, when I could touch him, when he would smile at me and make me laugh, when I worried for him. When my boy lived. Back then. Before I lost him.
    Before the world changed.
    She sighed in the darkness, and didn’t bother to wipe away the tears. They were meaningless - her body responding without her. They couldn’t undo what had been done, and so they didn’t matter. Voices echoed in the hall outside her apartments here in the tunnels, and she ignored them. If they had been shouting warnings of fire, she would have ignored those too.
    Sometimes she would think of all the people who had died. The amateur soldiers that Otah had led into battle outside the village of the Dai-kvo, the Galts dead on the road from Cetani. The sad rogue poet Riaan, slaughtered by the men he thought his friends. The innocent, naïve