Seasons of War

Westlander to the back of the house. Buy them some wine. Don’t mention me. Leave the old man.’
    The servant took a pose of acceptance so total it was just short of an open pledge. Eiah smiled, dropped the silver in his palm, and pulled up a shoeing stool to sit on while she waited. The night was cool, but still not near as cold as her home in the north. An owl hooted deep and low. Eiah pulled her arms up into her sleeves to keep her fingers warm. The scent of roasting pork wafted from the wayhouse, and the sounds of a flute and a voice lifted together.
    The servant finished his work and with a deferential nod to Eiah, made his way to the servants’ house. It was less than half a hand before he emerged with a thin woman and a sandy-haired Westlands boy trailing him. Eiah pushed her hands back through her sleeves and made her way to the small, rough shack.
    He was sitting beside the fire, frowning into the flames and eating a mush of rice and raisins from a small wooden bowl. The years hadn’t been kind to him. He was thicker than he’d been when she knew him, an unhealthy fatness that had little to do with indulgence. His color was poor; what remained of his hair was white stained yellow by neglect. He looked angry. He looked lonesome.
    ‘Uncle Maati,’ she said.
    He startled. His eyes flashed. Eiah couldn’t tell if it was anger or fear. But whatever it was had a trace of pleasure to it.
    ‘Don’t know who you mean,’ he said. ‘Name’s Daavit.’
    Eiah chuckled and stepped into the small room. It smelled of bodies and smoke and the raisins in Maati’s food. Eiah found a small chair and pulled it to the fire beside the old poet, her chosen uncle, the man who had destroyed the world. They sat silently for a while.
    ‘It was the way they died,’ Eiah said. ‘All the stories you told me when I was young about the prices that the andat exacted when a poet’s binding failed. The one whose blood turned dry. The one whose belly swelled up like he was pregnant, and when they cut him open it was all ice and seaweed. All of them. I started to hear stories. What was that, four years ago?’
    At first she thought he wouldn’t answer. He cupped two thick fingers into the rice and ate what they lifted out. He swallowed. He sucked his teeth.
    ‘Six,’ he said.
    ‘Six years,’ she said. ‘Women started appearing here and there, dead in strange ways.’
    He didn’t answer. Eiah waited for the space of five slow breaths together before she went on.
    ‘You told me stories about the andat when I was young,’ she said. ‘I remember most of it, I think. I know that a binding only works once. In order to bind the same andat again, the poet has to invent a whole new way to describe the thought. You used to tell me about how the poets of the Old Empire would bind three or four andat in a lifetime. I thought at the time you envied them, but I saw later that you were only sick at the waste of it.’
    Maati sighed and looked down.
    ‘And I remember when you tried to explain to me why only men could be poets,’ she said. ‘As I recall, the arguments weren’t all that convincing to me.’
    ‘You were a stubborn girl,’ Maati said.
    ‘You’ve changed your mind,’ Eiah said. ‘You’ve lost all your books. All the grammars and histories and records of the andat that have come before. They’re gone. All the poets gone but you and perhaps Cehmai. And in the history of the Empire, the Second Empire, the Khaiem, the one thing you know is that a woman has never been a poet. So perhaps, if women think differently enough from men, the bindings they create will succeed, even with nothing but your own memory to draw from.’
    ‘Who told you? Otah?’
    ‘I know my father had letters from you,’ Eiah said. ‘I don’t know what was in them. He didn’t tell me.’
    ‘A women’s grammar,’ Maati said. ‘We’re building a women’s grammar.’
    Eiah took the bowl from his hands and put it on the floor with a clatter. Outside, a gust of wind shrilled past the shack. Smoke bellied out from the fire, rising into the air, thinning as it went. When he looked at her, the pleasure was gone from his eyes.
    ‘It’s the best hope,’ Maati said. ‘It’s the only way to . . . undo what’s been done.’
    ‘You can’t do this, Maati-kya,’ Eiah said, her voice gentle.
    Maati started to his feet. The stool he’d sat on clattered to the floor. Eiah pulled back from his accusing finger.
    ‘Don’t you tell that to me,