Seasons of War

action against me without warning finding me. You can trust to that.’
    ‘You have to tell us more,’ Idaan said.
    ‘He doesn’t,’ Cehmai said, sharply. ‘He doesn’t have to offer me protection because I’m not going to do the work. I’m done, love. I’m finished. I want a few more years with you and a quiet death, and I’ll be quite pleased with that.’
    ‘The world needs you,’ Maati said.
    ‘It doesn’t,’ Cehmai said. ‘You’ve come a long way, Maati-kvo, and I’ve disappointed you. I’m sorry for that, but you have my answer. I used to be a poet, but I’m not anymore. I can reconsider as long as we both keep breathing, and we’ll come to the same place.’
    ‘We can’t stay on here,’ Idaan said. Her voice was soft. ‘I’ve loved it here too. This place, these years . . . we’ve been lucky to have them. But Maati-cha’s right. This season, and perhaps five or ten after it, we’ll make do. But eventually the work will pass us. We’re not getting younger, and we can’t hire on hands to help us. There aren’t any.’
    ‘Then we’ll leave,’ Cehmai said. ‘We’ll do something else, only not that.’
    ‘Why not?’ Maati asked.
    ‘Because I don’t want to kill any more people,’ Cehmai said. ‘Not the girls you’re encouraging to try this, not the foreigners who would try to stop us, not whatever army came in the next autumn’s war.’
    ‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Maati said.
    ‘It does,’ Cehmai said. ‘We held the power of gods, and the world envied us and turned against us, and they always will again. I can’t say I think much of where we stand now, but I remember what happened to bring us here, and I don’t see how making poets of women instead of men will make a world any different or better than the one we had then.’
    ‘It may not,’ Maati said, ‘but it will be better than the one we have now. If you won’t help me, then I’ll do without you, but I’d thought better of you, Cehmai. I’d thought you had more spine.’
    ‘Rice is getting cold,’ Idaan said. Her voice was controlled rage. ‘Perhaps we should eat it before it goes bad.’
    They finished the meal alternating between artificially polite conversation and strained silence. After, Cehmai took the bowls away to clean and didn’t return. Idaan led Maati to a small room near the back with a straw pallet and a night candle already burning. Maati slept poorly and found himself still upset when he woke. He left in the dark of the morning without speaking again to either of his hosts, one from disappointment and shame and the other, though he would never have said it, from fear.

5
    N antani was the nearest port to the lands of Galt, but the scars of war were too fresh there and too deep. Instead, the gods had conspired to return Otah to the city of his childhood: Saraykeht.
    The fastest ships arrived several days before the great mass of the fleet. They stood out half a hand’s travel from the seafront, and Otah took in the whole city. He could see the masts at the farthest end of the seafront, berthed in order to leave the greatest space for the incoming traffic. Bright cloth hung from every window Otah could see, starting with the dock master’s offices nearest the water to the towers of the palaces, high and to the north where the vibrant colors were grayed by humidity.
    Crowds filled the docks, and he heard a roar of voices and snatches of drum and flute carried by the breeze. The air itself smelled different: rank and green and familiar in a way he hadn’t expected.
    The Emperor of the Khaiem had been away from his cities for eight months, almost nine, and his return with the high families of Galt in tow was the kind of event seen once in history and never again. This was the day that every man and woman at the seafront or watching from the windows above the streets would recall until death’s long fingers touched them. The day that the new Empress, the Galtic Empress, arrived for the first time.
    There were stories Otah had read in books that had been ashes for almost as long as this new Empress had been alive, about an emperor’s life mirroring the state of his empire. An emperor with many children meant rich, fertile land; one without heir spoke of poor crops and thin cattle. An emperor who drank himself to sleep meant an empire of libertines: one who studied and prayed, a somber land of great wisdom. He had half-believed the stories then. He had no faith in them