Seasons of War

where they could never be called back. The voice of the crowd rose up like the waters of chaos come to drown them all.

6
    M aati relived his conversation with Cehmai a thousand times in the weeks that followed. He rose in the morning from whatever rough camp or wayhouse bed he’d fallen into the night before, and he muttered his arguments to Cehmai. He rode his weary mule along overgrown tracks thick with heat and heavy with humidity, and he spoke aloud, gesturing. He ate his evening meals with the late sunset of summer, and in his mind, Cehmai sat across from him, dumbfounded and ashamed, persuaded at last by the force of Maati’s argument. And when Maati’s imagination returned him to the world as it was, his failure and shame poured in on him afresh.
    Every low town he passed through, the mud streets empty of the sound of children, was a rebuke. Every woman he met, an accusation. He had failed. He had gone to the one man in the world who might have lightened his burden, and he had been refused. The better part of the season was lost to him now. It was time he should have spent with the girls, preparing the grammar and writing his book. They were days he would never win back. If he had stayed, perhaps they would have had a breakthrough. Perhaps there would already be an andat in the world, and Otah’s plans ruined.
    And what if by going after Cehmai, Maati had somehow lost that chance? With every day, it seemed more likely. As the trees and deer of the river valleys gave way to the high, dry plains between Pathai and ruined Nantani, Maati became more and more sure that his error had been catastrophic. Irretrievable. And so it was also another mark against Otah Machi. Otah, the Emperor, to whom no rules applied.
    Maati found the high road, and then the turning that would lead, given half a day’s ride, to the school. To his students. To Eiah. He camped at the crossroads.
    He was too old to be living on muleback. Lying in the thin folds of his bedroll, he ached as if he’d been beaten. His back had been suffering spasms for days; they had grown painful enough that he hadn’t slept deeply. And his exhaustion seemed to make his muscles worse. The high plains grew cool at night, almost cold, and the air smelled of dust. He heard the skittering of lizards or mice and the low call of owls. The stars shone down on him, each point of light smeared by his aging eyes until the whole sky seemed possessed by a single luminous cloud.
    There had been a time he’d lain under stars and picked out constellations. There was a time his body could have taken rest on cobblestone, had the need arisen. There was a time Cehmai, poet of Machi and master of Stone-Made-Soft, had looked up to him.
    It was going to be hard to tell Eiah that he’d failed. The others as well, but Eiah knew Cehmai. She had seen them work together. The others might be disappointed, but Eiah alone would understand what he had lost.
    His dread slowed him. At this, his last camp, he ate his breakfast and watched the slow sunrise. He packed his mule slowly, then walked westward, his shadow stretching out ahead and growing slowly smaller. The shapes of the hills grew familiar, and the pauses he took grew longer. Here was the dry streambed where he and the other black-robed boys had sat in the evenings and told one another stories of the families they had already half-forgotten. There, a grouping of stumps showed where the stand of trees they had climbed had been felled by Galtic axes and burned. A cave under an outcropping of rock where they’d made the younger boys slither into the darkness to hunt snakes. The air was as rich with memory as the scent of dust and wildflowers. His life had been simpler then, or if not simpler, at least a thing that held promise.
    He managed to postpone his arrival at the school itself until the sun was lowering before him. The grand stone buildings looked smaller than he remembered them, but the great bronze door that had once been reserved for the Dai-kvo was just as grand. The high, narrow windows were marked black at the tops, the remnants of some long-dead fire. The wall of one of the sleeping chambers had fallen, stones strewn on the ground. The gardens were gone, marked only by low mounds where stones had once formed their borders. Time and violence had changed the place, but not yet beyond recognition. Another decade of rain washing mortar from between the stones, another fire, and perhaps the roofs would collapse. The