Seasons of War

What is being a poet beside that?’
    Nayiit, he thought.
    Maati didn’t expect the tears, they simply welled up in his eyes. The pain in his breast was so sudden and sharp, he almost mistook the sorrow for illness. She put her hand on his, her expression anxious. He forced himself to smile.
    ‘You’re quite right,’ he said. ‘Quite right. Come along now. The bowls are all washed, and it’s time we got to work.’
    He made his way to the hall they had set aside for classes. His heart was both heavy and light: heavy with the renewed sorrow of his boy’s death, light at Vanjit’s reaction to him. She had known Eiah’s work to be of greater importance, and had already made her peace with her own lesser role. He wondered whether, in her place and at her age, he would have been able to do the same. He doubted it.
    That evening, his lecture was particularly short, and the conversation after it was lively and pointed and thoughtful. In the days that followed, Maati abandoned his formal teaching entirely, instead leading discussion after discussion, analysis after analysis. Together, they tore Vanjit’s binding of Clarity-of-Sight apart, and together they rebuilt it. Each time, Maati thought it was stronger, the images and resonances of it more appropriate to one another, the grammar that formed it more precise.
    It was difficult to call the process to a halt, but in the end, it was Vanjit and Vanjit alone who would make the attempt. They might help her and advise her, but he allocated two full weeks in which the binding was hers and hers alone.
    Low clouds came in the morning Eiah returned. They scudded in from the north on a wind cold as winter. Maati knew it wouldn’t take. There were weeks of heat and sun to come before the seasons changed. And yet, there was a part of Maati’s mind that couldn’t help seeing the shift as an omen. And a positive one, he told himself. Change, the movement of the seasons, the proper order of the world: those were what he tried to see in the low, gray roof of the sky. Not the presentiment of barren winter.
    ‘The news is strange,’ Eiah said as they unloaded her cart. Boxes of salt pork and raw flour, canisters of spice and hard cheese. ‘The Galts have fallen on Saraykeht like they owned it, but something didn’t go well. I can’t tell if my brother thought the girl was too ugly or she fell into a fit when she was presented, but something went badly. What I heard was early and muddled. I’ll know better next time I go.’
    ‘Anything that hurts him helps us,’ Maati said. ‘So whatever it was, it’s good.’
    ‘That was my thought,’ Eiah said, but her voice was somber. When he took a pose of query, she didn’t answer it.
    ‘How have things progressed here?’ she asked instead.
    ‘Well. Very well. I think Vanjit is ready.’
    Eiah stopped, wiping her sleeve across her forehead. She looked old. How many summers had she seen? Thirty? Thirty-one? Her eyes were deeper than thirty summers.
    ‘When?’ she asked.
    ‘We were only waiting for you to come back,’ he said. Then, trying for levity, ‘You’ve brought the wine and food for a celebration. So tomorrow, we’ll do something worth celebrating.’
    Or else something to mourn, he thought but did not say.

9
    ‘ B y everything holy, don’t tell Balasar,’ Sinja said. ‘He can’t know about this.’
    ‘Why?’ Idaan asked, sitting on the edge of the soldier’s bed. ‘What would he do?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Sinja said. ‘Something bloody and extreme. And effective.’
    ‘Stop,’ Otah said. ‘Just stop. I have to think.’
    But sitting there, head resting in his hands, clarity of mind wasn’t coming to him easily. Idaan’s story - her travels in the north after her exile, Cehmai’s appearance on her doorstep, their rekindled love, and Maati’s break with his fellow poet and then his return - had the feel of an old poem, if not the careful structure. If he hadn’t had the pirates or Ana or her father or his own son or the conspiracy between Yalakeht and Obar State, or the incursions from the Westlands, he might have enjoyed the tale for its own sake.
    But she hadn’t brought it to him as a story. It was a threat.
    ‘What role has Cehmai taken in this?’ he asked.
    ‘None. He wanted nothing to do with it. Or with my coming here, for that. I’ve left him to look after things until I’ve paid my debt to you. Then I’ll be going home.’
    ‘Is it working?’ Otah said at length.