Seasons of War

hundreds of thousands of people relying upon me. The politics of empire aren’t like a few low towns organizing to keep the local thugs in line.’
    ‘You also have a thousand servants,’ she said. ‘Dozens of high families who would do your bidding just for the status that comes from being asked. Tell me, why did you go to Galt yourself? You have men and women who’d have been ambassador for you.’
    ‘It needed me,’ Otah said. ‘If it had been someone lower, it wouldn’t have carried the weight.’
    ‘Ah, I see,’ she said. She sounded less than persuaded.
    ‘Besides which, I don’t have anything to feel guilt over.’
    ‘You broke the world,’ she said. ‘You ordered Maati and Cehmai to bind that andat, and when it went feral on them and shredded every womb in the cities, my own included, you threw your poets into the wind. Men who trusted you and sacrificed for you. You became the heroic figure that bound the cities together, and they became outcasts.’
    ‘Is that how you see it?’
    Idaan put her bowl down softly on the stone table. Her black eyes held his. She had a long face. Northern, like his own. He remembered that of all the children of the old Khai Machi, he and Idaan had shared a mother.
    ‘It doesn’t matter how I see it,’ she said. ‘My opinion doesn’t make the world. Or unmake it. All that matters is what it actually is. So, tell me, Most High, am I right?’
    Otah shook his head and rose, leaving his tea bowl beside hers.
    ‘You don’t know me, Idaan-cha. We’ve spoken to each other fewer times than I have fingers. I don’t think you’re in a position to judge my motives.’
    ‘Yours, no,’ she said. ‘But I’ve made the mistakes you’re making now. And I know why I did.’
    ‘We aren’t the same person.’
    She smiled now, her gaze cast down and her hands in a pose that accepted correction and apologized for her transgression without making it clear what transgression she meant.
    ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay through tomorrow, Most High. In case you come to a decision that I might be able to aid you with.’
    Otah left with the uncomfortable impression that his sister pitied him. He made his way back to his apartments, ate half of the meal the servants brought him, and refused the singers and musicians whose only function in the world was to wait upon his whim. Instead, he took a chair out to his balcony and sat in the starlight, looking south to the sea.
    Thin clouds streaked the high air, and the ocean was a vast darkness. The city that spilled down the hills before him glittered brighter than the stars; torches and lanterns, candles and firekeepers’ kilns. The breeze smelled of smoke and salt and the lush flowers of early autumn. He closed his eyes.
    He could feel the palaces behind him, looming like a weight he’d shifted off his back for a moment and would need to shoulder again. His mind ran free without him, bouncing from one crisis to another without ever pausing long enough to make sense of any one of them. And, intruding upon all of it, he found himself replaying his conversation with Idaan, searching for the cutting replies that hadn’t occurred to him at the time.
    Who was she to pity him? She’d made a low-town judge of herself, and now a farmer. It was an improvement from traitor and murderer, but it didn’t give her moral authority over him. And to instruct him on the nature of his feelings about Maati and Cehmai was ridiculous. She hardly knew him. Coming to court in the first place had been a kind of madness on her part. He could have had her killed outright rather than sit like a dog while she heaped her abuse on him.
    She thought he’d broken the world, did she? Well, what about the old way had been worth saving? It hadn’t brought justice. The peace it offered had been purchased at the cost of lives of misery and struggle. And from that first moment, more than forty summers earlier, when the Dai-kvo had told him that they could not offer Saraykeht a replacement should Seedless slip its leash, Otah had known it was doomed.
    The genius of the Galts - of all the rest of the world, for that - was that they had built their power on ideas that could grow one on another. A better forge led to better metalwork led to stronger tools and so on to the end of their abilities. By contrast, the Empire, the Second Empire, the cities of the Khaiem: all of them had wielded unthinkable power and fashioned wonders. And when the first