Seasons of War

voice low and matter-of-fact.
    His sister replied with silence.

12
    ‘ T here,’ Vanjit said, her finger pointing up into a featureless blue sky. ‘Right there.’
    On her hip, the andat squirmed and waved its tiny hands. She shifted her weight, drawing the small body closer to her own, her outstretched finger still indicating nothing.
    ‘I don’t see it,’ Maati said.
    Vanjit smiled, her attention focusing on the babe. Clarity-of-Sight mewled, shook its head weakly, and then stilled. Vanjit’s lips pressed thin, and the sky above Maati seemed to sharpen. Even where there was nothing to see, the blue itself seemed legible. And then he caught sight of it. Little more than a dot at first, and then a moment later, he made out the shape of the outstretched wings. A hawk, soaring high above the ground. Its beak was hooked and sharp as a knife. Its feathers, brown and gold, trembled in the high air. A smear of old blood darkened its talons. There were mites in its feathers.
    Maati closed his eyes and looked away, shaken by vertigo.
    ‘Gods!’ he said. He heard Vanjit’s delighted chuckle.
    The spirit of elation filled the stone halls, the ruined gardens, the spare meadows. All the days since the binding, it had felt to Maati as if the world itself had taken a deep breath and then laughed aloud. Whenever the chores and classes had allowed it, the girls had crowded around Vanjit and Clarity-of-Sight, and himself along with them.
    The andat itself was beautiful and fascinating. Its form was identical to a true human child, but small things in its behavior showed Vanjit’s inexperience. She had not held a babe or seen one since she herself had been no more than a child. The strength of its neck and the sureness of its gaze were subtly wrong. Its cry, while wordless, expressed a richness and variety of emotion that in Maati’s experience children rarely developed before they could walk. Small errors of imagination that affected only the form that the andat took. Its function, as Vanjit delighting in showing, was perfect and precise.
    ‘I’ve seen other things too,’ Vanjit said. ‘The greater the change, the more difficult it is at first.’
    Maati nodded. He could see the individual hairs on her head. The crags where tiny flakes of dead skin peeled from the living tissue beneath. An insect the shape of a tick but a thousand times smaller clung to the root of her eyelash. He closed his eyes.
    ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Could I put upon you to undo some part of that? It’s distracting . . .’
    He heard her robe rustle and go silent. When he opened his eyes again, his vision was clear but no longer inhumanly so. He smiled.
    ‘Once I’ve made the change, I forget that it doesn’t fall back on its own,’ she said.
    ‘Stone-Made-Soft was much the same,’ Maati said. ‘Once it had changed the nature of a rock, it remained weakened until Cehmai-kvo put an effort into changing it back. Then there was Water-Moving-Down, who might stop a river only so long as its poet gave the matter strict attention. The question rests on the innate capacity for change within the object affected. Stone by nature resists change, water embraces it. I suspect that whatever eyes you improve will still suffer the normal effects of age.’
    ‘The change may be permanent, but we aren’t,’ she said.
    ‘Well put,’ Maati said.
    The courtyard in which they sat showed only small signs of the decade of ruin it had suffered. The weeds had all been pulled or cut, the broken stones reset. Songbirds flitted between the trees, lizards scurried through the low grass, and far above, invisible to him now, a hawk circled in the high, distant air.
    Maati could imagine that it wasn’t the school that he had suffered in his boyhood: it had so little in common with the half-prison he recalled. A handful of women instead of a shifting cadre of boys. A cooperative struggle to achieve the impossible instead of cruelty and judgment. Joy instead of fear. The space itself seemed remade, and perhaps the whole of the world along with it. Vanjit seemed to guess his thoughts. She smiled. The thing at her hip grumbled, fixing its black eyes on Maati, but did not cry.
    ‘It’s unlike anything I expected,’ Vanjit said. ‘I can feel him. All the time, he’s in the back of my mind.’
    ‘How burdensome is it?’ Maati asked, sitting forward.
    Vanjit shook her head.
    ‘No worse than any baby, I’d imagine,’ she said. ‘He tires me sometimes, but