Seasons of War

plains his own daughter prepared to risk her life to make right what he had done.
    What they had done together. Otah, Cehmai, and Maati himself. One was crawling into bed with the enemy, another turning away and hiding his face. Only Maati had even tried to make things whole again. Vanjit’s success meant it had not been wasted effort. Eiah’s fear reminded him that it was not yet finished.
    He made his way down the corridors in the near darkness. Only candles and a half-moon lit his way. He was unsurprised to see Vanjit sitting alone in the gardens. Unlike the courtyard where they had spoken before, the gardens were bleak and bare. They had come too late to plant this season. Eiah’s occasional journeys to Pathai provided food enough, and they didn’t have the surplus of spare hands that had once held up the school. The wilderness encroached on the high stone walls here, young trees growing green and bold in plots where Maati had sown peas and harvested pods.
    She heard him approaching and glanced back over her shoulder. She shifted, adjusting her robes, and Maati saw the small, black eyes of the andat appear from among the folds of cotton. She had been nursing it. It shocked him for a moment, though on reflection it shouldn’t have. The andat had no need of milk, of course, but it was a product of Vanjit’s conceptions. Stone-Made-Soft had been involved with the game of stones. Three-Bound-as-One had been fascinated by knots. The relationship of poet and andat was modeled on mother and child as it had never been before in all of history. The nursing was, Maati supposed, the physical emblem of it.
    ‘Maati-kvo,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect anyone to be here.’
    He took a pose of apology, and she waved it away. In the cold light, she looked ghostly. The andat’s eyes and mouth seemed to eat the light, its skin to glow. Maati came nearer.
    ‘I was worried, I suppose,’ he said. ‘It seemed . . . uncomfortable at dinner this evening.’
    ‘I’d been thinking about that,’ Vanjit said. ‘It’s hard for them. Ashti Beg and the others. I think it must be very hard for them.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    She shrugged. The andat in her lap gurgled to itself, considering its own short, pale fingers with fascination.
    ‘They have all put in so much time, so much work. Then to see another woman complete a binding and gain a child, all at once. I imagine it must gnaw at her. It isn’t that she intends to be rude or cruel. Ashti is in pain, and she lashes out. I knew a dog like that once. A cart had rolled over it. Snapped its spine. It whined and howled all night. You would have thought it was begging aid, except that it tried to bite anyone who came near. Ashti-cha is much the same.’
    ‘You think so?’
    ‘I do,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t think ill of her, Maati-kvo. I doubt she even knows what she’s doing.’
    He folded his arms.
    ‘I can’t think it’s simple for you either,’ he said. He had the sense of testing her, though he couldn’t have said quite how. Vanjit’s face was as clear and cloudless as the sky.
    ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘Nowhere near as difficult as I’d thought. Only he makes me tired. No more than any mother with a new babe, though. I’ve been thinking of names. My cousin was named Ciiat, and he was about this old when the Galts came.’
    ‘It has a name already,’ Maati said. ‘Clarity-of-Sight.’
    ‘I meant a private name,’ Vanjit said. ‘One for just between the two of us. And you, I suppose. You are as near to a father as he has.’
    Maati opened his mouth, then closed it. Vanjit’s hand slipped into his own, her fingers twined around his. Her smile seemed so genuine, so innocent, that Maati only shook his head and laughed. They remained there for the space of ten long breaths together, Vanjit sitting, Maati standing at her side, and the andat, shifting impatiently in her lap.
    ‘Once Eiah’s bound Wounded,’ Maati said, ‘we can all go back.’
    Vanjit made a small sound, neither cough nor gasp nor chuckle, and released Maati’s hand. He glanced down. Vanjit smiled up at him.
    ‘That will be good,’ she said. ‘This must all be hard for her as well. I wish there was something we could do to ease things.’
    ‘We’ll do what can be done,’ Maati said. ‘It will have to be enough.’
    Vanjit didn’t reply, and then raised her arm, pointing to the horizon.
    ‘The brightest star,’ she said. ‘The one just coming up over the trees