Seasons of War

pillow, Uncle. I’m fine. Go.’
    He looked back. There was a place for him. Irit had made it up with two thick wool blankets. He couldn’t see it in the night, but he knew it was there. He wanted nothing more than to turn to it and let the whole broken world fade for a while. He couldn’t. Not yet.
    ‘Eiah-kya,’ he said softly. ‘About your binding. About Wounded . . .’
    She turned to him, a shadow within a shadow. He bent close to her, his voice as low as he could make it and still be heard over the clatter of hooves on stone.
    ‘You know the grammar well? You have it all in mind?’
    ‘Of course,’ she said.
    ‘Could you do it without it being written? It’s usual to write it all out, the way Vanjit-cha did. And it helps to have that there to follow, but you could do the thing without. Couldn’t you?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Eiah said. ‘Perhaps. It isn’t something I’d thought about particularly. But why . . . ?’
    ‘We should postpone your binding,’ Maati said. ‘Until you are certain you could do it without the reference text.’
    Eiah was silent. Something fluttered by, the sound of wings against air.
    ‘What are you saying?’ Eiah said, her words low, clipped, and precise. Maati squeezed his hands together. The joints had started aching sometime earlier in the night. The ancient dagger scar in his belly itched the way it did when he’d grown too tired.
    ‘If you were performing the binding, and something happened so that you couldn’t see,’ Maati said. ‘If you were to go blind when you’d already started . . . you should know the words and the thoughts well enough to keep to it. Not to slip.’
    ‘Not pay its price,’ Eiah said. Meaning, they both knew, die. A moment later, ‘She’d do that?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Maati said. ‘I don’t know anything anymore. But be ready if she does.’
    Eiah shifted the reins, the pattern of the horses’ stride altered, and the cart rocked gently. She didn’t speak again, and Maati imagined the silence to be thoughtful. He shifted his weight carefully, turned, and let himself slip down to the bed of the cart. The wool blankets were where he’d remembered them. Feeling his way through the darkness reminded him of his brush with blindness. He told himself that the shudder was only the cold of the morning.
    The shifting of the cart became like the rocking of a ship or a cradle. Maati’s mind softened, slipped. He felt his body sinking into the planks below him, heard the creak and clatter of the wheels. His heart, low and steady, was like the throbbing drum at the wayhouse. It didn’t sound at all unwell.
    On the shifting edge of sleep, he imagined himself capable of moving between spaces, folding the world so that the distance between himself and Otah-kvo was only a step. He pictured Otah’s awe and rage and impotence. It was a fantasy Maati had cultivated before this, and it went through its phases like a habit. Maati’s presentation of the poets, the women’s grammar, the andat. Otah’s abasement and apologies and humble amazement at the world made right. For years, Maati had driven himself toward that moment. He had brought on the sacrifice of ten women, each of them paying the price of a binding that wasn’t quite correct.
    He watched now as if someone else were dreaming it. Dispassionate, cold, thoughtful. He felt nothing - not disappointment or regret or hope. It was like being a boy again and coming across some iridescent and pincered insect, fascinating and beautiful and dangerous.
    More than half asleep, he didn’t feel the tiny body inching its way to him until it lay almost within his arms. With the reflex of a man who has cared for a baby, instincts long unused but never forgotten, he gathered the child close.
    ‘You have to kill her,’ it whispered.

21
    O tah stood in the ruins of the school’s west garden. Half a century before, he’d been in this same spot, screaming at boys not ten summers old. Humiliating them. This was where, in a fit of childish rage, he had forced a little boy to eat clods of dirt. He’d been twelve summers old at the time, but he recalled it with a vividness like a cut. Maati’s young eyes and blistered hands, tears and apologies. The incident had begun Maati’s career as a poet and ended his own.
    The stone walls of the school were lower than he remembered them. The crows that perched in the stark, leafless trees, on the other hand, were as familiar as childhood enemies. As a