Seasons of War

said softly.
    ‘We hadn’t mentioned it to the men,’ Idaan said. ‘I understand the first ones don’t always take.’
    It took him less than a breath to understand.
    ‘Ah,’ Otah said, a hundred tiny signs falling into place. Ana’s weeping at the school, her avoidance of Danat, the way she’d kept to herself in the mornings and eaten with Idaan.
    ‘What?’ Danat asked, baffled.
    ‘I’m pregnant,’ Ana said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact, her cheeks as bright as apples with her blush. The whole boat seemed to breathe in at once.
    ‘And how long has this been going on?’ Otah demanded, shifting his gaze to the dumbstruck Danat at his feet. His son blinked up, uncomprehending. It was as if Otah had asked in an unknown language.
    ‘You’re joking,’ Idaan said. ‘You have a boy who’s just ended his twentieth summer and a girl not two years younger, an escort of professional armsmen as chaperone, and a steamcart with private quarters built on its back. What did you expect would happen?’
    ‘But,’ Otah began, then found he wasn’t sure what he intended to say. She’s blinded , or They aren’t wed , or Farrer Dasin will say it’s my fault for not keeping better watch over them . Each impulse seemed more ridiculous than the last.
    ‘I’m going to be a father,’ Danat said as if testing out the words. He turned to look up at Otah and started to grin. ‘ You’re going to be a grandfather.’
    Eiah was weeping openly, her arms around Ana. A clamor of voices and a whoop from the stern said that whatever hope there might have been that the thing would be kept quiet once they returned to court was gone. Otah sat back, his stool creaking under his weight. Idaan took a pose of query that carried nuances of both pity at his idiocy and congratulations. Otah started laughing and found it hard to stop.
    It had been so long since he’d felt joy, he’d almost forgotten what it was like.
    The rest of the day was spent in half-drunken conversation. Otah was made to retell the details of Danat’s birth, and of Eiah’s. Danat grew slowly more pleased with himself and the world as the initial shock wore thin. Ana Dasin smiled, her grayed eyes taking in nothing and giving out a pleasure and satisfaction that seemed more intimate in that she couldn’t see its reflection in the faces around her.
    Stories came pouring out as if they had only been waiting for the chance to be told. Idaan’s spectacularly failed attempts to care for a younger half-sister when she’d been little more than fourteen summers old. Otah’s work in the eastern islands as an assistant midwife, and the awkward incident of the baby born to an island mother and island father and with a complexion that sang to the stars of Obar State. Eiah spilled out every piece of secondhand wisdom she’d ever heard about keeping a new babe safe in the womb until it was ready to be born. At one point the armsmen broke into giddy song and, against Danat’s protests, lifted him onto their shoulders, the deck shifting slightly under them. The sun itself seemed to shine for them, the river to laugh.
    Maati alone seemed not to recover entirely from the first surprise. He smiled and chuckled and nodded when it fit the moment, but his eyes were reading letters in the air. He looked neither pleased nor displeased, but lost. Otah saw his lips moving as Maati spoke to himself, as if trying to explain something to his body that only his mind knew. When the poet hefted himself up and came to take Ana’s hand, it was with a formality that might have been mixed feelings on his part or only a fear that his kind thoughts would be unwelcome. Ana accepted the formal, somewhat stilted blessing, and afterward Eiah took Maati’s hand, pulling him down to sit at her side.
    Even braided together. Otah’s anger and distrust and sorrow couldn’t overcome the moment. The blood and horror of the world lifted, and a future worth having peeked through the crack.
    It was only much later, when the sun fell carelessly into the treetops of the western bank and shadows darkened the water, that the celebration faltered. The boat passed a brickwork tower standing on the riverbank, ivy almost obscuring the scars where fire had burned through timber and stripped the shutters from the empty windows. Otah watched the structure with the eerie feeling that it was watching back. The river bent, and a great stone bridge came into sight, gaps in its rail like missing teeth. Birds as