Seasons of War

the Westlands and sending the thin stream of gold and silver that could be wrung from them back to the coffers of the High Council. Those he’d sealed in red would wheel the army - twenty thousand armsmen, three hundred steam wagons, six thousand horses, and God only knew how many servants and camp followers - to the east and the most glorious act of conquest the world had ever known.
    If he succeeded, he would be remembered as the greatest general in history, at least in his audacity. The battles themselves he expected to be simple enough. The Khaiem had no experience in tactics and no armies to protect them. Balasar would be remembered for two things only: the unimaginable wealth he was about to pour into Galt and the ceremony that would come with the dawn. The plot that stripped the andat from the world.
    As the dark hours passed, the thought pricked at him. He had put everything in place. The poet, the books that concerned Freedom-From-Bondage, the army, the arms. There was nothing he would ever do that would match this season. Succeed or fail, this was the high-water mark of his life. He imagined himself an old man, sitting at a street café in Kirinton. He wondered what those years would be like, reaching from here to the grave. He wondered what it would be like to have his greatness behind him. He told himself that he would retire. There would be enough wealth to acquire anything he wanted. A reasonable estate of his own, a wife, children; that seemed enough. If he could not regain this season, he could at least not humiliate himself by trying. He thought of the war leaders who haunted the corridors and wineshops of Acton reliving triumphs the world had forgotten. He would not be one of those. He would be the great General who had done his work and then stepped back to let the world he had made safe follow its path.
    At heart, he was not a conqueror. Only a man who saw what needed doing, and then did it.
    Or else he would fail and he and every Galtic man and woman would be a corpse or a refugee.
    He twisted in his sheets. The stars shone where the clouds were thin enough to permit it. Framed in the opened shutters, they glittered. The stars wouldn’t care what happened here. And yet by the next time their light silvered these stones, the fate of the world would have turned one way or the other.
    Once, he came near to sleep. His eyes grew heavy, his mind began to wander into the half-sense of dreams. And then, irrationally, he became certain that he had mixed one of the orders. The memory, at first vague but clearer as he struggled to capture it, of sealing a packet with red that should have been green swam through his mind. He thought he might have noted at the time that it would need changing. And yet he hadn’t done it. The wrong orders would go out. A legion would start to the North while the others moved east. They would lose time finding the error, correcting it. Or the poet would fail, and some stray company of armsmen would find its way to Nantani and reveal him to the Khaiem. Half a thousand stories plagued him, each less likely than the last. His sense of dread grew.
    At last, half in distress and half in disgust, he rose, pulled on a heavy cotton shirt and light trousers, and walked barefoot from his room toward the library. He would have to open them all, check them, reseal them, and keep a careful tally so that the crazed monkey that had taken possession of his mind could be calmed. He wondered, as he passed through hallways lit only by his single candle, whether Uther Redcape had ever rechecked his own plans in the dead of night like an old, fearful merchant rattling his own shutters to be sure they were latched. Perhaps these indignities were part of what any man suffered when the weight of so many lives was on his back.
    The guards outside his library door stood at attention as he passed them, whatever gossip or complaint they had been using to pass the dark hours of the night forgotten at the first sight of him. Balasar nodded to them gravely before passing through the door. With the stub of his bedside candle, he lit the lanterns in the library until the soft glow filled the air. The orders lay where he had left them. With a sigh, he took out the bricks of colored wax and his private seal. Then he began the long, tedious task of cracking each seal, reviewing his commands, and putting the packets back in order again. The candle stub had fizzled to nothing and the lanterns’ oil visibly