Seasons of War

the village of the Dai-kvo, but there were trade routes that jumped from low town to low town. Mud furrows worn by carts and hooves and feet. Around them, grasses rose high as the bellies of their horses, singing a dry song like fingertips on skin when the wind stirred the blades. The feeling of the sure-footed animal he rode had been reassuring at first. Solid and strong.
    But the joy of action had wearied while the dread grew stronger. The steady movement of the horse had become wearisome. The jokes and songs of the men had lost something of their fire. The epics and romances of the Empire included some passages about the weariness and longing that came of living on campaign, but they spoke of endless seasons and years without the solace of home. Otah and his men hadn’t yet traveled two full weeks. They were still well shy of the journey’s halfway mark, and already they were losing what cohesion they had.
    With every day, most men were afoot while huntsmen and scouts and utkhaiem rode. Horsemen were called to the halt long before the night should have forced them to make camp, for fear that those following on foot would fail to reach the tents before darkness fell. And even so, men continued to straggle in long after the evening meals had been served, leaving them unrested and fed only on scraps when morning came. The army, such as it was, seemed tied to the speed of its slowest members. He needed speed and he needed men at his side, but there was no good way to have both. And the fault, Otah knew, was in himself.
    There had to be answers to this and the thousand other problems that came of leading a campaign. The Galts would know. Sinja could have told him, had he been there and not out in some Westlands garrison waiting for a flood of Galts that wasn’t coming. They were men that had experience in the field, who had more knowledge of war than the casual study of a few old Empire texts fit in between religious ceremonies and high court bickering.
    The scratch came at the door, soft and apologetic. Otah swung his legs off the cot and sat up. He called out his permission as he parted the netting, but the one who came in wasn’t the servant boy. It was Nayiit.
    He looked tired. His robes had been blue once, but from the hem to the knee they were stained the pale brown of the mud through which they had traveled. Otah considered the weight of their situation - the young man’s dual role as Maati’s son and his own, the threat he posed to Danat and the promise to Machi, the aid he might be in this present endeavor to prevent harm to the Dai-kvo - and dismissed it all. He was too tired and pained to chew everything a hundred times before he swallowed.
    He took a pose of welcome, and Nayiit returned one of greater formality. Otah nodded to a camp chair and Nayiit sat.
    ‘Your attendant wasn’t here. I didn’t know what the right etiquette was, so I just came through.’
    ‘He’s running an errand. Once he’s back, I can have tea brought,’ Otah said. ‘Or wine.’
    Nayiit took a pose of polite refusal. Otah shrugged it away.
    ‘As you see fit,’ Otah said. ‘And what brings you?’
    ‘There’s grumbling in the ranks, Most High. Even among some of the utkhaiem.’
    ‘There’s grumbling in here, for that,’ Otah said. ‘There’s just no one here to listen to me. Are there any suggestions? Any solutions that the ranks have seen that escaped me? Because, by all the gods that have ever been named, I’m not too proud to hear them.’
    ‘They say you’re driving them too hard, Most High,’ Nayiit said. ‘That the men need a day’s rest.’
    ‘Rest? Go slower? That’s the solution they have to offer? What kind of brilliance is that?’
    Nayiit looked up. His face was long, like a Northerner’s. Like Otah’s. His eyes were Liat’s tea-with-milk brown. His expression, however, owed to neither of them. Where Liat would have kept her eyes down or Otah would have made himself charming, Nayiit’s face belonged on a man bearing a heavy load. Whatever was in his mind, in this moment it was clear that he would press until the world was the way he wanted it or it crushed him. It was something equal parts weariness and joy, like a man newly acquainted with certainty. Otah found himself curious.
    ‘They aren’t wrong, Most High. These men aren’t accustomed to living on the road like this. You can’t expect the speed of a practiced army from them. And the walkers have been rising early to