Seasons of War

he’d had dinner the night before, but he couldn’t recall what it had been or when he’d eaten it. He reached into a shallow ceramic bowl of salted raisins. They tasted rich and full as wine. He took a handful and sat on the chair beside Cehmai to look over the assorted results of their labor.
    ‘What’s your thought?’ Cehmai said.
    ‘I’ve found more than I expected to,’ Maati said. ‘There was a section in Vautai’s Fourth Meditations that actually clarified some things I hadn’t been certain of. If we were to put together all the scraps and rags from all of the books and histories and scrolls, it might be enough to support binding a fresh andat.’
    Cehmai sighed and closed the book he’d been holding.
    ‘That’s near what I’ve come to,’ the younger poet agreed. Then he looked up. ‘And how long do you think it would take to put those scraps and rags into one coherent form?’
    ‘So that it stood as a single work? I’m likely too old to start it,’ Maati said. ‘And without the full record from the Dai-kvo, there would be no way to know whether a binding was dangerously near one that had already been done.’
    ‘I hated those,’ Cehmai said.
    ‘They went back to the beginning of the First Empire,’ Maati said. ‘Some of the descriptions are so convoluted it takes reading them six times to understand they’re using fifty words to carry the meaning of five. But they are complete, and that’s the biggest gap in our resources.’
    Cehmai got to his feet with a grunt. His hair was disheveled and there were dark smudges under his eyes. Maati imagined he had some to match.
    ‘So to sum up,’ Cehmai said, ‘if the Khai fails, we might be able to bind a new andat in a generation or so.’
    ‘Unless we’re unlucky and use some construct too much like something a minor poet employed twenty generations back. In that case, we attempt the binding, pay the price, and die badly. Except that by then, we’ll likely all have been slaughtered by the Galts.’
    ‘Well,’ Cehmai said and rubbed his hands together. ‘Are there any of those raisins left?’
    ‘A few,’ Maati said.
    Maati could hear the joints in Cehmai’s back cracking as he stretched. Maati leaned over and scooped up the fallen book. It wasn’t titled, nor was the author named, but the grammar in the first page marked it as Second Empire. Loyan Sho or Kodjan the Lesser. Maati let his gaze flow down the page, seeing the words without taking in their meanings. Behind him, Cehmai ate the raisins, lips smacking until he spoke.
    ‘The second problem is solved if your technique works. It isn’t critical that we have all the histories if we can deflect the price of failing. At worst, we’ll have lost the time it took to compose the binding.’
    ‘Months,’ Maati said.
    ‘But not death,’ Cehmai went on. ‘So there’s something to be said for that.’
    ‘And the first problem can be skirted by not starting wholly from scratch.’
    ‘You’ve been thinking about this, Maati-kvo.’
    Cehmai slowly walked back across the floor. His footsteps were soft and deliberate. Outside, a pigeon cooed. Maati let the silence speak for him. When Cehmai returned and sat again, his expression was abstracted and his fingers picked idly at the cloth of his sleeves. Maati knew some part of what haunted the younger man: the danger faced by the city, the likelihood of the Khai Machi retrieving the Dai-kvo, the shapeless and all-pervading fear of the Galtic army that had gathered in the South and might now be almost anywhere. But there was another part to the question, and that Maati could not guess. And so he asked.
    ‘What is it like?’
    Cehmai looked up as if he’d half-forgotten Maati was there. His hands flowed into a pose that asked clarification.
    ‘Stone-Made-Soft,’ Maati said. ‘What is it like with him gone?’
    Cehmai shrugged and turned his head to look out the unshuttered windows. The trees shifted their leaves and adjusted their branches like men in conversation. The sun hung in the sky, gold in lapis.
    ‘I’d forgotten what it was like to be myself,’ Cehmai said. His voice was low and thoughtful and melancholy. ‘Just myself and not him as well. I was so young when I took control of him. It’s like having had someone strapped to your back when you were a child and then suddenly lifting off the burden. I feel alone. I feel freed. I’m shamed to have failed, even though I know there was nothing I could have done to