Seasons of War

keep hold of him. And I regret now all the years I could have sunk Galt into ruins that I didn’t.’
    ‘But if you could have him back, would you?’
    The pause that came before Cehmai’s reply meant that no, he would have chosen his freedom. It was the answer Maati had expected, but not the one he was ready to accept.
    ‘The Khai may be able to save the Dai-kvo,’ Cehmai said. ‘He may get there before the Galts.’
    ‘But if he doesn’t?’
    ‘Then I would rather have Stone-Made-Soft back than decorate the end of some Galtic spear,’ Cehmai said, a grim humor in his voice. ‘I have some early work. Drafts from when I was first studying him. There are places where the options . . . branched. If we used those as starting points, it would make the binding different from the one I took over, and we still wouldn’t have to begin from first principles.’
    ‘You have them here?’
    ‘Yes. They’re in that basket. There. You should take them back to the library and look them over. If we keep them here I’m too likely to do something unpleasant with them. I was half-tempted to burn them last night.’
    Maati took the pages - small, neat script on cheap, yellowing parchment - and folded them into his sleeve. The weight of them seemed so slight, and still Maati found himself uncomfortably aware of them and of the return to a kind of waking prison that they meant for Cehmai.
    ‘I’ll look them over,’ Maati said. ‘Once I have an idea what would be the best support for it, I’ll put some reading together. And if things go well, we can present it all to the Dai-kvo when he arrives. Certainly, there’s no call to do anything until we know where we stand.’
    ‘We can prepare for the worst,’ Cehmai said. ‘I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than taken unaware.’
    The resignation in Cehmai’s voice was hard to listen to. Maati coughed, as if the suggestion he wished to make fought against being spoken.
    ‘It might be better . . . I haven’t attempted a binding myself. If I were the one . . .’
    Cehmai took a pose that was both gratitude and refusal. Maati felt a warm relief at Cehmai’s answer and also a twinge of regret.
    ‘He’s my burden,’ Cehmai said. ‘I gave my word to carry Stone-Made-Soft as long as I could, and I’ll do that. I wouldn’t want to disappoint the Khai.’ Then he chuckled. ‘You know, there have been whole years when I would have meant that as a sarcasm. Disappointing the Khaiem seems to be about half of what we do as poets - no, I can’t somehow use the andat to help you win at tiles, or restore your prowess with your wives, or any of the thousand stupid, petty things they ask of us. But these last weeks, I really would do whatever I could, not to disappoint that man. I don’t know what’s changed.’
    ‘Everything,’ Maati said. ‘Times like these remake men. They change what we are. Otah’s trying to become the man we need him to be.’
    ‘I suppose that’s true,’ Cehmai said. ‘I just don’t want this all to be happening, so I forget, somehow, that it is. I keep thinking it’s all a sour dream and I’ll wake out of it and stumble down to play a game of stones against Stone-Made-Soft. That that will be the worst thing I have to face. And not . . .’
    Cehmai gestured, his hands wide, including the house and the palaces and the city and the world.
    ‘And not the end of civilization?’ Maati suggested.
    ‘Something like that.’
    Maati sighed.
    ‘You know,’ he said, ‘when we were young, the man who was Daikvo then chose Otah to come train as a poet. He refused, but I think he would have been good. He has it in him to do whatever needs doing.’
    Killing a man, taking a throne, marching an army to its death, Maati thought but did not say. Whatever needs doing.
    ‘I hope the price he pays is smaller than ours,’ Cehmai said.
    ‘I doubt it will be.’

14
    B alasar had not been raised to put faith in augury. His father had always said that any god that could create the world and the stars should be able to put together a few well-formed sentences if there was something that needed saying; Balasar had accepted this wisdom in the uncritical way of a boy emulating the man he most admires. And still, the dream came to him on the night before he had word of the hunting party.
    It was far from the first time he had dreamt of the desert. He felt again the merciless heat, the pain of the satchel cutting into his shoulder. The books he had borne then