The Price Of Spring

Low towns clustered around the great cities of the Khaiem, small centers of commerce and farming, justice and healing. Men and women could live out their lives under the nominal control of the Khaiem or now of the Emperor and never pass into the cities themselves. They had low courts, road taxes, smiths and stablers, wayhouses and comfort houses and common meadows for anyone's use. He had seen them all, years before, when he had only been a courier. They were the cities of the Khaiem writ small, and as he passed through them with his armsmen, his son, and the Galtic half-stowaway, Otah saw all his fears made real.

Silences lay where children should have been playing street games. Great swings made from rope and plank hung from ancient branches that shadowed the common fields, no boys daring each other higher. As a child who had seen no more than twelve summers, Otah had set out on his own, competing with low-town boys for small work. With every low town he entered, his eyes caught the sorts of things he had done: roofs with thatch that wanted care, fences and stone walls in need of mending, cisterns grown thick and black with weeds that required only a strong back and the energy of youth to repair. But there were no boys, no girls; only men and women whose smiles carried a bewildered, permanent sorrow. The leaves on the trees had turned brown and yellow and fallen. The nights were long, and the dawns touched by frost.

The land was dead. He had known it. Being reminded brought him no joy.

They stopped for the night in a wayhouse nestled in a wooded valley. The walls were kiln-fired brick with a thick covering of ivy that the autumn chill had turned brown and brittle. News of his identity and errand had spread before him like a wave on water, making quiet investigation impossible. The keeper had cleared all his rooms before they knew where they meant to stop, had his best calf killed and hot baths drawn on the chance that Otah might stop to rest. Sitting now in the alcove of a room large enough to fit a dozen men, Otah felt his muscles slowly and incompletely unknotting. With the supplies carried on the steam wagons and the men shifting between tending the kilns and riding, Pathai was less than two days away. Without the Galtic machines, it would have been four, perhaps five.

Low clouds obscured moon and stars. When Otah closed the shutters against the cold night air, the room grew no darker. The great copper tub the keeper had prepared glowed in the light of the fire grate. The earthenware jar of soap beside it was half-empty, but at least Otah felt like his skin was his own again and not hidden under layers of dust and sweat. His traveling robes had vanished and he'd picked a simple garment of combed wool lined with silk. The voices of the armsmen rose through the floorboards. The song was patriotic and bawdy, and the drum that accompanied them kept missing the right time. Otah rose on bare feet and walked out to the stairs. No servants scuttled out of his way, and he noticed the absence.

Danat was not among the armsmen or out with the horses. It was only when Otah approached the room set aside for Ana Dasin that he heard his son's voice. The room was on the lower floor, near the kitchens. The floor there was stone. Otah's steps made no sound as he walked forward. Ana said something he couldn't make out, but when Danat answered, he'd come near enough to hear.

"Of course there are, it's only Papa-kya isn't one of them. When I was a boy, he told me stories from the First Empire about a half-Bakta boy. And he nearly married a girl from the eastern islands."

"When was that?" Ana asked. Otah heard a sound of shifting cloth, like a blanket being pulled or a robe being adjusted.

"A long time ago," Danat said. "Just after Saraykeht. He lived in the eastern islands for years after that. They build their marriages in stages there. He's got the first half of the marriage tattoo."

"Why didn't he finish it?" Ana asked.

Otah remembered Maj as he hadn't in years. Her wide, pale lips. Her eyes that could go from blue the color of the sky at dawn to slate gray. The stretch marks on her belly, a constant reminder of the child that had been taken from her. In his mind, she was linked with the scent of the ocean.

"I don't know," Danat said. "But it wasn't that he was trying to keep his bloodline pure. Really, there's a strong case that my lineage isn't par ticularly high. My mother didn't come from the utkhaiem, and for some people that's as much an insult as marrying a Westlander."

"Or a Galt," Ana said, tartly.

"Exactly," Danat said. "So, yes. Of course there are people in the court who want some kind of purity, but they've gotten used to disappointment over the last few decades."

"They would never accept me."

"You?" Danat said.

"Anyone like me."

"If they won't, then they won't accept anyone. So it hardly matters what they think, because they won't have any sons or daughters at court. The world's changed, and the families that can't change with it won't survive."

"I suppose," Ana said. They were silent for a moment. Otah debated whether he should scratch on her door or back quietly away, and then Ana spoke again. Her voice had changed. It was lower now, and dark as rain on stone. "It doesn't really matter, though, does it. There isn't going to be a Galt."

"That's not true," Danat said.

"Every day that we're like ... like this, more of us are dying. It's harvest time. How are they going to harvest the grain if they can't see it? How do you raise sheep and cattle by sound?"

"I knew a blind man who worked leather in Lachi," Danat said. "His work was just as good as a man's with eyes."

"One man doesn't signify," Ana said. "He wasn't baking his own bread or catching his own fish. If he needed to know what a thing looked like, there was someone he could ask. If everyone's sightless, it's different. It's all falling apart."

"You can't know that," Danat said.

"I know how crippled I am," Ana said. "It gives me room to guess. I know how little I can do to stop it."

There was a soft sound, and Danat hushing her. Otah took a careful step back, away from the door. When Ana's voice came again, it was thick with tears.

"Tell me," she said. "Tell me one of those stories. The ones where a child with two races could still win out."

"In the sixteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Adani Beh," Danat said, his voice bright and soft, "there came to court a boy whose blood was half-Bakta, his skin the color of soot, and his mind as clever as any man who had ever lived. When the Emperor saw him ..."

Otah backed away, his son's voice becoming a murmur of sound, inflected like words but too faint to mean anything. Their whole journey, it had been like this. Each time Otah thought they might have a moment alone, Ana was near, or one of the armsmen, or Otah had brought himself to the edge of speech and then failed. Every courier they stopped along the road was another reminder to Otah that his son had to know, had to be told. But no word had come from Idaan, and Danat still didn't know that Eiah was involved in the slow death of Galt and, with it, the future Otah had fought for.

Before Pathai, Otah had told himself when they were on the road. During the journey itself, it hardly mattered whether Danat knew, but once they reached their destination, his son couldn't be set out without knowing what it was they were searching for and why. Otah had no faith that another, better chance would come the next day. He made his way back upstairs, found a servant woman, and had cheese, fresh bread, and a carafe of rice wine taken to Danat's room. Otah waited there until the Galtic clock, clicking to itself in a corner, marked the night as almost half-gone. Otah didn't notice that he was dozing until the opening door roused him.

Otah broke the news as gently as he could, outlining his own halfknowledge of Maati's intentions, Idaan's appearance in Saraykeht, Eiah's appearance on the list of possible backers, and his own decision to set his sister to hunt down his daughter. Danat listened carefully, as if picking through the words for clues to some deeper mystery. When, at length, Otah went silent, Danat looked into the fire in its grate, wove his fingers together, and thought. The flames made his eyes glitter like jewels.

"It isn't her," he said at last. "She wouldn't do this."

"I know you love her, Danat-kya. I love her too, and I don't want to think this of her either, but-"

"I don't mean she didn't back Maati," Danat said. "We don't know that she did, but at least that part's plausible. I'm only saying that this blindness isn't her work."

His voice wasn't loud or strident. He seemed less like a man fighting an unpalatable truth than a builder pointing out a weakness in an archway's design. Otah took a pose that invited him to elaborate.

"Eiah hates your plan," Danat said. "She even came to me a few times to argue that I should refuse it."

"I didn't know that."

"I didn't tell you," Danat said, his hands taking a pose that apologized, though his voice held no regret. "I couldn't see that it would make things between the two of you any better. But my point is that her arguments were never against Galts. She couldn't stand to see a generation of our own women ignored. Their pain was what she lived in. When you started allowing the import of bed slaves as ... well ..."

"Brood mares," Otah said. "I do remember her saying that."

"Well, that," Danat agreed. "Eiah took that as saying that none of the women here mattered. That she didn't matter. If the problems of the Empire could be solved by hauling in wombs that would bear, then all that was important to you about women was the children they could yield."

"But if there's no children, there can't be-"

Danat shifted forward in his seat, putting his palm over Otah's mouth. The boy's eyes were dark, his mouth set in the half-smile Kiyan had often worn.

"You need to listen to me, Papa-kya. I'm not telling you that she's right. I'm not telling you she's wrong, for that. I'm telling you Eiah loves people and she hates pain. If she's been backing Uncle Maati, it's to take away the pain, not to ..."

Danat gestured at the shutters, and by implication at the world on the other side of them. The logs in the grate popped and the song of a single cricket, perhaps the last one alive before the coming winter, sang counterpoint to the ticking clock. Otah rubbed his chin, his mind turning his son's words over like a jeweler considering a gem.

"She may be part of this," Danat said. "I think you're right to find her. But the poet we want? It isn't her."

"I wish I could be certain of that," Otah said.

"Well, start with not being certain that she is," Danat said. "The world will carry you the rest of the way, if I'm right."

Otah smiled and put his hand on his son's head.

"When did you become wise?" Otah asked.

"It's only what you'd have said, if you weren't busy feeling responsible for all of it," Danat said. "You're a good man, Papa-kya. And we're doing what we can in unprecedented times."

Otah let his hand fall to his side. Danat smiled. The cricket, wherever it was, went silent.

"Go," Danat said. "Sleep. We've got a long ride tomorrow, and I'm exhausted."

Otah rose, his hands taking a pose that accepted the command. Danat chuckled; then as Otah reached the door, he sobered.

"Thank you, by the way, for what you said about Ana," Danat said. "You were right. We weren't treating her with the respect she deserved."

"It's a mistake we all make, one time and another," Otah said. "I'm glad it was an error we could correct."

Perhaps mine also will be, he thought. It terrified him in some fundamental and joyous way to think that possibly, possibly, this might still end without a sacrifice that was too great for him to bear. He hadn't realized how much he had tried to harden himself against the prospect of killing his own daughter, or how poorly he had managed it.

He crawled into his bed. Danat's certainty lightened the weight that bore him down. The poet wasn't Eiah. This blindness wasn't in her, wasn't who she was. The andat might have been bound by Maati or some other girl. Some girl whom he could bring himself to kill. He closed his eyes, considering how he might avoid having the power of the andat turned on him. The fear would return, he was sure of that. But now, for a moment, he could afford himself the luxury of being more frightened of loss than of the price of victory.

They left before sunrise with the steamcarts' supplies of wood, coal, and water refreshed, the horses replaced with well-rested animals, and the scent of snow heavy in the air. They moved faster than Otah had expected, not pausing to eat or rest. He himself took a turn at the kiln of the larger steamcart, keeping the fire hot and well-fueled. If the armsmen were surprised to see the Emperor working like a commoner, they didn't say anything. Two couriers passed them riding east, but neither bore a message from Idaan. Three came up behind them bearing letters for the Emperor from what seemed like half the court at Saraykeht and Utani.

Nightfall caught them at the top of the last high, broad pass that opened onto the western plains. On the horizon, Pathai glittered like a congress of stars. The armsmen assembled the sleeping tents, unrolling layers of leather and fur to drape over the canvas. Otah squatted by the kiln, reading through letter after letter. The silk threads that had once sewn the paper closed rested in knots and tangles by his feet. The snow that lay about them was fresh though the sky had cleared, and the cold combined with the day's work to tire him. The joints of his hands ached, and his eyes were tired and difficult to focus. He dreaded the close, airless sleeping tents and the ache-interrupted night that lay before him almost as much as he was annoyed by the petty politics of court.

Letter after letter praised or castigated him for his decision to leave. The Khaiate Council, as it had been deemed in his absence, was either a terrible mistake or an act of surpassing wisdom, and whichever it was, the author of the letter would be better placed on it than someone Otah had named.

Balasar Gice, the only Galt on the council, was pressing for relief ships to sail for Galt with as much food as could be spared and men to help guide and oversee the blinded. The rest of the council was divided, and a third of them had written to Otah for his opinion. Otah put those letters directly into the fire. If he'd meant to answer every difficult question from the road, he wouldn't have created the council.

There was no word from Sinja or Chaburi-Tan. Balasar, writing with a secretary to help him, feared the worst. This letter, Otah tucked into his sleeve. There was no reason to keep it. He could do nothing to affect its news. But he couldn't bring himself to destroy something to do with Sinja when his old friend's fate already seemed so tentative.

Uncertain footsteps sounded behind him. Ana Dasin was walking the wide boards toward the kiln. Her hair was loose and her robe blue shot with gold. Her grayed eyes seemed to search the darkness.

"Ana-cha," he said, both a greeting and a warning that he was there. The girl started a little, but then smiled uncertainly.

"Most High," she said, nodding very nearly toward him. "Is ... I was wondering if Danat-cha was with you?"

"He's gone to fetch water with the others," Otah said, nodding uselessly toward a path that led to a shepherd's well. "He will be back in half a hand, I'd think."

"Oh," Ana said, her face falling.

"Is there something I can do?"

Watching the struggle in the girl's expression seemed almost more an intrusion than his previous eavesdropping. After a moment, she drew something from her sleeve. Cream-colored paper sewn with yellow thread. She held it out.

"The courier said it was from my father," she said. "I can't read it."

Otah cleared his throat against an unexpected tightness. He felt unworthy of the girl's trust, and something like gratitude brought tears to his eyes.

"I would be honored, Ana-cha, to read it for you," he said.

Otah rose, took the letter, and drew Ana to a stool near enough the kiln to warm her, but not so close as to put her in danger of touching the still-scorching metal. He ripped out the thread, unfolded the single page, and leaned in toward the light.

It was written in Galtic though the script betrayed more familiarity with the alphabet of the Khaiem. He knew before he began to read that there would be nothing in it too personal to say to a secretary, and the fact relieved him. He skimmed the words once, then again more slowly.

"Most High?" Ana said.

"It is addressed to you," Otah said. "It says this: I understand that you've seen fit to run off without telling we or your mother. You should know better than that. Then there are a few more lines that restate all that."

Ana sat straight, her hands on her knees, her face expressionless. Otah coughed, cleared his throat, and went on.

"There is a second section," he said. "He says ... well."

Otah smoothed the page with his fingers, tracing the words as he spoke.

"Still, I was your age once too. If good judgment were part of being young, there would be no reason to grow old. In God's name write back to tell us you're well. Your mother's sick that you'll fall off the trail and get eaten by dogs, and I'm half-sick that you'll come back wed and pregnant," Otah said. "He goes on to offer a brief analysis of my own intelligence. I'll skip that."

Ana chuckled and wiped away a tear. Otah grinned and kept the smile in his voice when he went on.

"He ends by saying that he loves you. And that he trusts you to do what's right."

"You're lying," Ana said.

Otah took a pose that denied an unjust accusation, then flapped his hands in annoyance. The physical language of the Khaiem was a difficult habit to put aside.

"Why would I lie?" he asked.

"To be polite? I don't know But my father? Fatter Dasin putting on paper that he trusts his little girl's judgment? The stars would dance on treetops first. The wed-and-pregnant part sounded like him, though."

"Well," Otah said, placing the folded page into her fingers. "He might surprise you. Keep this, and you can read it for yourself once we've fixed all this mess."

Ana took a pose that offered thanks. It wasn't particularly well done.

"You are always welcome," Otah said.

They sat in silence until Danat and the other water bearers returned. Then Otah left his seat to Danat and crawled into the sleeping tent, where, true to expectations, he shifted from discomfort to discomfort until the sun rose again.

They reached Pathai at midday. Silk banners streamed from the towers and the throng that met them at the western arch cheered and sang and played flutes and drums. Men and women hung from lattices of wood and rope to get a better view of Otah and Danat, their armsmen, the steamcarts. The air was thick with the scents of honeyed almonds and mulled wine and bodies. The armsmen of Pathai met them, made an elaborate ritual obeisance, and then cleared a path for them until they reached the palaces.

A feast had been prepared, and baths. Servants descended on the group like moths, and Otah submitted to being only emperor once again.

The celebration of his arrival was as annoying as it was pointless. Dish after dish of savory meat and sweet bread, hot curry and chilled fish, all accompanied by the best acrobats and musicians that could be scraped together with little notice. And Ana Dasin sitting at his table, her empty eyes a constant, unintentional reproach. Finding Maati and this new poet was going to be like hunting quail with a circus. He would have to do something to let them move discreetly. He didn't yet know what that would be.

The rooms he'd been given were blond stone, the ceiling vaulted and set with tiles of indigo and silver. A thousand candles set the air glowing and filled his senses with the scent of hot wax and perfume. It was, he thought, the sort of space that was almost impossible to keep warm. Danat, Ana, and the armsmen were all being seen to elsewhere. He sat on a long, low couch and hoped that Danat, at least, would be able to get out into the city and make a few inquiries.

When a servant came and announced Sian Noygu, Otah almost refused the audience before he recognized it as the name Idaan traveled under. His heart racing, he let himself be led to a smaller chamber of carved granite and worked gold. His sister sat between a small fountain and a shadowed alcove. She wore a gray robe under a colorless cloak, and her boots were soft with wear. A long scratch across the back of her hand was the dark red of scabs and old blood.

The servant made his obeisance and retreated. Otah took a pose of greeting appropriate to close family, and Idaan tilted her head like a dog hearing an unfamiliar sound.

"I had intended to meet you when you came into the city. I didn't know you were planning a festival."

"I wasn't," Otah said, sitting beside her. The fountain clucked and burbled. "Traveling quietly seems beyond me these days."

"It was all as subtle as a rockslide," Idaan agreed. "But there's some good in it. The louder you are, the less people are looking at me."

"You've found something then?" Otah asked.

"I have," Idaan said.

"What have you learned?"

A different voice answered from the darkness of the alcove at Idaan's side. A woman's voice.

"Everything," it said.

Otah rose to his feet. The woman who emerged was young: not more than forty summers and the white in her hair still barely more than an accent. She wore robes as simple as Idaan's but held herself with a mixture of angry pride and uncertainty that Otah had become familiar with. Her pupils were gray and sightless, but her eyes were the almond shape that marked her as a citizen of the Empire. This was a victim of the new poet, but she was no Galt.

"Idaan-cha knows everything," the blind woman said again, "because I told it to her."

Idaan took the woman's hand and stood. When she spoke, it was to her companion.

"This is my brother, the Emperor," Idaan said, then turned to him. "Otah-cha, this is Ashti Beg."