An Autumn War

No one heard him. He was a leaf in a storm now, command gone, hope gone, his men being slaughtered like winter pork. Otah dug his heels into his mount's sides, leaned low, and shot off in pursuit of the archers. It was folly riding fast over mud-slick ground, but Otah willed himself forward. The fleeing archers looked hack over their shoulders at the sound of his hooves, and had the naivete to look relieved that it was him. He rode through the nearest wedge, knocking several to the ground, then pulled up before them and pointed hack at the men behind them.

"Loose your arrows," Utah croaked. "It's the only chance they have! Loose arrows!"

The archers stood stunned, their wide confused faces made Utah think of sheep confronted by an unexpected cliff. He had brought farmers and smiths onto a battlefield. He had led men who had never known more violence than brawling drunk outside a comfort house to fight soldiers. Utah dropped from his horse, took a how and quiver from the nearest man, and aimed high. He never saw where his arrow went, but the bowmen at least began to understand. One by one, and then in handfuls, they began to send their arrows and bolts up over the retreating men and into the charging Galts.

"'They'll kill us!" a boy shrieked. "There's a thousand of them!"

"Kill the first twenty," Otah said. ""I'hen let the ones still standing argue about who'll lead the next charge."

Behind them, the other fleeing archers had paused. As the first of the fleeing horsemen passed, Otah caught sight of Ashua Radaani and raised his hands in a pose that called the man to a halt. "There was blood on Radaani's face and arms, and his eyes were wide with shock. Otah strode to him.

"Go to the other archers. "fell them that once the men have reached us here, they're to start loosing arrows. We'll come hack with the men."

"You should come now, Most High," Radaani said. "I can carry you."

"I have a horse," (bah said, though he realized he couldn't say what had become of his mount. "Go. Just go!"

The Galtic charge thinned as they drew into range of the arrows. Utah saw two men fall. And then, almost miraculously, the Galts began to pull back. Utah's footmen came past him, muddy and bleeding and weeping and pale with shock. Some carried wounded men with them. Some, Utah suspected, carried men already dead. The last, or nearly the last, approached, and Utah turned, gesturing to the archers, and they all walked back together. The few Galts that pressed on were dissuaded by fresh arrows. Ashua had reached the other wedge. "Thank the gods for that, at least.

The army of Machi, three thousand strong that morning, found itself milling about, confused and without structure as the evening sun lengthened their shadows. They had fled back past the northern lip of the valley where they had made camp the night before onto green grass already tramped flat by their passage. Some supply wagons and tents and fresh water had been caught up in the retreat, but more was strewn over the ground behind them. The wounded were lined up on hillsides and cared for as best the physicians could. Many of the wounds were mild, but there were also many who would not live the night.

The scouts were the first to recover some sense of purpose. The couriers of the trading houses rode back and forth, reporting the movements of the Galts now that the battle was finished. They had scoured the field, caring for their own men and killing the ones Otah had left behind. Then, with professional efficiency, they had made their camp and prepared their dinner. It was clear that the Galts considered the conflict ended. 'T'hey had won. It was over.

As darkness fell, Otah made his way through the camps, stopped at what cook fires there were. No one greeted him with violence, but he saw anger in some eyes and sorrow in others. By far the most common expression was an emptiness and disbelief. When at last he sat on his cot-set under the spreading limbs of a shade tree in lieu of his tenthe knew that however many men he had lost on the battlefield, twice as many would have deserted by morning. Otah laid an arm over his eyes, his body heavy with exhaustion, but totally unable to sleep.

In the long, dreadful march to this battle, not one man had turned hack. At the time, it had warmed Otah's heart. Now he wanted them all to flee. Go back to their wives and their children and their parents. Go hack to where it was safe and forget this mad attempt to stop the world from crumbling. Except he couldn't imagine where safety might be. The Dai-kvo would fall if he hadn't already. The cities of the Khaiem would fall. Machi would fall. For years, he had had the power to command the death of Galt. Stone-Made-Soft could have ruined their cities, sunk their lands below the waves. All of this could have been stopped once, if he had known and had the will. And now it was too late.

"Most High?"

Otah raised his arm, sat up. Nayiit stood in the shadows of the tree. Otah knew him by his silhouette.

"Nayiit-kya," Otah said, realizing it was the first he'd seen Liat's son since the battle. Nayiit hadn't even crossed his mind. He wondered what that said about him. Nothing good. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. A little bruised on the arm and shoulder, but ... but fine."

In the dim, Otah saw that Nayiit held something before him. A greasy scent of roast lamb came to him.

"I can't eat," Otah said as the boy came closer. ""Thank you, but ... give it to the men. Give it to the injured men."

"Your attendant said you didn't eat in the morning either," Nayiit said. "It won't help them if you collapse. It won't bring them back."

Otah felt a surge of cold anger at the words, but hit back his retort. He nodded to the edge of the cot.

"Leave it there," he said.

Nayiit hesitated, but then moved forward and placed the bowl on the cot. Ile stepped back, but he did not walk away. As Otah's eyes adjusted to the darkness, Nayiit's face took on dim features. Otah wasn't surprised to see that the boy was weeping. Nayiit was older now than Otah had been when he'd fathered him on Liat. Older now than Otah had been when he'd first killed a man with his hands.

"I'm sorry, Most High," Nayiit said.

"So am I," Utah said. The scent of lamb was thick and rich. Enticing and mildly nauseating both.

"It was my fault," Nayiit said, voice thickened by a tight throat. ""Phis, all of this, is my fault."

"No," Utah began. "You can't-"

"I saw them killing each other. I saw how many there were, and I broke," Nayiit said, and his hands took a pose of profound contrition. "I'm the one who called the retreat."

"I know," Otah said.

is

Liat had been nursing her headache since she'd woken that morning; as the day progressed, it had drawn a line from the hack of her eyes to her temples that throbbed when she moved too quickly. She had given up shaking her head. Instead, she pressed her fingers into the fine-grained wood of the table and tried to will her frustration into it. Kiyan, seated across from her, was saying something in a reasonable, measured tone that entirely missed her point. Liat took a pose that asked permission to speak, and then didn't wait for Kiyan to answer her.

"It isn't the men," Liat said. "He could have taken twice what he did, and we'd be able to do what's needed. It's that he took all the horses."

Kiyan's fox-sharp face tightened. Her dark eyes flickered down toward the maps and diagrams spread out between them. The farmlands and low towns that surrounded Machi were listed with the weight of grain and neat and vegetables that had come from each in the last five years. Liat's small, neat script covered paper after paper, black ink on the butter-yellow pages noting acres to be harvested and plowed, the number of hands and hooves required by each.

The breeze from the unshuttered windows lifted the pages but didn't disarray them, like invisible fingers checking the corners for some particular mark.

"Show me again," Kiyan said, and the weariness in her voice was almost enough to disarm Liat's annoyance. Almost, but not entirely. With a sigh, she stood. The line behind her eyes throbbed.

"'T'his is the number of horses we'd need to plow the eastern farmsteads here and here and here," Liat said, tapping the maps as she did so. "We have half that number. We can get up to nearly the right level if we take the mules from the wheat mills."

Kiyan looked over the numbers, her fingertips touching the sums and moving on. I ler gaze was focused, a single vertical line between her brows.

"How short is the second planting now?" Kiyan asked.

"The west and south are nearly complete, but they started late. The eastern farmsteads ... not more than a quarter."

Kiyan leaned back. Otah's wife looked nearly as worn as Liat felt. The gray in her hair seemed more pronounced, her flesh paler and thinner. Liat fund herself wondering if Kiyan had made a practice of painting her face and dyeing her hair that, in the crisis, she had let fall away, or if the task they had set themselves was simply sucking the life out of them both.

"It's too late," Kiyan said. "With the time it would take to get the mules, put them to yoke, and plow the fields, we'd be harvesting snowdrifts."

"Is there something else we could plant?" Liat asked. "Something we have time to grow before winter? Potatoes? Turnips?"

"I don't know," Kiyan said. "How long does it take to grow turnips this far North?"

Liar closed her eyes. Two educated, serious, competent women should be able to run a city. Should be able to shoulder the burden of the world and forget that one stood to lose a husband, the other a son. Should be able to ignore the constant fear that soldiers of a Galtic army might appear any day on the horizon prepared to destroy the city. It should he within their power, and yet they were blocked by idiot questions like whether turnips take longer to grow than potatoes. She took a deep breath and slowly let it out, willing the tension in her jaw to lessen, the pain behind her eyes to recede.

"I'll find out," Ifiat said. "But will you give the order to the mills? They won't he happy to stop their work."

"I'll give them the option of loaning the Khai their animals or pulling the plows themselves," Kiyan said. "If we have to spend the winter grinding wheat for our bread, it's a small price for not starving."

"It's going to he a thin spring regardless," Liat said.

Kiyan took the papers that Liat had drawn up. She didn't speak, but the set of her mouth agreed.

"We'll do our best," Kiyan said.

The banquet had gone splendidly. The women of the utkhaiem- wives and mothers, daughters and aunts-had heard Kiyan's words and taken to them as if she were a priest before the faithful. Liat had seen the light in their eyes, the sense of hope. For all their fine robes and lives of court scandal and gossip, each of these women was as grateful as Liat had been for the chance of something to do.

The food and fuel, Kiyan had kept for herself. Other people had been tasked with seeing to the wool, to arranging the movement of the summer belongings into the storage of the high towers, the preparation of the lower city-the tunnels below Machi. Liat had volunteered to act as Kiyan's messenger and go-between in the management of the farms and crops, gathering the food that would see them through the winter. Being the lover of a poet-even a poet who had never bound one of the andat-apparently lent her enough status in court to make her interesting. And as the rumors began to spread that Cehmai and Maati were keeping long hours together in the library and the poet's house, that they were preparing a fresh binding, Liat found herself more and more in demand. In recent days it had even begun to interfere with her work.

She had let herself spend time in lush gardens and high-domed dining halls, telling what stories she knew of Nlaati's work and intentionswhat parts of it he'd said would be safe to tell. The women were so hungry for good news, for hope, that Liat couldn't refuse them. After telling the stories often enough, even she began to take hope from them herself. But tea and sweet bread and gossip took time, and they took attention, and she had let it go too far. The second wheat crop would be short, and no amount of pleasant high-city chatter now would fill bellies in the spring. Assuming they lived. If the Galts appeared tomorrow, it would hardly matter what she'd done or failed to do.

"There's going to be enough food," Kiyan said softly. "We may wind up killing more of the livestock and eating the grain ourselves, but even if half the crop failed, we'd have enough to see us through to the early harvest."

"Still," Liat said. "It would have been good to have more."

Kiyan took a pose that both agreed with Liat and dismissed the matter. Liat responded with one appropriate for taking leave of a superior. It was a nuance that seemed to trouble Kiyan, because she leaned forward, her fingertips touching Liat's arm.

"Are you well?" Kiyan asked.

"Fine," Liat said. "It's just my head has been tender. It's often like that when the Khai Saraykeht changes the tax laws again or the cotton crops fail. It fades when the troubles pass."

Kiyan nodded, but didn't pull hack her hand.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" Kiyan asked.

"Tell me that Otah's come hack with Nayiit, the Galts all conquered and the world hack the way it was."

"Yes," Kiyan said. Her eyes lost their focus and her hand slipped hack to her side of the table. Liat regretted being so glib, regretted letting the moment's compassion fade. "Yes, it would be pretty to think so.

Liat took her leave. The palaces were alive with servants and slaves, the messengers of the merchant houses and the utkhaiem keeping the life of the court active. Liat walked through the wide halls with their distant tiled ceilings and down staircases of marble wide enough for twenty men to walk abreast. Sweet perfumes filled the air, though their scents brought her no comfort. The world was as bright as it had been before she'd come to Machi, the voices lifted in song as merry and sweet. It was only a trick of her mind that dulled the colors and broke the harmonics. It was only the thought of her boy lying dead in some green and distant field and the dull pain behind her eyes.

When she reached the physicians, she found the man she sought speaking with Eiah. A young man lay naked on the wide slate table beside the pair. His face was pale and damp with sweat; his eyes were closed. His nearer leg was purple with bruises and gashed at the side. The physician-a man no older than Liat, but bald apart from a long gray fringe of hair-was gesturing at the young man's leg, and Eiah was leaning in toward him, as if the words were water she was thirsty for. Liat walked to them softly, partly from the pain in her head, partly from the hope of overhearing their discussion without changing it.

"There's a fever in the flesh," the physician said. "That's to be expected. But the muscle."

Eiah considered the leg, more fascinated, Liat noticed, with the raw wounds than with the man's flaccid sex.

"It's stretched," Eiah said. "So there's still a connection to stretch it. He'll be able to walk."

The physician dropped the blanket and tapped the boy's shoulder.

"You hear that, Tamiya? The Khai's daughter says you'll be able to walk again."

The boy's eyes fluttered open, and he managed a thin smile.

"You're correct, Eiah-cha. The tendon's injured, but not snapped. Ile won't be able to walk for several weeks. The greatest danger now is that the wound where the skin popped open may become septic. NVe'll have to clean it out and bandage it. But first, perhaps we have a fresh patient?"

Liat found herself disconcerted to move from observer to observed so quickly. The physician's smile was distant and professional as a butcher selling lamb, but Eiah's grin was giddy. Liat took a pose that asked forbearance.

"I didn't mean to intrude," she said. "It's only that my head has been troubling me. It aches badly, and I was wondering whether. .

"Come, sit down, Liat-kya," Eiah cried, grabbing Liat's hand and pulling her to a low wooden seat. "Loya-cha can fix anything."

"I can't fix everything," the physician said, his smile softening a degree-he was speaking now not only to a patient, but a friend of his eager student and a fellow adult. "But I may be able to ease the worst of it. Tell me when I've touched the places that hurt the worst."

Gently, the man's fingers swept over Liat's face, her temples, touching here and there as gently as a feather against her skin. He seemed pleased and satisfied with her answers; then he took her pulse on both wrists and considered her tongue and eyes.

"Yes, I believe I can be of service, Liat-cha. Eiah, you saw what I did?"

Eiah took a pose of agreement. It was strange to see a girl so young and with such wealth and power look so attentive, to see her care so clearly what a man who was merely an honored servant could teach her. Liat's heart went out to the girl.

"Make your own measures, then," the man said. "I have a powder I'll mix for the patient, and we can discuss what you think while we clean the gravel out of our friend "lamiya."

Eiah's touch was harder, less assured. Where the physician had hardly seemed present, Eiah gave the impression of grabbing for something even when pressing with the tips of her fingers. It was an eagerness Liat herself had felt once, many years ago.

"You seem to be doing very well here," Liat said, her voice gentle.

"I know," the girl said. "Loya-cha's very smart, and he said I could keep coming here until Mama-kya or the Khai said different. Can I see your tongue, please?"

Liat let the examination be repeated, then when it was finished said, "You must be pleased to have found something you enjoy doing."

"It's all right," Eiah said. "I'd still rather be married, but this is almost as good. And maybe Papa-kya can find someone to marry me who'll let me take part in the physician's house. I'll probably be married to one of the Khaiem, after all, and Mama-kya's running the whole city now. Everyone says so.

"It may be different later, though," Liat said, trying to imagine a Khai allowing his wife to take a tradesman's work as a hobby.

"There may not be any Khaiem, you mean," Eiah said. "The Galts may kill them all."

"Of course they won't," Liat said, but the girl's eyes met hers and Liat faltered. There was so much of Otah's cool distance in a face that seemed too young to look on the world so dispassionately. She was like her father, prepared to pass judgment on the gods themselves if the situation called her to do it. Comfortable lies had no place with her. Liat looked down. "I don't know," she said. "Perhaps there won't be."

"Here, now," the physician said. "Take this with you, Liat-cha. Pour it into a bowl of water and once it's dissolved, drink the whole thing. It will he bitter, so drink it fast. You'll likely want to lie down for a hand or two afterward, to let it work. But it should do what needs doing."

Liat took the paper packet and slipped it into her sleeve before taking a pose of gratitude.

"We should have a lunch in the gardens again," Eiah said. "You and Uncle Nlaati and me. Loya-cha would come too, except he's a servant."

Liat felt herself blush, but the physician's wry smile told her it was not the first such pronouncement he'd been subjected to.

"Perhaps you should wait for another day," he said. "Liat-cha had a headache, remember."

"I know that," Eiah said impatiently. "I meant tomorrow."

"'T'hat would be lovely," Liat said. "I'll talk with Nlaati about it."

"Would you be so good as to get the stiff brushes from the back and wash them for me, Eiah-cha?" the physician said. "Famiya's anxious to be done with us, I'm sure."

Eiah dropped into a pose of confirmation for less than a breath before darting off to her task. Liat watched the physician, the amusement and fondness in his expression. He shook his head.

"She is a force," he said. "But the powder. I wanted to say, it can be habit-forming. You shouldn't have it more than once in a week. So if the pain returns, we may have to find another approach."

"I'm sure this will be fine," Liat said as she rose. "And ... thank you. For what you've done with Eiah, I mean."

"She needs it," the man said with a shrug. "Her father's ridden off to die, her mother and her friend the poet are too busy trying to keep us all alive to take time to comfort her. She buries herself in this, and so even if she slows us down, how can I do anything but welcome her?"

Liat felt her heart turn to lead. The physician's smile slipped, and for a moment the dread showed from behind the mask. When he spoke again, it was softly and the words were as gray as stones.

"And, after all, we may need our children to know how to care for the dying before all that's coming is done."

MAAT1 RIBBED HIS EYES wlTH THE PALMS OF HIS HANDS, SQUINTED, blinked. The world was blurry: the long, rich green of the grass on which they lay was like a single sheet of dyed rice paper; the towers of Machi were reduced to dark blurs that the blue of the sky shone through. It was like fog without the grayness. He blinked again, and the world moved nearer to focus.

"How long was I sleeping?" he asked.

"Long enough, sweet," Liat said. "I could have managed longer, I think. The gods all know we've been restless enough at night."

The sun was near the top of its arc, the remains of breakfast in lacquered boxes with their lids shut, the day half gone. Liat was right, of course. He hadn't been sleeping near enough-late to bed, waking early, and with troubled rest between. He could feel it in his neck and hack and see it in the slowness with which his vision cleared.

"Where's F,iah got to?" he asked.

"Back to her place with the physicians, I'd guess. I offered to wake you so that she could say her good-byes, but she thought it would be better if you slept." Liat smiled. "She said it would be restorative. Can you imagine her using that kind of language a season ago? She already sounds like a physician's apprentice."

Maati grinned. He'd resisted the idea of this little outing at first, but Cehmai had joined F,iah's cause. A half-day's effort by a rested man might do better for them than the whole day by someone drunk with exhaustion and despair. And even now the library seemed to call to him-the scrolls he had already read, the codices laid out and put away and pulled out to look over again, the wax tablets with their notes cut into them and smoothed clear again. And in the end, he had never been able to refuse Eiah. Her good opinion was too precious and too fickle.

Liat slid her hand around his arm and leaned against him. She smelled of grass and cherry paste on apples and musk. He turned without thinking and kissed the crown of her head as if it were something he had always done. As if there had not been a lifetime between the days when they had first been lovers and now.

"How badly is it going?" she asked.

"Not well. We have a start, but Cehmai's notes are only beginnings. And they were done by a student. I'm sure they all seemed terribly deep and insightful when he was still fresh from the school. But there's less there than I'd hoped. And ..."

"And?"

Maati sighed. The towers were visible now. The blades of grass stood out one from another.

"He's not a great inventor," Maati said. "He never was. It's part of why he was chosen to take over an andat that had already been captured instead of binding something new. And I'm no better."

"You were chosen for the same thing."

"Cehmai's clever. I'm clever too, if it comes to that, but we're the second pressing. There's no one we can talk with who's seen a binding through from first principles to a completion. We need someone whose mind's sharper than ours."

There were birds wheeling about the towers-tiny specks of black and gray and white wheeling though the air as if a single mind drove them. Maati pretended he could hear their calls.

"Perhaps you could train someone. "There's a whole city to choose from."

""There isn't time," Maati said. He wanted to say that even if there were, he wouldn't. The andat were too powerful, too dangerous to be given to anyone whose heart wasn't strong or whose conscience couldn't be trusted. That was the lesson, after all, that had driven his own life and Cehmai's and the Dai-kvo himself. It was what elevated each of the poets from boy children cast out by their parents to the most honored men in the world. And yet, if there were someone bright enough to hand the power to, he suspected he would. If it brought the army back from the field and put the world back the way it had been, the risk would be worth it.

"Maybe one of the other poets will come," Liat said, but her voice had gone thin and weary.

"You don't have hope for the Dai-kvo?"

Liat smiled.

"Hope? Yes, I have hope. Just not faith. The Galts know what's in play. If we don't recapture the andat, the cities will all fall. If we do, we'll destroy Galt and everyone in her. "They'll be as ruthless as we will."

"And Otah-kvo? Nayiit?"

Liat's gaze met his, and he nodded. The knot in her chest, he was certain, was much like his own.

"They'll be fine," Liat said, her tone asking for her own belief in the words as much as his. "It's always the footmen who die in battles, isn't it? The generals all live. And he'll keep Nayiit safe. He said he would."

"They might not even see battle. If they arrive before the Galts and come back quickly enough, we might not lose a single man."

"And the moon may come down and get itself trapped in a teabowl," Liat said. "But it would be nice, wouldn't it? For us, I mean. Not so much for the Galts."

"You care what happens to them?"

"Is that wrong?" Liat asked.

"You're the one who came to Otah-kvo asking that they all be killed."

"I suppose I did, didn't I? I don't know what's changed. Something to do with having my boy out there, I suppose. Slaughtering a nation isn't so much to think about. It's when I start feeling that it all goes confused. I wonder why we do it. I wonder why they do. Do you think if we gave them our gold and our silver and swore we would never hind a fresh andat ... do you think they'd let our children live?"

It took a few breaths to realize that Liat was actually waiting for his answer, and several more before he knew what he believed.

"No," Maati said. "I don't think they would."

"Neither do I. But it would he good, wouldn't it? A world where it wasn't a choice of our children or theirs."

"It would be better than this one."

As if by common consent, they changed the subject, talking of food and the change of seasons, Eiah's new half-apprenticeship with the physicians and the small doings of the women of the utkhaiem now that their men had gone. It was only reluctantly that Maati rose. The sun was two and a half hands past where it had been when he woke, the shadows growing oblong. They walked back to the library, hand in hand at first, and then only walking beside each other. Nlaati felt his heart growing heavier as they came down the familiar paths, paving stones turning to sand turning to crushed white gravel bright as snow.

"You could come in," Nlaati said when they reached the wide front doors.

In answer, she kissed him lightly on the mouth, gave his hand a gentle squeeze, and turned away. Maati sighed and turned to lumber up the steps. Inside, Cehmai was sitting on a low couch, three scrolls spread out before him.

"I think I've found something," Cehmai said. "There's reference in Nlanat-kvo's notes to a grammatic schema called threefold significance. If we have something that talks about that, perhaps we can find a way to shift the binding from one kind of significance to another."

"We don't," Nlaati said. "And if I recall correctly, the three significators all require unity. "There's not a way to pick between them."

"Well. "Then we're still stuck."

"Yes."

Cehmai stood and stretched, the popping of his spine audible from across the wide room.

"We need someone who knows this better than we do," Maati said as he lowered himself onto a carved wooden chair. "We need the Daikvo."

"We don't have him."

"I know it."

"So we have to keep trying," Cehmai said. "The better prepared we are when the Dai-kvo comes, the better he'll he able to guide us."

"And if he never comes?"

"He will," Cehmai said. "He has to."