Seasons of War (43 page)
Authors: Daniel Abraham
‘Well,’ he said aloud. ‘We might be able to find something. Come with me.’
He led them out and along the gravel path to the library’s entrance. The air had a bite to it. He could feel the color coming to his own cheeks. When he’d been young, a child-poet younger than Nayiit, he’d spent his terrible winter in Saraykeht with Seedless and Otah and Liat. In the summer cities, this chill would have been the depth of winter. In the North, it was only the first breath of autumn.
Cehmai looked up when they came in, a scroll case of shattered silk in his hand. A smear of dust marked his cheek like ashes. Boxes and crates lay about the main room, stacked man-high. One of the couches was piled with scrolls that hadn’t been looked over, two others with the ones that had. The air was thick with the smells of dust and parchment and old binder’s paste. Danat stood in the doorway, his eyes wide, his mouth open. Nayiit stepped around him and drew the boy in, sliding the doors closed behind them. Cehmai nodded his question.
‘Danat was asking if we had any other books,’ Maati said.
‘You have
all
of them,’ the boy said, awe in his voice.
all
of them,’ the boy said, awe in his voice.
Maati chuckled, and then felt the mirth and simple pleasure fade. The shelves and crates, boxes and piled volumes surrounded them.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, we have all of them.’
19
‘
H
ow many do we have?’ Otah asked.
H
ow many do we have?’ Otah asked.
The bows had been made for killing bears. Each one stood taller than a man, the bow itself made of ash and horn, the drawstring of wire. It took a man sitting down and using both legs to draw it back. The arrows were blackened oak shafts as long as short spears. The tips - usually a wide, crossed head like twined knives - had been replaced by hard steel points made to punch through metal. The chief huntsman of the Khai Cetani nudged one with his toe, spat, and looked out through the trees toward the road below them.
‘Two dozen,’ he said. His voice had a Western drawl. ‘Sixty shafts, more or less.’
‘More or less?’ the Khai Cetani demanded.
‘We’re fashioning more, Most High,’ the huntsman said.
‘How many men do we have who can use them?’ Otah asked. ‘It won’t matter if we have a thousand bows if there’s only five men who can aim them.’
‘Bear hunters are rare,’ the huntsman said. ‘There aren’t any old ones.’
‘How many?’
‘Eight who are good. Twice that who know how the bow works. With practice . . .’
The Khai Cetani frowned deeply, and turned to Otah. Otah chewed at the inside of his lip and looked down and to the east. The trees here were thick, unlike the plains nearer to the newly abandoned city where the need for lumber had created new-made meadows. The leaves were red and gold, bright as fire. The days were still warm enough at their height, but the nights were cold and getting colder. Soon it would be freezing before morning, and soon after that - a week, ten days - it wouldn’t be thawing by midday.
‘We have two and a half thousand men,’ Otah said. ‘And you’re telling me only eight can work these things?’
‘They’re not good for much apart from hunting big animals that need killing fast. And there aren’t many who care to do that, if they can help it,’ the huntsman said. ‘Why learn something with no use?’
Otah squatted and took one of the bows in his hand. It was heavier than it looked. It would be able to throw the bolts hard. Otah wondered how close they could afford to get to the road. Too far back, and the trees would offer as much protection to the Galts as cover for Otah’s men. Too close, and they’d be seen before the time came. It wouldn’t take much skill to hit the belly of a steam wagon if you were near enough. He tossed the bow from hand to hand as he weighed the risks.
‘Go ask for volunteers,’ Otah said. ‘Ask on both sides of the road. Anyone who says they’re willing, test them. Take the twenty best.’
‘A man who doesn’t know what he’s doing with this can scrape the meat off his legs,’ the huntsman said.
Otah stopped tossing the bow and turned to consider the man. The huntsman blushed, realizing what he had just said and to whom. He took a pose of obeisance and backed away from the two Khaiem, folding himself in among the trees and vanishing. The Khai Cetani sighed and took a pose of apology.
‘He’s a good enough man,’ he said, ‘but he forgets his place.’
‘He isn’t wrong,’ Otah said. ‘If this were a better time to have our orders questioned, I’d have listened to him. But then, if it were a better time, we wouldn’t be out here.’
The last of the men and women fleeing Cetani had passed them five days before, carts and wagons and sacks slung over hunched backs. For five days, the combined forces of Cetani and Machi had haunted these woods, sharpening their weapons and planning the attack. And growing bored and hungry and cold. Two nights ago, Otah had ordered an end to all fires. The smoke would give them away, and the prospect of a half-sleeping man dropping a stray ember on the forest floor was too likely. The men grumbled, but enough of them saw the sense of it that the edict hadn’t been ignored. Not yet.
It wouldn’t be many more days, though. If the Galts didn’t come, the men would grow restive and careless, and when the time came, it would be the battle before the Dai-kvo again, only this time, the Galts would march into Machi. The bodies left in the streets wouldn’t be of poets. They would be the families of every man in the hidden clumps that dotted the hills. Their mothers, fathers, lovers, children. Everyone they knew. Everyone that remained. That was good for another day. Perhaps two.
‘You’re thinking of the frost,’ the Khai Cetani said. ‘You’re worried that it’s going to come and drop our screen of leaves before the Galts do.’
Otah smiled.
‘No, actually, I’d been worrying about other things entirely. Thank you for distracting me.’
The Khai Cetani actually chuckled.
‘I’ll go and speak with my leaders,’ he said, clapping Otah on the shoulder. ‘Keep their spirits up.’
‘I’ll do the same,’ Otah said. ‘It’s coming. They’ll be here soon.’
The camps had been divided. Groups of men no larger than twenty. Only one stayed close to the road on either side. The others fanned out to the west. When the Galts appeared at the edge of the last cleared forest, runners would come from the watch camps, and the men would make their way to the road. Trees already had been felled at four places along the path - two before they reached the forest, another halfway to the hill on which Otah now stood, and the last where the road turned a little to the south and then west again toward Machi. The first time they were forced to stop, they would expect the attack. By the fourth, Otah hoped they would only think it another delay. The mixed coal would have their steam wagons running hotter than they intended. The bear-hunting bows would prick the steel chambers. In the chaos, the armies would appear, falling on the Galts’ long vulnerable flanks. If it all went well. If the plan worked. If not, then the gods alone knew how the fight would end.
Night fell cold. The wide cloudless sky seemed to pull the warmth of the day and land up into it, and Otah, most honored and powerful man in his city, wrapped an extra cloak around himself and settled down against a tree, Ashua Radaani snoring gently at his side. He had expected his dreams to be troubled, but instead he found himself ice fishing, and the fish he saw moving below the ice were also Kiyan and his children, playing with him, tugging at the line and then darting away. A trout that was also Kiyan in a silver-blue robe leapt from the water - with the logic of dreams frozen and yet unfrozen - and splashed back down to Otah’s delight when a rough hand shook him awake. Dawn was threatening, gray and rose in the east, and Saya the blacksmith towered over him, cheeks so red they seemed dark in the dim light, nose running, and a grin showing his teeth.
‘They’ve come, Most High.’
Otah leapt up, his back and hip aching from the cold night and the unforgiving ground. To the east, smoke rose in a wall. Coal smoke from the Galtic wagons strung along the road from Cetani like beads on a string. It was earlier in the day than he’d expected them, and as he pulled on his makeshift armor of boiled leather and metal scale, his mind leapt ahead, guessing at what tactical advantages the Galtic captain intended by arriving with the dawn.
None, of course. They had no way to know Otah’s men were there. And still, Otah considered how the light would strike the road, the trees, what it would make visible and what it would hide. He could no more stop his mind than call down the stars.
The sun found the highest reaches of the smoke first, where it had diffused almost to nothing. Closer to the ground, the smoke was already visibly nearer. The Galts had passed the third log barrier while the runners had come to him. The fourth lay in wait where Otah could see it. The innocent forest was alive with his men, or so he hoped. From his place at the ridge of the low hill, he saw only the dozen nearest, crouched behind trees and stones. Otah heard something - the clank of metal or the sound of a raised voice. He willed them to be silent, fear and anger at the sound almost enough to make his teeth ache until he heard it again and realized it was the first of the Galts.
The bear hunter appeared at his side. He held three of the spearlike bolts and the great bow. Saya the blacksmith scampered up with another, its steel heads only just fastened to it. Men appeared on the road below them.
‘The horn. Where’s the horn?’ Otah said, a sudden fear arcing through him. If he had learned the lesson of drums and horns from the Galts only to misplace the signal at the critical moment . . . But the brass horn was at his hip, where it had been since they’d set their trap. He took the cold metal in his hands, brushing dirt from the mouthpiece.
‘They look a bit rough around the edges, eh?’ Saya whispered, pointing at the road with his chin. ‘Amnat-Tan must have done them some hurt.’
Otah looked at the Galtic soldiers. There were perhaps a hundred that he could see on this small curve of road. He tried to recall what the men he had faced outside the Dai-kvo’s village had looked like; how they had walked, how they had held themselves. He couldn’t. The memory was only of the battle, and of his men, dying. Saya took a pose of farewell and slunk away, down toward the trees where the battle would soon begin.
The first of the steam wagons came into sight. He could hear it clacking like a loom. The wide belly at its back glowed gold in the rising sun. It was piled with sacks and boxes. Tents, perhaps, or food. Coal for the furnaces. The packs that soldiers would have worn on their shoulders. The wreckage he had seen at the Dai-kvo’s village had let him understand what these things were, but seeing one move - wheels turning at the speed of a team at fast trot, and yet without a horse near - was no less strange than his dreams. For a moment, he felt something like awe at the mind who had conceived it. The first of the soldiers below him saw the fallen log and called out - a long musical note that might have been a word or only a signal. The sound of the steam wagon changed, and it slowed, jittered once, and came to a halt. The long call came again and again as it receded down the road like whisperers at court passing the words of the Khai to distant galleries. The Galts came together, conferring. At Otah’s side, the bear hunter sat back, bracing the curve of the bow against the soles of his feet. He took one of the bolts, steadying it between his fists as, two-handed, he drew back the wire. The bow creaked.
‘Wait,’ Otah said.
A man came forward, past the steam wagon. He wore a gray tunic marked with the Galtic Tree. His hair was dark as Otah’s own, his skin dark and leathern. The crowd of men at the fallen trees turned to face him, their bodies taking attitudes of respect. Otah felt something shift in his belly.
‘Him,’ Otah said.
‘Most High?’ the huntsman said, strain in his voice.
‘Can you hit the man in gray from here?’
The huntsman strained his neck, turned his body and his bow.
‘Hard. Shot,’ he grunted.
‘Can you do it?’
The huntsman was silent for half a breath.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Then do. Do it now.’
The wire made a low thrum and the huntsman did something fast with his ankles that caught the bow before it could fall. He was already bending back again when the huge arrow struck. It took the gray man in the side, just below his ribs, and he collapsed without crying out. Otah fumbled with his horn, raising it to his lips. The note he blew filled his ears, so that he only knew the Galts below him were calling out to each other by the movement of their jaws and their drawn swords and axes.
The second bolt flew at the steam wagon as the soldiers fell back. It struck the belly of the steam wagon with a low clank and fell useless to the ground. A horn answering Otah’s own called, and something terrible and sudden and louder than anything Otah had ever heard before drowned it out. A great cloud gouted up into the sky from perhaps three hundred yards back in the Galtic column, and then the huntsman at his side loosed the third bolt, and Otah was deafened.
The cloud of steam and smoke boiled up toward him, and Otah found himself coughing in the thick, hot air. The huntsman loosed one last bolt into the murk, stood, drew two daggers, and bounded down toward the road. Otah stepped forward. He was aware of sounds, though they were muffled by the ringing in his ears - screams, a trumpet blast, a distant report as another steam wagon met its end. The road came clear to him slowly as the mist thinned. The cart had tipped on its side, spilling its cargo and its men. Perhaps a dozen men lay on the sodden ground, their flesh seared red as a boiled lobster. Many still stood to fight, but they seemed half-stunned, and his own men were cutting them down with a savage glee. The furnace had cracked open, strewing burning coal across the paving stones. The leaves on the nearest trees, damp from the steam, seemed brighter and more vibrant than before. Two more steam wagons burst, the sound like doubled thunder. Otah cried out, rallying his men to his side, as he moved down to the road and the battle.
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