Seasons of War

haven’t made it your policy to ally yourself with . . . well, with anyone.’
    Well, this is going just as poorly as I expected, Otah thought.
    ‘I have a wife, thank you,’ Otah said, his manner cool. But the envoy had clearly reached the end of his patience. Hearing him stand, Otah turned. The young man’s face was flushed, his hands folded into the sleeves of his brown poet’s robes.
    ‘And if you were a shopkeeper, having a single woman would be admirable,’ the envoy said. ‘But as the Khai Machi, turning away every woman who’s offered to you is a pattern of insult. I can’t be the first one to point this out. From the time you took the chair, you’ve isolated yourself from the rest of the Khaiem, the great houses of the utkhaiem, the merchant houses. Everyone.’
    Otah ran through the thousand arguments and responses - the treaties and trade agreements, the acceptance of servants and slaves, all of the ways in which he’d tried to bind himself and Machi to the other cities. They wouldn’t convince the envoy or his master, the Daikvo. They wanted blood - his blood flowing in the veins of some boy child whose mother had come from south or east or west. They wanted to know that the Khai Yalakeht or Pathai or Tan-Sadar might be able to hope for a grandson on the black chair in Machi once Otah had died. His wife Kiyan was past the age to bear another child, but men could get children on younger women. For one of the Khaiem to have only two children, and both by the same woman - and her a wayhouse keeper from Udun . . . They wanted sons from him, fathered on women who embodied wise political alliances. They wanted to preserve tradition, and they had two empires and nine generations of the Khaiate court life to back them. Despair settled on him like a thick winter cloak.
    There was nothing to be gained. He knew all the reasons for all the choices he had made, and he could as easily explain them to a mine dog as to this proud young man who’d traveled weeks for the privilege of taking him to task. Otah sighed, turned, and took a deeply formal pose of apology.
    ‘I have distracted you from your task, Athai-cha. That was not my intention. What was it again the Dai-kvo wished of me?’
    The envoy pressed his lips bloodless. They both knew the answer to the question, but Otah’s feigned ignorance would force him to restate it. And the simple fact that Otah’s bed habits were not mentioned would make his point for him. Etiquette was a terrible game.
    ‘The militia you have formed,’ the envoy said. ‘The Dai-kvo would know your intention in creating it.’
    ‘I intend to send it to the Westlands. I intend it to take contracts with whatever forces there are acting in the best interests of all the cities of the Khaiem. I will be pleased to draft a letter saying so.’
    Otah smiled. The young poet’s eyes flickered. As insults went, this was mild enough. Eventually, the poet’s hands rose in a pose of gratitude.
    ‘There is one other thing, Most High,’ the envoy said. ‘If you take any aggressive act against the interests of another of the Khaiem, the Dai-kvo will recall Cehmai and Stone-Made-Soft. If you take arms against them, he will allow the Khaiem to use their poets against you and your city.’
    ‘Yes,’ Otah said. ‘I understood that when I heard you’d come. I am not acting against the Khaiem, but thank you for your time, Athai-cha. I will have a letter sewn and sealed for you by morning.’
    After the envoy had left, Otah sank into a chair and pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. Around him, the palace was quiet. He counted fifty breaths, then rose again, closed and latched the door, and turned back to the apparently empty room.
    ‘Well?’ he asked, and one of the panels in the corner swung open, exposing a tiny hidden chamber brilliantly designed for eavesdropping.
    The man who sat in the listener’s chair seemed both at ease and out of place. At ease because it was Sinja’s nature to take the world lightly, and out of place because his suntanned skin and rough, stained leathers made him seem like a gardener on a chair of deep red velvet and silver pins fit for the head of a merchant house or a member of the utkhaiem. He rose and closed the panel behind him.
    ‘He seems a decent man,’ Sinja said. ‘I wouldn’t want him on my side of a fight, though. Overconfident.’
    ‘I’m hoping it won’t come to that,’ Otah said.
    ‘For a man who’s convinced the world