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