"Complicated's hard," Eiah said. "Loya-cha says it's always easy to fix
things when there's only one thing wrong. It's when there's two or three
things at once that it's hardest."
"Smart man, Lova-cha," Nlaati said.
Flah shrugged again.
"I Ie's a servant," she said. "If you can't recapture Seedless, we can't
heat the Galts can we?"
"lour father did once," \laati said. "IIe's a very clever man."
"Rut we might not."
" WVe might not," \laati allowed.
F,iah nodded to herself, her forehead crinkling as she came to some
decision. When she spoke, her voice had a seriousness that seemed out of
place from a girl still so young, hardly half-grown.
"If we're all going to die, I wanted you to know that I think you were a
very good father to Nayiit-cha."
\laati almost coughed from surprise, and then he understood. She knew. A
warm sorrow filled him. She knew that Nayiit was Utah's son. That Nlaati
loved the boy. 't'hat it mattered to him deeply that Nayiit love him
hack. And the worst of it, she knew that he hadn't been a very good father.
"You're kind, love," he said, his voice thick.
She nodded sharply, embarrassed, perhaps, to have completed her task.
One of her companions yelped and dropped under the water only to come
back up spitting and shaking his head. Eiah turned toward them.
"heave him he!" Eiah shouted, then turned to Nlaati with an apologetic
pose. lie smiled and waved her away. She went back to her group with the
squared shoulders of an overseer facing a recalcitrant hand of laborers.
Nlaati let his smile fade.
A good father to Nayiit. And to he told so by Otah's daughter. Perhaps
binding the andat wasn't so complex after all. Not when compared with
other things. Fathers and sons, lovers and mother and daughters. And the
war. Saraykcht and Seedless. All of it touched one edge against another,
like tilework. None of it existed alone. And how could anyone expect him
to solve the thing when half of everything seemed to he broken, and half
of what was broken was still beautiful.
The physician was right. It would he easy to fix one thing, if there
were only one thing wrong. But there were so many was to break something
so delicate and so complex. Even the act of making one thing right
seemed destined to undo something else. And he was too tired and too
confused to say whether one way of being wounded was better than another.
There were so many ways to be wrong.
There were so many ways to break things.
hlaati felt the thought fall into place as if it were something
physical. It was the moment he was supposed to shout, to stand tip and
wave his hands about, possessed by insight as if by a demon. But
instead, he sat with it quietly, as if it was a gem only he of all
mankind had ever seen.
He'd spent too much time with Heshai's binding.
Removing-thePart-That-Continues had been made for the cotton
trade-pulling seeds from the fiber and speeding it on its way to the
spinners and the weavers and feeding all of the needle trades. But there
was no reason for h Iaati to he restricted by that. He only needed a way
to break Galt. To starve them. To see that no other generation of Galtic
children ever saw the world.
It wasn't Seedless he needed. It was only Sterile. And there were any
number of ways to say that.
He sank lower into the water as the sense of relief and peace consumed
him. Destroying-the-Part- That-Continues, he thought as the little waves
touched his lips. Shattering-the-Part-"That-Continues. Crushing it.
Rotting it. Corroding it.
Corrupting it.
In his mind, Galt died. And he, Maati Vaupathai, killed it. What, he
asked himself, was victory in a single battle compared with that? Otah
had saved the city. Nlaati saw now how he could save everything.
21
Sinja woke, stiff with cold, to the sound of chopping. Outside the tent,
someone with a hand axe was breaking the ice at the top of the barrels.
It was still dark, but morning was always dark these days. He kicked off
his blankets and rose. The undyed wool of his inner robes held a hit of
the heat as he pulled on first one outer robe and then another with a
wide leather cloak over the top that creaked when he fastened the wide
hone broochwork.
Outside his tent, the army was already breaking camp. Columns of smoke
and steam rose from the wagons. Horses snorted, their breath pluming
white in the light of a falling moon. In the southeast, the dawn was
still only a lighter shade of black. Sinja walked to the cook fire and
squatted down beside it, a howl of barley gruel sweetened with
winepacked prunes in his hands. The heat of it was better than the
taste. Wine could do strange things to prunes.
The army had been marching for two and a half weeks. At a guess, there
were another three before they reached Machi. If there was no storm,
Sinja guessed they would lose a thousand men to frostbite, most of those
in the last ten days. He squinted into the dark, implacable sky and
watched the faintest stars begin to fade. 't'here would still be over
nine thousand men. And every man among them would know that this battle
wasn't for money or glory. Or even for love of the general. If by some
miracle Otah turned the Galts back from the city, they would die
scattered in the frozen plains of the North.
This battle would be the only time in the whole benighted war that the
Galts would go in knowing they were fighting for their lives.
"You want more?" the cook asked, and Sinja shook his head. Around him,
the members of his personal guard were moving at last. Sinja didn't help
them break down the camp. He'd left most of the company behind in
Tan-Sadar. They were, after all, on a deadly stupid march that, with
luck, would end with them sacking their own hones. It wasn't duty that
could be asked of a green recruit of his first campaign. Sinja had taken
time handpicking this dozen to accompany him. 't'here wasn't a man among
them he liked.
The last tent was folded, poles bound together with their leather
thongs, and put on the steam wagon. The fires were all stamped out, and
the stin made its tardy appearance. Sinja wrapped the leather cloak
closer around his shoulders and sighed. This was a younger man's game.
If he'd been as wise as the average rat, he'd be someplace warm and
close now, with a good mulled wine and a plate of venison in mint sauce.
The call sounded, and he began the walk north. Cold numbed his face and
made his cars ache. The air smelled of dust and smoke and horse dung-the
miasma of the moving army. Sinja kept his eyes to the horizon, but the
only clouds were the high white lace that did little but leach blue from
the sky; there was no storm coming today. And still the dusting of snow