"Most High?"
Otah raised his arm, sat up. Nayiit stood in the shadows of the tree. Otah knew him by his silhouette.
"Nayiitkya," 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.
Chapter 15
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.