The Price Of Spring(2)

Balasar sat on a low couch beside the window. He was a small man, more than half a head shorter than Otah, with the force of personality that made it easy to forget. The years had weathered his face, grooves at the corners of his eyes and mouth that spoke as much of laughter as sorrow. They had met a decade and a half ago in the snow-covered square that had been the site of the last battle in the war between Galt and the Khaiem. A war that they had both lost.

The years since had seen his status in his homeland collapse and then slowly be rebuilt. He wasn't a member of the convocation, much less the High Council, but he was still a man of power within Galt. When he sat forward, elbows resting on his knees, Otah could imagine him beside a campfire, working through the final details of the next morning's attack.

"Otah," the former general said, falling into his native tongue, "what is your plan if the vote fails?"

Otah leaned back in his chair.

"I don't see why it should," Otah said. "All respect, but what Sterile did, she did to both of us. Galt is in just as much trouble as the cities of the Khaiem. Your men can't father children. Our women can't bear them. We've gone almost fifteen years without children. The farms are starting to feel the loss. The armies. The trades."

"I know all that," Balasar said, but Otah pressed on.

"Both of our nations are going to fall. They've been falling, but we're coming close to the last chance to repair it. We might be able to weather a single lost generation, but if there isn't another after that, Galt will become Eymond's back gardens, and the Khaiem will be eaten by whoever can get to us first. You know that Eymond is only waiting for your army to age into weakness."

"And I know there are other peoples who weren't cursed," Balasar said. "Eymond, certainly. And the Westlands. Bakta. Obar State."

"And there are a handful of half-bred children from matches like those in the coastal cities," Otah said. "They're born to high families that can afford them and hoarded away like treasure. And there are others whose blood was mixed. Some have borne. Might that be enough, do you think?"

Balasar's smile was thin.

"It isn't," he said. "They won't suffice. Children can't be rarer than silk and lapis. So few might as well be none. And why should Eymond or Eddensea or the Westlands send their sons here to make families, when they can wait a few more years and take what they want from a nation of geriatrics? If the Khaiem and the Galts don't become one, we'll both be forgotten. Our land will be taken, our cities will be occupied, and you and I will spend our last years picking wild berries and stealing eggs out of nests, because there won't be farm hands enough to keep us in bread."

"That was my thought as well," Otah said.

"So, no fallback position, eh?"

"None," Otah said. "It was raw hell getting the utkhaiem to agree to the proposal I've brought. I take it the vote is going to fail?"

"The vote is going to fail," Balasar said.

Otah sat forward, his face cradled in his palms. The slight, acrid smell of old ink on his fingers only made the darkness behind his closed lids deeper.

Five months before, he had wrestled the last of the language in his proposed treaty with Galt into shape. A hundred translators from the high families and great trading houses had offered comment and correction, and small wars had been fought in the halls and meeting rooms of his palace at Utani, sometimes resulting in actual blows. Once, memorably, a chair had been thrown and the chief overseer of House Siyanti had suffered a broken finger.

Otah had set forth with an entourage of hundreds-court servants, guards, representatives of every interest from Machi in the far, frozen north to the island city of ChaburiTan, where ice was a novelty. The ships had poured into the harbor flying brightly dyed sails and more banners and good-luck pennants than the world had ever seen. For weeks and months, Otah had made his arguments to any man of any power in the bizarre, fluid government of his old enemy. And now, this.

"Can I ask why?" he said, his eyes still closed.

"Pride," Balasar said. Otah heard the sympathy in the softness of his voice. "No matter how prettily you put it, you're talking about putting our daughters in bed under your sons."

"And rather than that, they'll let everything die?" Otah said, looking up at last. Balasar's gaze didn't waver. When the old Galt spoke, it was with a sense of reason and consideration that might almost have made a listener forget that he was one of the men he spoke of.

"You don't understand the depth to which these people have been damaged. Every man on that council was hurt by you in a profound, personal way. Most of them have been steeping in the shame of it since the day it happened. They are less than men, and in their minds, it's because of the Khaiem. If someone had humiliated and crippled you, how would you feel about marrying your Eiah to him?"