The War With The Mein (18 page)

“You should see it,” he said.

“I would like to,” Corinn said. “Say that you will take me, and I’ll go with you. You can be my caretaker and you can take me to that wild country of yours. You can hunt fresh meat for me and protect me from the bears and other creatures. The world can go on without us.”

Igguldan’s hands were moist in hers. She noticed it when he pulled away, allowing cool air to touch the moisture. What had she just said? She did want it, but it was such a large prospect that she could not grasp it. It might be an absurd mistake; she could not tell. In any event, with the withdrawal of his hand Corinn was sure Igguldan was rejecting her offer. She waited to hear him indicate as much.

The prince felt around in his chest pocket with his fingers and pulled out a small envelope, sealed with wax. “I wrote this for you,” he said. “I was not sure that I would be brave enough to give it to you. I am still not sure if I am brave enough…but I am doing it anyway.” He pressed the folded envelope into her palm and closed her fingers around it.

“What is it?”

“You will see when you read it, but do not do so now. Read it later.” He stood up and tugged her to her feet. “Now we must rise to this challenge. Corinn, I would like very much to show you my country and for everything you said to come true, but now is not the time. My father called me home because we face the threat of war. I have to answer to him. And you, you must do as the chancellor instructs. He is sure to be right about this.” He stopped Corinn’s protest, gripping her on the arms, a hard squeeze at first, but then a caress. “Please, Corinn. Let me first serve my father and the memory of yours. After that I will come for you. Will you receive me? I must know that I am fighting for you. If I am no one will be able to defeat me.”

Corinn managed to nod. Igguldan pressed his face against hers, his hot skin smooth and soft. He kissed her on the cheek. Then he turned away and walked briskly to the door.

Rialus Neptos fled Cathgergen after what he would claim to have been a siege of several days. In a final action before departing, he tossed all manner of hard and heavy objects—his chair, a vase of copper flowers, a paperweight in the shape of an Ice Fields bear, an aged ax once bestowed on his father by the Aushenians—at the glass window that had so sorely embarrassed and betrayed his ego. It would not shatter into the cascade of shards he desired, but it cracked and chipped enough that he felt he had made his point. Whether the message was meant for the glass itself, for someone who would later view it, or for himself he did not consider. He took with him the meager entourage of officials, courtiers, and family members he had been able to maintain in the satrapy—only those so indebted to him that their silence was guaranteed. The Numrek whom he put behind him filled him with as much actual dread as he had feigned. As far as he could tell, few of his colleagues were even composed enough of mind to suspect that the governor himself had any hand in the misfortune befalling them. Indeed, as he ran through the Gradthic Gap he almost felt himself a fugitive in fear for his life.

Because of this Rialus arrived in Aushenia with all aspects of his deception in place. In hasty council with the realm’s king, Guldan, he told how the foreign invaders marched out of a squall of snow. He had been concerned for some time, Rialus claimed, by vague reports of movement as far north as the Ice Fields. This was why he had sent General Alain out to examine the territory and question the Mein brothers. He had not heard from him and therefore feared some mishap, but the actual attack had come as a complete surprise.

The Numrek, he said, had arrived in a massive horde, hulking creatures, hidden beneath furs and skins, armed with pikes twice a man’s height and with swords curved and weighted toward the tip. Many of them rode horned beasts, naturally armored creatures covered with hairy coats. They poured through Cathgergen’s gates before the alarm had even been sounded. They did not explain or announce themselves at all; they just commenced the killing, a merciless slaughter they went at with relish and ravenous glee, bellowing as they fought and dancing to the beat of an unseen drum.

None of this was far from the truth. The Numrek—his guests, as Maeander had called them—did arrive in a ravenous mob. Even though there was little military resistance to meet them, they still managed to find people to kill and did so with the glee Rialus described. He did not, of course, mention to Guldan that the entire Northern Guard had met their deaths in one monstrous trap. Instead, he claimed that the outnumbered troops of the guard fought in a frantic retreat, relinquishing one portion of the fortress and then another until all the remaining population stood cornered with their backs against the last granite wall of the place. It was only then, Rialus said, that he consented to parlay with whatever vile being led them.

“You looked their leader in the face?” Guldan asked. He had been a tall man in his youth. Even now, seated in his royal council chambers, stooped somewhat by stiffness in his back, he still had about him an air of natural nobility. His features were steady, although his voice trembled with a measure of trepidation. “What name does he go by?”

“Calrach,” Rialus said. “There have never been stranger creatures. There has been nothing like them in the Known World since the Ancients cast back the gods of Ithem—”

“You say they are gods?” one of Guldan’s aides interjected.

Rialus was taken aback for a moment. “Well, no. I just mean they are dreadful to look upon. Most alarming.”

As with so much in this strange charade, Rialus could speak for some time on this matter with complete honesty. Standing before the Numrek party he felt as if he were gazing through the warped glass of some window and into another age entirely, at beings whose clay had been fired in a different oven than terrestrial men, meant to inhabit another world, an older epoch. They were tall beings, at least three or four heads higher than normal, long of limb, shoulders wide and flat as if they wore some sort of square-edged yoke beneath the skin. They were black haired and bushy browed. For a time Rialus thought their skin had been powdered or painted, so pale was it. On stepping uncomfortably close to them, he saw that this was just their natural hue, a color like the ceremonial mixture of milk splattered with goat’s blood that the Vadayan drank at the new year. It was a thin membrane beneath which pulsed an intricate pattern of veins, all as clear to the eye as if they were drawn on paper and held up before a lamplight.

Calrach, their leader, showed his strength in the striated cords of muscle supporting his neck. Even his features had about them a fierce, tensile quality. His eyes were of a brown so dense as to appear solid black. His brows followed contours similar to those of regular men, but they protruded more prominently, crested high like sea waves just starting to spill over. They were pierced through by several thick silver rings, metal set deeply enough it must have punctured right through the bone. Rialus found it nearly impossible to keep his gaze on the man’s face. But as soon as his eyes moved on he could not resist turning them back, aghast each time that the creature continued to stare at him from behind the same frightening mask. He was a man, and yet he was not.

Rialus said that for a translator they used a Meinish scribe, a revelation greeted by shocked murmurs and gasps from his Aushenian audience. “Hanish Mein knows of this race?” Guldan asked.

Rialus guessed that he must, and then he continued. “Calrach offered no apology. No explanation or vindication. He simply said we had to leave. Cathgergen was ours no longer. The Numrek had been promised the city. He set me free so that others might learn of the enemy coming against them and be better prepared to offer sport.”

“Cathgergen was promised by whom?” an Aushenian aide asked.

Rialus shrugged his thin shoulders to his ears. “I do not know, but we were in no position to argue. He said that I should run to my people and tell them the end had come. They would hunt us for their amusement and roast us over spits.”

“You are not serious!” the king said. “Rialus Neptos, have you gone mad? The things you are saying are beyond belief.” The monarch seemed to lose his train of thought but found voice again by returning to his earlier question. “Have you gone mad?”

The governor could well imagine that he had. He could never have concocted such a thing in the normal course of his lying. Calrach had said just that. He had sat there, laughing with his generals, saying the vilest things as if Rialus had not been standing before him, as if a translator had not been whispering each word into the trembling man’s ear. He had to press his knees together to keep from spilling his bladder. Remembering the moment, Rialus felt a flush of envy toward those who had not yet seen what he had.

The Aushenians had more than a few questions for him. They knew they were the next obvious target, and they probed the exiled governor for further details, for his opinions and conjecture. Rialus warmed to the role of trusted adviser—such was all he ever really wished for. But behind this temptation to remain and be of genuine aid he could see both Maeander’s and Calrach’s countenances. These helped him to remain resolute. So Rialus explained to the Aushenians that his duty required that he travel to Alecia. Guldan released him, sending him with the grandiose message that whatever evil intent this horde brought would be met first by the soldiers of Aushenia. Such high notions! Rialus thought. But like so many high notions they were of no more weight than the expelled air that carried them. Rialus was in no doubt that Aushenia would fall within a fortnight, a month at most. This assessment, of course, he kept to himself.

Rialus left the kingdom aboard a vessel from the monarch’s fleet, watching the bustle of military preparations on the receding shoreline. He was pleased with himself, an emotion that filled him almost to bursting on landing at the capital. He had pined for a villa on the western hills of Alecia since he first saw the spot on a brief visit fifteen years before. Alecia: to him it was the real center of the Acacian empire, the beating heart from which everything of worth in the world radiated. He loved the very idea of the place, the wealth it controlled, the pleasures it offered, the power it wielded, the limitless maze of intrigue, the clandestine couplings. He could barely grasp the dense complexity of the city’s quadrants. No matter. Rialus had long believed that he would thrive inside the central city’s shimmering pale walls, heated by the sun, draped in hanging vines, and fragrant with only sweet smells.

It was a pity, then, that he arrived within Alecia’s gates a traitor to the people he so adored. He tried not to dwell on this, and he was largely successful at fixing his thoughts only on the bounty finally within his grasp. He had, as he earlier professed to Maeander, allies within the capital who shared his desire to see the wealth of the city redistributed. Some were members of the Neptos family, but many others had been nurtured by his agents at clandestine meetings, people who met in small groups and who scarcely knew of the other pockets of people likewise being groomed. He had a promise to keep. He did not shrink from the blood others would spill on his behalf, just as long as he might finally receive some portion of the rewards he had long deserved. In the first few days in Alecia Rialus was a man with two faces. His public face cried tears of grief at the coming war. Privately his eyes scanned the villas above the city for a suitable new home. True to his long-held belief, it appeared the Giver would indeed reward her worthies.

The commotion was like nothing ever heard in this frozen expanse of barren solitude: the grunts of beasts shackled to labor; the constant barrage of shouts; the jingle of numberless bells; the crunch of boot after boot after marching boot; and the grinding, grinding, grinding of large objects propelled across a surface that could not decide whether its nature was to aid or resist. It was the scrape of metal and wood over ice, the sound of a fleet of ninety warships traversing a frozen sea. They were tugged to motion by hundreds of woolly oxen, driven by an army of fifteen thousand men who walked with bells fastened to their boots. The old ones had instructed Hanish that each man should bear a chime upon his body that would sing to them no matter how great the distance they traveled. They should announce themselves to the world with voices that spoke for the many silent generations that had struggled to make them possible. The Tunishnevre must have heard them and known in their still chamber just how their children honored them.

With the passing miles Hanish felt the old ones’ hold on him slipping somewhat, but he had never felt surer that he was worthy of their trust and would achieve the things they wished of him. Because of him the rumors discussed in the mild climes of Acacia were true, true on a scale beyond even the most extravagant speculation. The few vessels that the fishermen had spotted weeks before were only a scouting force sent to verify the feasibility of what Hanish envisioned. Hanish had instructed the party to allow themselves to be seen. He believed that no matter what people heard about movements in the north they would never believe it until they stood face-to-face with the future he was bringing to them. So why not let them cogitate and worry over phantoms they could neither entirely believe in nor dismiss?

“Nature had always been to the Mein like the goading of a whip to an ox,” Haleeven shouted in his ear over the keening wind. “It changes nothing. It slows us little and keeps us bent to work. As it should.” His uncle always had such wisdom to dispense at the right moments, and Hanish was glad of his presence. Though he never showed it outwardly, it was often hard being a pillar of unflappable confidence. This older man, so like his father, was a living source of strength.

On a morning at the end of the first week heading south the weather cleared so suddenly that it set the animals on edge. It changed the very sound and feel and substance of the world and left men squinting into the distance, more than one head cocked to better hear the strangeness of it. The whole shell of sky shone pale blue. The sun could barely be seen, but it lit the entirety of the firmament evenly. Hanish climbed high up into the rigging of the ship he traveled in. The gnarled ropes bit into his palms, and his feet slipped on the ice-crusted rungs. He was no sailor. Who born in the Mein was? Still he felt joy take him when he leaned back against the mainmast in the lookout perch, his face red from the climb, the breeze tugging at him in gusts and carrying away the plumes of his breath.

Before him stretched a white world painful to look upon. He shaded his eyes with a visor of smoked glass. Looking through this artificial twilight he saw for the first time the entirety of his venture in motion. Surrounding him went a navy traversing a solid white sea. Ninety boats that did not rock and bob with the undulations of currents, that did not rise and fall with the swell of waves. Their sails were furled tight and their rigging sparkled like moist spiderwebs. The ships moved on runners of wood shod with iron, pulled by long lines of oxen, creatures hidden beneath coats so thick they rendered them shapeless. Fifty or so of the animals in double rows tugged each warship, whipped on by fur-garbed men who themselves resembled humans only in the way they moved and in the work they performed.

Behind them the army walked and sledged, outfitted against the cold and struggling to keep alive. It was not an enormous force, but it was the most they could field. Among them went more than one gray-haired man, more than a few smooth-cheeked youths of thirteen and fourteen. They would fight proudly, though, and they were but one of three points of his attack. Another army of five thousand threaded the northern pass into the Candovian lakelands. They would wreak the most useful damage under his brother’s command. Then there were the Numrek, who surely had taken Aushenia by now. And then there were a whole host of other schemes conceived over the years in Tahalian. Amazing, just amazing that it was in motion!

Hanish stayed in the crow’s nest well past the point at which his face and hands went numb, climbing down only when the sun, wherever it had hidden in the sky, sunk behind the ice and the world went dark and the storm returned, a wall as of shattered glass hurled by the angry wind.

They came upon the outpost of Scatevith a few days later, picking up vast quantities of supplies stored there. They stayed two days to see to any necessary repairs. Soon they continued south and skirted close to the mountains that hemmed the edge of the Mein Plateau. There was a wide valley there, a gradual slope to the Eilavan Woodlands much more easily traversed than most of the Methalian Rim. They were down it and into a snow-coated landscape, dotted with squat fir trees that made explosive fires. Though the temperature was below freezing each night and through much of the day, many soldiers took off their fur caps and shook out the knotted cascades of their hair, heavy ropes that fell down past their shoulders. With the chieftain’s blessing, groups of men voyaged out before the host, hunting reindeer. The smoke of roasting meat danced across the landscape.

Hanish, nostrils raised to catch the scent, remembered the old tales of how the Akarans stole the throne through backhanded alliances, promises made and broken, made and broken again, and then set about punishing any people brave or strong enough to stand against them and recite their crimes. It was then that the curse was set upon the race called Mein, then that the Tunishnevre was born and that his people were cast out of the lowlands and banished to above the Methalian Rim. For years they had followed the reindeer herds, living from them and with them in a fashion little different from that of the men from the forgotten times. It took several generations for them to find the site of Mein Tahalian, to recognize the uses of the hot gases bubbling below the crust of ice and dig themselves into a stationary life again, to hew the great trees and set to work on building a sanctuary in the most desolate region of the Known World. And it was many generations more before they found a tentative approach back into the larger world, professing allegiance to all things Akaran, pretending with every word that the past had never been what it had been and that they wished only to emulate, support, and fight in service of the greatness of the Acacian hegemony.

Such was the vast array of details that the scent of reindeer meat on frozen air conjured in Hanish. He doubted the children of Acacia knew anything about these things. There was so much of the history of the world that they willfully ignored. They forgot the things that shamed them, and convinced themselves that everyone else had as well. Not that Hanish would have had them be any other way. Better that his coming shock them to the core and leave them reeling and grasping for meaning, too late to recognize the true shape and substance of the world they lorded over.

The going grew easier yet when they slipped out onto the treeless and featureless surface of the Sinks, a large expanse of lake and marshland in the summer, the first receptacle of the great melt that came pouring each spring from the thawing north. At least, it made for fair travel for a while. They were four days atop this frozen flat before one of the ships broke through the ice. It sunk a few feet down, tossing up slanting slabs around it and creating one crevice that snaked away in front of it, half swallowing a dozen oxen and one man unfortunate enough to have been whipping the beasts at that very moment. The driver was plucked from the icy water and wrapped in furs, and several of the oxen scrambled back onto the ice once their tethers had been cut, but ice again formed around the unfortunate ship. It stuck fast that night, splintered and cracked along the hull. The damage might have been repairable had they the time and supplies at hand, but they had neither. Hanish ordered the boat unloaded, stripped of everything useful, and abandoned without ceremony.

The incident was a harbinger of what was to come. In many ways the next was the most treacherous portion of the journey. They navigated the unreliable ice, feeling the pulsing of the day’s thaw and night’s freeze and the traps this set for them. Hanish had scouts sent before the army with great iron poles they used to test the surface, a thing done both by sound and feel and by instinct. On a few occasions he walked out alone before the host, feeling his way forward, scanning the far horizon. Why he did this he was never sure. It just felt right. There was something comforting in looking into a frozen expanse and imagining for a moment that he was alone upon it, that this quest began and ended with him and his strengths or weaknesses. Of course, it was never long before he heard the scouts smacking the ice with their rods, like some strange herders that lashed the ground before their wards instead of following them. He was not alone, a thought that each time it came upon him was at once a disappointment and a reassurance.

When they reached the break ice, everything changed again. It came more quickly than Hanish had expected. There before them was a black line of open water. This became a blue-brown seething mass, draining the melting lake on which they had traveled and slipping away to the south to become the River Ask. Chunks of the pack ice broke away slab by slab. The army spent the morning in a fury of activity, trying to switch from ice to waterborne travel.

The first of the ships had scarcely gotten men, horses, and supplies aboard before the ice began to groan and shiver beneath them. The men, who had for days driven the oxen, dropped their whips and clambered on the vessels. The oxen, so long bound to labor, milled about, anxious, unsure what their sudden abandonment suggested. It was not until the first vessel lunged forward, tail end jutting into the air for a precarious moment, boards groaning as if the ship were about to snap at its midpoint, that the oxen turned with angry tosses of their great horned heads and sprinted for the north. Nobody stopped them. That first ship managed to slide forward and find its purchase on the water, to catch the current, and begin to move away.

Hanish’s was the third vessel to drop into weighty buoyancy in the water. He was not able, at that moment, to pause and pass news of it to the Tunishnevre, as he had wished to do. Chinks between the frozen boards of the hull let in jets of water. His captain shouted assurances that the boards would swell to watertightness, so Hanish put it out of his mind. He did not have the leisure to do anything about it anyway. The river this far north was barely manageable, swollen as it always was this time of the year by the melt just gathering force in the Sinks. Hanish had wished to enter Acacia with the spring, and it appeared he had timed things correctly. The flood rose well up into the trees on either bank, rushing downstream as if every drop of water was clawing its way past its fellows in the race to the sea. At times they rode up and over and down the backs of waves as large as those during an ocean storm. In other places whirlpools, rips in the current, and roiling eddies turned the ships and sucked the sides of them, tipping men into the froth. What seemed like clenched fists of water took hold of the oars and snapped them, cracking more than one skull in the process.

Most treacherous, however, were the places where the river flowed over obstructions usually above the water. Some of these were normally islands, now nothing but treetops reaching from the depths like the fingers of drowning giants. There were stone ledges that nearly ripped open the hull of one boat and massive boulders over which water fell into churning chaos. One of the leading vessels went over such a fall. It dug down into the froth and then rose, bow high in the air, poised a moment as if it might shoot into the sky. But then—sickeningly, despite the protesting groans of all those watching—it slid backward. The stern of the ship caught in the down-rushing torrent behind it. The whole thing somersaulted backward, sending men hurtling into the air out to all sides, then tumbling into the froth. The ship went end over end for a few seconds, then disappeared. When the hull of the vessel emerged, it was a living ship no longer. It broke the surface as a lifeless hulk, like the underbelly of some dead leviathan.

They were swept on. They rode on the back of a watery serpent. Hanish loved it. He had been too long cooped up! How wonderful to be free, even if that freedom led to death. He did not pity those he lost or mourn for them. This serpent just charged a heavy toll for the service it rendered. All that mattered was that he was getting close to his goal. Close enough that he prepared to try a thing he had previously experimented with only in the seclusion of Tahalian.