The War With The Mein (2 page)

Mena let the silence after this linger for a moment, then asked, “Is that the end?”

Leodan shushed her and nodded toward Dariel, indicating that he had fallen asleep. “No,” he said, beginning to slide his arms under the boy, “that is not all, but it’s the end of this night’s story. Bashar realized that some god had reached down and blessed his brother. He knew then that they were to be foes in a long and difficult battle. Truth be known, they still are fighting.” Leodan pushed himself upright, Dariel draped over his arms, in the dead weight of slumber. “Sometimes, if you listen carefully, you can hear them throwing stones at each other in the mountains.”

Watching her father’s back as he passed through the open portal, turned toward the glare of yellow light from the hall lamp and stepped out of view, Mena fought back the sudden urge to call out. It came to her like a gasp for air, as if she had been holding her breath unwittingly. It was the sudden, dreadful certainty that her father would vanish into that corridor, never to be seen again. When she was younger she often called him back time and again, for comfort, stories, and promises, until his patience wore thin or until she dropped senseless from fatigue. But lately she had grown embarrassed by whatever emotion choked her at parting from him. It was her burden to bear, and bear it she did.

She realized that she had clenched her bedsheets tight in her two fists. She tried to loosen her fingers and spread calm up from them and through the rest of her. It was fear without substance, she told herself. Leodan had told her as much many times. He would never leave her. He promised it with complete, undeniable parental certainty. Why could she not just believe him? And why did the wish that she believed him feel like a slight to her dead mother? She knew that many children her age had never suffered the loss of a parent. Even sleeping Dariel could not remember their mother enough to miss her. He knew nothing of what had been lost. Such a kind thing, that ignorance. If only she had been born the youngest instead of Dariel. She was not sure if this was a mean thought, unkind to her brother, but she was a long time thinking about it.

Thaddeus Clegg could see from the moment he entered his chamber that the woman was about to collapse from exhaustion. She stood in the center of the torch-lit room, facing the far wall, cast in silhouette by the orange glow from the fireplace. She swayed from side to side with the awkward, off-kilter movements of the truly fatigued. Her garments were as soiled and bedraggled as a peasant’s, but beneath the caked dirt and grime Thaddeus could make out the glint of her chain-mail vest. The tight-fitting skullcap of her helmet was distinctive enough with its single tuft of yellow horsehair at the peak.

“Messenger,” Thaddeus said, “my apologies that you had to wait for me standing. My servants hold to formality even in the face of reason.”

The woman’s eyes flashed up. “Why have I been kept here, chancellor? My message is for King Leodan, by orders of General Leeka Alain of the Northern Guard.”

Thaddeus turned to his servant, who had shadowed him as he entered the room, and instructed him to bring the messenger a plate of food. As the servant shuffled out of the room, Thaddeus motioned for the woman to sit on one of the couches just behind him. It took some convincing, but when he lowered himself, the messenger followed his example. He explained that she was there before him precisely because her message was for the king. As chancellor he received all communications first. “Certainly you know this,” he said, the slightest suggestion of reprimand in the purse of his lips.

At fifty-six years of age Thaddeus had left behind the handsome appearance of his youth. The invariable sun of Acacian summers had carved deep creases in his skin, lines that seemed to sprout anew each time he gazed at himself in a hand mirror. Still, sitting upright within the reach of the wavering firelight, with his arms folded in his lap and the dark red satin of his winter cloak around him, the chancellor looked every bit at home in his station as confidant to the ruler of the largest empire in the Known World. He had been born just months after Leodan Akaran, to a family nearly as royal, but he had been told early that his role was to serve the future king, not aspire to such heights himself. He was a constant confidant, the first ear for any secret, the eyes that saw the monarch as only those of his immediate family were allowed. He had been assigned his role and status at birth, as had been the case with each of the twenty-two generations of chancellors before him.

The servant returned, bearing a tray spread with plates of smoked oysters and anchovies, grapes, and two carafes, one of lime water and one of wine. Thaddeus motioned that the woman should help herself. “Let there be no discord between us,” he said. “I can see that you are an earnest soldier, and from the look of your clothes you have had a harsh journey. The Mein must be an icy misery this time of the year. Drink. Take a breath. Remember that you are within the walls of Acacia. And then tell me what you have to.”

“General Alain sends—”

“Yes, you said that Leeka sent you. You were not sent by the governor?”

“This message comes from General Alain,” the messenger said. “He sends his most devoted praise and affection to the king and to his four children. May they live long. He swears his loyalty now as ever, and he asks that the king listen to his words with care. They are all true, even if his message will seem incredible.”

Thaddeus glanced at his servant. After he left the room the chancellor said, “The king listens through me.”

“Hanish Mein is planning a war against Acacia.”

Thaddeus smiled. “Not likely. The Meins are not fools. Their numbers are small. The Acacian Empire would crush them like ants underfoot. When did Leeka become such a—”

“Sir, forgive me, but I have not finished my report.” The messenger seemed saddened by this fact. For a moment she rubbed at the bags beneath her eyes. “It is not just the Mein we must contend with. Hanish Mein has struck some alliance with people from beyond the Ice Fields. They have come over the roof of the world and south into the Mein.”

The chancellor’s smile faded. “That is not possible.”

“Sir, I swear by my right arm that they come south by the thousands. We believe they do so at the call of Hanish Mein.”

“He has gone out of the Known World?”

“Scouts have seen them coming. They are a strange people, barbaric and fierce—”

“Foreign people are always thought to be barbaric and fierce.”

“They are taller than normal men by more than a head. They ride atop woolly creatures, horned things that trample men underfoot. They come not just with soldiers but with women and children and the elderly, with great carts like moving cities, pulled by rows of hundreds and hundreds of beasts like none I have heard described before. It is said they wheel siege towers and other strange weapons with them, and manage great herds of livestock….”

“You describe wandering nomads. These are figments of some liar’s fancy.”

“If these be nomads they are like none our world has ever seen. They sacked a town called Vedus in the far north. I say sacked, but in truth they simply rolled over it. They left nothing behind, but grasped up everything of value and carried it with them.”

“How do you know Hanish Mein has anything to do with this?”

The messenger fixed the chancellor in her gaze. She could have been no older than twenty-five, but there was more than that length of suffering and perseverance in her face. Thaddeus had often believed this to be true of female soldiers. They were, by and large, cast of finer steel than average men. She knew what she was talking about, and he should acknowledge it.

Thaddeus rose and motioned the woman toward a large chart of the empire on the far wall. “Show me these things on the map. Tell me all you can.”

For the next hour the two talked: one asking questions with ever-increasing gravity, the other answering with conviction. Running his eyes over the chart, Thaddeus could not help but imagine the howling wildness of the place they discussed. No other region of the Known World was as troublesome as the Mein Satrapy. It was a harsh northern plateau region, a land of nine-month winters and of a blond-haired race of people who managed to survive there. The plateau bore the name of the people who inhabited it, but the Mein were not native to the region. They had once been a Mainland clan from the eastern foothills of the Senivalian Mountains, not all that different from the early Acacians. After an earlier displacement—at the hands of the Old Akarans—they had settled there and been forced to call it their home for twenty-two generations, just as the Akarans had made Acacia their base for the same amount of time.

The Mein were a tribal, warlike, bickering people, as harsh and prone to callousness as the landscape they inhabited, with a culture built around a spiteful pantheon of spirits called the Tunishnevre. They held in common a pride in their shared ancestry, which they protected by living a cloistered existence. They married only with each other and condemned interbreeding with other races. Because of their perceived racial purity, any Meinish male could claim the throne as his own, so long as he won it through the death duel called the Maseret.

This system made for a rapid turnover of rule, with each new chieftain having to win the approbation of the masses. Once crowned, the new chieftain took the race’s name as his own, signifying his representation of all his people. Thus, their current leader, Hanish of the line Heberen, became Hanish Mein on the day he fought his first Maseret and retained the crown of his deceased father. The fact that Hanish roiled with hatred for Acacia was not news, certainly not to the chancellor. But what this soldier was telling him outstripped his imaginings.

At Thaddeus’s urging the messenger consumed all the food on the plate. Another was brought, with cheese this time, the hard variety that had to be cut with a sharp knife. The chancellor sliced wedges for both of them, and then drew back with the blade in hand. He stared at his reflection in it as he listened.

The messenger tried to fight away sleep, but as the night turned into the silent hours her eyelids drooped. “I fear I am failing,” she finally said, “but I have explained everything to you. May I now have an audience with the king? These things are meant for his ears.”

At the mention of the king, Thaddeus had an unexpected thought, not at all what he would have anticipated at this moment. He recalled a day the previous summer when he had found Leodan in the labyrinthine gardens of the palace. The king sat on a stone bench in an alcove, hemmed in on both sides by the vine-draped ancient stone that had been the foundation of the first king’s more modest abode. His youngest son, Dariel, sat on his lap. Together they studied a small object held in the boy’s hand. As Thaddeus approached, the king looked up with wondrous, joy-filled eyes and said, “Thaddeus, come look. We have discovered an insect with spotted wings.” He said it like it was the most important thing in the world, as if he were a child just as much as his son. Thaddeus liked the king most during these clear-eyed, day-lit moments, with the royal eyes unclouded by the mist that hazed them each evening. At those dark times he could be a bore to sit next to, but with his children…well, with his children he was a fool who remembered youth. A wise fool who still found wonder in the world…

“Chancellor?”

Thaddeus started. He realized that they had both been sitting in silence. The messenger had been distracted by her fatigue just as he was caught up in random reveries. He felt the sharp point of the cheese knife where it pressed against his finger. He said, “The king must hear all of this within the hour. You say that General Alain sent you directly here? You have not spoken of this to the governors?”

She answered crisply. “My message was meant for King Leodan.”

“Just as it should be.” Thaddeus tugged on an earlobe. “Sit here a moment. I will arrange a meeting with the king. You have done us a great service.”

The chancellor pushed himself up to his feet. He still held the knife, but he began to move away as if he had forgotten about it and carried it with him absently. As he passed the messenger’s chair and stepped behind her, he swung about. He flipped the knife around in his fingers and grasped the handle in a white-knuckled fist. At just the same moment that one hand clasped over the woman’s forehead, the other one slit her neck from left side to right. He had not been sure whether the tool would suffice for this purpose and he used more force than he had to. But the work was done. The messenger slumped forward without a word of protest. He stood for a moment just behind her, with the knife held out to one side, the whole blade of it and of the fist that held it stained a slow maroon. With conscious effort he willed his hand open. The weapon clattered to the floor and then lay still.

Thaddeus was not entirely the loyal servant of the king that he seemed, and for the first time in his life he had demonstrated this fact with a blood act that could not be rescinded. The hard truth of this stunned him. He fought to steady himself and direct his thoughts, to focus on details and action. He would have to send his servants away, and then he would dispose of this soldier’s body and clean the mess. It would take the rest of the night to accomplish this, but he would not even have to leave his compound. There was a dungeon beneath where he stood now. He had only to drag the woman down the winding staircase that led to it; shove her inside; lock the door; and leave it to the rats, insects, and worms to clean her bones undisturbed.

Dealing with the moral ramifications of what he had just begun would not be nearly as easy.

Like all of the children of the noble houses, Aliver Akaran had been raised in opulence. He always woke to find his slippers resting in place on the floor beside him and flower petals in the basin of scented water he washed his face in. From the moment he took solid food, each meal he had eaten had been prepared to the highest standards, with the best ingredients, with the effect on the palate considered down to the last detail. He had never walked into a cold room on a winter’s day, never drawn his own bath or wet his hands washing clothes. He never even witnessed the washing of plates soiled by a meal. If asked, he would have had to create from fancy the process by which items were cleaned, mended, replaced. He had lived at the center of a massive delusion. It was a most pleasant one in which the world functioned largely for his gratification. At sixteen years of age, however, none of this stopped him from viewing the world through disgruntled eyes.

Leaving his private quarters a week after the seashore ride with his father and siblings, the prince grabbed up his leather training slippers and flung his fencing vest over his shoulder. In the corridor outside his room he strode between guards that stood like statues at either side of his door, and then he passed down a row of actual mannequins that lined one wall. These life-sized figures were carved of pinewood down to the minutest human detail, sanded to textures as smooth as skin and evocative of flesh over bone. They had been positioned in differing stances and wore military garb from the various nations: a Talayan runner, the wood stained to near-black to mimic his skin color, an iron spear poised in the fingers of his right hand; a Senivalian infantryman in scale armor, curving long sword at his belt; a horseman of the Mein with his characteristic thick breastplate, draped in hides that hung around him in tattered bands; a Vumu warrior adorned in eagle feathers; and Acacians in their various tidy uniforms, bare armed, with loose, flowing trousers under fine chain mail.

Aliver’s rooms had more objects of warfare than the king cared for. He had once pointed out that Acacia had overseen a largely peaceful empire for generations. But on this matter the prince did not mind his father’s disapproval. His daily interactions with his peers were a more challenging jostle than his relationship with his father. Leodan no longer elbowed through life among a throng of young men. Aliver, on the other hand, had yet to come through his manhood trials. As he saw it, all of the higher pursuits his father enjoyed had been made possible by the bravery of men and women willing to bear arms. It had been their earlier military prowess that allowed their ancestors to take the feuding, disparate elements of the Known World and unify them into a partnership of nations that benefited them all. How but through force could this have been achieved? How but through the threat of force could it be maintained?

In angry moments Aliver imagined his father trying to hold forth to that earlier rabble, to explain to them the virtues of peace and friendship. They would have laughed him away from the campfire. They would have kicked him into the cold, spat, and called him a coward. And then they would have commenced the snarling battle that decided things in this world. Sometimes during these imaginings Aliver came to his father’s rescue, sword in hand; other times he simply watched. It was not that he failed to love his father. He cared for him dearly. He hated that he thought such things. They came to him unbidden, no easier to submerge than the unexplained pangs of carnal desire that had plagued him the last couple of years. But this was also beside the point. What mattered was that the Akarans were the benevolent masters of a magnificent realm. They had been for twenty-two generations, and would be for much longer if Aliver had any say in the future. That was why he took martial matters so seriously.

The walk to the Marah training hall took only a few minutes, most of it downhill. The bulk of the palace, the town below it, the island, and the sea around it stretched out before Aliver. The receding scale of it was difficult to reckon with. The near buildings were hulking structures of clean Acacian architecture. Roads wound down in the switchback fashion the hillside’s natural steepness required. Beyond the gates, figures on the visible bend of the main road were slow-moving pinpricks, like deer ticks crawling across a man’s arm. The spires of the lower town were little more than sewing needles pointing upward, so tiny they could be squished between the thumb and forefinger. It was hard to imagine that all of it had begun with a simple fortress built by Edifus, a defensive structure perched high so that the nervous monarch could scan the seas around him in fear that his newly conquered subjects might yet unite against him.

Flushed from the brisk walk, Aliver entered the large pillar-supported space. It was lit by oil lamps hung on the wall or from three-legged stands and by skylights cut in the ceiling that cast slanting beams down on the gray-white stone of the place. The scent of the burning oil was almost sweet, stronger than the smoky flavor given off by the stoves used to keep the chill at bay. He greeted his instructors, nodded at other youths entering with him, boys mostly, although a handful of girls attended also. They received military training on an even footing with their male counterparts. Indeed, women made up almost a quarter of the Acacian armed forces. For this Marah training, however, they were all children of aristocrats bound for high posts as officers and government officials. Many of them were from the Agnate, the privileged group that could verify an ancestral link to Edifus’s family tree.

The prince knew that previous Akaran rulers had formed tight bonds with their young peers. His grandfather Gridulan was said to have been constantly in the company of thirteen male companions, dining and sleeping, ruling and wedding in a close tangle. Though his peers were deferential to him, Aliver found no such feeling of group connection. He tried to spurn the absence of it and value his independence of mind and position, but he feared something was lacking in his character, something he seemed powerless to correct.

Aliver smiled when he saw Melio Sharratt, a young man his own age, enter. Melio was the nearest thing the prince had to a friend. They had been born only a few weeks apart, and from their first classes together, the kind intelligence in the boy’s eyes drew Aliver to him. For a while, when they were both ten, they spent days at a time hiding out in the palace labyrinth, playing a game wherein one of them became a storyteller and the other the main character in what invariably became a tale of warfare and adventure, of mythic beasts slain and evil vanquished. Aliver felt comfortable with Melio in a way he did not with others. Still, despite his fondness for the lad, the prince never fully dropped his aloofness with him, or anyone else. If anything, it had grown as adolescence shifted and altered their bodies and emotions. So the smile that once would have been friendly changed into an expression harder to define.

“Hello, Prince,” Melio said. “I hope the day finds you well.”

“It does,” Aliver said, looking past him as if something at the far end of the training grounds interested him.

Melio combed the longish bangs of black hair back from his forehead with his fingers and good-naturedly copied Aliver’s examination of the other students as they arrived. “Have you been practicing your Fifth Form? I saw that Biteran was coaching you on it last week. If you passed it, you could start spear training.”

“I’ll pass it,” Aliver said. “You should worry about yourself. I’ll help you with the Fourth Form if you need it.”

“You?” Melio asked, laughing. “My royal tutor?” He had a face that might go unnoticed in a room, except when he smiled. Then all the various components of his features fell into place as if they had been designed with only mirth in mind. The whiteness of his teeth beside his olive skin made him glow with health. Both boys knew that in matters martial the ground between them was not even. Aliver may have been training at a higher Marah Form than his peers—such was the long tradition—but Melio had been suggested for training as an Elite. The Elite was quite different than the Marah. It was an even smaller group selected purely for ability, without regard for rank or social status. The suggestion that Melio might join them was an honor that meant the instructors saw inordinate skill in the young man.

“Look, there’s Hephron,” Melio said. “He’s getting quite good. He fought Carver’s father to a standstill the other day. You can be sure it surprised the old fellow.”

As he spoke Melio gestured at the boy in question with his chin. Hephron Anthalar was a year older than most of the others, taller by a head, with reddish hair that sprung in disheveled curls from his head. The Anthalars were also Agnates, of a line that had intersected several times with the Akarans through marriage. Hephron could claim royal lineage. He could, in fact, count the steps between himself and the throne on the fingers of his two hands. He walked with his followers tight around him; a sycophantic group that clung to him because the status found in his shadow was greater than any of them could have managed singly.

Hephron bowed on reaching the prince, a motion that his companions copied with less feigned and more genuine deference. “Prince,” he said, “ready to fight the ghosts?”

Aliver knew what he referred to in an instant and felt the cut of the barb. A peculiarity of his training was that after the initial lecture and demonstrations, Aliver and the other boys parted company. The others paired off and went at each other with the padded swords, sometimes using the wooden variety, which had no blade to cut but could still issue a painful rap or jab, or even break bones when wielded skillfully. Aliver, on the other hand, trained only with an instructor who further worked him through the classic Forms, the teacher attuned to the minutest detail of his student’s posture and positioning, the intake or exhalation of his breath, the position of his head or even his eyes. Using the wooden swords, they fenced together in slow motions honed to the finest precision. In this Aliver had thought himself special. His training had a purity that would always set him apart from the others. It was a gift to be envied. So he had believed until Hephron undermined it all with a single question.

“Ghosts?” Aliver asked. “I don’t believe in ghosts, Hephron. I do believe that the instructors know how best to train the nation’s next king.”

“Yes,” the other said, “I suppose they do. Quite right, as ever.” As he turned away, his eyes canted upward in a signal to his companions. He said something Aliver could not hear, and the other youths moved away with amused murmurs.

Aliver tried to forget Hephron in the hours that followed. The lessons began with a lecture. Today it was from the second instructor, Edvar, a bull-necked man of mixed heritage, his Candovian ancestry betrayed by the barrel stoutness of his torso. He talked about the technique of the sword soft block, a defensive tactic wherein one countered an opponent’s attacks with the bare minimum of force necessary. It was risky, he explained. You did not want to underestimate the opponent’s force, but it was a valuable maneuver in that you could use the opponent’s energy to initiate your own moves, thereby starting the next motion with a boost, before the enemy had recovered. It was an energy-saving method if one faced a long struggle, as had Gerta when she fought the twin brothers Talack and Tullus and their three wolf dogs.

After this the pupils divided up to practice the Forms. These were routines that derived from age-old reconstructions of specific sequences of moves by specific persons in ancient battles. The first was Edifus at Carni, when he fought singly against a tribal leader. The second was Aliss, a woman from Aushenia who killed the Madman of Careven with only a short sword. It was a unique Form, in that Aushenians themselves did not honor Aliss as much as Acacians did. Indeed, the Madman of Careven was considered to be somewhat more of a hero to Aushenians since he had fought to protect their old religions against the secular movement Aliss championed. The Third Form was that of the knight Bethenri, who went to battle with devil’s forks, short weapons similar to daggers but with long prongs stretching alongside of the central blade. Skilled hands used these to snap opponents’ swords.

Other Forms followed, each more complicated than the one preceding it, up until the Tenth and most difficult, that of Telamathon against the Five Disciples of the god Reelos. Aliver had his doubts as to whether Telamathon, the Five Disciples, or the god Reelos ever existed, but he looked forward to learning the Form. A large section of it, he knew, recounted how Telamathon fought weaponless and with one shoulder dislocated. Even so incapacitated he managed to beat back his opponents with a dazzling whirlwind of aerial kicks.

The other students were working through the Fourth Form. Aliver, as per tradition, worked on the Fifth Form, learning the method by which the Priest of Adaval went to work on the twenty wolf-headed guards of the rebellious cult of Andar. The prince had just begun the study of this. For most of his lesson he stood holding the birchwood staff, listening, and trying to imagine the scene his instructor detailed. As usual, the Form detailed an almost impossible triumph, the old priest managing to crack skull after canine skull with only a sapling for a weapon.

Aliver sometimes felt the eyes of the others on him. At other times he could not help but glance at them, interspersed as they were among the pillars, almost a hundred of them in total, so many pairs in the stop-start motion of swordplay. Every now and then a student would get caught by another’s winning strike. With the padded swords this was almost a pleasure, a thing to be laughed at, yielding oaths and promises of revenge. Not so when the hard ashwood swords stung someone’s thigh or jabbed unprotected ribs. Aliver was never prey to such contact, and he was keenly aware of it each time someone called out in pain.

When the day’s session concluded, the instructors left the students to return the weapons to their rightful places. Privileged sons and daughters that they were, they should still learn reverence for the tools of war. Aliver, once more mingling with the others, did the best he could to banter in a natural style. He tried to throw about casual comments, the jibes and jokes of youth. But what seemed to come effortlessly to the others was as concentrated an effort for Aliver as anything in his training.