The War With The Mein (22 page)

Hanish had expected the prince himself. He had imagined seeing him with his own eyes and placing his touch on the young man with his own fingers. He glanced at Haleeven briefly, such a passing gesture that none would know that the two men communicated with it. Clearly, his uncle thought he should proceed as planned. Perhaps this was fortuitous in a way…

Looking back at Hephron, Hanish tilted his lips with derisive humor. “So, in the place of your cowardly monarch you are here to answer for Akaran sins? What a strange people you are, led by men who don’t even lead.”

“I do not answer for Akaran sins. I’m here to see that you’re punished for yours. Don’t grin at me! I’ll see that grin sewn shut with wire before tomorrow is done.”

Hanish gestured toward his face with his fingers, a motion of innocence that denied the expression on his face was mirthful at all.

Another of the Acacians introduced himself as Relos, the military head of the Acacian forces. He was tall and angular, his short-cropped hair dusted with gray. He spoke for a moment about the military power they had mustered. Hanish was vastly outnumbered, he said, and even this force was only a portion of the army still at the empire’s disposal. “So what have you to offer? You have led us to this moment. Must we do battle, or are you ready to concede and to suffer the consequences?”

“Concede? Oh, no such thought troubles me.”

“I am Carver, of the family Dervan,” another Acacian said. “I led our army against the Candovian Discord a few years ago. I know battle, and I know how our troops perform when tested. You cannot hope to win against us.”

Hanish shrugged. “I assess the situation differently, and you have my declaration of war. Let us do battle two days from this one.”

“Two days?” Hephron asked. He glanced at Relos and around at the other generals. None of them protested.

Hanish shrugged. “Yes, we thought that would suit you. You should not object to that, as your numbers grow daily. I will gain no fresh troops in that time, but I will prepare my men with prayer. You would not deny us that?”

“So be it,” Hephron said. “It will be in two days.” The other Acacians turned to go, but Hephron stood without moving. He held Hanish’s gaze, unwilling to let him go but not sure how to proceed. He finally said, “Leodan was a fine king. You made a disastrous mistake in harming him.”

“Did I?” Hanish stepped a bit closer to Hephron. “Let me explain a thing to you. My ancestor Hauchmeinish was a noble man. He stood for right when your Tinhadin burned with a madness for power. Hauchmeinish spoke in Tinhadin’s ears, as a friend, as a brother might.”

Before Hephron could counter the motion, Hanish pulled the hand from his breast and draped his palm gently over the bones and muscles of the young man’s shoulder. Hephron flinched, coiled and ready. Hanish gestured with his fingers, pursed his lips, and somehow conveyed through the entirety of his body that he was no threat. This proximity, he conveyed, was necessary so that his message be understood.

“Hauchmeinish told Tinhadin he had been possessed by demons. He asked him to see that he had slain his brothers and driven magic from the world and sold everyone into bondage. But your king would have none of this. He turned on Hauchmeinish and cut his head from his shoulders. He cursed his people—my people—and drove us up onto the plateau, where we have lived ever since. What I am telling you is the truth. Hauchmeinish was right. Yours is an evil empire that for all these years has thrived on the suffering of masses of people. I come to end your reign, and—believe me—many will praise me for it. Can you not hear that these things are all true?”

The muscles and tendons of Hephron’s neck stood out as if the bulk of his body was at some great exertion. “No, I do not know them to be true.”

Hanish did not move for a moment. He studied the young man, his gray eyes wistful, sad in the manner of one who recognizes the only way to face tragedy is with humor. “I respect your anger. Believe me, I do. We will face each other soon, but I will try and remember you as I see you now.” He plucked his hand from Hephron’s shoulder blades and swiped it in a quick caress across his jawline. Hephron yanked his chin away, but not before Hanish’s fingers brushed the corner of his lips and glanced across the enamel of his teeth. Hephron nearly drew his sword, but Hanish had already turned his back on him.

“I will slay you myself!” Hephron shouted. “Find me in the battle. If you are man enough!”

The poor child, Hanish thought as he walked away. He has no idea of the power of a touch, no idea what he’s in for.

At dawn two mornings later Hanish walked at the spear point of his troops. They moved across ground laced with mist. The pale, bluish vapor vanished swiftly as the eye of the sun peeped over the horizon and lit the scene of the coming slaughter. There was no army ranked to meet them, as he’d known there would not be. Instead, they walked unopposed across the fields and turned furrows, over the geometric squares that would have been the battlefield. They crossed all of this and trudged without halting up to the edge of the Acacian camp. No one met them, no lines of soldiers, no missiles, no shimmering armor, nothing of the great host they’d all looked upon two days earlier.

Instead, the camp lay in smoldering desolation. The cook fires of the night before had burned out and oozed thin tendrils of smoke. Crows, always attracted by the stench and waste of so many persons gathered together, had alighted in great numbers on the ground and on tent roofs and various objects. Higher up, vultures drew circles in the air, patient and slow and confident. All this had a gloomy aspect, but it was the human forms that defined the horror of the scene.

Around the fires and in the lanes between the tents and across every open space bodies lay squirming in the dirt. So many bodies. Soldiers, camp attendants—any and all of the myriad persons who made the Acacian host what it was. They rolled on the ground. They lay prostrate in writhing intimacy with the earth or stared up at the sky, mouths agape, faces glistening with sweat and contorted with anguish, most of them streaked with ruby blotches the size and shape of tadpoles.

Hanish halted to take it all in. The hush over the camp was eerie, but it was not silence. The air was full of sound. It was just that it was such an unusual, subdued cacophony that it was difficult to make sense of. The Acacians panted and gasped. They moaned and whimpered and sucked on the air with gaping ovals of hunger. They were in the throes of an all-encompassing suffering. Very few of them could see beyond their misery to consider the approaching army. For the most part they did not respond to them at all. Hanish understood their torment well, and at that moment it would have been hard for him to say whether he took joy or shame in having presented it to them.

The Meinish troops could contain themselves no longer. They swarmed past Hanish, swords drawn, spear arms pumping as they ran. The bulk of the Acacians lay like thousands of fish tossed to earth and helpless. This was too much for them to resist. Meinish soldiers moved among them, jabbing them with spears or yanking back their heads to slice their throats. Some took sport in chasing down the Acacians still on their feet, but these were few. Hanish himself spilt no blood. He just walked amid the butchery, observed his men’s blood thirst with coolness in his gray eyes. He put out word that he searched for one particular Acacian, one whom he did not want killed before he spoke to him. A soldier eventually brought him the information he wished for. Hanish found him inside a large, elaborate Acacian tent.

Hephron had made it no more than a few feet from his cot. He was not even fully dressed. He lay with wide, unblinking eyes, wet with moisture that had left myriad tracks across his cheeks. His forehead was marbled with sweat, puddled so that the flies alighting on him did so carefully.

“Oh, Hephron…I really would choose to remember you as you were, not as you are now. I did not fail to note your strength. Nor your anger. I bow to both these things and honor you. That is why I want to explain to you what has happened. You understand none of this, do you?”

Hanish knelt beside him. He shooed the insects into flight. “Do you know the tale of Elenet and his first attempt to create with the Giver’s tongue? When the Giver came for him and found him in the orchard, Elenet was huddled over his newest miscreation. The old tales don’t tell us what this was, but I have come to my own opinion. I believe that the first thing Elenet sought for himself was eternal life. There is no mention of death before Elenet became a Speaker. But he feared that if he had once not existed, he might come to not exist again. So he tried to arm himself against the Giver’s wrath. But in trying to make himself immortal he instead unleashed the diseases that take life. He created illness that day, and we have paid for it ever since. You are paying for it now. You see, that was the problem with humans speaking the Giver’s tongue. They were not gods and never could be. They had not the complete ability to form the words accurately. The corruptions of their mouths and hearts and mistaken intent always twisted the magic toward something foul. It is such a thing that burns within you now.”

Hephron seemed to notice him just then. His eyes moved over toward him. His pupils were dilated to nearly the size of his irises, but something in the frantic intensity of them showed that he was trying to focus on Hanish. There was a tint of red in his sweat now. Hanish found a cloth in a basin beside the bed and dabbed Hephron’s forehead clean with it. Almost instantly the pink stain seeped back up into the creases of his skin.

“Some years back—before I was even born but when my mother lived—my people first made contact with the Numrek and through them with the Lothan Aklun. Those pioneering men all suffered this illness. The first party to return from across the Ice Fields infected nearly all of Tahalian. The whole fortress was racked as you are now. Thousands died. But those that lived, we learned, never got the illness again. Nor did we stay in a contagious state long after mending. At first we kept this illness a secret out of shame; only later, through my father’s genius, did we recognize it as a weapon as well. Your people never knew of it. We never reported our numbers accurately anyway. After the fever we were glad for it. We learned that it was possible to give a taste of the illness pricked on a needle, just enough so that a person once pricked would not succumb to the full wrath of it. Later still we discovered that the spirit of the illness can live on long after fever has passed. The touch I placed on you, young Hephron, came directly from a swatch of a garment my grandfather died in.”

Hanish slipped a hand into the fabric of his thalba—just as he had before touching Hephron two days before—but this time he drew out the square of fabric pinched between his fingers. “This is the thing that defeated you here today. It carries the contagion somehow trapped in it. Impossible to believe, isn’t it? I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t learned of its truth through suffering. You did not slay me after all, Hephron Anthalar. That possibility was never within your grasp. It is I who have slain you, with nothing more than a touch. Many people, with time, recover from this, but not without days in the throes you now feel and then a period of weakness afterward. So what will happen is this: this fever will travel like a wave through your people. And behind the wave we will come reaping. Be thankful your role in this is concluded. The Akarans’ idyll is over; as it dies a new age begins. Better for you that you do not live to see it. I doubt very much you would like the shape of things to come.”

When Hanish stepped out of the tent a moment later he carried his knife unsheathed in one hand. It was wet with the marbled pattern of blood. All around him his army kept at the butchery. He raised his eyes and looked at the wall of Alecia. He would have to find the Scatevith stone before proceeding past this wall. He would lay his cheek upon it. That is what he must do. He wanted very badly to lay his skin against that stone and have it whisper to him that all of this was as it should be. All of this was just and right. It began before him and would go on after him. He was simply an instrument of a greater purpose.

The chosen vessel was one of the larger fishing rigs, with two square mainsails near the midpoint and a triangular jib that danced before the prow like a kite at play, rippling and shifting so that the simple insignia that named its owner snapped into and out of view. Anyone watching from shore knew the boat well enough. It had plied Acacian waters for more than thirty years. The crewmen working the deck were slightly more numerous than usual, but it was not uncommon for the rigs to take on trainees in the late winter months, before the bonito returned from the Talayan Shoals, followed by mainland ships in need of spring crews. It floated high above the waterline, as was typical of empty hulls waiting to be filled; the time of its embarkation standard to begin the five-day loop necessary during the slack season. But none of these things were actually as they appeared.

The men dressed as fishermen were in fact Marah guards. The cargo was not to be the yellow-tailed fish the vessel normally trolled the winter seas for. Instead it carried the four Akaran children. They hid for the early part of the journey in the foul-smelling hold of the ship, each of them sullen and dead eyed, breathing through their mouths as much as possible. They wore the same look of worry under their skin, like a genetic trait passed to each of them at birth but only lately emerging. Mena kept feeling the impulse to speak, to share, to say something to break the tension. She was stopped every time by the indisputable fact that she could think of nothing reasonable to say.

Once out of the sheltered curve of the northern harbor, the vessel set a barb into the wind and flew hooked to its underbelly. It cut the glass-blue, frosted water, behind it a squall of seabirds, raucous creatures shouting out their demands. The captain of the guard invited the children up onto the deck once they had put the island some distance behind them, saying there were no eyes to spot them anymore. Mena watched the guards from the back of the boat, tasting the salty air on the wall of her throat. She wondered which of the men or few women she could see had killed before. Some among them had a part in putting down the uprising of the Meinish soldiers. The rebels had been defeated within a bloody hour, the last of them chased careening down the stairways and finally captured and slain in the streets of the lower town. Aliver, she knew, had been spirited away from the mêlée. He did not speak about it, but she could tell he felt shamed by it. Nor was it the only insult to his pride.

She turned away from the guards and watched the wake of the boat. She was not sure what to think of this journey. Thaddeus had explained they were fleeing the island temporarily, for a week or so, no more than a month. They would be safer out of the public view and needed to stay away only long enough for the rebellion to be crushed and for the culprits who killed their father to be punished and for any other schemers on the island to be found out and dealt with. They would sail to the northern tip of Kidnaban and stay in quiet seclusion with the mine’s chairman there. Thaddeus promised that they would return to Acacia as soon as possible. For some reason Mena had not believed him. There was some other truth behind his façade and his reasoned words, but she could not imagine what it was.

Aliver did not seem to doubt the man’s sincerity, but he had rebelled against the plan with more anger than Mena had ever seen him display before. He had shouted about the coming battle, saying it was his duty to lead the army. He was the king! The responsibility was his, even if he died in the effort! It took all of Thaddeus’s persuasive efforts just to soothe Aliver down to a normal volume. Thaddeus invoked his powers as sitting chancellor with interim responsibilities. He chastised Aliver, claiming the orders came directly from Leodan himself, saying that they were both honor bound to abide by them. In the end, though, it was not persuasion but force that got the prince onto the boat. He was escorted, along with the other children, by disguised Marah guards who made it clear they had to follow the king’s orders as handed to them by the chancellor. It was all Aliver could do to temporarily accept his exile, though he fumed and reddened at the perceived insult of it.

Late on the first day at sea they came in sight of the Cape of Fallon. It was a shoreline of crumbly cliffs, above which lay a landscape of gentle undulations, tall with grasses, splashed here and there with the colors of winter wildflowers. Dariel sat beside Mena near the stern of the ship. The two of them shared a spread of spiced sardines on crackers. Dariel picked at the fish more than he ate them, trying with the point of a knife to separate the soft bones from the flesh, collecting them in a pile that he occasionally scooped up on the blade and flicked overboard. Something about this filled her with love for the boy. The feeling swelled in her with the power of nostalgia for something lost, as if she were not sitting beside him at that very moment, still every bit his sister, as he was every bit her brother. She wondered why she looked at him with emotion that suggested this was no longer so.

Aliver strolled toward them, conspicuously wearing the ancient sword of Edifus, the King’s Trust. It looked too big on him, a strange appendage more cumbersome than useful. He was doing his best to shake off his sulky anger and to regain an appearance of control. Mena wanted to hug him for it, but she knew that would not please him. “We are coming up on the mines,” he said, gesturing with a nod of his head. “They are worked by criminals, as punishment. There is an even bigger one on Kidnaban and a chain of them in Senival.”

Mena craned her head to see over the railing. As they rounded a promontory, the low sun cast the landscape in enough shadow and highlight that it took her a moment to configure the scene. The great shadows in the land were actually a series of enormous pits. They were open to the sky, how deep she could not guess as she could only see the exposed far wall, which was crisscrossed with cuts and lines. Beacons flared up here and there, large fires encased in glass that fractured and amplified the light, sending bright shards into the sky. By the look of them, the work would not end with the dying day. She wondered how it was possible that there were so many criminals, so many foolish people who would steal from or harm others. Perhaps when she was of age she would do something about it. She would travel in her father’s name and demand that they do better with the opportunities offered them and not waste the long peace in petty actions.

They spent that night in the shelter between Kidnaban and the mainland. The following afternoon the vessel nudged into the harbor of Crall on Kidnaban’s northern coast. That evening, in the modest comfort of the chairman’s compound on the hill looking down on the town, they met Crenshal Vadal. He was not much to look at. Below his lower lip his face ended quite abruptly. It slid back toward his neck in a sheer diagonal. He spoke with a rigid formality, but at the same time he seemed to be wishing himself someplace else entirely, as if his entire body wanted to slide backward and slip around a corner. She noticed that some minutes passed before the man expressed sorrow for Leodan’s fate, and she suspected that one of his aides had reminded him to do this with a facial gesture.

As they ate dinner, Crenshal gave them more specifics of their fate. They were, quite simply, to seclude themselves in a portion of the chairman’s compound. That was all. They were there to wait. They would receive no visitors, because nobody was to know where they were. Thaddeus would send regular messages as to any changes or developments. They would send or receive no other correspondence. They would have to manage without luxuries, fine food, or entertainments, without any extravagances that might attract attention. Nor would it be wise for them to roam the lower town. It would be a simple existence, far from the aged opulence of Acacia. All Crenshal could offer were the somewhat drafty rooms of a facility meant to house the administrative and managerial staff of the mines, simple meals, and the pleasure of his company. He said this last in jest but with such incomplete vigor that it fell flat.

Aliver added that he wished to be kept apprised of all developments. His tone was haughty, as if he spoke from a position of authority different from his siblings. Mena glanced around, wondering if the others noticed his poorly disguised uncertainty. He feared that he was being shuttled to outside the flow of events and kept out of decision making. He was in a position of limbo: more than the prince he had been a few weeks ago but certainly not the king he hoped to become. To Mena’s eyes he had yet to come to terms with his situation.

He did lighten his tone when he asked, “Have you horses we can borrow? We should get out and explore the island. It will do us all good to get some air in our lungs.”

Dariel was well into an enthusiastic endorsement of this suggestion when the chairman broke in. “I’m afraid you cannot tour the island. It’s…well, it is your safety that matters most, Prince. Pleasures like riding will have to be forsaken for the time being. Surely the chancellor explained all of this to you.”

“And what of the mines?” Aliver asked. “I’d like to inspect them. We do not need to make a show of it or—”

“Inspect them?” Crenshal had apparently never heard these two words before. “But…young prince, this is also impossible. The mines are teeming with degenerates. They hold nothing of interest for you anyway. We will find entertainments for you within the compound. You will not be bored, young ones. I promise you that.”

Over the next few days, however, this proved quite false. They saw little of the chairman. He ate with them each evening, but other than that he was absent all day and left the children with few opportunities for distraction. The officials and managers usually housed in the compound had been relocated, leaving the simple halls and rooms echoingly empty. Mena had never even seen any of these phantom people, though in her room she found telltale signs that someone had left the place hastily: a half-empty bottle of scented oil by the basin, a single sock stuffed under her bedding, a toenail on the floor beside the dresser.

Board games helped them through the first few afternoons. Books from the former chairman’s collection—Crenshal himself had no interest in literature—provided some diversion the third day, when Dariel persuaded Aliver to read aloud to the group from a collection of epic poems. The boy was entranced, but Mena could not help but think of her father. Corinn might have experienced something similar. She rose abruptly and stalked away, giving no explanation. Corinn had barely said anything since leaving Acacia. When she did, she spoke in flat, matter-of-fact tones, as if she acknowledged nothing unusual in their circumstances.

The closest they came to having a meaningful exchange was on the third afternoon. Corinn entered the common room they passed most of the day in and glanced around with heavy-lidded eyes. Mena was surprised when Corinn drifted over toward her, plopped down on the couch near her, and exhaled a bored breath.

“Did you hear? One of the soldiers said that two men had been found trying to leave the village. He said they were ‘trussed for it’ and the other laughed and said it served them right. What do you think that means?”

“I am sure it means they were punished,” Mena said.

“Of course it means that!” Corinn snapped. “You always say the most obvious things. Punished how? That’s what I was asking.”

“I don’t say the most obvious things,” Mena said, fearful that this unexpected interaction was about to turn sour. If anyone said the most obvious things it was Corinn herself.

Corinn made a noise low in her throat, a sort of moaning protest. “It is so strange here, Mena. Nothing is as it should be. I cannot stand the way the people look here. They look like—like they’re dumb, like they have the brains of animals instead of people. I so want to go home. I hate this limbo. I have too much to do. Important things.”

“Like what?” Mena asked, trying to cast her voice in a way that would not offend.

Somehow she managed to anyway. Corinn looked askance at her. “You would not understand.”

On the fourth day, when a servant of the chairman brought them dice to play rats running, Mena truly gave up the pretense of finding diversion inside the compound’s bare walls. She counted the days just as precisely as Aliver, both of them waiting for the next bit of news from Thaddeus, hoping he would call them home. When the first terse, cryptic dispatch from the chancellor arrived, however, it brought them no change whatsoever. The situation was still unstable, he wrote. They should remain where they were. He promised them that he would alert them to any change, but while he said that, he provided them not a single indication of what had transpired since they left. Not one piece of news about the war. No indication of whether the situation was better or worse than before.

Mena noticed a pall in the sky one afternoon, and feared that her foreboding had somehow reached into the world in physical form. There were shadows in the air, cloudlike formations that rippled and flowed on low currents of air. Seeing them through the small window in her room, she realized they had always been there. She just had not stopped to study them before. The sky was not simply overcast, as she had assumed. Beyond the shifting darkness was a screen of light blue, clear all the way to the heavens. How strange, she thought. On this first glimpse she could not help but look away, those shapes in the sky too much like harbingers of ill, too much like swirls and currents that might materialize as something more ominous if she stared too long.

On waking in the morning she went to the window before doing anything else. The dark vapors were still there, clear and obvious now that she had learned to see them. They even grew heavier toward the evening. The longer she watched it, the more aware she became of the clouds’ presence in myriad ways around her. Mostly they shifted with currents she could not feel, but at still moments particles of the stuff fell all around her, settling on flat spaces and collecting on the rough contours of the walls. It was a form of dust, so light that it moved propelled by breaths of air. She felt the touch of tiny crystals on her cheeks and in her eyelids and collecting on her brow. She could taste it in her lungs, a grit that she inhaled with each breath. It was everywhere. It amazed her that it took her so long to notice it.