The War With The Mein (31 page)

Not least of his worries was that he had managed to catch only one of the four Akaran children. Corinn went unharmed and lived comfortably in Acacia. She knew nothing of the fate that still awaited her. Her presence should have been a comfort, one less thing to worry about. Instead, she shot him through with a sort of torment. What would he do with her? What did he want to do with her?

Sire Dagon pressed his teeth against a plum. He broke the skin of it, paused, and relished the moisture. He did not swallow the fruit. Apparently, the juice on his lips was all he wanted. “Anyway, these brigands, all their raiding up and down the coast—you need not trouble yourself with them. Even we have had some difficulty with them, but we have yet to crack down. We will do so now, and they will fall to us by next summer. The Ishtat will prevail where you struggled; we’re confident of this. When we are done, we will quietly take possession of the islands; you will bask in pride at having secured the coastline from brigands.”

“Why do you want those islands so?” Hanish asked.

Sire Dagon contemplated him for a moment. He touched the corner of his lips to wipe the fruit juice away. “Before I tell you, remember that the doubled quota will make you richer than Acacia ever was—”

“How can they want more?” Hanish interrupted, unable to keep the incredulity out of his voice. “What do they do with all these slaves? They could scarcely ask for more if they ate them for meat.”

Sire Dagon frowned and twisted his head to the side, indicating that both the question and the inference were in terribly bad taste. “One need not ask such things. They do whatever it is they do; let us both be glad for it. Remember that one of the original tenets of the Quota contract was that the league would serve as the only intermediary between Acacia and Lothan Aklun. As part of this, we have never betrayed the secrets of one side to the other. Nor will I do so now. As I was saying, the Lothan Aklun swear never to amend this agreement, not now, not ever. Nor will we overreach the quota in the provinces. This is something that sometimes happened during the last reign, but it will not happen again. Once we have normalized the increased quota, we will pacify the Outer Isles. We will clear them, make them arable, and we will begin production.”

“Production of what?”

“Of the only thing the Lothan Aklun want from us.”

The answer came to Hanish like an amorphous shape rising from the depths of his imagination. “You will breed slaves there.”

Sire Dagon showed no surprise, no satisfaction at Hanish’s pronouncement. He just plucked up a grape and spoke casually. “I do not recognize that word slaves. But if you mean that we will breed our product there, you are correct. It will be a most efficient means of production. We’ve made plans already. The island of Gillet Major, in particular, will make for a lovely plantation.”

After the leagueman left, Hanish leaned against his desk and gazed through the thin curtains, rippling as they did with the afternoon’s breeze. The world could be so calm at moments, he thought, so oblivious. His brother and his uncle entered, and he had to summon his energy just to erase the disquiet from his demeanor.

“I passed that weird one in the courtyard,” Haleeven said. “I have no love for those creatures, Hanish. No love at all.” His face testified to the turbulence of the passing years. Peacetime, it seemed, had been particularly hard on the older man. The climate—though he never complained—did not suit him. He seemed ever ill at ease within his skin, flushed as if coming in from exercise, confused by something in the air that he could not quite put his finger on.

Maeander had no such problems. He was as cocky as ever, confident in his body. He had gained muscle bulk in the arms and chest, and he had taken a tan better than most men of the Mein. The peeling skin on his nose testified to his continued passion for outdoor pursuits.

“What?” Maeander asked, gazing at his brother. “You don’t look well, Hanish. Queasy, that’s the word. Do you feel as queasy as you look?”

“We need more power,” Hanish said.

“I’ve said that all along,” answered Maeander.

“I am pulled and pushed by a thousand hands, each with a finger in my pocket and the threat of a knife in the other hand.”

“I hear you, brother. Haven’t I always said, ‘We need more power.’ I have that thought every morning on waking. I heft myself up out of the tangle of nubile bodies and the first thing I think is, Power! I need more…”

“Be serious,” Haleeven snapped. “Hanish isn’t clowning.”

Maeander rolled his eyes. He sat down in the chair the leagueman had used and plucked up an orange. He inhaled, his nose touching the skin of the fruit. “We need to move the Tunishnevre and complete the ceremony.”

“You know we cannot do that yet,” Haleeven said.

“They are impatient. We have no choice in this matter, Hanish. They speak to me also, and they’ve made it very clear. They want to be moved. They want to journey here. They want to rest their bodies on the scene of the crime done to them, and then they want a few drops of living Akaran blood. They want to be free, brother, and you can offer them that. The chamber here is nearly ready for them. There is no reason not to begin.”

“What of the other three?” Haleeven asked.

“Exactly,” Hanish said. “Without them the Tunishnevre cannot rise. At least they are safe now, their condition constant. This climate could destroy them, put them beyond our power to release.”

Unmoved, Maeander said, “That is not necessarily true. One may be enough. Especially if the others are dead. If Corinn is the last of the royal line, then her blood is all they need. She can free them. Imagine, Hanish, how powerful we will be! All these petty problems that trouble you so: they’ll be gone like that.” He raised a hand, fingertips touching until the moment he snapped his hand open, releasing whatever was held there into the air, invisible, inconsequential. “This is what the ancestors placed in me. They put this truth in me.”

“They said nothing to me about needing only Corinn.”

“They fear you may be compromised somehow, led astray by this place. I swore to them that they were wrong. They accepted my word. You are their beloved, but they can only wait so long. They taste release, Hanish. They have scant patience when they feel they are being denied.” Speaking through a mouthful of orange pulp, he added, “By the gods, the fruit down here is wonderful!”

Hanish ignored the last comment, but he thought for a long moment about Maeander communing with the Tunishnevre. He had known his brother was doing this for some time. It was unprecedented for anyone but the chieftain and a few of the higher priests to interact with them. Hanish had allowed it because he owed Maeander so much. He had always been a perfect weapon, a hound ready to bite whomever he was directed toward. Hanish knew the ancestors adored him for the strength he walked so casually with. But for them to speak to Maeander about him, about Hanish himself…For them to express doubts about their living chieftain was a grave thing. There was message after message to read here, threat inside threat. And he could not acknowledge any of it until he understood it better.

“We are ahead of ourselves,” Haleeven said. “You have not told us what news the weird one brought you.”

So Hanish did tell them. He had never kept such things from these two, even if he held back certain things when meeting with the Board of Councillors, that new body of prominent Meins that resided, ironically, in Alecia. It disturbed Hanish to note how much of the Acacian way of being they had taken on already. If he could see a way to do it differently he would, but on one and then another topic he found the Acacian template the only reasonable, achievable answer.

Once Hanish had told them everything, Haleeven said, “I hate it that we must bow to the Lothan Aklun. I’ve never even set eyes on one of them. The league may have made them up, for all we know. I’ve said this before, but we should brush the league aside and deal with the Aklun directly, if they exist.”

“I feel the same,” Maeander said, “but it is not for us to argue with the ancestors. They blessed the arrangements we made, and it is they who want to be freed and freed now. Remember that your brother’s voice speaks through them, Haleeven, and our father’s, Hanish.”

Hanish hesitated a moment but evaded the thought that troubled him and kept his composure right through it, enough so that Maeander would not notice the pause for what it was. He said, “I’ll speak with the ancestors tonight. If they agree, we will send word to Tahalian. We will tell them it is time to begin the transport. Haleeven, you will initiate the move.”

“That’s not as we discussed,” Maeander said. “Hanish, come now, you know I should go. You have an empire to rule; I am but a tool to aid you. You cannot possibly expect me to mismanage such an important task! Haleeven will come with me, if that reassures you, but when have we ever failed you?”

“You never have. Not once. It is just that this must be done right, exactly right.”

Maeander put on a look of mock affront.

“What I mean,” Hanish said, “is that we have more than just the move to take care of. We must redouble our efforts to find the Akarans. If they live, we must have them. This is what I need you for, Maeander. You have no other assignment now—just that you find them and bring them here.” He said this with finality, consciously avoiding meeting his brother’s gaze, not wanting to see rebellion in his face. “I should have put you in charge of hunting for them in the first place. For my part, I will make sure that Corinn remains safe, close to me and guarded.”

He moved around his desk, dug a key from his breast pocket, and bent to unlock a drawer. “Uncle, read over these,” he said, hefting a leather case of documents and plopping them on the table. “You will have to see to this exactly. Exactly. Do everything word for word as the early ones tell us. The Tunishnevre has not been moved in twenty generations. If you make an error…”

Haleeven gathered the case and sat down with it. He ran his fingers over the reindeer leather, flipped the simple latch open, and seemed to sit a moment in awe, his nostrils flaring as he inhaled the dry scent of the sheaves. “I will make no errors,” he said. “Thank you for this. The plateau in summer…I have longed to see it again.”

“You will,” Hanish said, smiling, genuinely pleased for the older man. “Perhaps you will even find time for a hunt. The reindeer must be fat by now, lax because you have been away so long. Do the work well, and be revived by it also.” He might have said more, but he felt Maeander’s eyes on him, tugging at him. He turned and looked at him.

“I cannot argue with you, brother,” Maeander said. “If the Akarans live, I’ll find them and drag them to you by their hair. When I do, I trust you will give me the honor of cutting their throats myself.”

The man who was to accompany the prince found him squatting outside his tent in the predawn darkness. Without speaking, Aliver gathered his few supplies in a goatskin sack and slung it over his back. He tugged the leather cord until the load settled as he liked it to. Other than that he wore only the short woven skirt of a hunter. This journey was to be a hunt of sorts, and he was dressed accordingly, exactly the same as he had been a few weeks ago when he ventured out to find a laryx. He had thought that earlier morning that he had never embarked on a task more dangerous, more important. Now it was almost forgotten.

“You are ready?” Kelis asked. His features were sharp edged in a manner that Aliver had long thought was constant judgment, although lately he had not been as sure that the man’s visage betrayed anything of the thoughts behind it.

“Of course,” Aliver answered.

The other man nodded and moved off. Aliver fell in beside him. He matched his stride and kept tempo with him. They progressed from a walk into an easy jog and then to the light-footed run these southern people were famous for. They moved out of the village, past the last of the shadow mounds of the huts. They rose up to the crest of an incline that, had it been lighter, would have shown before them a rolling stretch of tree-dotted pastureland, roasted to gold by the dry season. They would need to cover more than a hundred miles just to get into territory to begin the hunt. The entirety of this day and more thereafter stretched before Aliver as one of continuous motion. But he had been trained for such feats. Each breath of air brought strength into him. He felt the slap of the earth beneath his bare feet and knew he was suited to this life, this place in the world.

How different he had been when he arrived in Talay. His flight from Kidnaban had been harrowing, but at least he had made it to his goal. He had been dragged by a guardian all the way to the court of Sangae Umae, such as it was. What had he thought was happening to him back then? He barely remembered. He had been angry and scared—he knew that. But mostly he remembered random things, like finding a sand-colored snake in his boot his first morning in the village, back when he still wore boots. It was poisonous, he had learned, deadly. It was one of the reasons Talayans did not wear shoes. He thought about this often, mulling over the fact that he did not wear shoes anymore either, hadn’t in years and could barely imagine doing so again.

He remembered how hard it had been to balance himself above the hole the villagers shat in. Such a simple thing, squatting to release his bowels, but he had hated doing it, hated that he could not seem to wipe himself properly with leaves or stones, as everyone else here did. He remembered watching the boys of the village playing a game that he could make no sense of. There was nothing to it other than that each of them took turns getting smacked with a stout stick. They hit each other hard, their bodies cringing from the blows in obvious pain. But they laughed, taunted one another, and tilted their so-white teeth to the sky in mirth that seemed to have no end.

He remembered the menace he had seen in the lean, black-bodied youths he had trained with. He had been weak compared to them. He lost his breath before they did. They were all hard edges, knobs of thrusting knees and elbows as they wrestled, chins like knives wedged in his back. He remembered the girls of the village, round eyed as they watched him, whispering among themselves, sometimes breaking into peals of laughter more painful to his pride than anything the boys inflicted on him. He remembered how hard it was to pronounce Talayan words correctly. Again and again he had repeated exactly what he believed the other to have said, only to be answered by needling ridicule. There was something feminine in the way he rolled his r’s, something childish in his hard g’s, something of the imbecile in the way he could not master the timing of silences that gave identical phrases vastly different meanings. He remembered how he hated the sand blown on the evening breeze. It dusted his face and tracked his tears, no matter how he tried to wipe and wipe and wipe all traces of them away.

But all of that was years ago. Why even think about it now? Now he was a hunter, a man, a Talayan. He ran beside a warrior whom he cherished as a brother. He breathed steadily and flowed along, mile after mile, a film of sweat coming on to him as the sun rose. Those menacing boys were his companions now; those large-eyed girls were now women who looked upon him favorably, lovers who danced for him, a few who vied to be the first to bear him a child. He spoke the people’s tongue like a native. He did not entirely remember how he had worked this transformation. The fact that he had killed a laryx marked his maturation in the eyes of his community. True enough, he had never been more alive than during that hunt, never more aware of his mortality and his undeniable hunger to survive. And not just to survive, to win glory. But even this was only one episode, with many, many smaller ones to consider also. Who can explain just how he became the person he is? It does not happen this day or that one. It is a gradual evolution that happens largely unheralded. He simply was who he now was.

Except that this was not entirely true. He thought of those early days because of Thaddeus and all the things he had brought with him. Thaddeus, whom he loved and loathed in equal measure. The people of the village called him the Acacian. Aliver, when speaking to them in Talayan, used that name as well. It did not seem to occur to any of them that this was odd. Nor did it seem strange to him that he should feel so at home with—and challenged by—a people he had been raised to believe were inferior. But each afternoon that he sat down across from Thaddeus and spoke the language of his birth he knew he was not one of these people, not entirely, not as he wished he was. He was also the Acacian. And more, if Thaddeus was to be believed, he was a pivot on which the fate of the world was to turn.

Aliver and Kelis kept moving for the greater portion of the day, pausing only to drink and eat lightly, letting the food settle and then starting up again. They rested in the shade of an acacia tree through the afternoon’s burning hours, napped briefly, but then kicked dust right through twilight and for some time into the early evening. There were moments when Aliver, in a trancelike state, forgot the purpose of this journey and just ran, floating on the strength of his legs, aware of nothing but movement and of the visual panorama of the living world around him.

When they stopped to camp late that evening, however, he felt the weight of the responsibilities Thaddeus had pushed upon him. The two men made a small fire, just enough to remind the beasts that they were humans and better left alone. They carried nothing in the way of bedding with them. They dug two hollow spaces into the sand, side by side with their heads near the fire. The night could be chilly, but the ground retained enough heat to warm them through until morning. They ate a paste made from mixing their precious water with the pounded sedi grain they carried. It tasted like nothing at all, but it was nourishing. Aliver used a strip of dried beef as a utensil and ate it afterward. Kelis found the tuber the Talayans called knuckle root because of its shape. He sliced it clean at the joint, and the two of them sat sucking on their portions, the liquid inside it sweet and sharp, cleansing.

“Sometimes I feel like this is all madness,” Aliver said. “This cannot be real, what we are doing, what I am supposed to do. It’s a tale meant for children, a myth like those told to me as a boy.”

Kelis took the root from his mouth to say, “This is your story now. You are the myth.”

“So I’ve been told. Do you think us foolish,” he asked, “we Acacians? Hunting for banished magicians and all that? Are we a joke to you?”

“A joke?” The features of the man’s face were hard to read in the dim firelight, but his voice suggested no possibility of humor.

“Kelis, I have been sent to find five-hundred-year-old magicians and to convince them to help me regain the empire my father lost. Do you understand such a loss? There is nothing here, around us, which could possibly show you how much my father lost. He was the monarch who forfeited the world’s greatest empire. And now he speaks from the grave to ask me to win it all back. Is that not something to laugh at?”

A cacophony of jackal calls erupted in a wide semicircle around them. The canines saw the humor apparently. Kelis still acknowledged none. He tossed away his knuckle root and said, “Our storytellers teach of the God Talkers, too. They are of our legends as well as yours. You have heard these.”

“And you believe, then?”

Kelis did not answer, but Aliver knew what he would say if pressed. Of course he believed. To Talayans truth lived in spoken words. It did not matter that at times their legends were highly improbable or that they often contradicted one another. If they were spoken—if they had been handed down to them by those who came before—there was nothing to do for a Talayan but believe. There was no reason not to. Aliver had heard a great many of their legends over the years.

He knew that the God Talkers were supposed to have marched through Talay and into exile. They were enraged, the legend went, at their banishment. They had helped Tinhadin win the world, but now he—the greatest of them—had turned on them and forbade them from using their god speech. They cursed under their breath, quietly so that Tinhadin would not hear them. But even these whispered curses had power. They had torn swathes out of the land; they had tilted slabs of the earth’s crust; they had sparked fire with waves of their arms; they had touched their eyes on the beasts of the plains, corrupting them, twisting them into creatures like the laryx. They had done much damage, the legends went, but fortunately they walked on past the inhabited regions into the truly arid, baking flats to the south. According to myth, the Santoth still lived there. Nobody had ever ventured there to verify this. Why should they? Only one person would ever have reason to go in search of them—a prince of the Akaran line going to rescind their sentence.

“You want to hear someone else’s story instead of yours?” Kelis asked. “Listen to this one then. There was a young Talayan whose father was a very proud man, a warrior. He lived for war and he wished his son to do the same. His son, however, was a dreamer, one who predicts when the rains arrive, when children will be born healthy, one whose sleeping life is as vivid as the waking. The boy dreamed things before they happened. He spoke with creatures in his dreams and sometimes awoke, still remembering the animal’s language, for a few moments at least. The son wanted badly to learn more about his gift. The father, you might think, would have been proud his son was chosen for this. But he was not. When the father slept he was dead to life; only awake did he find meaning, only in war were all things clear to him.

“He forbade his son to dream. He did it with all the spite he could direct through his eyes. He did it through ridicule, with biting words and with scorn. He stood over his son when he slept. Whenever he saw the boy’s eyes move, the sign that he’d entered the dreamworld, he jabbed him with his spear shaft. He awoke him to pain again and again. Soon the boy feared sleep. Dreams sometimes came to him anyway, even in the light of day when he was otherwise awake. The father learned to recognize dreams in his son’s eyes, and he would slap him if he suspected the boy’s mind had wandered. None of it stopped the boy. He simply could not help being who he was. But the father found a way.”

Kelis paused to listen to a sound nearby, the scrape of sharp-clawed feet across the dry ground. They both listened for a moment, until the serrated trilling of a black-backed cricket cut through the faint sounds. The scraping was likely a lizard. Nothing that would bother them.

Aliver prompted, “The father found a way…”

Kelis continued. “He adopted a dead man’s son, and he put that dead man’s son before his own son. He called him firstborn, which meant that everything that was the father’s—his name, ancestors, belongings—would go to this adopted son. If the dreamer son wanted to live a prosperous life, he could do only one thing. He called the adopted one to the circle and killed him. He thrust his spear through his chest and watched his new brother drain of life. Instead of being angry, the father was pleased. It was just as he thought. His true firstborn son had a warrior within him, whether he liked it or not. The father got what he wanted. After that his son truly hated sleep. In sleep he still dreamed, but only ever of the same thing. He dreamed of that fight, of sinking his spear home, of the blood, of watching a man’s face as he dies. So the dreamer was squashed; only the warrior remained.”

“I have not heard this tale before,” Aliver said.

The other cocked his head to the side, straightened it. “None of us choose our fathers. Neither you nor I, nor anybody else. But, believe me, when one is born to a calling, it should not be refused. To not do the thing one was born to do is a heavy burden to bear.”

Aliver’s legs were stiff the next morning, but they loosened readily enough when put to work. The pace of the second day matched the first. The land through which they traveled shared the same tree-dotted and wide-valleyed rolling contours. But on the third day a pack of four laryx caught their scent and fell in behind them in pursuit. The loping beasts yelped their garbled speech and grew near enough that, glancing back, Aliver could see their individual features. One of them was missing an ear. Another ran on a weakened foreleg. The leader was a larger beast than the one he had killed, and the fourth tended to flank out toward one side, as if already anticipating rounding on them. If the four of them caught up with and surrounded the men, there would be no hope of their escaping alive. Laryx’s hatred of humans went hand in hand with their fear. Like a lion hunting the cubs of lesser cats, they seemed to hunt men out of spite.

Running before them, Aliver realized how different he was now from when he had hunted one of these beasts just a few weeks before. Back then, he had faced with clarity the reality that if he failed in any action, he would die horribly as a consequence. The strange thing was that at his core this feeling was entirely familiar to him. At some level he had lived with such a fear since the evening his father was stabbed in the chest. There had always been an unseen monster pursuing him. Facing a real one, in the bright light of day, liberated something in him. He had run the beast into the ground and then turned on it and drawn close enough that he could smell the creature’s breath. He had looked at the foul entirety of it and…he had done what he was supposed to do. He sank his spear deep into its chest and held it in place as the laryx bucked and protested with the last of its strength. He was not sure exactly how, but he knew this deed had altered something within him for the better.