The War With The Mein (41 page)

The longer Aliver stayed among the Santoth, the more he felt he belonged with them. They still had about them their unusual mannerisms. They continued to glide about like specters, leaving trails behind them. He was always startled when they moved in bursts of speed, so sudden that he could not track how they had gotten from one place to another. Nor could he get used to the way their facial expressions changed in an instant. But in a great many ways the sorcerers enveloped him in a welcoming embrace. They were like relatives met for the first time and recognized at a level more fundamental than his conscious mind understood.

He came to find their muted features familiar. Sometimes, staring into the hazy contours of one of their faces, he lost himself contemplating an image just like his own, as if the being before him were actually a living mirror, a reflection of himself both solid and incorporeal at the same time, true to him and yet different in ways that demanded study. He had not opened his mouth to say a word aloud since hearing the monstrosity of his own voice that first time, nor did listening through his ears even occur to him anymore. Their voices were without auditory resonance, but they were all the more intimate for it. They took on the tempo of thoughts framed within a silent place in his mind. He came to feel a greater ease in his communication with them than in any shared interaction he had previously known.

He sensed that, in the swirling discourse between them, the Santoth tugged away portions of his conscious. They searched out bits and pieces of memories and information, things stored in the far corners of his mind and long forgotten. As he released these things, he relived them to some degree. He walked through moments from his childhood again. He saw images not dreamed of in years, heard stories told in the cadence of his father’s voice, listened as his mother sung him to sleep. He felt again the complete peace of nestling against her bosom, her arms wrapped around him, the soft expulsion of her breathing caressing his face. He also remembered things not nearly as pleasant.

The Santoth had a slow, insatiable curiosity about everything he had seen and experienced, about history as he understood it, and about events of what to them was the most recent past. He felt how staggering it was for them to learn that Tinhadin had allowed himself to die within the normal span of a human lifetime. That was not the sorcerer they knew, not the ambitious one who stretched his arms with the hopes of encircling the entire world. Also hard for them to accept was the fact that the sorcerer’s direct ancestors knew nothing of the Giver’s tongue. How could Tinhadin’s descendants know nothing of The Song of Elenet? How could such knowledge have slipped from existence? Aliver sensed the dread pulsing behind these questions and could feel that they did not entirely believe all of it. The Santoth, although aged and wise, were tied like all creatures to life. They knew not what their own future might hold, and they feared the same as anyone faced with uncertainty.

However, they offered Aliver more than they took from him. They may have known nothing about events in the world for the last several hundred years, but they were encyclopedic in their knowledge of the distant time that had shaped them and all that came before. They nourished Aliver with history and lore. They detailed the Retribution in a manner that rewrote his understanding of his dynasty’s founding entirely. They spoke of Edifus and Tinhadin and Hauchmeinish as if they had parted from them only the day before. They told of battles and duels not preserved in the Forms. They fed him a diet made up entirely of knowledge.

Very little of what he learned of people’s actions began or ended with either the noble ideals or the fiendish wickedness he had been taught lay behind all great struggles. There was something comforting in this. For once, the nature of the world and the crimes of men in shaping it made complete sense to him. There was a truth, he realized. Things had happened in certain ways. It was possible to understand the events, although only from a place without judgment and only when one stared at them without the desire to shape the events to create certain meanings, to validate, to explain. The Santoth did not try to do any of this. They simply informed him and seemed to have no opinion whatsoever on the catalog of crimes and suffering they detailed.

Most often his exchange was with a collective consciousness, into and out of which individual voices flowed at will. Occasionally he found himself sitting beside the Santoth who had first spoken to him. His name had been Nualo, although in his existence here there was no need to single him out by name. If a thought was meant for him he simply knew it; likewise, if a thought came from Nualo, Aliver knew from its cadence and shape and feel from whom it had originated.

At some point—whether it was night or day, a week or a year after his arrival in the far south Aliver could not have said—Nualo said that he had just come to understand something, a flaw in Aliver’s conception of the world. It concerned the tale of Bashar and Cashen.

The story, as any Acacian child knew, was that two kingly brothers who failed to share power equally became great enemies. They fought in the mountains and sometimes, during great storms, their anger rose again and you could hear the rumbling of their ongoing battle. It was a tale, Nualo said, that hid a truth Aliver should know.

There was no Bashar, he said. There was no Cashen.

There were, however, two peoples: one called Basharu and one called Cularashen. In the distant past they were two nations of Talayan people. They lived so long ago that there is no way to measure the years. They came from common ancestry, but they grew in separate ways and believed themselves to be different beings entirely. As both nations grew prosperous and swelled in numbers, they also learned pride. The Basharu believed themselves favored by the Giver. The Cularashen called this heresy; they were the beloved of the Giver. Both peoples found all manner of proofs to verify their view: in the blessing the Giver bestowed on them, in the bounty of their crops in a given year, in the disease cast upon the other, in the sun that favored one’s crops, in the floods that destroyed the other’s. Each year—each month or day or hour, for that matter—confirmed and challenged their assertions.

Eventually, both races agreed to petition the Giver. Through prayers and sacrifices, offerings and ceremonies, they asked him to make known his preference. They wanted him to choose between the two peoples so that all would see and understand whom he favored most. The Giver, however, did not answer them. Not, at least, through a sign both sides could agree upon. So they fought to decide the matter themselves.

Theirs was the first war between nations of men, but in it they learned all the degradations humans would ever need to practice it. The Basharu eventually gained the upper hand. The Cularashen fled Talay. They sailed to an island in the center of what was to them a vast sea. They took with them many things, including the seeds of acacia trees. They planted them all across this island so that it would feel like home to them. They have lived on this island ever since.

This name, Cularashen, Nualo said, has been forgotten. As has Basharu. But those people—the defeated Cularashen—are the people you call Acacians. You, Prince, are one of them.

How could that be? Aliver asked. We are so different from the people of Talay. In so many ways… He meant in terms of racial characteristics—skin color, features of the face and form. But he hesitated to project this thought. Something about it snagged inside him with embarrassing barbs.

Nualo understood him well enough. He said that the Giver had been angry at the people’s folly. He abhorred the war and the foulness that so flared out of his own loved creation. If humans thought they were so different from each other, he would make them even more so. He twisted people’s tongues and made them speak differently, so that one nation’s words were meaningless babble to another’s ears. He roasted some in the sun and let others wither and go snow pale in the cold. He stretched noses or flattened them, made some people tall and others short, set eyes deep or pinched them at the edge and slanted them, twisted hair into curls or let it hang free. The Giver did this as a test for them to see through. But they did not. Before long, humans began to accept that they were different, and then discord between them became the norm. And this, in addition to Elenet’s betrayal, was another reason the Giver turned in disgust from the world. He has had nothing to do with it since.

All races are one? Aliver asked.

All the races of the Known World are one, Nualo said. Forgetting this was the second crime done by humans. We suffer for it still.

Aliver would have to live with this new version of the world for some time for it to become real for him. The old pride in his character scoffed at the idea of Acacians being nothing more than a defeated, displaced tribe of Talay. He had lived an entire life with Acacian supremacy as a given. Certainly he had found himself struggling to best his Talayan peers in any contest over the last nine years, but he had taken that to be a fault in himself. He was not up to the standards of his people. It was what pushed him to work harder, to grow fit, and to fight like a warrior and kill a laryx.

He was so sure of his own failings that he had sought to hide them every day of his life. None of this had shaken his belief that the differences observed on people’s outsides mirrored equally indisputable differences within. Nualo and the other Santoth slipped this belief from beneath his feet and left him drifting upon a sea of entirely unimagined possibility. For reasons he did not fully acknowledge, this troubled him more than any of the other revelations he received from the Santoth.

It seemed he lived with them an eternity before they prompted him back to his purpose. They did so en masse. They gathered around him, circle outside circle, face after stony face after face, much like the audience held with him when he first arrived. Aliver only gradually recognized that they had a particular purpose. They had accepted him. They had waited. They had learned and shared with him. Now they wanted.

Bring us back into the world, they said, speaking in the singular voice that was all of them at once. Free us.

They assured him that he was the only one that could do so. Only he out of all of his generation—that is, a firstborn son of the patriarchal line of Tinhadin—could lift the curse that kept them in a state apart from the rest of the world. That was how Tinhadin had woven the magic. It was strong magic, but Elenet himself had decreed that there must be a way out of any spell. He knew that men always erred in some way when they spoke the Giver’s tongue. The flaw might not be immediately obvious, the ramifications not clear for centuries, but eventually the faults showed. Tinhadin had no choice but to follow this edict, even when castigating others of his order.

There is no spell, the Santoth said, that cannot be undone. There is always a door back that never closes. You are that door, and you have only to say the words.

What words? Aliver asked.

That, however, was not an answer the Santoth could provide. Only Aliver himself could figure that out. They could not even teach him, as their god speech was so corrupted by time that nothing they uttered came out as they intended.

I know none of the Giver’s language, Aliver said, not for the first time. I’d never heard of Elenet’s book before you told me of it. I have never been taught one word of the language of creation. I’m sorry, but I’m powerless to aid you.

They did not disguise their disappointment. Why, then, did you seek us out? Why did you stir us from slumber?

Why indeed? He had almost forgotten the stretch of earthly years leading up to the present. It took some effort to wrench his attention back to what his purpose had been. But once he tried, it all came to him. He had come searching for them, full of import, with purpose hung about his neck like a punishment. There was a world of people—many of whom he loved—engaged in a titanic struggle. He had come here seeking aid, not for refuge, not for a home among the banished, not to forget the world. He had come to ask the Santoth what they could do to save a family—and a world—that had driven them away.

He let all of this flow from him to the sorcerers. It spun into the breathing air between them, circled and twined through them in the silent, flowing exchange that now seemed so natural.

You ask of us things that we cannot do, they said. We could help you from here, but there would be limits.

With your powers you could do much. I am sure of it. I—I give you permission to leave here and return to the world.

It took them some time to consider this. It would be good to venture north, they admitted. But without being properly freed from Tinhadin’s curse they would never function like normal people in the world. They would be walking ghosts haunting a world they were not completely a part of. What was more, they could not help him in the way he intended.

You wish to make war.

It was Aliver’s turn to hesitate. They put it so simply. Yet it was true—or mostly so. He did not want it, but a battle was coming. Now that he remembered it fully it was clear that his entire life had been leading toward war. A horrible war. A conflagration that would liberate or destroy him. He had no choice but to play his part in it. Soon, he would have to return to the world and…Yes, I will make war on my enemies. He almost added the word “noble” or “just” or “righteous,” for such was the type of war he wished to wage. He mulled them in his mind but did not release them. He knew what the Santoth would think of such notions.

You may invite us back into the world, the Santoth said, but we will be form without substance.

But if you were freed? Aliver asked. If I found Elenet’s book…If I learned how to free you…You could then fight for me?

Having asked the question, he sat aware of his heart beating, watching the blurred faces all about him, feeling the gravity with which they considered their response. It was the first sensation of time he had felt since arriving here. Something had shifted. The world had begun to reclaim him, and it seemed urgent that he have the answer to this question. Would you fight for me?