The War With The Mein (44 page)

Though Mena made sure never to waver in her duties as Maeben, the greater portion of her attention now went to her lessons with Melio. He met her in her compound every day, after she had completed her duties to the goddess. Instead of talking as they had done in their first few encounters, he tutored her solely in swordplay. He claimed to be out of practice and to never have been a teacher, but he dropped right into the role as if he had been born for it.

Within a few days of Mena stating her interest, Melio had ventured up into the interior highlands in search of suitable wood for practice swords. Though it was different from the ash used on Acacia, he did find a strong-grained timber of a reddish hue that served nicely. By the end of the first week they both danced about with training swords. They were lighter than he wished, but Melio was still pleased. His fingers caressed the gentle curves of the blades as if they wished to memorize each inch of them. He returned each day having made small refinements, added accoutrements, carved and sanded, oiled and honed the weapons in ways both functional and aesthetic.

Mena had little difficulty learning the postures, in getting her grip right, and setting her feet well. Any mistake that Melio corrected was banished forever. She never needed to be told a thing twice. At first this had surprised the tutor, but with the passing days he took her aptitude more and more as a given. They flew forward from one lesson to the next. Working on the various strokes, on how to best channel power from the legs up through the coiled tension of the torso and out to the blade. Her swims in the harbor and dives among the oysters had kept her fit, but Melio pushed her to use previously undiscovered muscles.

The First Form, that of Edifus at Carni, Mena committed to physical memory in three days. The fight between Aliss and the Madman of Careven took all of two days. Melio suggested they skip the Third Form, wherein the knight Bethenri went to battle with devil’s forks, but Mena would not hear of it. She helped him fashion versions of the short, daggerlike weapons. The two of them cut and slashed, bent and twirled, thrust and retreated throughout one long afternoon. They stirred up clouds of dust and attracted the eyes of the servants, who stood at respectful distances completely transfixed by the sight of their mistress spinning through the deadly motions of warcraft. She did her best to work through the exercises with the goddess’s calm façade. She voiced no fatigue. She never protested against a challenge. She wiped sweat from her face and stood straight even while her chest heaved and billowed.

In the solitude of her chambers at night she curled on her side and hugged her legs to her chest and cried at her body’s torment. She did not recognize her own arms. They were thinner in some places, thicker in others, more angular, cut around the muscle in new ways. Fortunately, she could always recognize herself in the new shapes. The altered contours of her forearms, the shapes of the veins on the back of her hand, the striated cords at the base of her neck: it was always her, Mena. She was not so much changing into something different as she was emerging from beneath a long-held disguise. In the privacy of her inner rooms she stood unclothed, admiring the changes. In public, of course, she did her best to hide them.

If the priests knew anything of her daily routine—and they must have—they did not speak of it. Mena gave them no excuse to find fault with her. She was prompter in her duties than before. She was always on time for the evening ceremonies, for the special displays put on for visiting dignitaries, and she was more easily found inside her compound than previously, when she had spent her free moments in solitary exploration of the harbor floor. She sat through meetings in Maeben’s garments without so much as a crack in her resolve. In the space of two weeks she had to twice meet with grieving parents, ones whose children had been taken by the goddess. She found herself speaking through the goddess in ways meant to please the priests. She had never quite done this before, and she did not like to recall some of the things she had intoned before the tearful, penitent parents. “Look not at the sky,” she said once, “if you wish Maeben to see your reverence.”

How unfair, she thought, to tell people to fear something as ever present as the heavens above them. She herself often searched out the raptor form aloft over the inner mountains. Why had she forbade the people from doing the same? Her words, she realized, would flow from one mouth to another. Soon the whole village, and eventually the entire archipelago, would know Maeben on earth’s new proclamation. They would walk through their daily lives with bowed heads. Vaminee, the first priest, must have been pleased with her, though, if so, he did not deign to show it.

Melio, on the other hand, was not shy in voicing his disapproval of her service to the goddess. They still met at night to talk through what they practiced during the day and to plan for the future. They were both Acacians, he reminded her. These island deities were nothing to them. They were petty powers—if powers at all. Worshipping them did nothing to heal the rift between humankind and the Giver. That was what was important. That, perhaps, could help restore rightful order to the world. If Mena wished to pray, she should do so in Acacian and to the Giver. Aliver would summon her any day now; she had to be ready in every way possible.

“But instead you worship a sea eagle?”

Mena sat across from him in the dim light of a handful of candles, the night air around them still enough that the flames stood straight.

“What of the children? Your Maeben snatches children and carries them screaming to—”

“Don’t!” Mena snapped. The word burst from her as forceful as a sword thrust. She could not listen to him speak so flippantly of the taken children. “I’ve no choice. I am Maeben. She happened to me. She came into me and I became her. I was nobody when—”

“You were a princess of Acacia.”

“—I arrived here. I knew nothing. I had nothing. I was nothing but an orphan child! I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t know a soul. I was alone! Can you understand what that was like?”

“So the goddess snatched you up as well. And you are thankful for it?” When Mena did not answer, Melio shook his head, turned away, and took in the night sky. “No, I don’t understand any of it. You’re a young woman, Mena. That child you speak of is no longer. You’re no goddess and you know it. The priests know it. The poor fools who revere you know it. You’re all playacting some shared delusion. Maeben taking children to serve her in her palace? How absurd. Your goddess is nothing but a voracious bird. It lives on the isle north of here, and not in a palace either. Instead of worshipping it, somebody should shoot it from the sky. I have seen her aloft myself. If I had had a bow I would not have hesitated to use it.”

Mena was silent for some time and then said, “You’re right. You don’t understand.”

Whatever differences they had during the evening, they were forgotten as they carried on with their martial sessions during the day. Mena learned the Fourth Form—that of Gethack the Hateful—with ease. By the Fifth, however, she found herself struggling. It was not that her ability was any less—just the opposite. Her skills, she felt, were increasingly hampered by the Form. What did it matter how the Priest of Adaval went to work on the twenty wolf-headed guards of the rebellious cult of Andar? Learning the Sixth Form just made her doubts even clearer. She came to feel that there was a difference between the strokes she made during fencing and the way she would attack if her goal was actually to kill the person she faced. Having distinguished this difference, she wondered why one would ever waste time attacking in a manner that the partner already expected. Yes, the motions of dueling back and forth through the preordained motions of the Form strengthened the body and honed the reflexes, but such practice seemed beside the point.

She broke off in the middle of the Sixth Form one afternoon, exasperated. “This is too much dancing. No wonder our army fell so easily.” Melio started to protest, but Mena gestured that she meant no offense. She wiped sweat from her brow and thought for a moment how best to express herself. “Why should we learn the steps of myth? The Early One casting back the gods of Ithem? What has that to do with anything? We won’t be fighting the gods of Ithem. Why pretend that we will?”

Melio had an answer for this, but Mena did not pause to hear it.

“These things you are teaching me are all very well,” she said, “but it seems to me that they constrict the sword instead of freeing it. You’ve taught me that the Forms are the basis of our military system?”

Melio nodded.

“Then you see the problem.”

Melio was not sure that he did.

“I know I’m holding in my hand a wooden sword. But I’m supposed to think of it as a real blade, one that was conceived, fired, pounded, and honed to an edge all for one reason, yes? What is that reason?”

The tutor’s answer had about it the tones of memorized maxims. “It’s the link between the swordsman and his opponent,” he said. “Properly used, the blade is an extension of the body, of the mind. A sharp blade is the tool of a sharp mind—”

“No.” Mena shook her head, impatient. “To cut! That is the reason. I don’t know anything about ‘an extension of the mind.’ Whenever it comes unsheathed, the intent should be to cut. Not to parry, not to dance, not to aim a blow that your opponent already knows is coming. A sword is a weapon. I want to learn to use it as one.”

“True swordplay is not like the fencing we do here,” Melio answered, “especially against opponents ignorant of the Forms. But having a host of known responses makes one quick when speed is needed.”

Mena’s head bowed slightly; her eyes canted upward to study Melio as he spoke on, his voice heavy with a tutor’s authority. She lowered her gaze to the ground, pursed her lips as if the gesture was necessary to clip words that wished to escape her.

Eventually she broke in. “Raise your sword. Try to cut me—if you can do so before I cut you.”

“This is a race to the cut, then?”

“Yes,” Mena said, “you could say that.”

They both stood in ready position. Mena nodded; Melio did likewise. A moment passed and then, they both knew, the duel could commence. One of them was more prepared for it than the other. Mena’s strike was simple. Direct and executed without hesitation. She stooped low and sliced hard at Melio’s left leg just below the knee. He did not have a chance to parry, and as the leg came out from under him, he twisted over the pain of it. He dropped to the hard-packed soil. Mena stood above him, the tip of her sword nudging his abdomen.

“I’m sorry, but here’s my point: why dance through fifty moves when a single one will suffice?”

Melio stared at her with a look of alarm in his eyes. She reached out a hand and pulled him to his feet, smiling as if all she had just said had been some sort of joke.

From then on their fencing was never as it had been. Mena learned the rest of the Forms, memorizing and mastering the moves quickly. She did so in a perfunctory way, as if she was simply appeasing him. She focused her full attention on fencing, convincing Melio to fight again and again “to the cut.” Initially, Mena scored more strikes. Melio seemed reluctant to commit to the stated rules, which were that from the moment they began each of them tried to immediately strike their blade into the other’s flesh. Smarting from blow after blow, he quickened to match her. Soon their quick bouts of three or four moves had stretched to seven or eight. Before long their matches went into double digits.

Mena writhed at night, sleepless, her body like a weed twisting with rapid growth. She was raw with bruises, with abrasions, with stressed bones and muscles daily shredding and knitting anew. But she knew she was improving. She began to think of techniques Melio had not taught her, as when she pressed her body close to his and stuck like glue against him so that for some time neither of them could strike effectively against the other. Another time she abruptly dashed him with her shoulder, using it as if it were a weapon also, springing away from the impact with a vigor that caught him by surprise. She learned how to smack his blade with a collision that several times knocked it from his hands, and how to touch blades in a manner that made the two stick together instead of bounce apart. At times she slowed the rate of her movements unexpectedly, feeling that the center of her timing was in her abdomen. With a deep internal contraction she changed her rhythm so completely it left Melio stumbling to adjust.

Mena could not be sure how skilled her tutor actually was, but on a morning toward the end of the last month of spring the two fenced their way to a standstill. She stunned him by striking at several different points on his body with a single cut. Though Melio parried her, the shock on his face registered. He realized as well as she that with a single downward blow she had nearly cut him at the neck, on the side, and at the back of the knee, without losing any of her initial momentum.

After this, Melio stood some time, panting, watching her from behind the dark locks of his hair that stuck to the sweat of his forehead. “Who would have thought that Princess Mena Akaran would be the first to challenge me with the true use of the sword?”

“Don’t look so surprised about it,” Mena said. “All I’ve proved is that we are equals.”

“Easily enough said, but perhaps you don’t know what it means.”

“Of course I do. It means I’ll have to find someone else to fight. You know of the stick fighters?”

Melio voiced his opposition to the idea over and over again. He explained things she already knew but which he could not help but voice, as they seemed too important for her to ignore. She had not been trained to stick fight. The art and technique of it was vastly different from the swordplay they had been practicing. The sticks didn’t cut, but this didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous, even deadly. Stick fighters came from the hill villages of the islands. They were the poorest of men. They claimed warriors’ blood but could do nothing with it but test themselves against one another, trying to earn quick bounty from betting. They danced as if they were entertainers, strutting and preening and catering to the betting crowd, but when they attacked they did so with all the force they could muster. They dislocated shoulders with downward blows, broke forearms with twirls, thrust into abdomens so hard that the bodies bled on the inside. He had seen a man’s skull cracked open, watched another man blinded in one eye, another with his collarbone smashed to pieces so that it would never heal properly. And yet another fighter, a master of the craft, had managed such force in his whirling strike to a man’s back that the victim was unable to walk thereafter. He crumpled to the ground, devastated by what had just happened to him, and never again rose to stand on his legs.