The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  “There will be a banquet?”

  “At the palace two evenings from now. I will personally attend. A small party of us only. It is rare to dine at the king’s table, but I…” The man’s words dribbled to a halt. His eyes took on a perplexed expression. His jaw worked for a moment before he could produce more words. “I know you. Thasren! Thasren…”

  The assassin hissed him silent and spoke close to the man’s ear, letting his lips brush the soft skin and cartilage. “Who I am does not matter to you. What matters is that you have grown weak. You speak with your mouth instead of your heart.” The ambassador protested, his eyes casting about side to side, as if help might have slipped in quietly and been awaiting eye contact to act. “Perhaps the Callach who judge all before the gates of the mountains will hear you and permit you entry. But in this world you look to a different master to evaluate your worth; this master is not pleased with you. Hanish Mein no longer values your life, but as you are a Mein, you will have one last chance to prove your loyalty.”

  During the next few hours he explained to the man and to his family how it was to be. He described the depths of pain and torture Hanish would inflict upon them if they failed at any of what was asked of them. He charged them with duty to their race, and he reminded them that the reach of the Tunishnevre was such that no Mein could escape their wrath. They had only a handful of things to do to save themselves. The wife and the children would show themselves in public with no sign that anything had changed. They would simper and fawn and flatter the Acacians, as seemed natural to them. They would find excuses to explain the absence of their servants and they would allow no one inside the house. For his part, Gurnal would tutor Thasren in all the things he would need to know to get near the king, what customs needed to be followed, whom he might encounter, what security he might meet. In short, they would help him kill the king.

  When Thasren left the house that afternoon he wore a wig cut from one the slain servant’s heads, tugged into place and secured with a headband of woven horsehair that crossed his forehead, a traditional decoration at occasions of importance. There was a reason other than just his skills as a killer that he was best suited for this task. The structure of his face was very similar to Gurnal’s, the same basic shape, almost identical in the cant of the eyes and the bones of the jawline. They were, after all, part of the same family tree, second cousins on their mother’s side. The most markedly different thing about them was their hair, but that had been remedied.

  He found his way up toward the palace easily enough. He entered the royal gates as one of a flow of people, not questioned by the guards at all but simply waved through. As none of them were meant to be anywhere near the king they were not searched for weapons of treachery, just watched and contained in preordained spaces, spectators but not participants. He hated the smell of the place, such a confusion of different scents, the colognes and perfumes of so many foreign lands. It was just as Hanish had said it would be: the representatives of so many different nations, races of men who now bowed and smiled before the Acacian masters. Had the entire world forgotten pride of race? They were like so many hoofed creatures—deer and antelope—gathering to sing the praises of the lion that devoured their children. It made no sense at all.

  He stood near the exit the entire evening, casually feigning comfort in the ambassador’s strange clothes, nodding greetings to others when they made eye contact with him. Several times he turned away from people who seemed prepared to speak with him. Twice he held conversations with men who seemed to know him well. He coughed into his hand and explained his quiet by claiming he had caught a chill. The humor inherent in this was not lost on the Acacians. He had been too long on the island, they joked. He was becoming Acacian himself, prey to the slightest cold in the air. Both men departed smiling.

  The effort of these deceptions wrung his body to exhaustion. His heart pumped furiously the entire time. Beads of sweat seeped out of his nose and perched on his cheeks and ran unseen down his armpits. A film of moisture developed between himself and the underside of his wig. But to the eyes that touched him, he appeared composed. When a hush fell across the throng and the crier called for attention and he watched the monarch enter, adorned with a golden crown, a wreath that prickled with thorns in imitation of the island’s namesake—then he knew he was close, very close to earning his place in the history of his people. This evening he would not try to get any nearer. This was but a flirtation; the deed itself was better consummated on the morrow.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  Unbeknownst to his father, siblings, or even to the nanny in whose charge he was supposed to spend the afternoons, Dariel Akaran often escaped the confines of the nursery and wandered off for hours at a time into the bowels of the palace. His journeys had started the previous summer. When his former nanny took ill with a fever, an elderly woman replaced her. She was suitable enough in her plump and amiable manner, but she took a liquid substance in her tea that always put her to sleep. Dariel took advantage of this.

  Even when she woke to find him missing, the quarters reserved for the children were so expansive that she could search for him without suspecting he was no longer within the maze of connected rooms. When he appeared, he simply dropped right into conversation with her, expressing his boredom and begging her to play one of any number of board games or darts, soldiers of the realm, sword fighting with sticks…The old woman had not the energy for such pursuits. She left the lad to his own devices for increasingly longer periods of time, just as he wished she would.

  He had come across the hidden passageway quite by chance, following an errant marble that had vanished into the crack between his wardrobe and the wall behind it. The wardrobe was an enormous piece of furniture. It covered the better portion of the entire wall, built of solid mahogany and as immovable to the young boy as if it were part of the very stone of the palace. He squirmed his way behind it, first with the length of his arm, then a leg, then a full commitment, chest pressed against the wood of the wardrobe, back rubbing across the cold granite of the wall. He tried to lower himself on twisted knees, fingers stretched down toward where he believed the marble to be. He was so fixated on reaching it, and so annoyed at the intractable materials that were stopping him from doing so, that when he finally found the space to squat down and run his fingers through the dust-covered floor he did not pause to consider how he had accomplished this.

  It was only with the marble clenched once more in his fist that he realized he was in some sort of corridor, lit just enough that he could make out the old stonework of the walls, rough edged in a manner rarely seen inside the palace. There was a stillness here, a quiet deeper than he had ever felt. There was also a slight movement of air. A breath across his face that brushed past him like a whisper.

  Thus began his introduction to the long-forgotten network of passageways that had been used by servants to navigate unseen throughout the palace in an earlier age. It was a labyrinth of stairways, tunnels, hallways, and dead ends, lit occasionally by holes drilled through the stone and open to the air. He strolled into abandoned rooms, complete with pieces of furniture, wall hangings, and rugs visible only as raised geometric squares thickly layered over in dust. He never came upon a living being while in these precincts, but he found enough to fear in the ferocious figures carved into the lintels, bulbous-eyed beasts that walked on two legs like men and women, with the body parts of boars and lions, lizards and hyenas and eagles, including one that looked like a frog, save that its violent visage had nothing in common with the amusing creatures that emerged from the ground during the spring. What a strange people must have carved these things! What a horrific time it must have been when humans had yet to step away and set themselves apart from beasts. A golden monkey had followed him in once, but upon seeing these statues the creature bolted, leaving Dariel wondering if he should do the same.

  On one occasion he emerged from a long, narrow passageway into the bright sunlight and the spray o
f sea waves just below him. He crept through an opening and crawled out onto a ledge, blinded by the brilliance of the day. He had found a hidden route right down to the sea at the northern edge of the island, not far from the Temple of Vada. He stood smelling the salt-moist air, wind currents blowing his hair about him. A stone’s throw out to sea a shoal of fish churned the water. Large, gape-jawed seabirds circled overhead. He watched as one pulled in its wings and shot down into the water.

  Dariel decided to retrace his route and find something to use as a fishing rod. As he began to turn, a swell in the waves smashed against the stone beneath him. It sent up a flume of water that smacked him under the chin and against the chest and lifted him off his feet. For a moment the water billowed and fizzed all around him. His legs and arms lashed out in all directions. He clawed for purchase on the ledge, using his fingers and feet and eventually wedging his torso between two stones. For a moment he lay there breathing in frantic gasps. He could have vanished beneath the waves. No one would have guessed what had happened to him. He would simply have disappeared.

  The thought of all of this racked him with sobs. He did not return to that spot, nor did he mention the event to anyone. As much as it had scared him—as much, really as all his subterranean ramblings sent his blood pumping and his hands tingling, and as much as the ghostly breath in the corridors rippled and flexed the hairs on his neck, making them stand and sway like long grass pressed by a shifting wind—he still loved his time in these secret places. He did not wish to give up his adventures, as he knew he would have to the minute anybody found out.

  Anybody, that is, from within the world of the upper palace. Those beings of the light were only a portion of the population of the palace. He found several points other than his playroom where the unused passageways connected to others still in use. This world was just as interesting to explore. In the subterranean community of laborers, the unseen society of servants and engineers, cooks and technicians through whose efforts the palace functioned, there Dariel was well known and much liked. Likewise, it was at the elbows of these employees that he found the most joy he had yet experienced in the company of adults—with the exception of his father, whom he adored. It took them some time to get used to him and to get beyond their fears that something might happen to the boy and that they would be punished for it. Indeed, some of them never warmed to him. He suspected they argued about him when he was not there. But in others he found fast friends. He rode in the donkey-drawn carts that a man named Cevil used to bring supplies from the lower storerooms up into the palace. He stood among the full hips of the sweets bakers, stealing one after another of the sugary teacakes that were his favorite. He sat at the knees of the aged former palace workers who lived in frugal retirement in a network of caves, old men and women invisible to royal society.

  He spent whole days awed by the labors of the fire feeders who worked in the sweltering, blackened catacomb-like chambers below the kitchens. The ovens that the royal cooks used were fed by a series of gigantic furnaces, from which networks of pipes stretched up and through the ceiling in such a confusion that the boy never made sense of them, no matter how many questions he asked. The feeding room was a brooding kiln of a cave. It was caked with soot and floating coal dust; peopled by blackened men who were often naked down to the waist and streaked by sweat, with bulging forearms and shoulders, bloodshot eyes, and yellowed teeth. The room was open on one side, not for the splendid view of the sea stretching off to the west but to provide some relief from the heat of the ovens and to facilitate the arrival of new loads of coal from Senival, which came in on barges from the Mainland.

  It was here that Dariel ventured the morning of the Aushenian banquet. He approached, hearing the commotion from some distance away, smelling the soot in the air, growing warmer with each bend in the carved granite of the corridor. When he stepped out of the corridor, the heat of the ovens hit him in a roar, as if he had stepped into the mouth of some living beast. For a few moments the scenes of men lit by glowing red embers had a horrific look to it. Once he spotted a particular figure, though, Dariel moved toward him.

  Val claimed to be a Candovian. He also claimed to have been a raider in his youth, a sort of pirate of the Gray Slopes. Dariel took his claims with a grain of salt. Val seemed such a part of the stone and earth of Acacia itself that Dariel could not imagine that he originated anywhere else. What was never in question, however, was his stunning physical presence. He had an upper body of such girth that the first time Dariel spied him—moving about with hulking grace before the stoves, backlit and highlighted by the fiery glow—he had clutched his chest with one hand, sure that he had stumbled on the giants that fuel the world’s volcanoes.

  He still shuddered on seeing him now. Val yelled out a cursing order to someone and then stooped to get a grip around a chunk of coal as large as a small child. That was when he spotted Dariel. He straightened to his full height and wiped an enormous hand across his mouth, brushing away the profanity he had just uttered. “Young prince, what are you up to?” he asked, stepping nearer and dropping to one knee. “There’s a banquet tonight. Don’t you know that? Your father is honoring the Aushenian prince. It’s not a good time for distraction down here. Or is that why you’ve come—to try and get old Val in trouble?”

  As ever, Dariel was struck with shyness on meeting this large man, even as he was drawn to him and loved something about how small he felt before his bulk. He answered as he often did, with a bashful smile and a mumbled declaration of innocence.

  The man set his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave him a playful shake. “Come on,” he said, rising back to his feet with some effort, “it’s time for my break anyway. Let’s get some air.”

  Together the two retreated from the furnaces. Dariel walked behind Val, who cut a swath through the throng of workers. Shovels flinging coal, carts creaking past behind ornery donkeys, men swaying and cursing with the effort of their work: the movement was all around him, but as long as Dariel stayed close to Val, he knew he was safe. He stumbled occasionally on the rough contours of the floor and once bumped into Val’s legs when he paused to let a cart past. The man’s hand dropped down from a height and blanketed his shoulder, a momentary touch, and then they moved on again.

  The sky was heavy with clouds, layer upon layer of them, but still, stepping out of the cavern and into the winter morning was blinding. The swift change was an overload of his senses, from dark to light in a few paces, hot to cold. They emerged as if from a fissure in a volcano, an exhaling fumarole of foul breath, greeted by the shock of salt-tinged air. They ascended a staircase cut into the stone and then walked along a sloping ramp from which openings led into the ovens that the lower furnaces fed.

  Dariel stepped into the mess hall in time to watch Karan, the woman who doled out the laborer’s rations, straighten from a stooped position. She had just set a tray of hard biscuits into the slotted holder on which they cooled. The momentary sight of her swaying breasts froze him in his tracks; he flushed with an embarrassment he did not understand, one that pulsed in him when she glanced at him and seemed to read his thoughts better than he did himself. Her eyes passed on to Val. She perched her fists on her hips, which bulged out from under the constriction of her apron, and eyed the man with disapproving eyes. “You’re a bit of a sight,” she said. “Coming in here without so much as splashing water on your face.”

  Young as he was, Dariel knew that he—not the foreman—was the target of her displeasure. She had never trusted him in the way Val did, Dariel thought, although why or how he could cause her harm escaped him. And he sensed that regardless of the cold tone she used with Val, she actually liked him, something that seemed to embarrass her enough that she wished to hide it.

  “If I had a reason to care for my appearance, you can be sure that I would, woman,” Val said, “but I’m here for some biscuits and a bit of tea. Is that too much to ask? I didn’t know I had to clean up for a biscuit and a bit of tea.” He shot a glanc
e at Dariel, asking for a little commiseration, and then he used one hand to swipe most of the biscuits off one tray and into his other fist.

  “Don’t mind her,” Val said a little while later. The two had returned to the staircase and seated themselves, side by side with the biscuits and tea between them, one long pair of legs and one short dangling over the rocky slopes below them. “She’s worried that you shouldn’t eat laborer’s food.”

  Dariel held a biscuit between his fingers, contemplating it with no actual interest in putting it near his mouth, tasteless and brittle as it was. “I like it all right,” he said. “It’s hard to bite,” he added, as if this was an understandable compliment.

  “Sure you like it. That’s what I tell her, but some folks are funny.”

  Dariel had certainly found that to be true. “Why does she not like me?”

  “Her people have cooked for yours for generations now. She and I, we’re servants, got no business associating with royalty. She’s got a point, but I’ve my own way of thinking. You’re a good lad. And, anyway, in a year’s time or so you’ll not bother with me. You’ll stop coming around. I’m not meaning to offend. I just mean you’ll have better things to do. You’ll have your training. You’ll have the whole business of becoming a prince. Now, Karan, she thinks you’ll be the death of me somehow. Said she dreamed as much; to which I said she must’ve been eating her own cooking too close to bedtime. But she does have a way of making one think. So let me ask you…What’s this all about then?” Dariel looked suitably perplexed enough for Val to go on. He leaned close to the boy and squeezed his brows into one large central knot between his eyes. “Why are you down here with me, eating my rock biscuits, sharing my black tea? You’re a prince, Dariel, this food must be like eating dirt to you, not to mention the matter of my low company.”