The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  But the words that finally escaped her surprised her. She did not speak them in Vumu. She used the language she sometimes dreamed in, the language of her half-forgotten childhood. She said that she was sorry for them. She could not begin to understand their sadness. If she could undo it, she would. She would give them back their round-faced girl. She truly would.

  “But I cannot,” she said. “Maeben cares for your daughter now. You, though, should love your son twice as much. You have given to the goddess. Now your lives will be blessed and your son will be a joy to you always.”

  Leaving the chamber later, Mena wondered what the priest would have done to her if he had understood the language she had spoken in. It was bad enough that he had heard her speak the other language. He would likely chastise her for it later, but this never frightened her as much as the priest thought it did. Sometimes as he spoke she imagined herself drawing the old Marah sword she had arrived on the island with and cutting off his head. She saw just how she would do it, even imagining the blood and gore of it. It surprised her that her thoughts could turn so violent, but perhaps that was just a result of living so long as a representative of Maeben’s anger.

  She wondered if her speech had done any good for the couple. Certainly her words had been gibberish to them. Perhaps it was just a cowardly act, an incomplete confession. Why was she always drawn to this other language when faced with the most difficult of moments?

  She was still wrapped up in these thoughts that evening as she left the main temple building and headed for her private quarters. She was dressed in a simple shift to ward off the sea breeze. Her bare feet padded on the packed sand, the path before her lit to bone gray by the stars, hemmed in on one side by a hedge of low bushes. She knew the way by heart and never carried a light with her.

  She froze in mid-step, thinking she heard something—a whisper, perhaps, some sound that did not belong and had already vanished. But there was nothing except near silence, an insect chirping in the undergrowth and the quick scrabble of a rodent alarmed at her sudden immobility, a dog barking in town and some voices from back at the temple: that was it. The longer she listened the more she doubted that there had been a sound of any consequence at all. She had almost settled in to the comfort of this, when there was a rustling in the brush behind her.

  She spun around to see a man’s shape step into silhouetted being behind her. He must have hidden in the bushes until after she passed. He was taller than any Vumu in the village. He had to be an off islander, a sailor or raider, someone who meant her harm. Why else would he come upon her in the dark, alone? She calculated the distance to the village and considered her prospects of darting around him and back to the compound. She could scream. If so, how long would she have before someone reached her? She clenched her hands into fists, feeling the sharpness of her nails against her flesh, feeling the quick-beating calm that she understood as anger. She felt more the goddess at that moment than she had earlier, when she had worn her finery.

  “Mena? It is you, isn’t it?”

  She understood him clearly enough, and for a moment she noted that his accent was indeed not of the island. But then she understood something else. He had not spoken to her in Vumu. He spoke…he spoke that other language. She recognized the words and knew their meaning even as she tasted the strangeness of hearing them spoken by another. He had called her by her first name, something known to few on the island. For a moment she feared she had brought a demon upon herself. Perhaps the goddess abhorred her for speaking in that foreign tongue. Perhaps this one who addressed her was here to punish.

  “What do you want?” she asked, consciously speaking in Vumu. “I have nothing you can have, so leave me. I serve the goddess. Her wrath is keen.”

  “So I have heard,” he said. “But you don’t look like a giant sea eagle that snatches up young children. You don’t look like that at all.” The man took a step closer. She backed up, and he held up a hand to calm her. There was a noise in the compound. As the stranger cocked his head, the light on his profile was just strong enough for her to recognize the sailor who had stared at her that morning. For some reason, this mystified her more than it frightened her. “You speak Vumu like a native, but you are not, are you? Tell me I am not wrong. You are Mena Akaran, of the Tree of Acacia.”

  Mena shook her head, saying “I am Maeben on earth” several times, but not loudly enough to interrupt him.

  “Your brother was Aliver. Your sister, Corinn. Dariel was the youngest. Your father was Leodan—”

  “What do you want?” she snapped, not a question at all but a sudden shout that burst from her chest, a need to silence him because the names he was saying and the language he was speaking so calmly did not reach her calmly at all.

  “You know me, Mena. I was your brother’s companion, from his training group. My father was Althenos. He handled records for your father in the palace library. I danced with you when you were ten. Remember? You stood on the flat of my feet and caused me no end of pain. Say that you remember me. Please, Mena.”

  All through this speech he moved closer to her. Though the light got no better, his nearness drew out his features. She could only partially recall the things he said. They jostled and shoved about in her mind, arguing with the impossibility that he was standing before her uttering such things. And yet she did know his face. She recognized the boy he had once been in his eyes, still so large on his face, wide set and calming. His lips were parted, but her internal vision remembered what they looked like when he smiled, the way mirth transformed his features.

  “Princess,” the man said, dropping to his knees, “I had given up hope…. Tell me you are you and that I am not mistaken.”

  “What is your name?” she asked, her voice calmer than she felt. She could see his eyes reflecting the starlight. She watched something change in them and realized they had filled with tears.

  He said, “I am Melio.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Rialus Neptos had once believed that his governorship of the Mein Satrapy had been the great curse of his life. He hated that frozen place, filled with rough, outcast citizens of the empire. He seethed when he thought about the dismissive air with which the Akarans treated him, so much so that he had been willing to do anything to win a better situation in life. Thus, he had called upon low elements among his acquaintances in Alecia—family members, criminals, opportunists of every stripe—to rise and cause all manner of confusion to coincide with Hanish Mein’s attack. He had watched with joy as the city spun into chaos. For a few short days he had lived in complete euphoria, seeing the old order swept away, awaiting the new reign of Hanish Mein, sure that he had earned a place of prominence within it.

  How utter a betrayal, then, that Hanish had—in a maneuver that the new ruler must have thought the greatest joke on record—made Rialus personal liaison to Calrach, the headman of the thronging Numrek horde. Rialus often woke screaming from a nightmare of the moment when the chieftain had told him of the appointment. Hanish had pointed out that Rialus was one of the first Acacians the Numrek had encountered. He claimed that the Numrek still spoke warmly of the reception he had given them at Cathgergen. Rialus had demonstrated his fortitude, his skills at dealing with the rough race the Numrek were.

  “You’re the man for it, Rialus,” he said. “You’ve more than earned it.”

  Rialus had offered a nervous rebuttal. He knew nothing about the Numrek! He wasn’t suited to the cold portions of the country the Numrek were to settle in. He’d much prefer a post nearer the heart of the nation, in Alecia or along the coast near Manil. Perhaps he could serve Hanish as the chief magistrate of Bocoum? Some such position as that. But liaison to the Numrek? He did not even speak their language. He did not wish to seem ungrateful, Rialus had said, but perhaps Hanish could reconsider. The beasts ate human flesh, after all! Hardly the sort of company a valued ally should be keeping.

  He regretted afterward that he had protested at all. Maeande
r was there to hear it and seemed to take pleasure out of his begging. The appointment held, and so began a new period of misery in Rialus’s life.

  There was some satisfaction to be taken from the fact that the Numrek ignored Hanish’s proclamations whenever they felt like it. They did not stay in the Mein, or even in Aushenia, as they had agreed to. Instead, they spread down toward the south. Calrach himself set up his court in a seized villa along the Talayan coast. Here, at least, Rialus found the warm weather he so enjoyed. But sun on the skin proved to be scant reward for other miseries of his daily existence.

  What activities served to pass the time for the Numrek? What sort of culture did they have and how did they choose to enjoy the bounty their service to Hanish in the war afforded them? Well, they loved roasting themselves in the sun, as if this alone was a pursuit worthy of reasonable beings. On clear days they would lie naked on the sand of the seashore, only moving so as to roll from one side to another, sipping drinks fetched for them by Acacian servants. The young ones were always in among the adults, being coddled one moment and knocked around the next, always afforded a clear vantage to any and all of the carnage.

  When not lying about in the sun, they would rise long enough to beat one another with clubs, with curved wooden sticks that often broke bones, with knives they deemed just short enough not to be fatal. They took pride in acquiring scars. Rialus made the mistake of showing his squeamishness around wounds, which meant only that he was daily presented with new gashes and tears, the Numrek watching his face and never failing to be amused by his reaction, no matter how hardened a façade he tried to present.

  He made another mistake regarding the spear-chucking game the Numrek enjoyed. It involved sending a slave dashing forward through an obstacle course as a spearman hurled a selection of javelins at him. Rialus once admitted that he found the spectacle amusing. In answer Calrach made Rialus himself run the course. He had pulled him from his seat and hefted a spear and smiled at him. “The trick,” he said, “is to be lucky.”

  Rialus had never run so fast in his life. His heart pounded so hard he imagined others could see it thumping against his chest. Each instant he was in the course, he felt at the edge of death. The spears thudded just behind him each step of the way, marking his progress. He was sure he would either die or spend the rest of his life twisted around some festering impalement. None of the spears struck him, however. And it was not until his heart calmed enough so that he could hear over its bass notes that he realized Calrach and his companions were howling with glee. Calrach had not been trying to hit him. It was a game to them. Everything was, and try as he might Rialus could not find the courage not to make a fool of himself.

  “Yes, Neptos, yes!” one of Calrach’s lieutenants said. “Very amusing. You are right!”

  They showed no inclination to higher forms of art. No painting or sculpture, no poetry or recorded history. They had no written language. They saw no need for it. In fact, their primitive nature went beyond anything Rialus had observed before. No function of the body embarrassed them. They would eat, belch, fart, defecate, fornicate, or even self-stimulate in clear view of anybody, without regard for sex or age or status. Rialus so amused them by seeking seclusion for his bodily functions that eventually he had to give up on privacy. It made him the butt of jokes; whereas dropping his trousers and piddling in the middle of the courtyard roused not the slightest interest. He sometimes wondered if the Numrek were, in fact, a race of human beings at all. Nine years at his post and he had yet to form a definitive answer to the question.

  He had learned the Numrek tongue, however. It was the strangest of languages. Even the simpler words were many-pronged monstrosities. They required contortions of the tongue and inhalations of breath and guttural inflections from low in the throat.

  The evening Calrach chose to bestow upon him his first official mission began as any other banquet night. Rialus, at someone’s humorous prompting, no doubt, was situated between two young women, concubines who were attached to no headman in particular. They did not look much different from the males, frankly. They brushed against him often; reached over him to grab morsels of food; prodded him with playful, thick-knuckled fingers.

  The worst thing about this placement was that the females actually aroused Rialus. He hated it, was disgusted by it, could not understand it; but truth be known he sat uncomfortably positioned around a rigidity at his groin. The women had a smell to them, a syrupy sort of scent like a fruit overripened and starting to turn. It was not a pleasant smell, but somewhere imbedded in it was an invitation to carnal excess. It was a sort of confused torture to endure the young women’s presence through the evening. Calrach seemed to understand his discomfiture and to relish it. Indeed, the chieftain never tired of observing and commenting on Rialus’s failings.

  “Rialus, you still don’t care for our food?” Calrach asked. “How can this be so? I have a dish for you. Try.” As a servant set down a bowl of the concoction, Calrach described it as a stew made of the intestines of their rhinos, fermented in the milk of the females of the species, and stored for months in barrels. It was splashed liberally with alcohol before serving.

  He watched Rialus touch a spoonful of the stuff to his lips. Unimpressed, he said, “Perhaps your stomach is too weak for this, like the rest of you.”

  The female to his left said, “There’s only one part of him that’s even the slightest bit hard.”

  “There is a great deal about my race you still must learn,” Calrach said. “Another year or so, and you’ll be Numrek yourself. And proud of it.” He guffawed at the absurdity of this, and then switched gears. “Rialus, tell me, do you think Hanish Mein honors us? We Numrek, I mean. We chosen ones. Does he insult us?”

  Rialus said, “I am not sure what you mean.”

  “Does he insult us?”

  Calrach had a habit of doing this—repeating the last thing he said as if to demonstrate that all possible answers, meanings, interpretations were contained in the words themselves, if only Rialus would look more carefully.

  Rialus asked, “What taste of insult have you felt?”

  Calrach shrugged, tossed a hand about, scratched his cheek forcefully enough to tear away a few scraps of peeling skin. “Not a taste, so much. A smell, though. There is a smell I don’t like. My grandfather used to speak of such a smell. It came from the Lothan, before they turned on us and drove us from their world. We used to be their personal army. You know that, don’t you? We were their allies for many generations, but they used us foully in the end. If I have one wish, Rialus, it’s to one day return to the Other Lands and bring the Lothan a new smell. You understand me.”

  Rialus hated it when he said that. He did so often, especially on occasions when Rialus did not understand him in the slightest. There was no use pushing it, however. Calrach had an orbital pattern of discourse that one had to adjust to. He would come back to the point later if it was something that mattered to him.

  Then the drums sounded, announcing the arrival of the main course. The evening was to feature a dish Rialus had not tried before, an event that always troubled him. The entire table before them suddenly rose, lifted above their seated heads by servants at each corner. It passed over Rialus, casting him in shadow. The young woman to his right grasped him across the bicep and purred something in his ear, an expression of anticipatory pleasure. By the time the first table cleared him the next table was being lowered into place.

  Before him lay a delicacy the Numrek called tilvhecki. It was about the size of a mature pig, and looked like a bloated skin sack, translucent enough to reveal its contents as some sort of gaseous, multihued offal. Calrach, in talking about the pleasure awaiting them, explained that the look of it was in keeping with the truth. Tilvhecki was the name they had for lamb. During their exile in the Ice Fields they’d had no sheep with them and therefore had been deprived of this dish for some time. It was made with the usual Numrek elements of fermentation and putrification. It began weeks prio
r when the meat and internal organs of a young lamb were left for several days exposed to the open air. The meat was not cooked just then, but it was basted in blood juices and spices and wine. When the thing was thriving with maggots it was shoved into the skin sack, sewn tight and left to ferment. It was eventually cooked, and placed as it was now before them, steaming hot.

  Calrach himself sliced the package open. With the first touch of the knife point, the contents gushed for freedom. The sight of the soft, mottled flesh surging out of the slit started a gag low in Rialus’s belly. The scent, when it smacked his face, carried a physical force that was like falling forward into a latrine. Rialus would have spilled his insides on the spot, except that he had already perfected mouth breathing. He bypassed his nose entirely and played air about on his tongue with shallow breaths.

  Calrach’s facial muscles twitched and pulled, exposing his irregular array of teeth. A grin, perhaps. “Tell me, Neptos, do you think us vile?”

  Rialus, answering as he knew he must, said that of course he did not think them vile. Happy to hear it, one of the women smacked a ladleful of the tilvhecki onto a platter for him. The other one shouted something to the group. The entire room turned toward him and waited for him to try the course. Rialus began to beg off on account of being stuffed already. Filled to the gills. Could not eat another mouthful. He pantomimed physical expressions of all these things, but nobody paid the slightest attention to his protests.

  “Eat! Eat! Eat of it!” somebody yelled. The chant caught on. Within a few repetitions every mouth in the place screamed it at him. Many leaned in close to him, their breath striking his face like gusts of putrid wind. “Eat! Eat! Eat of it!”

  Eventually, hating himself as much as the Numrek, Rialus lifted the spoon to his mouth and tipped the clump of meaty pungency onto his tongue. This was met with roars of laughter. Rialus sat immobile, his jaw tense, the morsel a dead weight in his mouth. Another Numrek, the chieftain’s brother, came up behind him. He slapped two great hands on him, one across the crown of his head, the other on his chin. He worked the man’s jaw into a chewing motion. This, too, was a mirth the party found almost unbearable to behold. They fell about the place, rolling among the cushions as if they had never witnessed anything so amusing.