Spratling placed himself before the leagueman’s defiant eyes. He had to be quick without seeming to hurry. “What is your name?”
“You don’t know?” the man asked. “I know yours. Unless I am wrong you’re the one they call Spratling. I would never have imagined your name would be so appropriate. You are but a little fish. You would do better to hide your little worm from view. You know that, don’t you?”
“What is your name?” Spratling repeated.
The leagueman pursed his lips, as if considering the nature of the question. Eventually he said, “I am Sire Fen, vice admiral of Ishtat naval operations.” He grinned. “I am what you call a big fish.”
Throughout this exchange Spratling watched Clytus and Wren out of the corner of his eye. As he spoke with the leagueman they interrogated the bound and tooth-broken pilot, who had been spared. Clytus smacked him several times with the back of his hand, threatened him in whispers meant not to disturb Spratling. He could not tell if they were making progress or not.
One of the guards outside peered in and signaled that they were all together again but that time was short.
“You cannot expect to take this ship,” Sire Fen said. “In truth, you have but minutes to live, young brigand. That’s the problem with your type. You don’t think before you leap.” He paused for a moment, head tilted to the side, and then asked with true curiosity, “What did you hope to achieve here? You brought, what, ten thieves to take a warship?”
“We are not trying to take the ship,” Spratling said, though his attention was only partially on the leagueman now. He thrust his chin toward the door, enough instruction that two of his men closed on it, bows drawn. They both let arrows sing out the portal.
“No?” Sire Fen asked. “What did you have in mind, then?”
Spratling glanced at Clytus, who had paused in such a way as to draw his attention. He stood over what looked like an open crate, though from his gaze and the way he spoke with a nod, Spratling knew he had found what they thought they would. Wren yanked the twine between her breasts. She caught the pill as it fell from her back with one hand and tilted the glass shade of an oil lamp free with the other.
“There are more ways to strike at an enemy than the obvious ones,” Spratling said.
“Oh,” the leagueman said, nodding with new understanding. “You seek a prisoner. A hostage? You’ll ask for a bounty for me. Is that it? A bold idea, I grant you, but—”
Setting his eyes back on Sire Fen, Spratling interrupted him. “You want to destroy us, don’t you?”
The leagueman scrunched his face about his nose as if he smelled something foul. “Each and every one of you.”
“Why? Are we so great a threat to you?”
“You are not a threat at all. You’re like rats in a city. Shitting everywhere. Stealing. Spreading disease. Yes, the league plans to eliminate every last one of you.”
Spratling shook his head, something like disappointment heavy on his features. “That’s why you don’t understand my goal tonight. You want to kill many. Tonight, I only care about killing one.”
The leagueman’s face registered bewilderment in a slow progression all its own. First, at the words. Then, looking down, he almost seemed to flush with embarrassment. Spratling had sunk his knife to the hilt in his chest. He pulled it out, flipped the grip in his fist, and slashed Fen’s neck so deeply that his breath issued out of the crescent, bubbly with blood. The two raiders holding him stepped back, and the leagueman fell into a formless crumple on the floor.
“Kill the pilot,” Spratling said, “and let’s get out of here.”
The pilot shrieked. “No! No! No! Don’t kill me.” He pointed a crooked finger at Spratling’s chest. “I can tell you what hangs from your neck! Please, lord, I can tell you what that is!”
The raider stayed his men with an arm. “What?”
It took the man a moment to recover his breath. He pointed to the leather twine around Spratling’s neck, to the gold object he had taken from the league brig months ago. “On your neck. That pendant. Do you know what it is?”
Spratling did not look down at it, as the man seemed to want him to. “Speak fast.”
“Will you spare me?”
“Not if you don’t speak fast.”
To his credit, the pilot exercised a dexterous tongue. The things he said proved most interesting. Enough so that Spratling, surprising even himself, ordered the man taken prisoner. “You and I will need to talk at greater leisure.” Over the man’s shrieks of protest at this, Spratling said, “Wren, light it and drop it.” The order given, he moved toward the door. A moment later the pill was loosed and falling through the network of pipes the pilot used to send messages into the bowels of the ship, the short fuse of it crackling as it fell.
The deck was alive with action now. Soldiers erupted from the various hatches of the ship. They came on—helmeted and armored, behind shields—steady in their progress. The raider’s archers loosed the last of their arrows, and then they all dashed toward the rear of the ship. At the railing, Spratling turned to the others. “Remember to clench your ass muscles, unless you want water to flush your insides from the bottom up.” He said this casually, but his gaze settled on Wren. “Are you sure you can do this?”
Wren pushed past him and mounted the railing. “Worry about yourself,” she said. A moment later she jumped. Her long hair rose above her as she vanished, each tendril reaching for the sky as she fell. Spratling hoped like hell that she survived, for something about the parting image shot him through with carnal desire.
He made sure the pilot was shoved overboard, and then he threw his leg over the railing. As he fell, piercing through layer after layer of air, he sensed the concussions within the ship beside him and knew that their pill had erupted deep within it. It contained a concoction they had paid a good deal for, an explosive in liquid form. The explosion going off inside the bowels of the warship would not destroy it. He knew that. Even if it ignited some of the pitch they used so viciously there was little hope of sinking the thing. But it would leave them with quite a bellyache. He smiled thinking about it. Then he clenched for impact.
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
That first night Mena only listened. She allowed the man who called himself Melio, and who claimed to know her and her family, into the inner courtyard of her compound. She had never done such a thing before with any man. It was an act forbidden the priestess of Maeben, one that the day before would have seemed impossible. But in this one’s company unthought-of things happened. They sat together on the hard-packed earthen floor. Unnerved by a male presence, her servants lingered in the shadows, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. Mena just stared at the young man; he, seemingly encouraged by her silence, let flow a rambling discourse.
He spoke Acacian, and so Mena knew her servants would not understand a word. What amazed her was that she did. She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing.
He had been a soldier of Acacia, a young Marah faced with the first mass attack upon the empire in many, many generations. The things he witnessed in the war were too horrible to speak of in any but the most general terms. He had lost everything a man can lose except his life. He had seen most of the people he cared about killed or enslaved, or watched them betray their nation for a new master. He had held Acacian superiority as a given, and it still amazed him that Hanish Mein dismantled his nation’s military might so completely.
He had been wounded in one of the small skirmishes after Alecian Fields. While in pathetic retreat, the fever caught up with him. When he woke from it, the world around him had changed completely. He had been so defeated, he said, that if the will to die was sufficient to cause death, he would not be before her now. He would even ha
ve taken his own life, except that such an action was all but impossible for a soldier trained as he was. He joined the resistance in Aushenia for a time, using the work to try to win himself an honorable death. He failed at this too.
He was eventually saved from orchestrating his own death by the power of rumor. One drunken night a Teh mercenary informed him that the Akaran children had been spirited to safety. The bearer of this news could name no credible source to verify his claim, but he laid out a simple logic. Only Corinn had been captured, yes? The fact that Hanish put her on display only highlighted the absence of the others. He would have done the same with the others if he’d caught them, wouldn’t he? On the other hand, could anyone prove that they’d been killed? Had bodies or heads been produced? Had anything been displayed to the public to confirm the Akarans’ fate one way or another? The answers were obvious, and with them new possibilities dawned. The simplest of them—the one that Melio hitched himself to—was that if the Akaran line was not extinguished it could be returned to power again.
He decided to stay alive as best he could, to wait out the passing of time in the hopes that there might be some truth to the tales. For the last three years he worked for the floating merchants. His route followed the seasonal currents that circulated the Inner Sea. He had thrice ventured as far out as the Vumu Archipelago, with whom the merchants traded. He never stayed long and had never beheld the priestess of Maeben before. How fortunate it was that he had found her. She was alive! So there was reason to believe that Dariel was alive also. And surely Aliver lived and even now was planning to regain the throne. The rumors were true, and Melio thanked the Giver that he had not died before discovering this for himself.
She sent him away as dawn approached, promising nothing, admitting nothing, betraying no sign of the effect he had on her. She lay on her cot as the day came on, hot and bright as always. Her mind was surprisingly empty. She knew it should be raging with fears and doubts, memories stirred, questions raised. But she simply could not grasp onto any one thought long enough to face its import. She lay until she slept, woke when her servant warned her of the late afternoon hour, rose, and did her duties as priestess.
She returned in the early evening to find that the Acacian waited for her on the path again. Once more she let him into her compound and sat down to hear him speak. When she sent him away hours later she had still not promised anything. She admitted nothing, betrayed no sign that she thought anything of the tales he told. She slept hard through the morning, woke to the heat of noon, and stared at the ceiling above her, listening to the rustle of lizards hunting insects in the thatch. Melio had an unremarkable face, she decided. Unremarkable, and yet for some reason she very much wanted to see it again.
The next evening he awaited her at the gate to her compound. He rose from squatting as she approached, called her “Princess,” and stepped inside when she nodded that he could do so. Once they were seated across from each other, in the same arrangement as the previous evenings, the young man resumed his discourse. Amazing, really, that after two nights of talking he still found things to say. He’d heard that the prince’s agents were afoot in the land, he said, working covertly to bring divergent sectors of the resistance together. There had even been a revolt in the Kidnaban mines, led by a prophet who swore he had dreamed of Aliver’s return. Soon Aliver would summon his siblings to unite their armies, he said. Many were anxious to believe him.
Mena heard and filed away the things he told her. She also spent some time confirming that his face was, in fact, unexceptional, studying him feature by feature to be sure. Hair long and unkempt, often falling over his eyes so that he had to flick it away, brown eyes of no particular note, teeth too prominent when he smiled, cheeks that look cherubic, but only viewed from certain angles: average in every way. Not unattractive but not particularly noble or strong or suggestive of great wisdom. So there it was, confirmed. It seemed strange that she had wondered about his appearance at all.
And with this question behind her, Mena interrupted him. “You say that a prophet of the mines dreamed of Aliver? Tell me, did this prophet describe his features? Did he know what my brother looked like, how he spoke? Did he know of his character? My brother never saw the mines up close; how is it that somebody in the mines knows so much about him?”
It was hard to tell whether Melio’s stunned expression was in reaction to what she had said or just to the fact that she had strung that many sentences together. He stared at her more fixedly than he did while speaking, when his eyes tended to bounce around from object to object. “I cannot say from where a prophet’s gift comes,” he said, “but I believe there is something to it. And I believe your brother has strengths he has yet to discover. I always thought that about him, even when we were boys. To the people at large he is a symbol. Few people in the Known World ever set eyes upon your brother, but they all know his name. They all imagine him as they wish him to be. He is hope in a time when people desperately need hope. Maybe that is as much what the resistance is about as anything. We meet secretly, spread our messages by word of mouth, seek one another out through personal references. I met with a group in a household near Aos once. There were perhaps fifteen of us, but as soon as the doors were closed and we felt safe in one another’s company we opened up and spoke like old friends. We spoke of the hardships we’d seen and the loved ones we’d lost and the dreams we have for the future. It was a wonderful evening, and at the center of it was the hope embodied by the young Akarans. It doesn’t surprise me that you know nothing of this here. There are few in the resistance living as far out as Vumu. Although, fortunately, I am here, and here you are as well.”
Without drawing attention to the act, Mena ran her fingers through her hair, parting it in the back and pulling strands over her shoulders. Thus she hid her breasts. She had never before felt embarrassed by her semi-nudity. With Melio, however, she was increasingly aware of her body. She said, “You say that we—the Akaran children—are poised to appear again, leading an army that will overthrow Hanish Mein’s empire. What are you talking about? Look at me. I’m an Akaran. We both know that much. So where is my army? Look around. Do I look like I’m about to wage a war?”
“I’ve thought about that,” Melio said, making sure his eyes stayed fixed on hers. “I cannot explain it. Perhaps in your case something went amiss.”
Her dead guardian certainly qualified as something gone amiss. But Mena admitted nothing. Instead, she told him he had to go. He could, however, return in the morning. They might as well speak in the light of day for once. She had not planned to say this. The words rose out of her of their own accord. Afterward, she wondered why. And then she realized, and it seemed strange to her that she might act in a certain way and only know afterward what had prompted her.
The next morning Melio stood at her gate. She signaled for him to be let in. As he walked toward her, squinting in the sun until reaching the shade, she said, “I never caught the fever.”
“Everybody got the fever,” Melio said. “It swept the world.”
“Yes, it came through the archipelago. But it did not sweep me.” She said this matter-of-factly with a clipped tone that closed off any dissent. She changed tack with the next breath. “In Vumu culture women are not allowed to wield weapons. That was not so in Acacia, was it?”
Melio, reluctant to leave her earlier statement, took a moment before deciding to answer. “In our country any girl who was inclined could receive training. So long as they met the men’s standard they weren’t restricted from service.”
“Did many meet the standard?”
“Most who tried did, I believe. The Seventh Form is that of Gerta. She fought the twin brothers Talack and Tullus and their three wolf dogs. It took her two hundred and sixteen moves to defeat them, but she did. Both brothers lost their heads, and the dogs each a limb or two. So at times women did not just meet the standard, they set it.”
Mena stared into the middle distance, lost in thought for a moment. S
he knew why she had arranged for Melio to be here and what she was going to ask him. She had regained herself enough to control the moment. Even so, her own desires surprised and confused her. They had nothing in common with the role she had grown so accustomed to. She was a priestess of Maeben. She had been so for years now and been content. But still she opened her mouth and moved closer to what she wanted to ask. “And you know all the Forms?”
“I learned only the first five properly.”
“And the rest?”
“I know them,” Melio said. “I learned the last Forms in a rush, more from texts than from real training. The world was already falling apart then…”
“Melio, I want you to teach me to use a sword.” There. She’d said it. She knew it as a betrayal and departure from all that she had become, but she had to admit that she felt calmer at the center than she would have imagined. She did want to learn. She had wanted to for a long time. She had often entertained violent thoughts while Vaminee lectured her or dreamed of dancing about with her Marah sword at night, waking to wonder if something was wrong with her.
“Are you serious?”
The question bolstered her certainty. “Of course I am.”
“Princess, I’m no instructor. And I have no weapons anymore. I cannot teach without—”
Mena cut him off by shooting to her feet. “What you lack the goddess will provide. Come.”
A short time later, in a storeroom at the rear of her compound, with light filtering down through the thatch of the walls and roof, dust thick in the air between them, Mena stood with her arms stretched out before her. Her palms cradled the sheathed sword she had swam to the shore of Vumu with nine years before. It was stained with a rust taint in some of the engraving. There was not the shine on it that there should have been, but still there was much underlying beauty in the artistry of it.
“This was the only thing I carried with me from Acacia,” she said. “It would not let me go. The priests never dared to take it from me. It must have seemed a sort of charm to them. So long as I agreed to hide it, they left it with me and have not spoken of it since. Do you know this weapon? Ones like it, I mean.”
The War with the Mein Page 41
