“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.
“These are men you want to test yourself against?”
If she entered the circle with one of them, she risked a hundred injuries and would gain nothing for it. Why do that? It simply did not make sense. She was vain beyond all reason if she believed a month of sword training had prepared her for such a test. And, anyway, if found out, the wrath of the priests would fall upon her, endangering everything.
Thus was Melio’s rant. It did not do the least bit of good. Mena chose the day she appeared in the rough ring of the stick fighters. She dyed her skin with blackberry juice, leaving it a strange tint but not entirely unnatural. She wrapped her torso in a binding cloth that flattened her small breasts, dressed as a laborer, and bound her hair as Vumu men did. She held her open eyes above a smoky fire long enough to redden them, like those of a mist smoker. No doubt she looked unusual, but none who saw her imagined her to be the priestess of Maeben.
With Melio as a guide, she found the stick fighting gathering at the far side of Ruinat. Discovering it was the easy part. Getting into the ring, she thought, might be more difficult. She shouldered her way into the throng of men. They were young and old, laborers and dockworkers, hill farmers and urchins of the town, the smell of them rank and thick, the air clouded with sweat and mist smoke. She knew these people. She recognized faces from ceremonies. But she was not Maeben now. There was no distance separating them now. She was not arrayed in the guise of a goddess.
The ring man approached her, taking her in from head to toe, grinning. She thought he might ask her to explain herself, to justify being there. But he had no interest in her credentials. He was all business. He informed her that all new fighters had to earn the right to compete. Their first match was always with the one who held the ring’s title. The new fighter had to put up the entry fee. The sum, of course, was essentially forfeit. She would lose, but afterward she would be able to compete with lesser fighters.
“If I win,” Mena said, keeping her voice clipped and low, “am I then the title holder?”
The man laughed. “If you win, you’ve earned a place at the bottom, that’s all. Do you still wish to fight?”
“Of course.”
“Then you fight Teto,” the ring man said.
Teto, the said champion of the ring, was happy to oblige. He pushed through the sweaty bodies and stepped into the circle of cleared sand, where Mena awaited him. His stick, which he held toward the point and carried pressed up against the back of his arm, slid through his loosened fingers until his fist tightened around the hide-wrapped hilt. He moved with a demeanor quite different from Melio’s. His bare feet were careful in their placement but playful. He was light upon the toes, his legs rubbery bands of muscles that supported a floating, tranquil torso. His head seemed the weightiest portion of his body, eyes deep set in the skull and hard on her.
Mena did not have time to think much. Teto opened the duel; she responded. Within a few seconds she decided to fight him with the deadening defense. It was not something she had practiced before or named in advance. But from the first moments she knew that his strength was his greatest attribute and his pride in this was likely his greatest flaw. Instead of exerting extra energy in the impact of their sticks, she let her own force give when she parried. She stopped his strike but without the normal impact he was used to. He struck again harder and harder, his anger showing on his face and in the quickening pace of his strikes. But each time he touched her stick, it gave against his with a limpness he clearly found disturbing, as if he had struck a heavy rope that somehow diffused his force.
The end of the match came so quickly that the onlookers stood stunned afterward. Teto rushed her, his stick straight before him, intent on impaling her with his blade or flattening her with the rush of his body. Mena simply touched his stick with hers, slipped to the side, kept his weapon in place with the pressure of hers sliding over it. She lifted to clear his hilt and then snapped her stick across the base of his exposed neck with all the force her body could muster. And that was it.
Teto dropped to the sand, his hands clasped to his throat, writhing in agony, his cries of angry pain the only sound within the hushed arena of bodies. For some moments the spectators stared about confused, looking from one another to the two fighters and then around again, trying from the scene before them to understand the blinding motion that had preceded it, each of them blinking as if in so doing the world would snap into the rightful order, the outcome of the match reversed. Mena let them study this for a few moments, and then she turned on her heel in the sand and pushed through the crowd.
“Where was your fear?” Melio asked, jogging to keep up with her as they wove the back alley trail toward the temple compound.
“I don’t know,” Mena said. And it was true. She had forgotten there even was such a thing as fear. She’d felt only exhilaration and purpose as she faced Teto. Now she jogged with a positively giddy energy. “I just knew I could beat him. I had to be careful, yes. But I did not fear.”
“He would have liked to have hurt you.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
They carried on in silence for a time. As they came out of the shrubs near the compound wall, Melio said, “Can I convince you not to do that again?”
Mena stopped and turned toward him. Looking at his brown eyes and crooked lips and disheveled hair she realized that she felt very different in his presence now from the way she had when he first arrived. She was more at home within herself, more at peace, especially so when in his company. Strange that all the hours fighting could bring them closer. All the time with their bodies pressed close together in physical contest, moist with sweat, each trying to best the other, pain and humiliation only a mistake away. Part of her wanted to acknowledge that there was something special in what they had become to each other. But she was not sure just what to say or how to say it.
She spoke simply. “Thank you for the things you’ve taught me.”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure that I taught you anything, Mena. It feels more like I just reminded you of things you already knew. You may have been born to wield a sword. Do not laugh. I’m not joking….”
He hesitated a moment. The deepening furrows in his forehead suggested he might have something more to say. He did have something more to say! The same sort of thoughts she herself had. She read it all on his face in an instant. Though it sent a trilling of excitement through her body, Mena moved before he could speak. She patted his arm and turned and jogged the last stretch to the compound.
Arriving back at the gate, she found Vandi waiting for her. The summons he bore was the one she had come to most dread. She w
as needed in the anteroom of the temple in little more than two hours. It could only mean that Maeben had taken another child. It was the fourth in less than two months.
She parted from Melio without a word, shutting him out of the compound. Inside, Vandi waited to one side as she stripped naked and stepped into her bath, scrubbing her skin furiously to remove the berry tint from her skin. Vandi watched her with his greenish eyes, his lips tightly clamped. He offered neither comment nor question, though he must have noted every detail of her disguise. He had even seen her hand her stick to Melio.
Mena scrubbed her face raw without actually getting all the stain off. But when she could take it no more she gave up. She and Vandi walked briskly to the temple, where he dressed her as the goddess. The makeup appliers lathered unguents on liberally. By the time they set her headdress in place she looked firmly within her role. Only then did she remember to slow her breathing and cool her body and think away the beads of sweat that threatened to smear her façade. She thought back to her claim that she had not been afraid to fight Teto. It had been true at the time, she was sure. She tried to summon such courage again. Looking into the faces of grieving parents, however, was not something she would ever grow comfortable with.
She seated herself on the large chair in the anteroom of the temple. Vaminee stood in his usual place beside her. He tugged his robes snug and showed Mena his chin in profile, nothing unusual in that. Tanin, the second priest, took up a position at her left hand. He was not usually a part of these interviews. He watched her with an intense consideration that made her skin itch.
“Priestess, you may be interested to learn,” Tanin said, “that a delegation of foreign warriors arrived in Galat yesterday.”
Mena felt a need to reach out and steady herself, but she knew she was already seated, already steadied. Being careful to keep her voice neutral, blandly uninterested, she asked, “What do they want?”
“We thought you might have an opinion on them,” Vaminee said.
“How could I know anything about them?”
Neither priest responded.
“I—I’ve heard rumors that war may be coming to the foreign lands. If that’s true, perhaps these soldiers want our aid.”
“That may be true,” Vaminee said, “and it may not be true. They claim to seek a lost child and believe she may be living on Vumu. In any event, it’s none of our affair. I’ve told the foreigners nothing as yet. The goddess is displeased with the islanders. That’s all we need concern ourselves with. We must first appease Maeben. Then we will decide on a course for dealing with the delegation.”
This was meant to end the subject, but Mena had to know at least a little more. “The foreigners…what nation are they from?”
“How should I know?” Vaminee asked.
“They are pale,” Tanin said. “They have skin like pig flesh.”
An ugly description, but coming from Tanin it was hard to know its accuracy. “I should meet with them,” Mena said. “As Maeben, I mean…Perhaps it is Maeben’s wish that Vumu play a role in the world. If I see them while in the goddess’s garb I might understand what she would wish.”
“You’ve done poorly at that lately. The fourth child taken since—”
“That’s no fault of mine! I hate that the goddess takes children. I’d do anything to make her stop.”
Vaminee closed his eyes, head tilted slightly, the muscles of his jaw rigid with anger. “You forget yourself entirely, girl. I didn’t want to believe it, but it’s whispered that you’ve been playing about with wooden swords. Is this true?”
“Within the walls of my compound I’m free to—”
“So it’s true.” Vaminee exchanged glances with the other priest. “You must stop this at once. People talk, Priestess. You may do as you wish in your compound up to a point. You cannot dishonor Maeben.”
The curtain at the far side of the room parted, indicating that the grieving parents were about to enter.
Vaminee noted it but continued. “You will stop immediately. And your friend—yes, I know of him—will leave next week when the floating merchants embark. If he remains, he will suffer for it. And you will suffer for it.”
The procession stepped through the entrance. The two parents, flanked by lesser priests, moved forward slowly, with grief-drenched reverence. From the instant Mena saw the couple she felt her heart accelerate. It took her a moment to truly understand why. They stepped forward slowly, faces tilted toward the floor, hands held before them beseechingly. They seemed so very familiar. Their shapes and movements…she’d seen them before! It was the same couple she’d seen weeks before when they’d lost their baby girl. If her eyes weren’t lying…if it was really them…
“No,” Mena said. “Not them…I promised them the goddess wouldn’t take their second child.”
Vaminee snapped his head toward her. “Foolish girl! That promise was not yours to make. Look these two in the face and see the results of your false pride.”
CHAPTER
FORTY-EIGHT
The cliffside resorts of Manil were amazing to behold. As black as the night sky, the basalt walls rose more than two thousand feet into the air from the sea swells, vertical all the way to their heights. Residences had been wedged into fissures up and down the expanse of stone. Some actually hung from protrusions, slung in place by intricacies of architecture Corinn could only marvel at. They were painted pale blues and violets, hung with banners that danced in the air’s tumultuous currents.
As the homes were playgrounds in which rich merchants mingled with nobility, the Akarans had never deigned to buy a property here, but others among the extended royal family had. A girlhood friend whose family had a holiday home at Manil had bragged that the lower floors were made of thick glass panes that provided views of the waves hundreds of feet below. She claimed she could step out of bed and walk across her room, all the time watching the paths winged by gulls beneath her feet. Corinn had never visited that particular villa. She had been wary of believing the girl, but the memory had lingered, enough so that she recalled it from the moment she set eyes on Manil.
To reach the estates from the sea, one docked within the protection of a gated port, hemmed in by great blocks that had been lowered to serve as breakwaters. One morning well into the Acacian spring, Corinn stepped from a pleasure vessel onto this stone pier, Hanish Mein at her side. The two climbed into an open-top carriage and began the switchback ascent up a series of ramps. Though she still tried, it was getting more and more difficult to hold to her aloofness. Hanish was constant in his attentions, more so recently than ever. In the weeks since Calfa Ven he had requested her company on every journey. And there had been several. He had somehow managed to get her to serve as a guide to the high circles of Bocoum. With carefully placed questions—during what must have been orchestrated moments of solitude—Hanish again and again got her to open her mouth and speak civilly to him. She still planted barbs in him when she could, but he proved more consistent with his courteousness than she could be at rebutting him.
The villa they were to stay in was lavish in the way only vacation homes ever were, designed to attest to the owner’s wealth, to pamper guests for short periods. It would have belonged to an Acacian family, perhaps one known to her. She did not ask. Such things failed to trouble Corinn as they once had. Everything, it seemed, had once belonged to Acacians. Now it belonged to Meins. She knew she should consider this a personal affront, but indignation was hard to hold on to year after year. She had been fluent in the Meinish language for some time. Aspects of their culture that had once seemed foreign to her now blended—in courtly circles, at least—so intricately with Acacian ways that it was hard to know where one ended and the other began.
The villa had been anchored to the plains above the cliffs. It draped over the upper rim and stretched down several stories. One room flowed into the next with a sensation almost like sliding, as if the rooms moved to adjust to your progress. One reached a room simply by initiati
ng a motion toward it. Corinn found it all somewhat disconcerting, yet pleasurably so. All the walls facing the sea made full use of the vistas, with building-length patios or windows set low on the walls to reveal the heaving sea far below. The mosaic pattern on the floor simulated ocean waves, whitecapped and frothy. Porpoises leaped into and out of the swells. Fishermen clung to tiny boats, tilted at precarious angles that would have overturned actual vessels. Left alone in her room, Corinn spent a portion of the afternoon on her knees, studying the details, dragging her fingertips across the tumultuous motion. It was so well done. She loved the way the fishermen seemed always on the verge of destruction, loved that their smiling faces suggested they thought it all a great game.
The first evening, she and Hanish attended a banquet hosted by a newly rich Meinish family. In times past Hanish would have entertained the gathering at her expense, finding something to needle her about. But the usual entourage had not come on this trip. Hanish was cordial enough with his hosts, but he never truly engaged with them, despite their repeated efforts to bring him to the center of things. He simply did not seem that interested, neither in them nor in the music; nor in the food and drink so abundant around them; nor in the fawning gestures of men and women alike, all of them so eager to praise Hanish Mein, their hero, the only Mein to ever ascend to the throne of an empire, the one who might yet lift the old curse. He was the greatest chieftain in the history of their people, and folk such as these never tired of praising him for it.
Instead of paying them any mind, he blocked out a space for himself and Corinn to share privately. She could no longer deny—at least not to herself—that she enjoyed speaking as he listened. She enjoyed answering queries, liked to have his gray eyes upon her, liked knowing that the rest of the room watched from outside the pull of his gravity. The confidence which she had once thought of only as arrogance actually had an allure to it.
And Hanish relaxed in her presence, even as troubling affairs of state crowded his mind. He told her of the league’s ongoing campaign against the Outer Isles raiders. It had not gone as easily as the league had predicted, he said. Not at all. One captain of the bandits called himself “Spratling”—an ironic play on words, no doubt, as there was a tiny, inconsequential fish that went by that name. This Spratling was not at all inconsequential. In addition to hobbling a warship and actually killing a leagueman, he had exploded a portion of the league platforms. The initial blast tore the warehouses to pieces and threw up a spray of flaming pitch that set the entire structure ablaze. Even the stuff that fell into the sea continued to burn. It floated on the surface and came riding the swells toward the other platforms with each shift in the tides. The fires, his sources said, burned for a week before they were contained or dissipated. The raiders had done so much damage that the league postponed the spring shipment of mist. They would be months working to recover, backlogged in every province.
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