The Sacred Band a-3

by David Anthony Durham

  When Kelis arrived, tired from running across the mainland, his friend Naamen with him, Aliver could not have been more ready for them.

  “I need your help,” Aliver said. “Each of you, I need you to fight with me in a way you have not before.”

  He stood before the small group he had summoned to meet him: Mena, Kelis, Naamen, Perrin, Haleeven, Rialus. “What I say here is, for now, to stay among this company. I am going to ask something of you that few others would understand, and I’m going to ask it for a goal not many would imagine possible. Mena knows what I intend. She is a skeptic, which I understand. Still, she helped me choose each of you for this. Mena herself has dream-talked with her sister’s spirit before. Perrin, Mena tells me you don’t know this, but you were kind enough to offer your body as a spirit vessel.”

  The young officer could not have looked more perplexed.

  “Corinn also reached you, Rialus, over a great distance. You must be sensitive to the spirit world. Kelis, you were born with powers over dreams, with gifts outside the waking world. Naamen, few people have spent as much time with sorcery in the air around them as you, and, Haleeven, I believe your people for generations knew much about conversing with the dead.”

  The old Mein nodded.

  “It’s those traits in each of you that I want to use. Before I tell you what I want us to do, I should tell you why I want us to do it.” He sat down to be closer to the others. “I am going to make peace with the Auldek.”

  “No!” Rialus barked. And then, surprised by his own outburst, asked much more quietly.” What… did you say?”

  Aliver repeated it. He saw exactly the concern and doubt he had expected-and which he had received from Mena as well. As with her, he took some time to explain himself, making it clear that he did not mean surrender or defeat in any way. He intended for both sides to gain much more in the agreement than they would lose by continuing to fight.

  By the time he finished, the concern and doubt had moved around on all their faces. It remained, but in differing proportions on each of them. Rialus was, again, the first to find his tongue. “Your Majesty, this… this cannot happen. Even if we offer it, they will never accept. You don’t know them as I do. They are fearless. Ruthless. They have no respect for life. Not their own or anybody’s. I saw them eat human flesh!”

  “Why did they eat flesh, Rialus?”

  “I told you!” Shocked again by his outburst, he said, “Your Majesty, I explained earlier. They thought it would make them fertile. They wanted to have children. They are so obsessed with-”

  “With life? That’s what they’re obsessed with. They are not casual about life. They hunger for it. More than anything else they want to be parents. Wouldn’t you say that?”

  Rialus thought for a moment. He seemed reluctant about the answer he came up with. “Yes, but they want war and conquest, murder just as much. They are vile. Just vile!”

  “They are not ‘just vile.’ There is more to them than that. If you cannot see that, then you have only one of two choices: destroy them or be destroyed by them. I want more than two choices. Rialus, you yourself told me the Auldek once built magnificent cities. You said they sing poems of love and tell tales of valor. You said that they trained birds to dance about them, to land even in their mouths! You said that in their country eating human flesh was a crime. And you said, Rialus, that you were certain that their codes of honor mean more to them than ours do to us. I’m sorry to use your own testimony against you, but the race you described to me was not entirely vile. And the part of it that is most vile-the ways they use our people as slaves, body and soul… that is something we partnered with them on.”

  Rialus shook his head. “I pray you destroy them all.”

  “I pray for something better,” Aliver said.

  Mena’s young officer Perrin spoke for the first time. “If we do make peace with them, what’s to stop them from becoming our enemies again sometime? They’ve suffered coming over here. We made sure of it.” He glanced down at his hands, which were wrapped with layers of new bandages. Frostbite, suffered on the long run south with the Auldek tormenting them. He had lost parts of all his fingers. He knew something about suffering, though it barely showed on his boyish face.

  What a group we are, Aliver thought. Perrin with his hands two bandaged mallets. Kelis with one hand part flesh and part metal. Naamen, born with one stunted arm, small of stature. Rialus, sniffling through his peeling nose, his eyes darting about, nervous as a mouse. Haleeven, once an enemy, now a grave face watching him from the back of the small group. And Mena, bruised and battered, her shoulder wrapped and arm in a sling, ready to shake free of it and bring up a sword again at a moment’s notice. An extraordinary group…

  “But what about in ten years?” Perrin asked. “Twenty? Who is to say they won’t come at us again? I would not want future generations to have to face them because we didn’t.”

  “Nor would I. But it may also be that a future generation will find them to be friends. I am an idealist, Perrin. Have you heard that about me?”

  The young man smiled. Nodded.

  “What else can I do but provide the possibility of us all finding our better natures?”

  Haleeven, sitting behind most of the others, said, “I can testify that such a thing is possible. Enemies may become friends.” Lest he sound wistful, he carried on more sharply, “But will our soldiers accept this? All these people, they’ve come to fight, haven’t they?”

  “They came to live. They came because living meant they might have to fight. It’s the peace they want, though, not the war that precedes it. If we can end this honorably, of course, the troops will support it. Perhaps in the future some will find cowardice in the act, but I hope they will see inspiration instead. Mena and Rialus-perhaps you as well, Perrin, Haleeven-think that the Auldek will accept nothing but victory on their terms. Right now, today, that’s probably true. But by tomorrow, if you help me, I believe we can have them thinking differently. Will you help me?”

  As nobody objected, Aliver explained it as best he could.

  T hey think you’re crazy,” Mena said, once the others had exhausted their questions, talked it all through, and then walked, mystified, out into the fading day.

  Aliver smiled. “Yes, but they will get past that soon. Before I got here, they thought you were the crazy one.” He caught the first scent of the dinner stew. That made him smile as well. He could count the time he had left alive on his fingers and toes, and yet he still knew hunger when his belly was empty.

  “How is Elya?” he asked.

  Mena nodded. “Much better. I think she is healed as much as she is going to. She is strong everywhere except the wing that the frekete chewed on. I’m not sure why. I think she could heal it if she wanted to, but… I don’t know. I may be imagining it. I may be thinking of myself instead, but I feel like the intent of the wound is what she fears. It was too malicious. She was not meant to be attacked like that.”

  “With time?” Aliver asked.

  “She will heal that, too. Yes, I think so. We will have to be far from here, though.”

  “Has she warmed to her children?”

  “No,” Mena said. “I know she recognizes them. She stares at them. They approach often, but she hisses them away. They’re so much bigger than she, but they fear her. Corinn took them from her. I don’t know if I can forgive her for that.”

  Aliver closed his eyes. He nodded and exhaled a breath and said, “I know.”

  With the hand of her good arm, Mena rubbed her injured shoulder. It, too, was healed she said, but only as healed as it could be. That arm had tried to leave her body several times already, the first when she was a girl being pummeled by the surf in Vumu, hand clenched around a sword too heavy for her to even lift at that point. The shoulder was healed by Elya’s touch, but that did not mean it had not been damaged by time and abuse.

  “Mena,” Aliver said, “I am going to die.”

  “You told me that a
lready, but I don’t need to believe it until it happens. Sire Dagon is a liar. I would not trust him to tell me whether it was snowing outside or not.”

  “You’ve changed, Mena. Before you came up here, you would not have talked of snow. You would have said, ‘I would not trust him to tell me whether it was raining outside or not.’ We knew so little of snow on Acacia. Just that one time, really. That’s the only snow I remember.”

  He cleared his throat, then coughed for a bit. By the time he quieted the memory had passed. “I can feel it. Believe me. I’ve been to death already. I know what it feels like as it approaches. I’m not scared. I do wish I had-”

  He stopped himself. Cut the words with the side of his hand and pushed them away with the flat of it. “It’s hard not to talk of regrets, but I won’t. Waste of time, regret.” He sat forward and took her hands in his. “Mena, I am constantly asking myself if I could live in a world in which the Auldek are at peace with us. Can I find a way to get beyond the crimes they’ve done and the suffering they’ve caused? Can I do all the things that come after this war ends in peace between us? It’s not easy to imagine.” He looked at her a long moment. “When I ask these things, the answer I come back with is yes. Yes. Of course yes. I would be a fool to let even one more good person die if he or she didn’t have to. That’s what tyrants do, not kings.

  “The thing is, I won’t be living in that world. So then I ask the same questions, but thinking about the world you’ll live on in, and Aaden and Shen. Do you know what happens to my answer? It changes. It becomes an even firmer yes. I don’t just think you could live in that world. I think you should. I think it will be a world to be proud of.”

  “That’s a lot to ask of me.”

  “Mena, it’s not the only thing I’m going to ask of you. Both Corinn and I, we expect a great deal from you.”

  L ater that night, Aliver once more rose up from his sleeping body. He floated through the top of his tent and hovered in the air above it. For a time he paused there alone, the world quiet around him, save wolves howling somewhere in the distance.

  He knew he was not alone when he heard Mena’s voice, saying that she was here.

  A little later, Haleeven found them, and then Perrin, glowing bright as he moved toward them. Soon, they were all there with him. Beautiful spirit selves, pure energy and light, hovering about the earth.

  “All right,” Aliver said. “Come harvesting with me. Come, you will like this work. Remember, we are not killing. We are setting innocents free. Come harvesting souls with me.” So saying, he led them north, toward the sleeping Auldek.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Amazing, Corinn thought, how different one wave can look from another. She would never have believed it before, but after days on the wing, with only water beneath them, she began to see waves that seethed and waves that crested, ones that bulged in soft mounds and others that cut like blades, some smooth and black as stone, others foaming and hissing. Some cut diagonally against the others. Some changed their character and shading right before her eyes. And some rose like mountain peaks, so vast that they changed the air currents above them and had Po struggling to maintain his course.

  The Range, Corinn thought. Dariel saw this before I did.

  Amazing also how much the sea thronged with life. Yes, there were great lifeless and gray swaths of sea. But so, too, were there times when schools of fish rose to the surface in such massive numbers they became the world. She watched shoals of silverfish paint swirls and shimmers, dancing as predators cut through them. For the greater part of a morning, they flew over floating islands of sea fronds, so thick that creatures lived atop them, running from Po’s shadow like tiny antelopes. One night the glow of life under the sea outdid the shining of the stars. And once she watched the illuminated outlines of a pod of whales, large and ghostly, moving with a stately grace.

  At the back edge of all this wonder ran their hunters, pressing ever onward. Sometimes they, too, seemed like giants, striding ocean miles with each step. But other times they were only men, tiny men in an ocean that dwarfed them. Po stayed beyond the reach of their sorcery, but Corinn heard them speaking to her. For a time they tried to convince her to stop running. They must have the book, but once they did they claimed they would heal her, make her mouth right. They would study The Song with her.

  Though she knew better, there was something powerfully persuasive about them. Strange how narrow the line between their warm, soothing voices and their evil truth was. The intent behind both was the same, strong in a way that had a similar essence. She never let herself believe them. It helped that Hanish was there whispering warnings, keeping her true to her course.

  Eventually, they dropped the pretense and taunted her instead. They would never tire, they said. She had already failed. She had already led them back into the world. She could not stand against them. She was not Tinhadin. She had not his strength. She had not his mouth. They would chase her right around the world if they had to. She could not outfly them. They would catch her tomorrow, or the next day. But they would catch her.

  The Song is ours! It’s already ours. Your days are few.

  She did not know if they said that because they knew about the poison in her, or because they intended to make sure of that themselves. She gave them no response. Hanish did not even talk anymore. He just rested his chin on her shoulder and watched the same watery world that she did. That was all right. There was nothing more to say. They just flew.

  A nd then came the day they were searching for. The sea beneath them suddenly thronged with creatures. One moment it was empty. The next, white leviathans clamored at the surface. Hundreds of them. Enormous creatures that she had only seen in paintings, paintings that at the time she had assumed were touched by fancy.

  “Sea wolves,” Hanish said.

  Po did not like them. At first he roared at them, thinking them some new curse of the Santoths’. Corinn calmed him. Careful not to let him see the images she had of what was to come, she had him bank into a wide circle, looping around and around above the water.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  I dreamed it.

  “Ah.” She knew that Hanish had a quip to follow, but he held it in.

  I dreamed it. Since that was so, she did the only thing she could. She did what had been shown to her already in the dream. She flew that circle, taking Po lower and lower as she did. Each time she came around, she saw the Santoth on the horizon but closing on them. They had not been part of the dream, but they would be part of the reality.

  The sea wolves did something Hanish found very strange. “What in the Giver’s name?” he murmured. Corinn expected it, though. They copied Po’s circular motion. They drew tighter, going around and around beneath them. They swam with a strange pulsing motion, twisting over one another, ghostly white, tentacled, with eyes that watched the dragon fly above them. Hard to separate one from another. The tighter they got, the more that became the case.

  They are his searchers, Corinn said. That’s all they were ever doing, searching for The Song of Elenet anytime ships passed near them .

  By the time Po’s wingtip skimmed the surface they were so close together there was no water visible between them. And when Corinn asked Po to land on them, the bodies of the strange leviathans congealed together, forming a circular, flat surface on which to land. It took some convincing to get the dragon to do it. In the end, he did it only because she promised him he could fly away as soon as she and Hanish were down.

  Po’s feet danced across the surface. It was flat, and strangely smooth, but it was made of great, sea-crusted white bodies, entwined tentacles, and large eyes that stared up at them. Po only stayed touching them for the time it took for Corinn to gather The Song of Elenet from a saddlebag and climb down. Then he lifted into the air, barking as he did so. It was a strange noise, one she had not heard him make before. For some reason, she knew what it meant. He was telling her to be quick. He did not like this place and wanted to g
o.

  Hanish stood beside her. “What now, Corinn?”

  Now we call for the worm.

  She had wondered how he would respond to this. When he did, she knew he had done so perfectly. “All right. I hope it’s quick.” He dipped his head in the direction of the Santoth, who were tall figures now, slashing the air as they ran, sending sprays of water up from their feet.

  Corinn held the book out before her. She ran her palms over the aged leather of its cover. Her fingers caressed the frayed leaves of its pages. As she did so, she felt the creature wake. He was somewhere far below them, embedded in the depths of the ocean floor. Come, I’ve brought it. What it sent back to her was not an image or a clear thought, certainly not words. It was a feeling. It was the sensation of a massive body peeling away from the bottom, turning upward in the blackness and writhing in great sweeps of its gargantuan length.

  It’s coming. She opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was Hanish, standing just before her, his gray eyes there to meet her gaze. I could not have done this without you.

  “You could have,” he said, “but I’m glad you didn’t have to.”

  The Santoth were much nearer. They stood even taller, their elongated forms stretching far up into sky. Their churning arms cut through the clouds. She could hear them now, singing themselves faster and faster, hungrier than ever for the book that was so near.

  Corinn opened it and, pulling her gaze away from the sorcerers, she began to read. The song bloomed inside her. It twined and danced about her. It wrapped her and Hanish in ribbons of energy. It sped the Santoth on, and it snapped through the tail of the creature below them, driving it upward.

  When the Santoth reached them, it looked as if they would arrive in massive stature, stamping the strange platform down into the water. They held to that size until the last moment. Po had to pull back, roaring at them. Just as their feet touched the sea wolves, the Santoth shrank. The entire stretched length of their bodies pulled in, so that they stepped onto the platform the size of normal men. Cloaked, dull figures, old and ravaged by time and evil and desolation. Their eyes bulged and trembled with intensity.