The Sacred Band a-3

by David Anthony Durham

  “Give it to me.” Nualo extended his hand. “Give it to me!”

  Looking at his cracked, aged hand, Corinn realized what the last thing Leeka had tried to say to her and Aliver was. They cannot take it from me. I have to give it to them. They stood there, ranked in front of her, like starving men before a feast she held in her hands… and they could do nothing.

  For a sliver of a moment Corinn rejoiced. If they could not take it from her, she could keep it! They did not have the power over her that they claimed. She could…

  And then that brief madness was gone. She could not keep it. She had not the life to use it anymore, and, even now, surrounded by the threads of beauty that still swam around her, she knew the song should not be sung by any human mouth. Never again.

  You cannot have it, she said. None of us can. This ends now. Here .

  Nualo’s face bunched with rage. He raked up a curse from deep within him, but before he could utter it, the worm arrived. As when she had envisioned it swallowing the whole of the isle of Acacia, the creature’s mouth was enormous. It emerged under a great swell of seawater, a wide ring that took in everything: the sea wolves, the people standing on them, the sea around them. The mouth rose around them all. It stretched upward, stories upon stories tall, a wall so dripping with water and encrusted with barnacles and hanging with tendrils of seaweed that Corinn could only take in the vastness of it with no greater understanding of exactly what it was. The strong, aquatic smell of it drenched the air. And still it rose.

  The Santoth tried to leap away. They roared their anger and slashed out with their foul sorcery. Nualo clawed for the book, begging Corinn to give it to him. She yanked it from his grasp when the sea wolves beneath him fell away. He splashed down among them, bellowing curses. The sea wolves loosed their tight weave and sent the sorcerers down to thrash among their tentacles and the great rolling heave of their bodies. Only the sea wolves directly beneath Corinn stayed together.

  The queen pressed the book to her chest and looked at Hanish. He stared back. He reached out and took one of her hands. The two of them stood like that, the only stillness in all that great commotion. His mouth opened as if to say something. But instead of speaking he smiled. Of all the things he could have said and done, that smile was perfect. It was sad, resigned, and yet also confident. Somehow, it conveyed that this was as it had to be, the best of all possible outcomes. It said that what they went to now was nothing to fear.

  Then the creature’s mouth closed around them all. It stopped its upward thrust and slowly, heavily, fell back into the sea. Above the churning froth into which it sank, the dragon Po circled for a time, crying out his distress. Circling, as the sea went calm beneath him, as the waves rolled on, and the wind, until there was nothing but the sea.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Standing alone in the dressing room he had been provided, Dariel listened to the murmur of the gathering crowd. He could not help but remember the multitude of voices he had sensed inside that glowing wall on Lithram Len. It was the same sound in so many ways, except that here, out in the main courtyard of Avina, the masses gathered in exuberant joy. They had mouths to speak with, hands to clap, free will to move themselves through the world. They had life to rejoice in, now more than ever.

  Such had not been the case with the spirits trapped through the sorcery that encased them in that wall and somehow connected them to all the accursed soul vessels. Dariel did not expect to ever understand it entirely. He hoped he wouldn’t. Understanding the sorcery was the very thing that drove the Lothan Aklun to acts of revenge that had enslaved the entire world-themselves along with it-for generations. Better just to know that his bow of reverence had placed the raised rune on his forehead into the engraving meant to receive it. His living tissue touched that strange, glowing matter. A key. That was what Na Gamen had given him. A key that unlocked that cage of souls, freeing all the spirits that the Lothan Aklun had used to power their vessels. The moment it was done, the glowing wall had gone dark. Silent. Motionless. He had felt a concussion of energy, but it had come from elsewhere. In that small chamber, the cage of souls simply ceased to be, and the enslaved vanished into freedom.

  “I freed them,” Dariel said. “Or… you freed them.” That was another thing that he was going to have to learn to live with: that he and Na Gamen would share his soul for as long as they both lived on inside Dariel’s mortal body. Acknowledging that, Dariel said, “We freed them.”

  Bashar brushed his leg. He stroked the hound. Still a pup, but tall enough already that Dariel did not need to bend to reach him. All lean muscle and bone. Hunters. The ridge running against the grain up his back bristled stronger than ever. He looked at Cashen, who lay watching them. The pup thumped his tail. Considering the massive pads of their paws, Dariel had finally come to believe Birke had not exaggerated. The hounds would be enormous, and they would be there soon. Dariel repeated, “We freed them.”

  “Yes,” a voice said, “we did.” Mor stood in the open doorway, in silhouette against the light behind her. Dariel could not see her face, but he knew her form and her voice. She walked in, more beautiful now as the lamplight illuminated her. “You look good in these clothes.” She reached for the collar of his new linen cloak, tugged it around a bit, seemed to like it even better. “Are you ready?”

  Dariel said he was, but Mor did not move to lead him to the meeting being held in his honor. She stared at his face, tattooed just like hers. She stared at his forehead, which no longer had the rune embossed on it. His skin was as smooth as it had been before the Sky Watcher took the stylus to it. The key, once used, vanished along with the soul vessels.

  “At least you’ll always have these Shivith markings,” Mor said.

  “And I’ll never forget who drew them under my skin,” Dariel responded. “Rather painful, as I recall.”

  Mor ducked her head a moment, laughed. “We’ve come a long way, Dariel Akaran. I’ll tell you something.” She leaned in a little closer and whispered. “I am a woman who finds beauty first in other women. That is just the way I am. But if I did like men… I might come to you to explore it.”

  Dariel was glad she pulled back. His face had flushed, and he feared if she kept studying him so closely his cheek might start to twitch.

  “I never told you what Na Gamen told me at the Sky Mount,” Mor said, strolling away and running her finger across a nearby desk. “I didn’t doubt him, but I didn’t want to accept it, either. First, he said you had a destiny here. He said your story, whether it ended well or ill, would be the story of our nation as well. I told him I despised the blood in your veins. Do you know what he told me?”

  “What?”

  “That it was your Akaran blood that made greatness in you possible. I thought that was foolishness, but the more I’ve thought about the many things he showed me, the more I believe he could not complete his work without an Akaran’s blessing. Does that sound right?”

  Dariel nodded.

  Mor did as well. “The second thing… was that he confirmed that my brother’s spirit force was still inside Devoth. Buried deep, he said. It was close to his true self. I had always thought my memory of that was true, and it was.” She picked up a stylus and felt the grain of the wooden handle. “He said that if I went in search of him-to kill him-I might succeed, but that I might not get back to Ushen Brae. He said I could have revenge or a future among the People. He did not think that I could have both.”

  She hit the stylus against the palm of one hand for a time. Stopped. Glanced down and seemed surprised that she even held it.

  “Which do you want more?”

  “I wanted each more than the other, but I had sworn to fight for the Free People. I thought that once we had won I would track Devoth to the ends of the earth and cut each soul out of him until I found Ravi. I would have done it.”

  “I believe that.”

  “I would have, but now I don’t have to. Ravi’s been released.”

  “Released? How d
o you know?”

  “I felt it happen. I always felt his life force, Dariel. Every day since he was taken from me I’ve known that he still lived, trapped. You once called me cranky. You would be, too, if you had to live with that.” She tossed the stylus back onto the desk. “Anyway, I felt his soul go free. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know if Devoth is dead. I only know that it was a different thing from what you did with the soul vessels. Somehow, over there in your lands, Ravi found peace.”

  I n the high hall a short time later, Mor led Dariel to the gathered Council of Elders. Yoen and the other elders stood waiting for him. They had arrived the day before, having trekked all the way from the Sky Isle on the news that Dariel had been accepted as the Rhuin Fa. Little did they know that as they journeyed, a short, crucial war would unfold. Little did they know they would arrive in a city rejoicing, with the league defeated at the moment that the soul vessels vanished. A great number of the invaders had drowned, but others were plucked from the water, prisoners now locked away and awaiting their fate.

  Mor waved Dariel into the circle of elders. He stood, feeling awkward before them. He knew them all, if only from his brief time at the Sky Isle. Perhaps it was the new garments. It had been some time since he had worn clean clothes with sharp creases and fine stitching. Or maybe it was the crowd gathered in the squares just below them. He could hear them even better now, the sound drifting through the large, open balcony windows at the far end of the room. It was heady stuff to be a hero to so many people.

  Heady enough to make young Spratling nervous, Dariel thought.

  It might also be that the chamber contained a solemn air he had not expected. Everyone gazed at him: the elders near at hand; Mor and Skylene, Tunnel and Birke and all the People he had become so close to here in Ushen Brae. A little farther back stood Melio and Clytus, Geena, and the others who had come so far to find him. All of them safe and well, largely unscarred by the skirmishes they had fought so that he could complete his part in this story. They stared at him, too. He got the feeling everyone knew something that he did not.

  “I have a story to tell you,” Yoen said. He spoke to Dariel, but he lifted his voice for everyone to hear. “It’s a true story. True stories do not always make the best ones, but this one is pretty good. Many, many years ago, hundreds of years, during the early days of the Free People’s settlement at the Sky Lake-” He cut in on himself to say, “This was before my time, in case you are wondering.”

  He waited as the polite laughter faded. He was just as frail looking as before, his hair still disheveled, in contrast to the care taken with his long robe. His limp had increased, the product, no doubt, of the journey. He leaned heavily on his cane.

  “One day, a Lothan Aklun found the settlement,” he continued. “The People were shocked, because no Lothan Aklun had ever come searching for them before. Not even the Auldek had ranged that far. They need not have been alarmed, though. The Lothan Aklun was not hunting them. He was on a mission. He told them that he had come to hate his people’s ways. He was taking his quota children-both those inside him and those living through their years beside him-up into seclusion in Rath Batatt. You know this man. It was Na Gamen.

  “Before he went, he gave the villagers something. He took from his wrist a bracelet made of pure, precious gold. He said that it was not actually a bracelet. It was an armband that had been worn by the first quota child he had come to love as his own. I called it a tuvey band, though in truth it was just a child’s trinket. He gave it to us, and he also gave us a sapling from a tree of your lands, Dariel. An acacia tree. He planted the tree, and slipped the band around it. He told those Free People that one day the quota trade would end. One day, a person would come to us who had the power to change everything. A good person. A kingly person. A man or a woman with a pure heart and noble intent. This person would have the power to release our trapped spirits. He said that on that day-when we knew this person had arrived-we should build a great fire around that tree. A beacon to announce the freeing of the world. When it died down, we were to retrieve the band from the ashes and see if it still held its shape.

  “We did as he asked us to. We left the band around the trunk of that small tree, waiting for the day we could build that fire. A lovely idea, but it did not go as anyone wished. The wait was to be longer than we could have known. Not a lifetime or two. Many more than that. That sapling became a tree. Generations lived and died. The tree got thicker, stretched taller. Years passed. The ring grew tight around the trunk, and then the tree lifted the ring into the air. Still longer it took, so long that the tree swallowed the band and grew around it. The band went hidden for generations. The world turned so long that I was born, and you were as well, Dariel, and everyone else in this room and out in the courtyard there.”

  The old man pointed to the great balcony that opened above the gathered crowd. He had been strolling in circles as he talked, his eyes drifting, gentle everywhere they touched. They came back to Dariel now. “Do you know the tree I’m speaking of?”

  Remembering the sacred acacia he had seen from the hillside above the village by the Sky Lake, Dariel nodded.

  “Before we came here, we burned it. We believed in you, Dariel Akaran. It appears that we were right to. And look what we found in the ashes…”

  Yoen had paused behind a small table, atop which a simple box sat. Dariel had not noticed it before. Yoen opened it, reached in, and lifted out a thin circlet of twisted gold. He walked toward Dariel, holding it high for all to see. “It began as a child’s armband,” he said. “Now it looks rather more like a crown.”

  He paused before Dariel. The band was but a simple circlet. No stones set in it. No engravings. The only feature enhancing the gold beauty of it was the waves that years inside the tree must have bent into it.

  “It’s beautiful,” the prince said.

  Yoen agreed. “None here dispute it. You are our savior, Dariel. You are the one who came to free us. The Rhuin Fa. This band is yours to do with as you wish. I hope that you do something wise with it.” He pushed the band from his fingers into Dariel’s.

  “This is not for me. It’s too precious.”

  “We believe it is yours. It was always yours. You may even slip it atop your head, if you wish, and ask the people to accept your leadership. I believe they would.”

  Holding the warped and stretched band-a child’s bracelet that had grown inside an acacia tree-Dariel absorbed what was being offered. It was there in the curves of the band. It was in Yoen’s eyes. Looking around the circle of elders and beyond them to his companions-both the new ones and the old-they all waited for him. It was up to him to say whether he wanted to ask the People to make him king of Ushen Brae. The headiness of this dizzied him. He stood with his mind racing out across the great continent he had only seen a portion of. He thought about the glowing ruins of Amratseer and the jagged peaks of Rath Batatt and the wild rapids of the Sheeven Lek. He remembered names of places he had heard of but had never seen. By the Giver, he might rebuild the ancient city of Lvinreth. He had never seen it, but the notion of a white-rocked city carved into the far north, a place where snow lions roamed the streets beside people… It took his breath away. He could be king, and he could create a culture different from anything in the Known World. Better. Fairer. A dream of a nation like one Aliver might have imagined. Perhaps one day he and Birke would climb into Rath Batatt. With Bashar and Cashen they would go hunting, wandering until they found whatever wonders lay beyond that range of mountains.

  It would be a magnificent life.

  Only… He searched out Melio’s face, saw him watching, concern on his features. Clytus as well. Geena. Even Kartholome. If they had not come for him he might have answered Yoen differently. He might have grasped for a magnificent life in Ushen Brae. But they had come, and that life could not be. They had come to take him home, to Acacia, to Wren. If she lived and he could get back to her, he would never let her go again. Never. He had to go back. He ha
d to sail with Melio beside him, hoping that the future included him being uncle to the child Melio wanted to have with Mena.

  “No, I can’t accept this.” He looked around at the silent people watching him. “I love the Free People,” he said. “I have learned to love Ushen Brae, and I could not be more thankful for the gifts you’ve given me. But”-his gaze settled on Mor-“I must go home.” He walked to Mor and pushed the crown into her hands. “If this is mine to do with what I wish, I give it to Mor. Why not a queen instead of a king? A mother for the nation. Go ask the crowd what they think of that.”

  When Mor looked down, stunned by the treasure in her hands, Dariel turned and walked away. In the hush, his steps sounded loud on the marble slabs. He did not look back, though he badly wanted to. He wanted to see Mor stepping into the light of day, crown in hand, to ask the People to name their future. He pictured it in his mind. He saw it that way, and walked with the vision in his mind’s eye, knowing it was a fine vision, a truly fine vision.

  He was into the hallway and down it some ways before his steps slowed. He wanted to go back. What was he doing? He loved this place! If he had come here under different terms, he might have stayed forever. But he had been away from home too long. He did not want to forget the ones he loved over there. No, he had to go. He had to go home.

  He got a few steps farther before he heard the eruption of cheers from the square. He kept walking, embarrassed lest anybody see the tears suddenly washing his face. A good effort, but he did not get far. He stopped again. He leaned against a wall and watched the world go liquid. He was not even sure why he was crying, whether it was for this place or the other, whether from sadness or joy. He listened to the hush and burst of cheers, to the gaps during which one or another person spoke. He could not hear what they were saying, but he was happy for them. The Free People were becoming a nation. The children who had been stolen had finally-