He would think many times later how strange a thing it is that one moment a person can wish for death, only to be distracted into life by a few kind words, by a kerchief extended, by simple food to fill an empty stomach. These things, as much as anything else, brought Leeka through. After that morning it was never really so hard to refuse the mist. He did have pangs of his old hunger, certainly. He had them daily, hourly almost. He had to decide again and again not to succumb. But he found he had the power to refuse. The fact that Thaddeus gave him a mission lent him the strength.
He left his hillside hovel with a mind full of instructions, with his hopes renewed in the most unexpected of ways. He bore an Acacian sword at his hip, a parting gift from the chancellor. In earlier years a former soldier of the empire would have drawn attention walking about armed, but the world had changed somewhat from the first years of Hanish’s rule. The resistance had been vanquished. The thinly spread Meinish troops paid little attention to individuals, reserving their energies to protecting the security of Hanish’s rule and the commerce that sustained it.
Leeka walked, loving the pumping of air in his lungs, the ache of his legs. By the end of his first week of trekking, he had found his old discipline again. He intentionally chose routes up and over the harder passes, trudging up scree or talus slopes, each forward stride halved by the loose matter sliding beneath his feet. One afternoon while resting in the saddle between two peaks, his legs cramped. His hamstrings clenched and heaved, the pain of them all enveloping. Leeka tilted his face to the sky, crying with joy. He was getting his body back.
He would never forget the exhilaration he felt on top of a peak near the western crest of the Senivalian Mountains, around him nothing but the clouds above, below thousands of pinnacles rising all around, each sharp as wolverbear’s teeth, each like a rebellious finger pointed toward the heavens in accusation. He danced himself through the Tenth Form, that of Telamathon as he fought the Five Disciples of the god Reelos. He had felt no purer moment in his life. It was a choreographed tribute, an act of connection with everything that he ever had been and everything he hoped he might be again. He may have been mistaken, perhaps delusional, light-headed from the altitude, vainglorious; he was not sure, but he had believed, as he slashed and swirled, leaped and spun, that for a moment all those mountainous protrusions paused to watch him.
And then, all too soon, he stumbled out of the mountains and rolled down to the shore of the Gray Slopes. He shouldered his way into the bustle of trade, commerce, and human treachery in the seaside towns there. Few faces looked upon him with kindness. All measured him for risk or opportunity. There was, he felt, a menace hanging in the fabric of the air, different from anything he had felt during Leodan’s reign. He was accosted again and again by peddlers of mist, all assuring him of the quality of their product, its purity, its direct origin from source, uncut, clean. Leeka was not sure if something in his face or demeanor made him a target for such people, or whether such was just the traffic of the world now. A few times he clamped his fist down on the hands of pickpockets exploring his garments. He was twice accosted in bars for insults he had not been aware of giving. Once he brandished his sword when cornered by three youths in a back alley. He sliced the air with the few quick strokes it had taken Aliss to dispatch the Madman of Careven. They had sense enough to back away, and he was grateful for it.
Thaddeus had given him the name of a man to seek out in a particular coastal town. He found the man and convinced him Thaddeus had sent him. The man passed him into the care of another, who fed him and told him what he could, who helped him fight back the mist hunger and sent him forward with a message to another person. Thus he came to understand that there was a hidden resistance at work in the world. The old chancellor was part of something larger than himself. Thanks to him, so was Leeka.
Throughout all of this he interviewed anyone he could as casually as he could. He knew of the person he searched for by a single name. He uttered it sparingly. He framed his queries differently depending on whom he spoke to. He passed one full month and much of a second in this manner, getting no closer to his goal, hearing little that helped him but much that fired his desire to push on. Still, when a break came he at first did not recognize it for what it was or welcome it.
A woman approached him in a tavern in a fishing port whose name he had not even asked. She carried a drink in one hand. She smiled at him and was young and attractive in a jaded enough way that he took her to be a prostitute. When she spoke, however, she struck with surprising directness. “Why are you asking after a raider?”
Leeka answered with one of his prepared responses. He was intentionally vague. He alluded to a business proposal, to inside information that he possessed, to the prospect that he and this raider might benefit each other in a variety of ways, all of them too delicate to reveal to anybody but the young raider himself.
“Hmm,” she said. She nodded her head as if this satisfied her. She took a sip of her drink and then, without any sort of warning, she pursed her lips and spat at him, spraying his face and eyes with a burning liquid. He was blinded. Hands fell upon him, more than just the woman’s. Suddenly it seemed every person in the tavern had lain in wait for him. He was battered by fists and blunt objects; his weapons stripped from him; his head beaten, beaten, beaten against a wall until he lost consciousness.
When he awoke he knew he was at sea. He felt the spray against his face. His body was wet. Drenched, actually. Intermittently dunked beneath the surface of the sea. He was, he realized, strapped rigid against a board that had been nailed to the prow of a ship. His arms and legs and torso were bound tight, and at times his body cut the ship’s course through a seething green sea. He was a living prow figure.
And it was as such that he arrived at Palishdock, in a less than desirable condition, with a great deal less secrecy than he wished, very little of his stature obvious to the motley throng of brigands that gathered to gape at him. The crew that lowered him to the pier was not over-careful about it. They left him facedown againt the sun-bleached beams for some time. When they finally carried him to shore they simply lifted the entire plank and walked with him, the ground rising and falling beneath him with their strides. They dropped him in the hot sand but only for a moment. He felt the entire board tilted upward and leaned back against a building of some sort. Thus he waited, bound, bruised, sand dusted.
The young woman he had taken for a prostitute was there, along with the host of thugs that had so easily beaten and bound him. They leaned about, as casual and lackadaisical as any street vagrants, until two others stepped out from one of the makeshift structures of the place: a young man and a large man. The young man did not look pleased. He conferred with the ones who had brought Leeka, and then studied him from a distance, seemingly considering whether to address him or turn away. The large man leaned heavily on a cane. His skin was pallid and his frame, though massive, sagged like a sack half full. He watched Leeka without speaking, just stared at him fixedly.
Eventually, the young man walked forward through the sand. He plucked the dagger from the sheath on his thigh and held it between himself and Leeka, not exactly a threat but not far from it. “Who are you, and why were you asking about me?”
Looking into the young man’s handsome face, nearly breathless at the prospect of the answer, Leeka asked, “You are the one they call Spratling?”
“I answer to that name. What of it?”
Leeka wished his lips were not so swollen and stiff, crusted with dried blood and salt. He wished his puffy eye was not obscuring his gaze and that he had a drink of water to loosen the words in his throat. But none of these things was about to change, so he said what he had planned to.
“Prince Dariel Akaran,” he began, “I rejoice to set eyes—”
“Why do you call me by that name?” the young man cut in, flaring with confused anger.
To Leeka’s relief, another answered for him. The large man hobbled his great bulk forward. “Calm y
ourself, lad. It’s my doing. It’s my doing.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Mena grabbed hold of the loops of rusty metal and pressed her bottom to the sand. Thus anchored she tilted her head and gazed up through columns of living mollusks. She sat, as she often did, on the sandy floor of the harbor, some thirty feet from the surface, her breath clamped tight inside her. Her hair floated around her in sinuous tendrils. Around her rose a towering forest of shadows, each of them a chain suspended from the surface and anchored to the ground. Oysters hung from the links by the thousands. Full grown, the creatures were as large around as a child’s head. Though much of this bulk was composed of shell, each of them could feed three or four diners, simmered in a coconut milk sauce and served with transparent noodles. They were a delicacy around which the temple controlled a monopoly. The export market in black oysters filled the temple coffers each time the floating merchants passed the archipelago.
Her lungs began to burn. They heaved against her chest. Every muscle out to her fingertips and toes twitched in protest, every part of her shouted in anger. Beyond the oysters, the brilliant turquoise of the surface glow highlighted the weight and size of the mollusks, as if the world above was a blessed place of light that she could regain only by the most perilous of ascents. She unclenched her hands and floated free. As she flew upward toward the light she blew a stream of bubbles preceding her. She was never sure if it was the bubbles themselves or if the oysters sensed her coming, but one by one the creatures folded their gaping shells closed, opening a passageway for her all the way to the surface. The last few moments were the worst, the most frantic, the entirety of her being screaming to get out of her skin, sure she had hung on too long.
She broke into the air with her mouth a gaping oval. Air engulfed her, as did light and sound and movement, as did life. She could not explain her need for this strange ordeal, but it always left her feeling temporarily secure about the purity of her soul. This was a thing that concerned her, especially on a day like this one, when she would look into the face of grieving parents and swear that a child’s death was a boon to them all, a necessary sacrifice, and a gift any parent should wish to give.
She left the oyster farm mid-morning. For nearly half an hour she negotiated the labyrinth of piers and floating docks that clogged the shallow, crescent harbor. The portion of the docks owned by the temple was a solitary domain in which Mena spent hours. But in the commercial harbor she entered a bustling throng of merchants and seamen, fisherfolk and net weavers. She wove through stalls offering all manner of foodstuffs: fish and crustaceans, fruit from the coastal plantations and jungle meat from the inner mountains. Salesmen cried their wares in the singsong cadence of Vumu speech. She moved through it with quiet purpose, accepting the mumbled greetings directed at her, the respectful bowed heads, and the prayerful invocations. Maeben on earth walked among them. Usually this made people joyful, but this afternoon there was veiled import behind the eyes watching her.
As she walked the last stretch of pier to the shore, Mena noticed the stillness of a sailor who had paused to look at her. He stood on the railing of a trading barge, one hand grasped around a rigging rope to steady him. She glanced up at him just long enough to take in his shirtless torso; his clean-shaven, angular jaw; steady eyes; and head wrapped in strips of white cloth, the ends of which hung down to below his shoulders and stuck to the sweat on his chest. He was not from Vumu, but sailors were always a polyglot bunch. There was nothing kind in his countenance nor lecherous, but his attentive silence made Mena uneasy. She quickened her step.
At the temple she dressed in all the accoutrements of her guise as Maeben: talons fastened to her fingers; layers of feather robes; the spiky headdress that capped off her fierce, flamboyant appearance. As she felt the hands working around her she waited to feel the divine presence animate her form, place words in her, use her tongue to speak with, and form in her mind the resolution of complete belief. Thus far, however, the goddess refused to enter her when she was most needed. She held to her silence, and Mena was left to answer for her as best she could.
At first Mena had thought herself deficient. The senior priest assured her the goddess was just testing her, harsh mistress that she was. It was only a matter of time, he had said, until Maeben truly came to live inside her at all moments—not only during the frenzy of ceremonies. Though that had not happened, Mena had grown more and more comfortable with her role. All around her seemed complete in their belief, and that was usually sufficient to buoy her. Today was different, however, and she could not help but dread the meeting awaiting her.
A short while after dressing she sat on a thronelike chair in the anteroom of the temple. The head priest of Maeben’s order, Vaminee, stood beside her. He was dark skinned. His complexion was so smooth as to betray no obvious hints at his age, though Mena knew he had held his post for more than forty years. He wore a thin robe that fell from his shoulders in diaphanous folds, and he stood so still he might have been a statue. This was not the first time they had waited for a meeting like this to begin. In truth, they had shared this same silence three times in the last few years.
The young couple entered, flanked by lesser priests. Heads down, hands held before them with palms upraised, they approached slowly. Mena could not help but note how small they looked. They were but children themselves! How could they have borne—and now lost—a child? They knelt at the foot of the dais.
Without ceremony, Vaminee asked, “Who are you? Of what place? What circumstance?”
The father answered in a high-pitched voice, choked with emotion. They were inlanders, he explained. They lived in a village in the mountains. He hunted birds for the feathers used in temple ceremonies; she wove palm fibers for baskets and various wares that they sent to market in Galat. Their daughter, Ria, had been a good girl, round faced like her mother, shy among other children. They had loved her more than life. He would have given his own soul instead of the child’s without a moment of hesitation. He could not understand why—
“You have another child,” Vaminee said. “A boy who is twin to the girl. Be thankful of that.”
“And we had another before that,” the father said, anxious that this point be understood. “Our children came all three at one time. We lost our first to the foreigner’s offering. They took Tan from us. So why would Maeben punish us yet again?”
Oh, Mena thought, they had given a child to the Quota already. Now they had lost a second!
Vaminee was not moved. “Three children in one womb is too rich a bounty to go unnoticed. But tell us exactly what happened to the girl.”
This fell to the mother to answer. She showed little of her husband’s visible emotions. Her voice was like her eyes, flat and weary, as if she had passed beyond grief and found herself in another place. She had been walking a ridgeline with her daughter, she said. Ria had trailed some distance behind her, but she knew the trail well. She could hear her singing, repeating a few simple verses over and over and over. At some point her song stopped. Simply clipped in mid-phrase. She looked back to the spot where her child should have been, but it was empty. When she looked to the sky, she saw her daughter’s legs. She saw them dangling as if from the sky itself. And then she saw the spread of wings that carried her away. And then she heard the beat of them.
Her eyes touched on Mena briefly, before tilting to the floor in front of her. “I knew then that Maeben had stolen her.”
“Maeben steals nothing,” Vaminee said. “What she takes becomes hers the moment she touches it.”
“I had thought,” the mother said, glancing up, “that Ria was my own. She came from—”
Vaminee’s voice rose to cut her off. “Drop your eyes! You forget where you are. You think that your grief belongs to only you. You are wrong! Grief belongs to Maeben. What you feel is only a portion of what she endures. It is like a single grain of sand from all the beaches of Vumu. Maeben took your child to keep her company on Uvumal. One day you will understand
it as a gift—to the girl and to you as well. Is this not so, Furious One?”
This was the sign Mena had dreaded, the signal that she had now to enter the exchange. She rose and moved toward them with her arms raised out to either side, wings held as if in preparation for flight. Her face was as still as she could keep it, though inside her mind raced to find the right words to justify the deeds of an angry deity. She still did not have them. She felt the beaked monstrosity of her mask. A pang of shame ripped through her.
She stopped just before the two, both of whom had flattened their foreheads to the floor. She saw the tattoo on the man’s arm, the vertebrae nudging through the thin skin of the woman’s back. How she loved these people—all the Vumu people! She loved the look of them, the smell of their skin and shape of their mouths in laughter, the quiet grace with which they moved. These two before her, at the moment, represented all of them who lived under the tyranny of the goddess she embodied. She hoped they would not look up at her. They did not have to. They could just keep their heads bowed and listen as she justified Maeben’s actions. She had only to say a few sentences, just enough to remind them that Maeben answers to nobody, that she feels anger still for the slight humanity did to her. There was nothing for her to apologize for, and these two—she had been taught—would thank her later for showing strength in the face of their grief.
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.”
Acacia, The War with the Mein Page 36
