Acacia, The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  “All because of a little spratling.” Hanish dismissed it all with a wave of his hand. “Anyway, it’s only a temporary setback. The league has a thousand weapons to bring to bear. That’s what they’re saying; I’d like to believe them. When they’re crippled, we’re crippled as well.”

  “Have you considered doing away with them?”

  “With the league?” Hanish asked.

  Corinn hesitated a moment. “I know the league has been around for ages, but if they cannot even defend themselves against a band of raiders…why not handle the trade directly?”

  “No chance of that. You cannot imagine how entrenched the league is. They have steel hooks planted in every aspect of the world’s affairs. They are efficient at what they do usually. Perhaps most to the point, they’ve made many powerful persons rich beyond their dreams. This was true in your father’s time; so it is true in ours.”

  “You never miss a chance to point out that my people began the world’s injustices,” Corinn said, feeling a flare of her old anger. “We were the villains who created the Quota, who brought mist to the Known World, who conscripted slave labor to work the mines. You want me to know that this foulness was inside me all along. You act as if you had a righteous mandate to overthrow it, but how have you made the world better? You’ve killed the slave master, but instead of freeing the slaves you’ve stepped into his place—”

  Hanish interrupted, speaking in a flippant tone that ignored the import of her argument altogether. “Will you dance with me?”

  Corinn showed her annoyance with a cold stare. “Meinish music isn’t fit for dancing.” This was not just an insult. Their tunes were still strange to her ears. Compared to the lush, all-encompassing fullness of Acacian ensemble groups, the plucked notes of the Meinish instruments were discordant, the melodies spare and unpredictable. She could not imagine how to dance to it. Nobody else was.

  “So you would dance, had we the proper music?”

  When she did not answer immediately, Hanish took her by the wrist. He squeezed her fine bones between his thumb and forefinger and tugged her toward the center of the room. “In all the many centuries that musicians have played Meinish tunes, I’m sure that someone has danced to this one. Someone has felt within the sounds a rhythm suited to the movement of two bodies. That’s how I like to think of it. One must find rhythms others’ ears don’t hear.”

  The hand at her wrist slid somehow into the grip of her palm. The other swept around her back. He pulled her close. She yanked her arm to loose it from his and stepped back, but instead of breaking free she found Hanish swept forward, the movement of her arm a gesture in what was suddenly choreography. Her backward step had been so perfectly timed to his forward motion that she almost believed she had initiated the intimacy. Try as she might she could not manage to break the flow of their movements. Before long she stopped trying. It was amazing, really, how well he moved and how much her body enjoyed the swirling pattern they cut across the floor.

  “Corinn,” Hanish said, “I cannot pretend to have a noble answer to your question. I have not made the world better. I know that. But I’ve made it better for my people. Believe me, we deserve it. No other people has suffered like mine has.”

  “I suppose that’s my fault also.”

  Hanish waited a few moments after this, moving through the dance, his eyes furtive in a way Corinn had never seen them, canted off to the side. “Not you, but your people, yes. Your people gave birth to the Tunishnevre. They created it. On winning the throne through all manner of deceit—and if you think I’m treacherous, you should know your own blood, Corinn—Tinhadin turned on my ancestors and cursed them. He was a sorcerer. He had but to speak a thing to make it happen.”

  “Santoth,” Corinn said. “You’re talking about the Santoth.”

  Hanish nodded. “Tinhadin had a gift that perhaps you have as well, if you knew how to use it. He cursed the line of Mein with everlasting purgatory. No man of my family has found peace in death since—not one in over twenty generations. Our bodies don’t rot. Our dead flesh doesn’t burn. Our souls remain trapped within. We’re not alive, but we linger. Just linger.”

  Several other couples had joined them in the open space. They twirled about in imitation of Hanish’s dance, their faces eager for the eye contact he denied them. Corinn thought he might change the subject for fear of being overheard, but he carried on without even lowering his voice.

  “There is no greater curse than being forever trapped between life and death,” he said, “allowed neither one nor the other. Can you imagine what it means to be a spirit contained within a corpse for year after year, no end of it in sight? Death comes for all things. All things—humans and beasts, trees and fish—everything is promised release except my ancestors. Except me. This is what the Tunishnevre is. This is why it grows greater with each passing year. This is why your people make sure their own corpses are made into dust and cast out into the wind. Your customs remember the curse and fear it, even if you don’t. I find that’s often the way of things. Collective memory has a wisdom individuals cannot match. I’d like to find a way to free them so that they could truly find the peace and rest of death. Perhaps—should you ever find it in your heart—you could help me do this.”

  “Me?”

  Hanish nodded. “You may have an importance you have not yet imagined.” “Is it true that you speak with them?”

  “In a manner, yes.”

  “What do they tell you?”

  They bumped against a couple that had gotten too close. Hanish stopped moving, dropped his arms, and spoke quietly in a way that made his voice an intimacy. “They tell me a great many things, Corinn. Right now they are telling me it’s getting too crowded here, Princess. They suggest that we retire.”

  They spent the entirety of the next day together. Hanish seemed to have nothing to do except entertain her. On horseback they rode the coast road to the north, flowing over the contours of the plateau, sea to one side, manicured farmland stretching off to the west. His escort of Punisari guards kept a good distance behind them, well out of earshot of their conversation. For the first time they truly spoke without the possibility of anybody overhearing them. They did not, however, use the solitude to speak of anything of any significance.

  At a famous spot they stood above a fissure in the rock face that channeled the power of the swells into a foaming eruption of spray. It came rhythmically, like blasts blown up from some undersea bellows. And after lunch they shot quail released one by one for their pleasure. The birds took to flight in a frenzy, the flapping of their wings audible even from a distance. By no means were they easy targets with a bow and arrow. Hanish made only one grazing contact with a bird; Corinn pinned five. There was something satisfying about making a hit: the way the bird’s wings stopped instantly, its course altered, the way it dropped from the sky, a dead weight that twirled with the awkward appendage of the shaft imbedded in it. Once her arrow passed directly through a bird, so smoothly it carried on into the distance and sank into the ground long after the bird had thudded down. Hanish applauded, and she found ready occasions to tease him, which clearly gave him pleasure.

  When he proposed that they refuse the evening’s invitation to dinner Corinn did not object. They ate together at the far ends of a too-long table. The main course was scallops simmered in a chili sauce, topped with fragrant herbs. It was wonderful on the palate, a play of sweet and fierce that sent Corinn’s body temperature soaring. They drank a dry, pale wine that made Corinn suck her cheeks absently. Hanish imitated her; Corinn accused him of selecting the fare just to make her look a fool. He did not deny it.

  Later, they shared a sweet liqueur on the villa’s main balcony. Below them the sea darkened as the sun passed from view. Before long the moon appeared and shone behind a lacy weave of thin clouds. The breeze carried a chill with it, but not uncomfortably so. Just enough to pimple the skin. Corinn stood near enough to Hanish to smell the scented oils that had been rubbed into
his skin. She brushed her shoulder against his absently. Once she felt the electric shock of her breast grazing his arm. Did she intend such moments? Did she orchestrate them or had wine and liqueur—which had pleasantly blurred the edges of the world—made her so clumsy with her body as that? She was not sure.

  Holding her small glass out to accept Hanish’s offer of a refill, Corinn asked, “What next? Will you offer me a draw on a mist pipe?”

  The question was posed playfully, but Hanish rubbed the grain of the weathered balcony abutment nervously, looking for a moment like a child trying to leave an indentation with just the pressure of his fingers. “Never.”

  “Did you bring me here to seduce me? Is that what this is all about?”

  Blood rose to Hanish’s cheeks. Even his forehead reddened. She had never seen such an involuntary display register on his features before. “I brought you here to offer you a gift. I fear you’ll throw it back in my face.”

  “I strike fear in you, then?”

  “You fill me with trepidation, Corinn, in a way that nobody has before.”

  Corinn looked at him, her face giving nothing away, waiting. Hanish motioned for her to sit beside him on a nearby bench, from which they leaned forward and gazed over the railing. They sat side by side, near enough that their legs touched at the knee.

  “What if I said that this was all yours?” Hanish asked. “This villa, I mean. There is no reason you shouldn’t have the best of everything. You were a princess; you are still a princess. It confounds me that you won’t take me at my word on this. I imagine a day when you and your siblings will gather here and enjoy—”

  “You need not buy me, lord. I’m your slave anyway.”

  “Please, Corinn,” Hanish said. “This home belonged to a family called Anthalar. You knew them, yes?”

  Corinn nodded.

  Hanish admitted that he had met one of them himself. It was during the war, before a battle. He had given the young man death, he said. He had always regretted that death. He saw strength in him, pride. He reminded him of his brother Thasren. So angry, so intent on doing right for his people. But it could not have been any other way. Being where he was that day, the young man simply had to die. A life lived truly created regrets such as this. There was no way around it. He regretted the things done to Corinn also.

  “I know you cannot be bought,” he said, “but if you have any kindness within you, you’ll understand this gift is one I must try and give. If I’ve kept you penned up in the palace for too long I apologize. I used to fear to let you out of my sight.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head, just enough to indicate he was not going to answer that question just now. “But you’re not a slave. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, actually I do know that.” Corinn drew her knees in, breaking the contact between them. She no longer felt giddy or elated from the drink. “I saw real slaves once. I was staying with a noble’s family in a village near Bocoum. I knew I was wrong to do it, but my friend and I stole out late at night and climbed onto the roof. We did this sometimes back then to look at the stars and tell stories. But this night we found a spot from which to watch the street below and there we saw a strange…Well, at first I thought it was a parade. But who has a parade in the middle of the night? In complete silence? And in what parade are the marchers all connected by chains? They were the same age as I was then. Ten, eleven, just on the verge of starting the change. They were chained at the necks, one to another to another, hundreds of them. Men drove them with drawn swords. They made not a sound over the shuffling of their feet and the tinkle of chains and…I never forgot that silence. It was dreadfully loud.”

  “This sounds like a dream to me,” Hanish offered.

  Corinn shook her head. “Don’t even allow me that much. It was no dream. Some part of me knew it, even back then. I did not know details, but I knew not to ask any adult what that procession had been. It was the Quota, of course. The Quota, upon which everything depends.” She stared at Hanish for a long moment. The small scar on his nostril was more pronounced than usual, his nose flushed from the liqueur, perhaps. “Why do the foreigners want our children so badly? What do they do with them?”

  “Some questions are best left unanswered. But listen, you’ve confessed to me. Let me do the same. I want you to understand me and my people. We suffered so terribly during the Retribution. Do you understand that level of suffering? Twenty-two generations—as many in my line as in yours. But yours reigned supreme; mine struggled just to survive. And eventually we began to dream that old wrongs could be set right. All of that disruption we caused over the years—the petty squabbles and hijackings, the raids on Aushenia—none of that was true to our character. That was all just noise we made with drums and horns, behind which we hid our true objectives. We wanted Acacians to believe they knew us. I know our success gives you no joy. I’m just trying to explain myself. It is your right to judge us, but it is mine to want you to judge us fairly.”

  “And so you killed my father,” Corinn said. She intended her voice to sound cold, angry, but instead she heard something pitiful in it, a desire to be comforted.

  “I wish every day that there could have been an alternative. You do not know how much I wish I could have come to know you in some other way. But what I did against the beast that was the Acacian Empire I did not do against you. I’m no monster. Sometimes I wish the world to believe me so, but in truth my only distortion is that I feel the sorrow of an entire people. I must think of them first, understand that? I don’t love that I now send thousands of children into bondage. I hate it. But my own people have to come first. Understand that and you understand me.”

  It was not that Corinn was untouched by what he said. It was not that she did not believe him or that she did not warm at the thought of this softness in his heart. She felt all these things, but habit had so sharpened her tongue that she responded with a meaner thought, one meant to defend herself even now.

  “This is a strange method of seduction,” she said.

  Hanish lifted his face to hers, his eyes brimming with moisture. The weight of his tears shifted as he moved and broke free from both eyes, spilling down his cheeks. It was so achingly pathetic a transformation that Corinn reached out to him. She touched him at the shoulder blade. She slid her fingers in line with the bone, across the fabric of his shirt, and onto the bare skin of his neck. She had wanted to touch him there for so long. His flesh was warm, soft as she imagined few parts of him were. She thought she could feel his pulse through his skin, but it may have been her own throbbing at her fingertips.

  It was tiring being faithful to her father, she thought, exhausting to hope that her siblings would appear and have some influence on her life. Her stomach churned with the acids she daily nurtured. Why not just give herself to Hanish? Who better than he? She wished that Hanish actually had the power to make her whatever he wanted. She wished that she had the temperament to accept whatever role he shaped for her. He did have a capacity for cruelty. That would remain, no matter this show of intimate vulnerability. In the morning he would be Hanish Mein again, and the world would never know of the cracks beneath his façade of complete control. But for some reason—and despite everything she knew to be right and true—she wanted to learn this very trait from him. She wanted to eat it piece by piece from his mouth and take it inside her and be a partner to it.

  She did not retreat when he looked into her face. There was, in fact, an expression on her face like defiance. “How did you know to bring me to this villa?”

  “I’ve made it my business to know. Tell me it pleases you and I’ll be happy.”

  “Are there rooms here with glass floors?” she asked, knowing the answer already.

  Hanish nodded. “In the children’s bedrooms. They are below us.”

  “Show me them,” Corinn said, in barely more than a whisper.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Aliver returned to the world of the living. He parted
with the Santoth, promises made on both sides, and he walked himself gradually back to an understanding of his corporeal body. At first, his limbs swung unwieldy about him, heavy as if flowing with molten metal. His legs were a chore to lift. Each time he set a foot down he felt guilt for placing the burden of himself onto the earth. Why had he never noticed that before? The flow of time, the progression of the sun, the brutal heat of day, and the sharp cold of night: so many things to remember. It seemed the world’s volume was out of all order. What should have been the tiniest of sounds—wind stirring sand grains to tumbling, a grumble of thunder in the far distance, the blast from his chest as he coughed—rocked him right to the center. Again and again he had to stop in his tracks, hold his head, breathe low and shallow. With each step he considered turning around. But this was never really an option. It was like the hunger of a mist smoker for the green cloud. He had no intention of giving in to it. In fact, he had never felt more resolved to face his fate back in the Known World.

  He met Kelis just where the man promised he would be. Something about being with another person broke down the last barriers between Aliver and the world. He heard another human voice for the first time in what seemed like ages. He opened his own mouth in response and was relieved to find his speech no longer the discordant clatter it had been. By the time they reached Umae, he and Kelis were running again, the pair of them looking much as they had when they left weeks before.

  Umae, however, was not the same as it had been. It had doubled in size, lapping out of the gentle bowl that housed it and reaching out in all directions. Makeshift tents clustered around the main village, satellite settlements that had a fledgling look of permanence to them. As he and Kelis approached, calls went up announcing them. People thronged the lanes between the fields, perched in acacia trees, squatted on every area of available ground. Walking through them, Aliver heard inflections that marked the dialects of neighboring tribes. He saw Balbara headdresses made of ostrich feathers and seashell necklaces from the eastern shore and the skintight leather trousers worn by the hill people of the Teheen Hills. A cluster of high-cheekboned warriors greeted him with a timed shout. He had no idea what people they were. He answered them with a nervous nod, which—judging by their grins in response—sufficed quite nicely.