Aliver stared at Oubadal for a long moment. He no longer felt frightened by the man’s heavy eyes and calm air of superiority, nor humbled by his own ignorance, not when this man’s version of leadership was so vile. He would just have to find another way. “I will not help you destroy an entire nation. If you are so mighty, why not do it yourself? Why not ask the Bethuni, if you control them also?”
“The Bethuni are bound by older loyalties,” Oubadal said. “They have a blood bond with the Balbara. They cannot fight them, but neither do they love them. I won’t speak from the side of my mouth to you, Prince. Without your help, the war between us and the Balbara would be uncertain. They aren’t without bravery.”
Aliver said, “Perhaps I should be speaking to the Balbara. I’ve come to speak to the wrong nation.”
Oubadal seemed amused by this observation. “If, Prince, you were friends to our enemy and came against us, you would find yourself cursed in many ways. Who would be your army? The Balbara and Talayans? We would fight them. And while we did, the Bethuni would attack Talay. The coast tribes would not fight us, as they are bound to us by blood. If the Balbara did not come against us but marched away with you, we would pounce on their women and children or the old ones. And because they know this, they would never do it. And so you would gain nothing, except the defeat of your cause before you had yet begun.”
“When I am king of Acacia you will no longer talk to me thus,” Aliver said. “You will remember respect.”
“If you were the king of Acacia, Prince, I would bow before you and suck your big toe.” Oubadal glanced around at his companions, who fell into laughter, the old men especially so. “But you are king of nothing right now. Is that not the truth?”
Aliver barely managed to get through the formal courtesies of leave-taking, so anxious was he to run out into the open air, away from the scent of sandalwood and the lazy, simmering intensity of Oubadal’s eyes.
Kelis stopped him a little distance outside the village gates. He grabbed him by the elbow and slowed him to a halt. “Oubadal can bring us ten thousand fighting men. You cannot walk away yet.”
“I will not slaughter a blameless people,” Aliver said. “This is not what my father intended.”
“This is the way things have been done since the beginning, by all races of men,” Kelis said. “Do you want to achieve your goal or not? I know what you believe. You have noble intentions, but rarely do noble men shape the world. They talk about it, while men such as Oubadal act. Do not leave here without making this moment yours. It is not yours yet, Aliver. So do not leave.”
Aliver sat down on the parched gray earth and cradled his head in his hands. Thaddeus had said that the world was corrupt from top to bottom. Here was his first proof of it. He tried to still his mind and see good in this somewhere, but there was no good in it. He could not begin this war in such a foul way, not if he was to maintain any grip on his humanity. He tried to think of some other terms the chieftain might accept, but the convolutions of tribal alliances were so frustrating that he kicked out at the dirt. It was stupid! It was petty! Too coarse and small. It was one small example of all the practices he wanted to wipe the world clean of. Thinking this, he had an idea.
He said, “What if I told Oubadal that I’m demanding his help, not asking for it? What if I said that I am Prince Aliver Akaran now, but I will be King Aliver Akaran come the fall. What if I remind him that I’m a lion, and say I will not concern myself with the squabbles of the cubs at my feet. What if I tell him the Santoth sorcerers answer to me now and that with them I’ll wipe my enemies from the earth. He can join me and be of aid—on my terms—or he can suffer the wrath of powers he cannot imagine.”
“You could try that, I suppose,” Kelis said. “You will have to look him in the eye as you say it, though, to make sure he doesn’t bite your lip. If you call him a cub you’ll be insulting him…unless, of course, you are a lion. There’s no insult in the truth.”
Aliver rose and looked his friend in the eye. “I am still hesitating, aren’t I? You don’t think I should.”
“I believe that if you speak from your heart each time you open your mouth, you cannot go wrong.”
Aliver turned and looked back at the stronghold. From this distance the hides pinned to it looked like tiny things. Like the pelts of alley cats. He started walking. When he heard his friend’s footfalls beside his, he asked, “Tell me something, Kelis. All these people who claim they are descended from lions—what proof do they offer?”
Kelis smiled. “There is no proof. They just say it and try to sound convincing.”
Chapter Fifty
Mena told no one what she intended, not even Melio, who had inadvertently helped her to form the plan. She took only the Marah sword and the few things that she could carry in a shoulder sack. She crept out of her compound and through the still streets, grayed with the coming day. Part of her was afraid of being discovered. Another part moved with quiet confidence. She could walk silently when she wanted to. Years before, as a girl, she had crept past the Marah guards to discover the horrors of the Kidnaban mines. If she had accomplished that, no Ruinat villager or slumbering priest would wake to question her now. Of course, it was the foreigners that had prompted this, made it urgent. They were Meins, Melio had said, disappointment in his voice. It was only a matter of days before they left Galat and came for her. They must do something, he’d said. So she was doing something. It was not the thing Melio had proposed, but it was something.
She chose a skiff from among those beached on the shore, tossed her sack inside, and shoved the craft into the water. An hour later she swung around the far tip of Vumair and caught sight of Uvumal. The island broke jagged and green out of the sea, like upright shards of broken glass poorly disguised beneath a covering of plant life. It was a short sail away, but she had never made the journey before. Nobody ever did. The island was considered sacred to the goddess. It was her home and sanctuary. Since the rise of Maeben worship it had been left wild. It had not been forested or hunted, no hillside plots cleared for tilling. It seethed with feral density. The undergrowth was a tangle of plant life. Here and there massive trees broke up out of the canopy. They were lopsided giants, with long stretches of trunk that erupted in knots of branches. They were twisted by age, torn at by the weather, each of them a totem to savage antiquity. Such was Mena’s destination.
The beach she dragged the skiff onto was a sublime stretch of bone-white sand, untouched by human feet. Palms secured to the higher sand leaned toward the water. Natural debris littered the beach—driftwood, coconuts and their husks. Crabs skittered sidelong through fallen fronds and…Something caught her eye, a surprising enough object that it snagged her attention and took her a moment to believe. The weathered head and upraised arm and upper portion of the torso of a child’s doll jutted up from the sand. It was a creepy, eyeless form, its arm frozen in what looked like a frantic gesture of greeting.
Nor was it the only man-made object. A length of rope and a fishing buoy lay a short distance away. Farther on, a piece of fabric draped a stone like laundry set out to dry. Mena’s eyes darted around for a few frantic seconds, until she was assured that she was alone. How strange. People may not have journeyed here, but their rubbish did. She walked a few steps toward the items, nervous lest the goddess spot the insults before she could snatch them up. If the priests knew of this, they would forbid the custom of dumping refuse into the current off the southern harbor point. She began to form the words with which she would broach the subject to Vaminee. There are a thousand ways to defile the goddess, she would begin. One must remember that a thing dropped in one place does not simply vanish…
Catching herself, she drew up and cursed under her breath. It was so easy to drop back into her prescribed role. She was not here as the domestic servant of the goddess! She was not here as her eyes and mouth. She had no plans to take any message back to the priests.
She spent the rest of the morning pushing into the fo
rest. She had imagined the inner island would be silent and brooding, a place she would have to creep through, fearing every twig beneath her feet. Instead, the leaf-thick air thronged with a cacophony of birdsong. Monkey calls swept through the trees in waves. Insects screeched, chirped, whirred with abandon. She stepped on the woven mesh of mangrove roots, squelched through heavy mud that stank of bad eggs. The sword on her back snagged again and again. She grew so twisted and jammed within the undergrowth that at times she simply stopped moving and hung suspended, resting. And then she carried on.
She took a late breakfast sitting on a pebble wash beside a thin stream. She thought of the doll on the beach. Whose had it been? There were a thousand ways to explain how it might have been lost. Perhaps it was old. It might have been discarded by a child who did not care for it anymore, made a plaything for a dog who was careless with it. Was it a lost treasure swept away with the tide, mourned with small tears? Had it been tossed to the sea by grieving parents? Or had it fallen from the sky? She regretted leaving it. She should have at least dug it from the sand and set it in the skiff and promised it that she’d return and bear it away.
By noon she was scrambling, often on all fours, to ascend the interior hills. For all the difficulties of the terrain, it did not take her long to find what she was looking for. Standing on the trunk of a fallen tree and gazing through the slit its descent had cut in the canopy, Mena spotted the aerie. It perched near the crest of a hill three ridgelines away. The tree that housed it pierced the canopy and rose up to a singular height. It was a giant, ragged beam. Much of it looked dead. It was bone white where long swathes of bark had peeled free. Many of its branches were broken halfway or nubbed close to the trunk. The nest perched near the top. From a distance it looked like a crosshatched confusion of debris, flotsam deposited there by a strange act of nature. She could see no movement in it.
From the moment she started toward it, she lost sight of the nest, so thick was the woodland. Down a ridge and then up, down another and then up, down and up. Cresting each rise she veered intentionally to the right. Once atop the third ridgeline she turned left and progressed along it, hoping this would take her to her goal. It took two hours, during which time she could not see more than a hundred feet. She feared she might walk within a stone’s throw of either side of it without noticing.
In the end she found it with her nose. There was a stench. A reek of decay, of rot. She wanted very much to avoid it. It repelled her, and for that reason she turned toward it. Within a few minutes she approached the base of an enormous trunk. It was larger than any near it, wide enough around that it would have taken four or five of her arms’ lengths to embrace it. The smell rose from a putrid mixture of bird droppings and flesh and bones that littered the ground: rib cages, femurs cracked open, bits of dried organs, a rodent’s skull, a leather sandal, the withered stick of a forearm…a child’s forearm and a hand.
Mena vomited. It was an instant release, over almost immediately. She wiped her mouth and stared at the arm, transfixed, stunned out of thought for many breaths. This was why she’d come. She had known this deep within her all along. She had strapped the sword to her back for a reason, but she had also journeyed here with a stubborn kernel of hope. Perhaps—some portion of her wished—she would find that Maeben did live in a palace high in the trees. Perhaps she really did snatch children to be her servants. Perhaps she’d find proof of everything she’d been told to believe, everything she’d spent years representing to the people of Vumu.
But no matter what she might have hoped, that arm refuted it. She had devoted her life to a lie. She had stood in judgment of innocent people. She had chastised them for…what? For loving their children with all their hearts? For wanting lives with no limit on joy? And all the time her goddess was but a flesh-eating beast.
She moved closer to the limb. There was something about the way the fingers—shriveled and leathery though they were—clenched. Squatting, she could just make out a glint of metal. She reached out, pinched the object in her fingertips, and pulled it free.
It was a silver eel pendant. She had seen such a form before…in the water beside the pier months ago. She had loved the shape of it in the rippling clear sea; it was just as fine now. A hole pierced the rounded bulb of the head. The threadlike remains of the string that had once held it dropped away. She imagined the owner wearing it about her neck. It might have been the first thing she reached for when death swooped down from above and sank its talons through her flesh. She felt sick again, this time with the memory that she had warned the villagers not to look up into the sky.
She rose, fastened the pendant to her necklace, and looked up at the tree. It would not be an easy climb. The bark was rough and crevassed enough that she found ample holds for her hands and feet, but it was also crumbly in places, rotten and termite bored. She tore away chunks with her hands. It was amazing, really, that the tree still managed to stand. She found a handhold and a nub for her foot, pulled herself off the ground, and began the slow ascent.
An hour later she broke free of the canopy, having passed through regions of animal and insect life she had never conceived of. She blinked at the brightness of the world and felt the touch of moving air over her sweat-drenched skin and noted how the tree swayed. Despite a strengthening breeze the stink increased. The branches grew more crusted with droppings. They dirtied her hands and made it harder to trust them. She had to dig her fingernails into the stuff. Upon reaching the bare stretch of naked bark just below the nest, she straddled a branch, leaned back against the trunk, and caught her breath.
A flock of yellow parrots skimmed above the treetops to the north, fast flaps and then long glides, flap and glide. Below her, parakeets darted into and out of view, sticking close to shelter. Nothing larger floated on the air, no great raptors, nothing of divine origin. She did note the thickening clouds off to the east, a storm gathering, perhaps the first of the summer downpours.
The nest above her seemed to be empty. It was silent up there, save for the occasional rustle and shift of the nest material. She could get up and into it, look around, decide what she would do next. She hoped this last knowledge would come to her, for she had no clear idea as yet.
Opening the lid of her pouch, she drew out a coil of rope. It was a thin weave made from plant fibers, oily in her fingers. She shook loose the knots. She let one end of the rope fall free and tried to ignore the breathtaking height the dangling coils betrayed beneath her. The near end had been fastened to a three-pronged hook, a tool she had adapted from a deep-sea fishing lure. She flung the hook up and over the nest. It caught on the first attempt. The first few tugs gave slightly. A few twigs snapped before it set firm.
As she gripped the rope and stepped off the branch, the eel pendant fell free from her chest and then banged back against it. She dangled for a moment, her full weight committed to the rope. She caught herself starting to invoke a prayer to Maeben. She clipped the words and swallowed the unspoken portion. Once she stopped swaying, she climbed up, hand over hand. For some reason she thought of Melio, perhaps because her lithe fitness had so much to do with his training. But then she reached the tangle of brittle branches that was the nest and could think about nothing except how to claw her way up over the curve of it.
She was clinging there, panting, trying to find a decent placement for her hands, when an avian head rose up from inside the rim of the nest. It was just more than an arm’s length away, a grotesque, hooked visage. It opened its beak and squawked. Something was wrong with it, Mena knew, but she could not stop to think what. She expected the bird to take flight, and she moved more jerkily for fear of it. She scrambled as far back as she could. The nest swayed with the shift of her weight. Branches and twigs snapped. It took an absurdly long time to position herself well enough to let go with her right hand and draw the sword. Once she had the weapon in hand, however, she knew exactly what to do. She swung at it, using all the full, awkward force she could muster. The sword bit the bir
d on the neck, but the blade angle was off and it did not cut deep. She yanked it out—still surprised that she had the time to do so—and struck again. She got the angle and force right this time. The creature’s head sailed up and away from its body, then plopped down next to it.
In the nest a few moments later, staring at the convulsing body of the thing, she realized what had seemed strange about it. The bird was feathered sparsely, ill formed and pathetic, no bigger than a vulture. Fully grown sea eagles were two or three times as large. It was not Maeben at all. It was barely more than an infant of the species. Mena half formed a joking comment about the things only a mother could love, but she did not speak it aloud.
She sat down across from it, thinking how very strange this all was, amazed that she was actually here, in a sea eagle’s nest well above the forests of Uvumal, across from a corpse, with a naked sword in her hand, swaying as the wind buffeted the creaking, aged tree from side to side. Who was she? When had she become this person? Perhaps this was all madness, she thought. It was a crisis of her own creation. She could envision two paths for her future now: one of them that ended no farther than this aerie, the other one such a complete leap into the unknown that she could scarcely believe she had conceived of it. And yet in some bizarre way either course was acceptable to her.
She realized that she could just climb down now. She had taken a child from the goddess. Let her see how it feels. Mena could grasp the rope and swing into the air and be down from these heights before the storm—which was even more palpable now—dumped rain on the canopy. She could go home feeling she had accomplished something, an act of retribution, sealed in blood.
She could, she thought, but no, she wouldn’t. She was not finished yet.
By the time she distinguished the flapping of wings from the sounds of the strengthening wind, she had repositioned herself. She lay back against the nest with the dead infant in her lap, propped against her chest. It was headless, of course, but she held the severed part roughly in place with one hand. Thus situated, she watched the mother return, hoping the disguise would help her get close enough to strike.
Acacia, The War with the Mein Page 49
