Acacia, The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  Eventually, infuriated, he hissed, “What good is such a thing?”

  The sound of his voice jolted him. He looked around the library, watched dust float in the air, listened to the silence, and searched for any sign that he might have been heard or seen. The chamber was still and empty, but he realized that it was not night anymore. It wasn’t even early morning. The full light of a clear day cascaded through the windows. Hours had passed while he sat with his head in the book. He had been so preoccupied someone could have walked in and tapped him on the shoulder. He could hear voices in the courtyard outside, the click of shoes passing in the hallway, a grinding sound as somebody moved a heavy piece of furniture in a nearby room.

  And then he felt the weight of the book, as if it consciously pressed against his thighs, taunting him to try again. He snapped it closed. He was not, of course, meant to read it. He had not intended to try. It could only be understood with close study, and should only ever be examined by one who would commit his life to learning it, to accepting the magnitude of what such knowledge entailed. Thaddeus was not that person. He jammed the volume under his arm and moved for the door. He was very tired, dull with hunger. It would take all his strength to get out of this place alive.

  As he approached the door, a voice flew through the opened window just to his left. A woman’s voice, calling to someone. He did not hear the spoken words clearly, but something about them hooked him with a curiosity to see who had spoken and to whom. He stepped closer, craned his neck to see. The view spread out before him slowly, each portion of it taking his breath away with its grandeur.

  A group of three women stood with their backs to him. One of them motioned across the courtyard at another young woman. This one seemed to have been stopped in her progress. She hesitated a moment, then turned and proceeded toward the others. Watching her draw nearer, Thaddeus realized who she was. Corinn. It was Corinn. Bits and pieces of Leodan and Aleera were there on display, as were various shadings of resemblance to Aliver and Mena and Dariel. She carried all their traits with a grace beyond any of them. Her posture was upright in a courtly manner, her waist slim, breasts and shoulders snug within a sky-blue dress. She was a part of Acacia’s splendor, he saw, in a way he no longer imagined the other siblings could be.

  Having thought this, though, he knew it was only partly right. She belonged here but not like this. Not as a prisoner; not as mistress to Hanish Mein; not as a living, forced betrayal of all that she held dear. He could see all of this on her face as she spoke with the other women. She was stunning, but that did not hide the misery residing just below the surface. Her face had about it a brittle aura, a crystalline fragility. She looked as if she could explode into a thousand pieces at any moment.

  Thaddeus surveyed her for as long as she stayed in the courtyard. It was the second time he forgot his need for stealth. He viewed her and her surroundings from various windows, learning all he could from what he observed. It did not take long to confirm that she was under close surveillance. People spying on one person may hide their actions well from that person, but they are often as obvious as the sun to others. Guards watched her covertly. Passing officials viewed her with sidelong glances. A servant walked into and out of view several times, holding a basket that she neither dropped off nor added to. In all of this Thaddeus observed hidden signs of her captivity. Because of it, he decided to rescue her.

  This thought had already crossed Thaddeus’s mind. He had rolled it over as he marched across northern Talay. He had dismissed it, though. Everything depended on his retrieving the book, and rescuing the princess added layer upon layer of complexity to the mission. It provided many more opportunities to fail. And he could not fail. He had even gone so far as to imagine conversations with Hanish in which the still-captive Corinn was used as a bargaining point. He doubted Hanish would hurt her. Not after having kept her alive and in health for so long, not after lying night after night in the same bed with her. She’d be safe enough, he had thought, until the conflict reached its conclusion.

  But that was before, when Corinn had been but a notion, a phantom he thought of daily but had not laid eyes on in nine years. How different he felt now that he saw her. If he managed to escape this island with both The Song of Elenet and with Princess Corinn, he would have made great strides toward redeeming his earlier sins. All the children would be safe. The future of the world would lie in their capable hands. The fact that he might be able to make this happen meant that he had to try. Of course he did.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Maeander had watched it all from a platform set up beside his tent back in the Meinish camp. He had his own seeing aid, two spyglasses strapped together to bring the distant scenes into binocular view. He had hummed as the Acacians marched down the slope in battle formation. He had smiled at their hesitation as they spotted the antok cages. He had imagined the bewildered expressions on their faces and laughed out loud in occasional, quick guffaws that startled the men around him.

  Still, the destruction the beasts caused when unleashed stunned him. He thought he knew what to expect. Over the years since the league had brought antok pups as gifts from the Lothan Aklun, he personally checked on the training the creatures received. He watched them grow from the size of suckling pigs. He had instructed the trainers to prepare them for some moment like this. They taught them to hate all color, infused them with fear of visual variation. Through long months of work they forced them to equate orange and red, purple and green and blue with pain, with suffering. And they had taught them that the only way to answer such things was through fury. For the most part this had not been difficult. Fury was in their nature from the moment they kicked their belligerent ways out of their mothers’ wombs.

  But what he watched during those first few hours went beyond his imaginings. With a view of the entire field, he saw the way the four monsters worked in loose coordination. They plowed through the dense concentrations of troops, but not with the random abandon the Acacians must have perceived. They also looped out to the edges, pulling in the fleeing, herding them back, controlling the entirety of the frenzy. Amazed, Maeander realized that the trainers hadn’t lied about their potential; the Lothan Aklun tales about these creatures were true. He was, he believed, going to watch them slaughter every last one of the Acacians and their allies. They would not stop until every scrap of moving color was squashed or shredded. He had felt, mixed in with the euphoria, a pulsing dread of the foreigners from across the Gray Slopes. If they gave weapons such as these away, what sort of powers did they keep for themselves?

  This thought was cut short before it went too far. The small band of strangers arrived, Vumuans he soon learned. He knew exactly why the antok did not destroy them, but he did not anticipate that in all the confusion of battle the Acacians would be able to put together the clues themselves. He cursed when he saw them stripping off their clothes. He wanted to shout for them to stop. That won’t save you! Die with bravery, not with backsides exposed to the world! And yet he watched as they slowly brought the beasts under control, surrounded them, hemmed them in with walls made of their very flesh. Each and every one of them stood naked and vulnerable, their hearts exposed. By no other means than that they calmed the antoks’ savagery. He would never have imagined such a thing.

  Nor could he believe his eyes as he watched Aliver find a way to kill the antoks. There he was, naked as the day he was born and looking much like the Talayans around him, wielding only two lengths of steel in a show of bravery that would have made Maeander himself proud. He could not see every detail precisely, but he saw Aliver leap on the beast’s side. He saw it charge Aliver a few moments later and could tell that when the creature collapsed whatever wound had dropped it had been fatal. The others of Aliver’s army simply followed his example, with variations. Within a half hour all four of the antoks lay dead. Triumphant Talayans climbed on them and danced their jubilation.

  The generals who sat in council with him that evening sought to highligh
t the gains they had made. The Acacians would not be able to field an army the following day. The officers estimated the enemy had lost more than fifteen thousand souls to the antoks in the short space of time they had rampaged. It was a phenomenal number. About a quarter of their entire force. Also, there had been no sign of sorcery on the field. No outside force aided them. Perhaps the one who had been working magic for them had perished before the antoks. Or perhaps he had had only so much of the witchcraft at his disposal. It may have been used up, just as anything else can be used up.

  “Aliver has delayed his defeat,” one general said, “but we’ll be ready to finish this now. We should march on them in full force in the morning. Overrun them. Even if they don’t take the field. Let us slaughter them in their camps and lay them beside their unburied dead.”

  Several murmured agreement. Another, filling the silence where Maeander’s response should have been, said, “Remember, we lost not a single soldier today. Not one. Not even Hanish could have done better.”

  But such things were cold comfort to Maeander. This time it was he, not his advisers, who saw the gains the enemy had made despite what looked like defeat. The tale of Aliver killing the first antok himself would course across the land with the speed of a contagion. It would make the prince a legend of gigantic proportions and stir the land into an even greater frenzy.

  He got word of two other disturbing developments that night. The league-controlled vessels all along the coast had withdrawn. They gave no explanation and refused all efforts at dialogue offered by the few Meinish captains in control of their own boats. There was treachery in this, but it went as yet unexplained. It meant, of course, that Maeander could not evacuate his forces if they were driven up against the sea. Though he did not voice it aloud to anyone, he wondered if this was not his brother’s doing, a chastisement, a challenge. It did not make any sense, but that did not stop the thought from spinning about inside his head like a wheel in perpetual motion.

  Even later that evening, sitting alone in his tent, his gaze fixed on the motionless flame of the oil lamp on his table, a messenger brought him another piece of correspondence. It was a letter from his brother, sent across the sea pinned to a messenger bird. It mentioned nothing about the league—perhaps Hanish had not yet heard what happened. Instead, he wrote with enthusiasm, reporting that he had already sailed from the Mainland. The Tunishnevre were with him. All of them. They were undamaged by the journey and writhing with life. They were bursting to be free. He would have them safely within the new chamber on Acacia within a few days’ time. And then he’d free them.

  And then, Maeander thought, you’ll have completed your life’s work. And I—I’ll have done nothing more than helped secure your fame.

  The thought filled him with despondency. Fast behind this came an old memory from when he was eleven years old and Hanish had just turned thirteen. Their father was still alive then, vocally proud of them both. In honor of Hanish’s birthday, Heberen had arranged for them to dance a Maseret before a revered group of veterans in the Calathrock. It was to be one of Hanish’s last duels as a novice—the last time it would not be a fight to the death. They used real knives, but they wore their thalbas over chain-mail vests. Spots on their chests marked their heart points. This was the target they were each to aim for to end the contest.

  They were both lithe and strong, their bodies growing in exuberant bursts. Maeander was nearly Hanish’s height and strength and had suspected for some time that his skills at the dance surpassed his brother’s. On this occasion, before the roomful of elders, he could not help but push Hanish to the edge. He had not planned to do it. It just happened. Pride billowed in him and drove his actions. He moved faster than he had previously, with unexpected shifts in tempo. He marveled at how composed his brother’s face remained; even more impressive and annoying because Maeander felt the strain he was causing him. He did not attempt to win the duel. That would have been too overt an insult. But he did want to make sure the elders saw him, and so he drew Hanish’s blood. He nicked his left nostril with a backhanded maneuver, looking up at the crowd as he did so. A few moves later he let Hanish touch his heart point. He left the arena satisfied with himself. A face cut was not considered important in the rules of the dance nor was it a serious injury. But it would leave a lasting scar. He was pleased about this.

  That night, however, he was yanked from his dreams. He awoke to instant fear. He felt a living weight pressed down against his back. Someone clenched his hair and wrenched back his head. The flat edge of a knife blade touched his skin, angled just enough that he could sense the edge of it tasting his flesh.

  And then Hanish’s voice spoke from close to his ear, cold and precise. One way or another, he said, Maeander would never humiliate him again. “Don’t deny that you didn’t mean to! Everybody with eyes saw it. I felt it. You would have me know that you are my better. You wish me to fear you, don’t you? But I don’t fear you. It’s my knife at your neck, brother. It always has been and always will be. I could kill you right here, right now, if I wished to.”

  Maeander did not doubt him. His brother might have spoken with the Giver’s voice, so complete was his assurance. Hanish told him that he had a choice to make. He could die right there—with no accomplishments to his name—or he could agree to help him change the world. “Swear to the ancestors that you’ll never work against me. Swear that you’ll always obey me. Swear it to them and I’ll let you live. Otherwise you die right here, right now. Nobody will question me for it. You know that.”

  The answer poured out of Maeander to his lasting shame. Perhaps the one thing that had kept him true to the oath he swore that night was how much it shamed him. Faced with death, he balked. He lay there paralyzed with fear, horrified that he might miss out on the life of glory he so vividly imagined. It was, he knew, a moment of unforgivable weakness. Hanish had pressed him up against the only real thing a Meinish male could be made to fear—a death before having achieved greatness. Ironically, by the Meinish code, he should still have hissed defiance back at Hanish. He should have accepted that worst of fates with smiling indifference. He did not.

  That fact would have been an unbearable disgrace, except for what Hanish did next. Having heard the pledge muttered, Hanish’s weight went limp on top of him. His breathing came in gasps. After a few mystified moments, Maeander realized his older brother was crying, bawling from someplace so deep within him that each sob wrenched upward from his gut. Maeander did not move, did not even mention that Hanish still held the blade to his throat. They had never spoken of that night since, though Maeander remembered it almost every day.

  And now…now Hanish was on the verge of his greatest triumph. Maeander, by comparison, had failed. That was what it amounted to. He had failed. It did not mean defeat for his people. Nothing Aliver could do would stop Hanish from completing the ceremony to release the Tunishnevre. When the ancestors walked the earth again, they would be an invincible force. All the tricks and ploys and strategies he and his brother had devised would be nothing compared to the fury they would unleash. So by holding Aliver’s army in northern Talay he had aided his brother’s complete victory. That was fine enough. But that was not the point. The point was that Maeander Mein would have no true place of glory in the story anymore. Who would remember him? Who would sing of Maeander after Hanish accomplished the one thing his people had yearned for for more than twenty-two generations? It felt as if Hanish had never removed the blade from his throat.

  Facing this, Maeander decided that there was only one honorable way left for him to redeem himself. He sent messengers to his generals, informing them that they would be launching a delayed assault in the morning. He had something in mind to open the day. He would not live through it, but that did not matter. If he joined the Tunishnevre now he would be unleashed with them in the days to come. He would be one of the Tunishnevre, one of the ancestors his brother must revere. Anyway, he had been too long without looking the enemy in the face. Even
Hanish had never done that. And if he accomplished what he hoped to, Hanish would never be able to take it from him.

  None of what he thought or planned was even remotely evident on his face or in his demeanor the next morning. He set out from camp at the vanguard of his personal force, just a handful of Punisari striding through the slant of the rising sun, all of them taller than the norm, their burned faces like stonework chiseled to match their musculature and bearing. Each of them had straw-blond hair down below their shoulders; a few wore the traditional knotted locks to remind them of the years their ancestors roamed the wilds in exile; all knew to what work they went and none showed the slightest sign of hesitation. Maeander had drawn together each of the three braids that, with their weave of colored ribbons, numbered the men he had killed with his own blade. His torso was wrapped in a gray thalba. The only weapon on his person was the Ilhach dagger secured horizontally across his abdomen.

  So accompanied and armed, Maeander approached the Acacian camp across the scarred desolation that was the previous days’ battlefield. He carried a banner that indicated the desire to parlay, and he wore a façade of composed, smiling humility.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  The paper swan was waiting just inside the portal. Somebody must have shoved it underneath the door. Just how this was accomplished was not clear, considering the object’s placement, the way it stood upright several inches from the crack beneath the door, a space not as tall as the stylized, geometric creature that must have passed beneath it. Also, there was a note beside it. Just a ribbon of paper so thin it was hard to pick up. Corinn did so carefully, pinching it between two fingernails. Accept this gift, she read, in the event that you need it.