Bane of a Nation

by A J Burns

  He pressed on; he was known for many things, but his stubbornness was the highlight. “You didn’t answer me.”

  “Why are you so concerned about me?” She licked the indigo paste off her fingers. “It’s edible,” she said in response to his raised eyebrow.

  “Because you seemed to shy away from the question.” He pulled her towards him and kissed her cheek. “But I won’t stir the waters if you don’t wish me to. You’re like a sister to me. Never forget that.”

  “How’s your family?” she asked with hope of changing the topic. “Is Gretna fine? The kids?”

  He looked away for the first time in the conversation. “I haven’t seen them. I don’t even know. They’re in Mesallian territory right now.” A sight of shame overtook his visage. “The congregation I mean.”

  If she had taken these talks of ethnicity as personal affronts, she would’ve hanged herself from the turrets years ago. “How long has it been, Kron? I know you love them. Pardon my words, but what is it with you and this distance?”

  “I can’t explain it,” he mumbled. “I wouldn’t even know what to say to them. They’re my everything. I just can’t stomach seeing them. And the more time that goes by, the harder it is. Now I don’t even have a choice. I’m dead if I try to ride into Grofven.”

  “Why don’t you send somebody? To check on them?”

  He sighed away the frustration he would’ve unleashed on almost anybody else. “I don’t know. I guess…. I guess I don’t want to know. They’re my reason for fighting—my reason for living, breathing—they’re my reason for everything. As of now, they can be alive or they can be dead, and I’m none the wiser either way. What if they are dead? What then?”

  After some silence, both awkward and not, she finished with his treatment and went to tend to Tefvon. She lifted an arm and draped it over her shoulder. The deadweight fell back into its seating.

  “I’mma need a little help on your end,” she said, irritated at his indolence. “Tefvon, wake up.”

  “I’m awake.” He was mumbling with a smile on his face. “You get the children.”

  “What’re you talking about?” She pulled on his arm, but he wouldn’t budge.

  “I did it last time.” He swatted her away. “It’s your turn to get the kids.”

  “Tefvon, please get up.” She let go of him and stepped back, wishing she had brought Kron.

  “They’re probably hungry. My boobs don’t produce milk like they used to.” He chuckled and made himself comfier on the throne.

  “This is Maisi, not Carysa.”

  “Well go get Carysa. Tell her she needs to feed the kids.” He turned his torso to the side and waved her off.

  Maisi exited the hall, walked to the other side of the domicile, took a blanket from the linen closet, and traveled all the way back. She whipped air with the blanket and then tucked the cotton in around him.

  For the next few weeks, she made it her personal mission to cleanse the house of drugs and alcohol. With a sober mind and the persuasion of Kron, Tefvon sent letters to each of his senators, demanding their presence in Vykten’s capital city. Each of the senators arrived, first the Berittas, then the Henesons, then the Macores, and finally the Stakores, with the rectors coming in randomly throughout.

  Maisi entered into the senatorial chambers as Tefvon was preparing to give his speech. As was standard for him, he had written no speech beforehand. He stood at a podium in front of Vykten’s fifty senators; Byson Thorne, his Warden of the Southern Territory, was to his right.

  “Nearly two decades ago,” Tefvon said to the senators, “our fathers and grandfathers revolted against the congregation. Do not let us betray their intentions; do not let their sacrifices—our sacrifices—be in vain. The revolution never ended, only its first campaign. We have continued to fight, to hemorrhage through politics instead of battle, but the war is the same. As long as the Noconyx linger over us, our fate will be the same, whether through action or inaction. Fifty! There were fifty clan chiefs once among us. We lost some through treachery and the rest through conflict, and twelve now remain. They scratch, gnaw, and pick at us, hoping we’ll dwindle away. We exist because they cannot beat us! It is not mercy or benevolence that allows us to exist. No, we remain because they are too weak to assault us. But their numbers grow! The common provinces become more populous every year and their economies grow together while ours remain stagnant. The time is near when they can sever Vehymen from the clans once-and-for-all, and it is fast approaching indeed. Should we let the menace grow, our grandchildren will never see adulthood.

  “The time for action is now. First, we will march west to pacify the Wostaurs, and from there we shall march on the capital. Are you with me, brothers and sisters?”

  “How can we hope to win?” asked Alasyn Thorne. “We’re outnumbered.”

  “We don’t fight alone—we are the Kynaurs, the Tekotaurs, the Orynaurs, the Elynaurs, the Sworfaurs, and the Vyktaurs.”

  “And they are the Hytaurs, Bostaurs, Rofynaurs, Wostaurs—the congregation and the entire Mesallian population,” said Preston Macore.

  “It will not be an easy war,” Tefvon admitted. “But we six are the strongest we’ll ever be. If we do not strike now, then we will strike never.”

  “Yet the enemy surely will,” said Theon Beritta.

  “Yes,” said Bron Heneson. “They already have. My father and eldest brother would’ve been against this war, but it is our enemies who silenced their votes on this senate.”

  Briene Stakore spoke softly. “The Hytaurs are responsible for the wedding massacre, not the congregation.”

  “Are they not the same?” asked Walton Beritta.

  “To some extent, yes,” said Briene, “but their vendettas against Vykten are their own. Aggression by them does not mean aggression from the congregation.”

  “My mother is right,” said Malia Stakore. “Raurs killed the magistrate. Raurs exiled the Mesals and Noconyx from Grofven.”

  “There is no denying that the congregation wants us gone,” said Tefvon. “Maybe the time for war was not then, not in Grofven, but it has come to that at least, and we must respond to the situation at hand.”

  “Must we?” asked Briene.

  “You, Briene Stakore, your larded nephew was vomiting out his ass when the massacre began … because he had consumed too much dairy, the fat bastard. I refuse to be like your nephew, shitting my responsibilities away as the world burns around me.” Tefvon then addressed the crowd in its entirety. “You’ve made your decisions already. Let us not waste any more time.”

  Tefvon sat in silence as the senate talked amongst itself. After a minute of what seemed like deliberation on his part, he reached into his satchel and pinched some powder between his fingers.

  “What are you doing?” whispered Maisi. “Please don’t.”

  “Our province needs an assured chief at this moment,” he said. “This is my assurance.”

  After several minutes of chatter, Tefvon stood and addressed the senate. “Let us begin the vote.”

  Starting from left to right and from top to bottom, each senator stood and gave his or her answer.

  Theon nodded. “Aye.”

  “Let them suffer,” said his brother, Baron. “Aye!”

  Mandon Heneson had assumed his position in the senate after his father and older brother were slain in the wedding massacre. “Aye,” he said. “Let us bring the war to them.”

  His brother, Bron, agreed. “Let them fear the wrath of the sleeping giant.”

  “The Light of the World does not promote vengeance,” said Briene Stakore. “I vote ‘no.’”

  “No,” said Malia Stakore. “Not today.”

  “Aye,” said Preston Macore. “Rally the troops.”

  “No,” said his daughter, Elya. “There has been enough bloodshed.”

  “The time has come,” said Walton Beritta. “Aye.”

  After the senators had voted, Maisi had heard “aye” twenty-eight times and “n
o” twenty-two times. Three weeks later, she watched as the Vyktaurian army traveled westward, following the command of their chief. She coughed into the palm of her hand.

  18

  Enk Arqua

  Panther General

  Whenever a Raur would murder, the rest of them would condemn that man and shun him from society, returning his deed unto him or casting him to the confinement of prison; whenever a Mesal would murder, the Raurs would condemn them, in their entirety, eventually expelling them from society and banishing them to the confinement of Soten.

  It was there, in the outskirts of its capital city, that Enk was born, alongside three-million other outcasts, and it was there that he learned the true meaning of survival. While the other provinces feasted in prosperity, relative or absolute, Soten was the land of the depraved, its people forever in a cycle of grief and bloodshed, a land where children were born into homes without food and where infants died sucking at breasts that produced no milk. In Soten, there was no belief that the strong would survive, only that the weak would perish.

  The Mesals in this province had no concept of economics; a man’s worth never exceeded what he could protect. While Enk had witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Raurs and how their royalty had murdered their own for money and fame, it paled in comparison to the woe the Mesals brought upon themselves; but in Soten, it was not fame or fortune that the scandalous sought out, for the land was so barren and inhospitable that food was the currency.

  Fields that could be harvested were, to a citizen of Soten, as castles were to citizens of the other provinces. Whereas the others experienced an occasional famine, Soten experienced an occasional harvest.

  When the congregation had expelled the quarantine of Soten, its inhabitants were quick to flee, having moved southward to Grofven and as far east as Parven; but Enk had remained, having never intended to leave his homeland. As grotesque and barbaric as it seemed to outsiders, it was where his mother had labored and died for him, where his father had worked and fought for him.

  Tamperil, the city of his birthplace, had been built upon the remnants of a forest: five-hundred acres of tree stumps, the lumber having been exported to the clans before he was born. The Elynaurian and Wostaurian fleets had been constructed with wood from this forest, and one of the Tekotaurian chiefs had built his palace with the timber from a different Sotaurian forest. During the first revolution, when the Vyktaurian chief had encroached on and encamped in the southern woodlands, the Raurs from both allegiances scorched everything in their paths.

  They fought in Soten for five months, using its populace as shields and distractions, flinging newborn calves over the walls of fortifications, hoping to infect their enemies with the plague. Whenever one army was forced to retreat, they would infect the Mesals in that area with The Itch; when the war ended, the civilians unfortunate enough to have survived in the areas of conflict were rounded up and placed in the fringes of Rofynen where they were detained and experimented on with hopes of discovering a cure.

  The chiefs and their followers excelled at either forgetting or ignoring their misdeeds, having become, or having always been, audacious enough to label him and his followers “villains.” Their heralds slandered him, said he was a “drug-lord,” but the truth of it was: He strived to eradicate the cartels from his homeland.

  He had joined with a group of vigilantes, intent on removing the Nisola family from its influence on the land; and he fought with his allies, witnessing as they sacrificed themselves in the sake of desperation.

  The memories he retained, mainly of the faces he would never see again, haunted his nightmares worse than anything he had envisioned prior. He would allude to, but never speak about, the incidents of that era.

  When the Raurs had seized Grofven and sent his kin into exodus, he welcomed them back and promised them deliverance. Throughout his life, he had maintained one overarching goal, and that goal was to experience peace in his lifetime, but peace was so fleeting a thought, he doubted he would ever attain it.

  Today, he sat inside his tent, outside the capital city of Parven, drinking from a glass that had been filled to the brim with rum. This night was the darkest he had ever seen, and it felt like the alcohol couldn’t affect him fast enough. The nine Panther Generals, of which he was one, were scheduled to meet at midnight, but, even with a fifty-minute walk factored in, he still had forty minutes to waste.

  He opened his journal, the pages worn from humidity; and although his mind was set on writing, he couldn’t think of a topic. He pondered a dozen of topics before finally settling on one. His aunt had always spoken of the Old Country, and her mother had done the same.

  “My aunt was seventeen when the Grofven soldiers came fleeing over the hillside. Raurs. To search for refuge after they were obliterated by Vykten.

  “‘We welcomed their veterans after the brutality they suffered in the later days of the revolution,’ my aunt would say. ‘They were homeless, unfed, and cast aside by their fellow clansmen. Like parasites, they took our kindness and fed upon it. Your uncles died in the war alongside them. Did they appreciate it? Not one bit. After the Grofven battles, more came and they never stopped coming. They brought sick with them—ghosted entire towns with nothing but their sneeze.’

  “News tended to trickle to Soten in fragments, usually brought by traders and merchants, but refugees were now coming in swarms, some passing through and some searching for work. ‘We pitied them—gave them jobs at the fishery.’

  “One summer, the refugees stopped coming. Marching from the horizon was a hoard of Vykten soldiers. ‘I took care of my grandma,’ Auntie had told me. ‘Helped her onto the bed when Zeke came running down the street, yelling of the Vyktaurs. Our neighbors tried to flee, but Zeke and me couldn’t leave Grandma behind. They attacked us like they hated us—miners who had never done nothing to them. They lanced Zeke in the heart an put an end to Grandma.’

  “My aunt and grandma fled to Tamperil and tried to outwait them there, along with the Grofven refugees who had been given shelter. Tefvon Vyktaur—I remember, like it was yesterday—called upon the Raurian, Grofven refugees—and offered them a peace deal. All Raurs who wished to live could surrender by bringing them the head of a Mesal. Most of them did.”

  Enk slammed his journal shut when Ritek barged in, interrupting him with the same grace he had come to expect from royalty.

  “Who gives you the right to interfere with my plans?” Ritek asked.

  “What did I tell you about killing innocents?” Enk stood up and moved aside his chair. “Leave his wife and kids outta this.”

  “They tortured my brother!” Ritek was angry at everyone, and Enk pitied the next subordinate who dared upset him.

  “We don’t know what,” Enk told him. “They might’ve killed him first and did the rest to spite you—and regardless of that, his family hadn’t a part in it.”

  “What sick fuck mutilates a person like that? I can see that type if dishonor from the others, but Gregh? May his entire family burn in hell.”

  Enk took a bottle of rum from the cabinet and poured some for Ritek. “Here,” he said, pushing the cup forward. “I’m not gonna try and stop you from having Gregh killed, but leave his family outta this. You understand me, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Ritek said sheepishly. He chugged the rum and placed the cup on the table. “Thank you for your time.” As he made a step to the entrance, he turned and withdrew his leave. “I betrayed my own blood for you—and now my brother is dead because of it. The least you can do is allow me to exact my revenge.”

  “I won’t be an accomplice to murder.”

  “Then you don’t need to hear another thing about it.” This time, Ritek followed through with his step towards the entrance.

  Enk sat down to write, but no words came to his mind. He slipped his feet into a pair of soft, leather slippers and snuck into the wilderness.

  The congregation had posted sentry along the byways, forcing him to meander slightly to av
oid revealing the whereabouts of the meeting.

  He followed a trail until he came to the lone redwood, a forty-two minute trek if his pocket-watch was to be believed. Syras had tangled themselves around the branches, singing a melody so sweet and pure that Enk was entranced by their sound.

  When he came to the abandoned barracks, seven of the Panther Generals were already there. These generals were a renegade group of Mesals, loyal to their own since before the assimilation of Soten and imperial forces. They had been convening out here to avoid glances from curious minds.

  Enk was their de facto leader, a position to which he was indifferent. “I’m sorry for the delayed meeting,” he said as the last general found his seat. “The congregation has a thousand eyes upon us.”

  “You don’t joke.” Devos had a brown, forked beard and cheekbones that rose to his eyes. “I can’t take a piss without their dead eyes following me.”

  “So, what’s the plan for tomorrow?” asked Vessi. He had a pocked face and droopy ears.

  “The same as it’s always been,” said Antin, lisping “Tomorrow, one of us will escort the magistrate-slayer to the chancellor’s pavilion.”

  “And then they’ll slit his throat,” Devos said with a smirk. “Any volunteers?”

  Nobody brought attention to themselves. After a moment of silence, Enk said, “There’s a huge risk—yes—but we must do it.”

  “Why don’t we pluck a nameless sergeant?” Len asked the group collectively. “There’s no reason for any of us to die.”

  “That’s wrong.” Theos raised his arms in bewilderment.

  “We won’t sacrifice a third-party for our own schemes,” Enk said. “It’ll have to be one of us. I’ll do it.”

  “To hell with that.” Vessi straightened his posture. “I’ll die before I let that happen.”

  “Looks like we have a volunteer!” said Devos.

  Selath chuckled. “We need to figure this out soon.”

  Having reacted for the first time that evening, Enos spoke; “I’ll do it.”