The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  The young woman took the stone steps two or three at a time. They were cut shallow so that one approached the temple with slow, measured, and reverent steps. But this applied to the worshippers, not to the one being worshipped. “Calm yourself, Vandi,” she said. “Remember who serves whom here.”

  Vandi, like most Vumuans, was short of stature, with night-black hair, greenish eyes, and a tight pucker of a mouth. As he was a priest and often indoors, his skin did not quite match the villagers’ coppery complexions, but he was still remarkable to behold. “We all serve the goddess,” he quipped.

  She slipped inside the garment offered her and let herself be bustled deeper into the temple. In the deep, incense-pungent seclusion of her chambers, attendants set about dressing her. They draped her in the various, feathered layers of her office, securing each with quick fingers. Others painted her face and fit the bird’s beak mask over her mouth, making sure that she could breathe. Perfumers hovered around them all, taking sips from precious gourds and exhaling the scented water in a fine spray it took them years to master the delivery of. They slipped talons onto her fingers, tugged them into place, and fastened them with wraps of leather around her hand and up her wrist. Each hand bore three of these, two partnered fingers and a thumb supporting the weight of the curving crescents. They were fearsome relics of an actual sea eagle, a creature so large it must have approached the goddess in grandeur.

  Through it all the young woman stood still, her arms raised out to either side, impassive as they worked. She remembered that her long-ago father had sometimes stood in a similar posture as he was dressed. Perhaps, she thought, she had not come so far from her origins as she believed. Before she became the priestess, she had answered to the name Mena. Now she was Maeben. Not so different. She sometimes remembered her family with a clarity that stunned her, but most of the time she saw them as still images that resided within frames, like portraits hung on the wall of her mind. She even saw herself this way. Princess Mena, dressed in too much clothing, a jeweled brooch at her neck, and royal pins in her hair. She recalled two of her siblings well, but again her memory kept them frozen in differing postures: earnest Aliver, so concerned over his place in the world, and good-hearted Dariel, innocent and eager to please. Corinn she could not picture entirely. This troubled her. She should have known her sister best of all, but in fact she was the hardest to pin to an identifiable character. None of it mattered, though. Whether she liked it or not, that existence was behind her. Her life was now about something else entirely.

  One morning years ago she woke from sleep, knowing before she opened her eyes that she was afloat on a tiny, bucking skiff. She looked up at the boundless white-blue sky. If she lifted her head, she would see all around her the same heaving whitecaps of the open ocean that she had scanned for days already, and for the first time this filled her more with weariness than with fear. She sat up. Her Talayan guardian was a taciturn man. He conspicuously avoided looking at her, keeping his dark eyes turned toward the far horizon or up at the billowing sail or off to either side, taking in the shape of the swells.

  She felt no inhibition about staring at him candidly, studying his lean face, watching how skillfully he functioned even with two fingers missing from his left hand. He used it without hesitation but with strange hooked motions that trapped her eyes and would not let them move on. She had rarely seen any sort of bodily deformity on Acacia. Never among the servants, certainly, and visiting dignitaries would have hidden any such wound. He did not seem as large a man as she had first thought, but maybe she was just losing perspective, he being the only figure in view inside a small boat and against the backdrop of the ocean’s vastness. Large or not, he was a soldier. He wore his short sword at his waist. The hilt of his long sword was just visible from where it jutted out of a compartment in the deck. From its placement it almost seemed that he had tried to hide it.

  For the hundredth time she felt compelled to shake her head at the absurdity of it all. She had believed his claim that this plan was all of her father’s devising, but that did not make it seem any more sensible. It was this man’s face that she had first beheld when she opened the door to her room on Kidnaban. Him that she had chosen to trust as they mounted two ponies and made off on a coastal road. In the woods he had shorn her hair with goat shears. He had her put on rough clothes and explained that their story—should they need one—was that she was a boy indentured to him to pay a familial debt. As it turned out, nobody asked about her anyway.

  They sailed from port to port, booking passage where and when they could, and it was not until they reached Bocoum that the man opted to purchase the small vessel they now sailed in. He haggled for it for nearly an hour, as she watched it all, mystified. She asked him several times why they were traveling this way, but he ever directed her only to read the letter he had presented to her. In it, written in Thaddeus’s hand, was an all-too-brief explanation. The best way for her to slip into hiding was to do so without fanfare, drawing no unwanted attention, requesting no luxuries. Nobody would dream that the Akaran children would travel with only a single protector; thus they could hide in plain sight and proceed unmolested. It was imperative that they leave no signs somebody could later piece together and follow. This, she reasoned, was why they could no longer appear to have the kingdom’s finances to draw upon. The pretense, to say the least, was becoming tiresome.

  “Where are you taking me?” Mena asked.

  The guardian craned his neck around and took in the sea behind them for a moment. Mena noticed he did this often, every minute or so, as if it were a compulsion that his reserved manner could not subdue. “I am doing as ordered,” he said.

  “I know that. But where have you been ordered to take me?”

  “To the Vumu Archipelago. Just as I told you yesterday and the day before, Princess.”

  “Why?”

  “I do not know. I am just doing as ordered.”

  “Will you take me home instead?”

  His eyes touched on her for a moment, an emotion in them that she could not read. Then he looked back out over the sea again. “I cannot. Even if I wanted to…I cannot. I understand that you are scared, but all that I can do to help you I am doing.”

  “How long will it take to get there?”

  “A few more days. It depends on the wind, the currents.” He motioned with his hand as if he distrusted these things, was not even quite sure where they were located.

  Mena stared at him, unimpressed. “Anyway, I did not say that I was scared. You are the one who is scared. Why do you keep peering about? What are you looking at?”

  He scowled at her and then set his eyes forward as if he would not answer. But something in his respect for her family—however it might have been altered by recent events—chastened him. “There is a boat,” he finally said, “behind us. And closing.”

  And so there was. It was tiny as yet. She would have passed her eyes across it, thinking it just the whitecaps on some wave. It surged into and out of view as it, and they, rose and fell. At first she did not believe that it was following them. How could he tell that for certain on such a heaving expanse? But an hour later she thought perhaps it was and maybe it was somewhat nearer already. Each time it emerged from a trough and cut through the peak of a wave it seemed to have closed distance. Mena asked the Talayan if they should wait for it. Perhaps it had been sent from Acacia to find them. Maybe they could turn back now. The guardian did not answer, neither did he alter their course or lower the sail. It did not much matter, though. The other boat was faster. It had longer lines and a wider billow of sail. It gained on them steadily, propelled by a gathering storm. Or perhaps it dragged the storm behind it. It was hard to say which directed the other.

  Gusts of wind ripped talons across the water and buffeted the boat like a toy. The waves rose to increasing heights. By late in the afternoon the other boat had pulled abreast of them and cut the water at the same rate, separated by a hundred yards and then less, then still
less. A lone man crewed the vessel. Mena had scarcely picked him out and was straining to observe details about him—still hoping to find him a messenger from her father—when he rose to his feet. He stood a moment, finding his equilibrium. He held what looked like a pole in his hand. The guardian must have seen this, too. He hissed a curse under his breath. He motioned for Mena to come near him, saying something she could not understand. She thought he wanted her to take hold of the tiller he held clenched under his armpit. Or perhaps the rope his hands fumbled and yanked at. Either way, the alarm in his voice and gestures froze her. She did neither. They climbed the face of a wave and launched screaming onto its back, their sail so filled with angry air, Mena feared they might lift out of the water and fly away like a kite untethered.

  For a moment they were alone in a valley. Then they were two again. The other vessel came sliding down the back of a wave toward them, the prow hissing as it cut the slick back of the water. The pursuer flung the pole—now obviously a spear—with a force that almost toppled him forward out of the boat. It flew toward and pierced the center of the guardian’s breast as if it belonged in no other portion of the world. He released the tiller and grasped the spear shaft. He did not try to pull it out, but he did seem to want to support the weight of it. He coughed up a gush of blood, and then, reaching behind with one hand, he pulled himself backward, over the lip of the gunwale. He plopped into the water and was gone.

  The boat swung around, directionless, pitching side to side. It leaned over and slurped in a gush of the sea and then righted and spun again. Mena had to throw herself to the deck to avoid being hit by the yardarm. The sailcloth thrashed about like a frantic animal, but it did not catch the air the way it had a moment ago. Mena had no idea what to do with it. She stared up at the snarling life in the fabric, paralyzed. Then she felt something she had not in days—the impact of the boat against something solid. This snapped her upright.

  The other boat was beside hers, gunwale to gunwale, each smacking against the other as if each wished a fight. The attacking sailor leaped from his boat and landed sure-footed inside hers. He took her in with a quick glance, but came no nearer. He held a rope, with which he bound the vessels together, with enough slack between them that they could float apart. He was out of sight for a moment, then rose back into view, fumbling in the guardian’s shoulder bag. What did he want? What did he want with her? What would he do to her? She could not possibly imagine, but the specifics hardly mattered. Whatever the answer was, it would be a horror. At first she did not realize that her hands had found a weapon, and yet they had. She clenched her guardian’s long sword in both her hands. She tugged at it and just managed to pull it from its stowed place. But it was too heavy to actually lift. She could not even get it unsheathed, though the scabbard point dragged a jagged line across the boards. She had never felt so powerless.

  How strange, then, that the man turned his back to her. He tugged at the rope for some time, and then leaped from the gunwale back into his boat. The two crafts crashed together again. The man reached out a quick hand and tugged loose the knot that attached his boat to hers. He seemed to have no interest in her whatsoever.

  “What are you doing?” Mena shouted.

  The soldier paused and looked at her, holding the two boats together with a single wrap around the cleat beside his foot. He clearly had wished to avoid speaking to her, but, once questioned, he could not fail to answer. “I wish you no harm, Princess,” he said, shouting back to be heard over the wind and water. “What happened here was between this man and myself. I have no quarrel with you.”

  “You know who I am?”

  The man nodded.

  “Why did you kill this man? What are you going to do with me?”

  “He and I had a—a dispute. With you I have no wish to do anything.”

  They rose up over a wave and all was chaos for a moment. When she could see the man’s face again Mena spoke. “You will leave me here to die?”

  The man shook his head. “You won’t die. You are in a current that drags you east. It runs through Vumu as if through a sieve. Even if you raise no sail but just float, you will sight land in a few days’ time. You will find land again. And people. What passes between you and them is for you to decide.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mena said, emotion rising in her voice.

  The man looked at her, something mocking in his eyes. “You are not the only one with a story. What happened here was mine and his.” He thrust his chin scornfully toward the depths. “It is an old debt, settled now.”

  “Are you my father’s enemy?”

  “No.”

  “Then you are his subject! I order you not to leave me here!”

  “Your father is dead, and I take orders no more.” He flung the loose coils of rope into her boat. “Princess, I don’t know what your father intended by sending you out here, but the world is not what it once was. Make your way as best you can; I will do the same.”

  After that he spoke no more. He turned his back to her and unfurled his sail. It snapped full and his boat carved away, cutting a diagonal line up the face of an oncoming wave. Mena watched him slip over the edge and out of sight, feeling his words like a slap across the face. She realized that she had naïvely believed that the workings of the world revolved around her and her family. Never before had she acknowledged that somebody else’s life might alter hers. How foolish. That was exactly what was happening! Had not Hanish Mein’s actions changed her life? And her guardian and his killer had stories too, lives too, fates too. She realized that the world was a dance of a million fates. In this dance she was but a single soul. This, at least, was how she would come to remember the event and its effect on her.

  As it happened she stared after the killer at each rise, watching him fade into the distance. Eventually, he was beyond her view. She was alone, nothing around her save the featureless sky and moving liquid mountains that at that moment made up the entirety of the world. And it stayed that way for five more days, until she first spotted the island that was to become her home, her destiny.

  “There,” Vandi said, stepping back to examine the fully costumed priestess, “you are the goddess once more. May she be praised and find us humble!”

  The attendants who had dressed her echoed this in mumbles. They drew back from her reverently. This moment always seemed strange to Mena. These young women had themselves transformed her. They had put each portion of her costume onto her near-naked body, and yet once they finished their work they went weak with fear over what they had created. She walked between them behind Vandi, toward the cymbals and chimes that announced the ceremony. Vumuans were a strange people, she thought. But still, she had always liked them and felt some amount of comfort with them. She had since she had first laid eyes on them.

  Her arrival on the island had been a rough one. She might easily have died; the fact that she lived and the way that she emerged from the sea became the basis of all that followed. Alone in the boat with scant provision left her, she had watched the island draw nearer for two full days. The seas were calmer now, but around the island ran a barrier reef constructed in such a way that the ocean tossed a fury of waves over it. From the heights of these as she approached, Mena thought she might be able to ride the froth all the way into the calm water beyond the breakers. But it was not to be so easy. The boat snagged on the bottom. She lost her hold on the tiller and hurtled forward, smashing her shoulder against the decking. The pain of it was immense, complete, almost enough to block out the tumult around her. She rolled onto her back, wedged herself in as best she could, and stared up as waves poured over the boat. She felt the hull catch and grind across the reef until the boat turned sideways and rolled. For a moment she was suspended in the boiling water, her mouth full of the stuff, breathing it and choking on it at the same time. The mast must have snapped, allowing the boat to roll around. But it did not stop when it got upright. Instead, it rolled over again and again, over and over until the world made
no sense at all.

  She was sucked from the boat, flipped and tumbled and wrenched about by the soft muscle of the water. Her face pressed against the coral once, her arms and legs many times. She clasped something in her hand, an object that caught and twisted and wrenched her arm about. She thought it was a part of the boat and would not let it go. It was a vain hope, but she felt if she held on to a board or pole or whatever it was, she might make it through this. She changed her mind when whatever she held yanked her arm from the socket at that shoulder.

  She must have gone unconscious. She was not sure, but at some point she just awoke, gasping in the calm. She sucked air furiously, all of her focused on the frantic need to inhale. Only after she had done so for a while did she realize there was sand beneath her feet. The water around her was warm and peaceful. The waves broke not far away at all, but she had gotten past them and could make out individual trees on the shore. Even more, she saw the smoke of a fire and the thatched roofs of huts and a boat moving along the shoreline. She remembered the searing pain of her shoulder, but the arm was home again and the dull throb in the joint hardly registered.

  As she began to wade forward she noticed that her left arm dragged an object behind it, an awkward weight in the water. Her hand was clenched around a leather rope. Actually, this rope knotted around her wrist, enough so that her hand was bluish and swollen. Lifting it, she pulled the guardian’s long sword to the surface. The rope around her wrist was the sling used to carry it over one’s back. It was the sword that she had clung to, not a piece of the boat at all. She might have been holding the sword for a while, but it was the knotted cords that assured it stayed with her, as if the weapon itself feared the depths and had refused to let her go.