The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  Melio’s eyes nodded before his head did. “It’s a Marah sword. It is much like one I had myself once.”

  Mena gripped the hilt and tugged the blade free of the scabbard. The sound it made as it slid was absurdly loud in the hushed space, a grating noise that rose to a lilt as the blade cut naked into the air.

  Melio pulled away and said, “I thought that being Maeben was your destiny.”

  “Why do you back away from me? You came and found me, remember?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “You may not have found me as you expected, and now this thing I ask of you may also surprise you. But so what? You’ve been surprised by life before.”

  He had no direct rebuttal for that. “The priests will—”

  “They have nothing to do with it.”

  The wrinkled expression on Melio’s face managed to say that the flaws in such a statement were obvious. Before he could try to put them into words, Mena continued. “I’ll worry about the priests. They are of no concern to you. Have you any other excuses?”

  Melio appeared to be stumped, unable to withdraw but at a loss for how to proceed. He looked behind him toward the door by which they had entered the storeroom, as if it might be possible to retrace his steps and gain the more stable ground he had stood on only a few moments before. Mena, impatient now, asked him what the First Form was. Edifus at Carni, he responded. Was it a sword Form? Yes, of course, he said. Most of the Forms are.

  “Show me,” Mena said, tossing him the scabbard without warning. He caught it spryly enough. A moment later she stepped out into the center of the room, her own sword in hand. She kicked a few crates to mark out a cleared space. It was not as if she’d never come here before, never unsheathed the sword and swung it around her. She had done so many times over the years. It had been little more than a test of her growing strength, or so she’d thought. Now, it seemed, part of her had felt a need to touch the weapon, to remind her she had not entirely forgotten it. Since she had held it often she knew well how best it fit her hand. She chose to hold it awkwardly, however, with a finger hooked over the guard, with her wrist cocked over as if the blade were too heavy for her. The point of it traced a short, jagged scar on the dirt floor.

  To a swordsman it was not a pleasing picture. Melio could not help but correct her grip on the hilt, as she had known he would do. That was only a start, of course. He taught her how to set her feet, demonstrated proper posture. He named the various parts of the sword and explained the function of each. Within just a few minutes he had lost a good deal of his reluctance.

  He explained to her that Edifus personally fought with the champion of the Gaqua, a tribe that had controlled the Gradthic Gap, the route through the mountains between Aushenia and the Mein Plateau. Just how this duel was arranged was lost to history, but the battle itself was detailed down to the slightest move. Melio had never taught the moves to someone completely unfamiliar with them, but within a few stops and starts he managed to take on the Gaquan’s skin. He held the scabbard like he would a sword, and moved through the series of strikes and parries at quarter speed. Mena was quick to anticipate his moves, and showed him as much.

  Despite himself, Melio warmed to the work. He seemed to forget his reluctance and the slight stature of his pupil and the strange, shadowed space they occupied. The words formed on his lips and his mind seemed to welcome them, to hum with the return of skills long neglected. Whenever he paused or seemed to falter, Mena pinned him with her eyes until he continued. If he was embarrassed by her naked torso he did a good job of hiding it. By the late morning Mena had worked through the entire sequence and knew the early portions by heart.

  Eventually, they paused by mutual, silent agreement, both of them slick with sweat. They stood for some time, catching their breath. Melio wiped the perspiration from his forehead with his palm, though the moisture returned in an instant. Now that they had paused, a look of confusion seeped across his features. He peered at the scabbard clenched in his fist, flipping it from side to side as if he were not quite sure how it came to be there.

  “How long before my brother summons us?” Mena asked.

  “I thought you did not believe it would ever happen.”

  “I don’t, but how long until the summons that you believe will come?”

  “If it happens, as I’ve been told, he will start searching for you this spring. And in the summer he’ll call the armies together. There are many of us who speak of it. When he calls, I’ll hear of it through people I know among the traveling merchants.”

  “So,” Mena said, “a few months. Not much time. How good a swordswoman do you think I can become in a few months?”

  Melio could not shake his look of bafflement. He did not try, nor did he answer the question. Instead, he said, “We should oil that blade. The rust is a crime. Though, of course, we should make training swords. There’s likely good wood in the hills….”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-FOUR

  Maeander had known since boyhood that his gifts were different from his brother’s. Hanish possessed a sharp mind, an encyclopedic memory, a capacity to manage both grand schemes and minute details at the same time, a skill for inspiring adoration from the masses, and a keen understanding of how to manipulate myth in his favor; all fine enough, but Maeander was the one who walked with their people’s tangible, martial anger pulsing within him. His cool demeanor, his smile, his slow eyes: all disguised the seething core of violence ever-present within him.

  He never stood before any man without pondering how he could kill him in the space of seconds, with or without a weapon. While others smiled and chatted and commented on his appearance or upon the weather, Maeander imagined what force would be necessary to drive the wedge of his tensed fingers through a person’s neck so that he could grab and tear loose the artery pumping blood into his head. He had always imagined such things, and he had yet to grow tired of the unease his stare infused into others.

  Maeander knew that he, not his brother, most fully embodied the wrath of the Tunishnevre. The ancestors told him as much themselves. And they advised him that favor was turning his way; he had only to wait for it, to stay true, and to be ready. This was also why he had groomed Larken all these years. The Acacian was as fine a killer as any Mein, and he would make a perfect ally when the time came.

  By sending Maeander in search of the Akarans, Hanish had given him an assignment secondary to the one bestowed on Haleeven. But in the end, Maeander believed, it would be the one of ultimate importance. The Tunishnevre needed Akaran blood. Nothing suited their needs more than liquid spilled from the veins of Leodan Akaran’s children, direct descendants of Tinhadin himself. Corinn might suffice as a last resort; but if the others lived, the Tunishnevre would want and need their blood as well. Think of how the hand that delivered such ambrosia would be rewarded! The ancestors, when they’d been freed from the curse, would shine favors on those that had made it possible. Why should he not be foremost among those? Why should their wrath not live on in him, in a tangible, physical presence that could reshape the world far more completely than Hanish had yet dreamed?

  Maeander embarked on his hunt with the same vigor he had shown for campaigning. He gathered around him a pack of his most trusted, veteran killers and the best of the young ones, the most inured to their own fatigue and to others’ suffering. He led them, barking and rabid, in search of a trail nine years old. He sailed up the River Ask; disembarked below the Sinks; and cut east, weaving through the broad-leaved forest abutting the Methalian Rim. There were no particular clues that led him here, but much of the area’s dispersed population remained loyal to the dead Akaran king. Maeander searched among them, questioning, punishing, leaving villages aflame and young men whose arrogance angered him nailed to trees by the hands and feet and pin-cushioned with arrows. A few tongues babbled nonsense loosened by fear, but he could recognize this for what it was and took payment for wasted time in ways none in the woodlands would soon forget.
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  As he rounded the barrier mountains that separated Aushenia from the Mein Plateau he was no wiser for his efforts. He had, however, warmed to the work. He had long held the belief that the terror and pain one instilled in a victim were directly proportionate to the pleasure to be received as the tormentor. If this was so, he had caused much terror and pain. He knew this was not what Hanish had asked of him, but this mission was his to prosecute as he saw fit.

  Aushenia offered a rolling expanse of field and woodland, cities and towns, in which to further test this equation. Officially, the province remained a Numrek possession, but so many of the foreigners had quit the place in favor of the Talayan coast that the territory had reverted to semi-autonomy. The Numrek were more trouble than they had ever been worth, Maeander thought. There was nothing harder to account for than the character of one’s “friends.” Strange also that lands defeated only a few years before refused to come to terms with the new order of things. Aushenian recalcitrance thrived like weeds in every crack and crevice of the place. And, more to the point, there had always been rumors that the northern forests hid bands of Acacian exiles, people gone nomadic, wandering from place to place, refusing to acknowledge reality. His men waded into Aushenia like wolves into numberless sheep, searching for signs of Acacian gold among those woolly fleeces.

  Not every aspect of his strategy began and ended with brutality, however. He also waved before the people rewards for right behavior, to tempt them, to tie their loyalties into knots, to prove to himself and to them that there was a price for everything. Nothing could be more cheaply bought than honor. Simply put, he sent forth word that he would pay handsomely for useful information. “The person who gives me an Akaran will be rich beyond his imaginings,” he said, “and will have won the undying loyalty of the Mein. He will receive a thousand gold coins, an island or a city or a palace, a hundred courtesans of whatever sort suits him. Consider this. Measure it and act wisely.”

  This message duly went out, and for a fortnight he chased the most credible leads. He sent men like quicksilver spilled upon the land’s contours, slipping out in myriad directions, seizing the leaders of suspect towns, interrogating, threatening, cajoling. He set a trap along the main road between Aushenguk Fell and the north because—he was told—a band of rebel Acacians would be fleeing on it with a stash of weapons and coinage to fuel a planned insurgency. No such items or persons were uncovered. He took a village by sudden storm, torching hut after hut on the sworn testimony that an Acacian royal resided there. None was found. And, one evening, he ordered his men to slice their way into a steaming underground dwelling that he had been told housed Aliver Akaran himself. But what they found inside, in sickening fact, was a den of Numrekian debauchery, foul enough to haunt even his dreams afterward.

  By the end of a month in Aushenia he had soured on his own strategy. To open oneself to the shrewd peasant testimony of any and all was faulty practice. Some of those who came to him had mistaken information; some, fueled by avarice, made grand leaps of conjecture that never mirrored reality. Many based their declarations on rumors with no verifiable validity. Some were bold-faced liars. In the eyes of a few he thought he discerned hidden mirth. This annoyed him more than anything else. These bog trotters thought they could make him out to be a fool!

  When real information finally found Maeander, however, it was not the sort of lead he expected. A girl servant of a former Marah guard arrived, swearing that her master knew something of the missing Akaran daughter, Mena. Maeander promised the girl that if she spoke an untruth he would shove a spear point glowing and red from forges straight through her belly hole. She would cook from the inside out. The girl, pale faced and trembling, stuck by her story.

  This supposed Marah was no longer a soldier. For whatever reason, he chose to run a small farm wedged between two rocky ridges. Maeander arrived amid the motion of his band, the pounding of hooves and clank of their jostled weapons. They found the man in his field, standing beside a lone horse, watching them as an elderly man might await the bringers of death. He heard the reason for their arrival silently, did not look at the girl or express much of any emotion. He just gestured toward his cabin.

  Inside the close, damp structure, Maeander chose to stand, pacing, as the man sat. He had the body of a warrior, right enough, though it was crooked now and somewhat gnarled by farmwork. He had thin-fingered hands that he set on his knees, and the bulbous red eyes of a mist smoker. He asked if he might light a pipe and Maeander nodded.

  He was neither quick to speak nor cagey. He seemed to have held his information for long enough that it was both a part of him and something he did not mind being unburdened of. He answered slowly, responding to one question and then another with terse, honest answers. He had been among the guards that had shepherded the Akarans to Kidnaban after their father was killed. He had not been particularly near the royal family. He watched from a distance as their story unfolded. His true focus was another of the Marah, an officer he had long hated and wished vengeance on. It was by following him that he discovered the children were being sent into hiding. This man, his enemy, became Mena Akaran’s guardian. He followed him covertly, abandoning his post. He saw him sail from the island aboard a sloop and pursued him to a port town along the Talayan coast. He watched them board another vessel, packed with supplies, and sail. He followed. He did not catch them until they had reached the deep ocean outside the Inner Sea’s protection. There he killed the man.

  “Why did you kill this guardian?”

  The man blew a cloud of mist from the side of his mouth before answering. “Lord, he ridiculed my father.”

  “He ridiculed your father?”

  The man nodded.

  “Fine, he ridiculed your father. How so?” Maeander pressed.

  “My father was from a village at the base of the mountains in northern Senival. He spoke with an accent that this Marah, who was Talayan born, found silly. He said as much.”

  Maeander raised his eyebrows, his lips puckered in a manner uncharacteristically comical. “That was all? He poked fun at your father for speaking with hard g’s? You killed him for that?”

  “He did another thing, also. I had a sister—”

  “Ah! This sister—now we get to the meat of it!”

  The soldier looked at Maeander askance. “It is not as you think, lord. She was just a girl, my sister. She was overweight. She had always been too heavy, even as a baby. One day she and I were passing in the street, when I was but a boy myself, and this Marah called to my sister. He made pig noises at her and lewd gestures. She did not need to hear that from him, or to see those gestures. It wasn’t something I could forgive. I lived with it for years without touching him. I believed he was untouchable, but I came into my courage slowly. Hatred of him made me a warrior. Then the war that your people brought changed everything, made new things possible. I wished him dead; so I made him so.”

  Maeander made eye contact with several of his men, moving from face to face, seeing that mirth lay just beneath their features, ready to erupt if he allowed it. He chose not to. He tried to imagine the weathered man before him as that boy, thin shouldered and trembling with anger he had not the heart to unleash. He could not quite picture it. But other men, he had found, rarely comport themselves in a manner that made sense to him. Certainly, wars had been started over lesser slights…

  “So you had cause to kill this man. What of the princess?”

  “I didn’t harm her or aid her.”

  “Yet you left her alive?”

  The man nodded, the motion looser now, softened by the mist.

  Maeander motioned for one of his aides to take the man’s pipe from him. He said, “You would have me believe that the fate of the Princess Mena Akaran was determined based on an insult made by a youth to a fat girl, remembered only by you?”

  “Believe what you like, lord. The truth remains what it is.”

  Maeander drew a stool up close to the former Marah, smiling as if he were
a friend arrived to share a drink. “Tell me more about it, then,” he said. “When did you see the princess last?”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-FIVE

  The longer Aliver stayed among the Santoth, the more he felt he belonged with them. They still had about them their unusual mannerisms. They continued to glide about like specters, leaving trails behind them. He was always startled when they moved in bursts of speed, so sudden that he could not track how they had gotten from one place to another. Nor could he get used to the way their facial expressions changed in an instant. But in a great many ways the sorcerers enveloped him in a welcoming embrace. They were like relatives met for the first time and recognized at a level more fundamental than his conscious mind understood.

  He came to find their muted features familiar. Sometimes, staring into the hazy contours of one of their faces, he lost himself contemplating an image just like his own, as if the being before him were actually a living mirror, a reflection of himself both solid and incorporeal at the same time, true to him and yet different in ways that demanded study. He had not opened his mouth to say a word aloud since hearing the monstrosity of his own voice that first time, nor did listening through his ears even occur to him anymore. Their voices were without auditory resonance, but they were all the more intimate for it. They took on the tempo of thoughts framed within a silent place in his mind. He came to feel a greater ease in his communication with them than in any shared interaction he had previously known.

  He sensed that, in the swirling discourse between them, the Santoth tugged away portions of his conscious. They searched out bits and pieces of memories and information, things stored in the far corners of his mind and long forgotten. As he released these things, he relived them to some degree. He walked through moments from his childhood again. He saw images not dreamed of in years, heard stories told in the cadence of his father’s voice, listened as his mother sung him to sleep. He felt again the complete peace of nestling against her bosom, her arms wrapped around him, the soft expulsion of her breathing caressing his face. He also remembered things not nearly as pleasant.