The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  “You’re making a mistake!” he cried, both for the guards to hear and for the priests and the crowd. “Harm me and the priestess will rage at you. Don’t you see what’s happened here?”

  The guards faltered, slowed.

  “I said kill him,” Tanin repeated.

  Melio took one hand from the stick hilt long enough to point at the corpse. “This Maeben is no more. This Maeben will never take your children again. The priestess did this for you.”

  “Kill him this instant!”

  One of the guards leaped forward behind a downward strike. Melio twisted his torso to avoid the blow. He snapped his stick hard and fast, hitting the man with the blade flat across his cheek. The force of it spun the man into the air—head first and body following—and dropped him limply to the ground.

  The others had not moved. “I don’t wish to fight with you,” Melio said, addressing them. “I don’t even wish to fight with the priests. If Maeben was a goddess, then the priestess is a god slayer. It’s the truth. The priestess will tell you so herself.”

  Tanin had had enough. He pushed through the crowd to the space left open by the fallen guard. He snatched up the man’s stick, holding it in a manner that showed he knew how to use it. With him inspiring them, the circle began to close again.

  Talking was over. Melio picked out one stick at random and smacked it so hard he almost knocked it from the hand that grasped it. He felt another attack coming from behind and he spun to face it. He took one man out at the knee and hit another with a downward strike that audibly snapped his collarbone. Tanin yelled for his death over and over. Melio tried to find him in the seething crowd of bodies and weapons, but it was too much of a blur. He ceased to think of his actions. He just let his body whirl and leap, duck and thrust and slash. His movements arose directly from a quick place in his instinctual mind, faster than the plodding engine of his consciousness. He heard the crack of wood on wood. He knew that his stick often touched flesh, snapped bone, but the attackers came on and he could see no end to it.

  This may have gone on for many minutes, or may have been no more than a few seconds. He lost track of time until the barrage of weapons began to fall off one by one. Soon he was spinning and slashing, spinning and blocking in a dance with no actual attackers.

  He stopped moving. He stood panting, drenched in sweat, eyes darting, stick held in a ready position. The guards had drawn back. Most of them weren’t even looking at him anymore. They gazed at something beyond him. Only Tanin stared fixedly at him, his face twisted with rage and disbelief, his mouth an oval hungry for oxygen. Melio understood the look. They had not touched him. Not one of them had gotten through his defenses and touched wood to flesh. He had left men on the ground all around him without ever suffering a single injury. This obviously mystified Tanin. But it was not the reason they’d stopped.

  A Vumuan woman pressed forward through the crowd, a shock wave of confusion preceding her. People shouted as she passed, grabbed at her, questioned her. She ranted as she pushed through them. Whatever she said whipped the frenzy higher, but she did not stop until she reached Vaminee.

  She knelt before the priest and began an impassioned speech. Melio had to concentrate hard to understand her. There were others behind her, running from the same direction she’d come, likely bearing the same news.

  Just an hour ago, the woman reported, Maeben on earth had arrived at the magistrate’s home. She’d walked through the gates in all her finery. She’d strode past the stunned guards and demanded to see the foreigners who were staying there as his guests. They’d spoken to her in their strange tongue for a few minutes, and then the foreigners seized her. One of them, the tall one with hair like gold thread, actually placed his hand on her divine person. They left immediately for their vessel and were already sailing away on the receding tide.

  Melio heard the whole of this in one inhalation and did not understand it until the woman finished. Then it hit him in the chest, the first blow to land on him that morning.

  “They have the priestess?” Tanin asked, still breathing heavily.

  “Yes,” a man, a new arrival, said. “She tried to speak. I heard her. I was closer than this one.” He motioned toward the woman dismissively. Then, remembering himself, he dropped to his knees facing Vaminee. “Honorable Priest, she turned her eyes to me and she said, ‘People of Vumu…’” He stopped without finishing the sentence.

  “People of Vumu?” the first priest demanded. He finally lost his menacing calm. “What more did she say?”

  “That’s all. They pulled her away. They did not let her speak any more.”

  Melio only half listened to the chaotic discourse that followed, but he knew they were tossing about a version of events that escalated minute by minute. The foreigners had grabbed her, abducted her, dragged her away to their strange nation. Somebody began a moan that spread from person to person. Another shrieked that the foreigners had killed Maeben. The goddess was dead to them and the priestess was a prisoner of evildoers.

  Melio sensed dawning possibility. There was something in this. Something he could do with these events, perhaps something Mena had only half envisioned when she’d set out on it. He steered away from the sorrow he knew hovered just behind his shoulder. He could give in to that later. But now—right here—he had to seize the moment before it was gone forever.

  He pushed between two of the guards who had just been out to kill him and closed on the eagle’s corpse. He smacked it with his palm, clenched, and tore away a handful of feathers. He tossed them in the air above the crowd. Eyes turned toward him. Voices died down. Even the two priests fixed on him, waiting for what he might say. He was not sure himself until he opened his mouth.

  “The goddess lives in the one called Mena,” he said. “Do you hear me? The goddess lives in Mena! She went to fight the foreigners and to challenge the people of Vumu to prove themselves.” He paused, only now understanding the question to which his oration was leading him. “People of Vumu, the priestess is in danger. She’s in the hands of an enemy. People of Vumu…what will you do to save her?”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Mena always knew when they were coming down to her. She heard the impact of their hard-soled boots on the narrow wooden stairs. Maeander always stepped in first, followed by his shadow, the Acacian traitor named Larken. They always stood on the far side of the room, rocking with the motion of the boat, staring at her with bemused expressions. They could not come to terms with how she had been delivered to them. They asked her several times why she had come to the magistrate’s house that morning. Each time she answered the same. She had heard they were looking for her, she said. This simple statement never failed to make Maeander grin and look back at his friend.

  There was a great deal more to it than that, of course, but she felt no need to tell them anything more. They were carrying her back toward the center of the world, toward Acacia. That was what she wanted. Despite themselves, they were doing her bidding, not the other way around. Better to keep quiet about it, though. She told them nothing of the events directly prior to her showing up at the magistrate’s. If they had not left so promptly they could have learned a great deal more about her than they knew, but this suited her as well. They saw before them a young woman of small, almost petite stature. She sat demurely, with an upright posture, dressed as a bird, feathered and adorned, a priestess who had lived a cloistered life. No doubt they knew her to be a virgin and took amusement from discussing it.

  They could never have imagined that she had returned from Uvumal in the middle of the night. She had trudged up from the shore through the shadows of a wood-shaded lane. She limped on her battered right leg, bruised so deeply that the whole of the thigh was blue and purple and black. She wheezed from an injury done to her chest. The damage might have happened during the fall through the canopy, bouncing as she had from branch to branch, poked and jabbed and snapped about like a dead thing until she had finally come to rest tang
led in a crosshatch of branches. Or she might have caught the lung sickness from a chill she had taken as she worked her slow way back through the forest, dragging a heavy burden behind her and then sailing a rainy sea toward Vumair. She would never know.

  Ruinat had been hushed and sodden, pressed beneath the black blanket of a cloud-heavy night. Water collected in wagon ruts and footprints and depressions of every sort. She walked without care for the puddles. She just cut through them, halfway up to her ankles in the muck. She wore her sword strapped to her back, and behind her she pulled a burden great enough to cause her strain. She had twined the rope around her waist several times, tied it off, and run the rope up over her shoulder. The far end had been wound tight around the trussed bird, pinching its wings into its body. She was bringing it home, an offering to the people of Vumu, one they would have to decide themselves what to do with.

  Climbing the temple steps took considerable effort. The corpse caught on each corner. She had to lean forward to ascend. Once on the top step, she loosened the rope from around her waist and flung it over the stone carving of Maeben. She tugged with all her weight, which was only enough to drag the bird into a semiupright position. There she left it. She simply dropped the rope and turned away without considering it further.

  Inside her compound she moved with greater ease. She knew where every servant slept and that they would not vary their routine in her absence. That was how she noticed an extra person sleeping in one of the rooms. Melio. She had only to hear his breathing and to smell his scent in the slumbering air to know it was him. She hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t accounted for it in her planning of the evening’s events. But she knew she had to communicate with him in some way. It would be incomplete, she knew. It would drive him mad. But she had to give him something in return for all he had done for her.

  It took her a few moments to pen a note to him. She held it to her chest as she entered his room. She sipped shallow breaths and moved with the silent stealth that had always come to her at moments of need. She propped her sword against the wall, where he was sure to see it on waking, and then she approached his sleeping form. She knew she would not wake him, so she placed the folded square of paper close to his face, safe within the shelter described by his bare arm. She risked extra moments gazing at him. She took in the generosity of his sleeping features, and for the first time she did not question why her eyes so loved to linger on his features. They were perfectly imperfect. She had never seen a face that pleased her so. Not, at least, since she had last looked up into her father’s face as he told the myths of the old times.

  Though what she felt for Melio was different from what she had felt for her father, she still knew that people named the emotion love. She had known this was what she felt before she entered the room. She loved him so much that if she woke him she would never have carried through her plan. That was why she had let him sleep and instead wrote in crabbed, rusty Acacian letters…

  M,

  You were right about everything, of course.

  I was slow to learn, but I know it now,

  M.

  Below this, not an afterthought but a postscript that it took her a few minutes to pen, she wrote two more lines.

  I love you.

  If ever the world allows it, I’ll prove it to you.

  It took a few hours of hushed preparation to move her plan forward. There was only one last deception necessary to open the path toward the heart of things. She moved stealthily to her dressing chambers, stripped naked, and washed in the basin of flower-scented water. She dressed in the goddess’s robes. She slipped into the garments in the closed space of her dressing chambers. She applied her makeup by feel. When she felt she was passable in appearance and when she sensed the coming day, Mena left her compound and went to the magistrate’s house, wherein lay the sleeping Meinish party.

  The rest happened quickly. Maeander asked her only a few questions before being satisfied as to her identity. She was on their vessel within half an hour, and the ship was unmoored and in motion only minutes later. She felt it when they cleared the shallow harbor waters and began to ride the heaving ridges that rolled south to north this time of the year.

  Maeander seemed to enjoy his time questioning her, despite the fact that she could not tell him anything he did not know already. She knew only as much about her brothers and her sister as Melio had been able to tell her, and none of that was particularly concrete intelligence. Actually, Maeander informed her of much more than she told him. From him she learned that Aliver was, in fact, alive and well in Talay. He was amassing an army in the center of that nation, gradually moving northward as his numbers grew.

  “They say he’s become quite the speaker,” Maeander said. “He’s been touched by a sorcerer’s hand and now he’s rousing the masses with his oratory. He speaks of freeing the Known World from suppression, from forced labor, from harsh taxes, even from the Quota. Strange that he seems to have forgotten who created that world order in the first place.”

  There was a rumor, unconfirmed as yet but credible, that Dariel had joined him. Until recently this youngest of the Akarans had been but a raiding thief of the Gray Slopes. And Corinn, Maeander said, had been converted to the Meinish cause by the pleasures of his brother’s bed. “Many called her the chieftain’s whore behind her back. I’d never do so myself, of course.”

  “No,” Larken added, as if on cue, “if you were to call her anything, you’d do it to her face.”

  Listening to all this, Mena managed to control the emotion that swelled in her. She had dealt with much of it already, in her own way. As she dragged Maeben’s corpse through the forest she had been bombarded by memories from her childhood. They jabbed at her as much as the tree limbs and gnarled root networks and bloodsucking insects. She even spoke to her siblings as she walked, trying to explain herself to them, asking what they had become, trying to see if they could unite again and be the same again. Of course not, she knew. Nothing could be the same. Nobody could have imagined she’d become what she now was, nor could she imagine what they were. But she decided that there was no doubt in her—she loved them no matter what. Nothing Maeander said changed that in the slightest.

  Maeander disembarked at Aos. He had something to attend to there but would likely arrive in Acacia about the same time as they would. Mena was left in Larken’s care. Out of Maeander’s shadow, the Acacian was a different man. He swaggered the same way, smiled with the same arrogance, held his body with the same self-adoration. But these things were natural to his character. What was different was that he conveyed himself as a free man, not just a hanger-on. He spoke with a casualness that almost suggested disdain for Maeander’s authority, although Mena was not entirely sure why it felt this way. It was nothing he actually said, just something in his attitude.

  The evening after they sailed from Aos, Larken entered with several Acacian servants trailing behind him. Mena had noticed that all of the servants were Acacian and most of the crew was made up of Talayans. Only the captain himself, his first mate, and the Punisari guards were of Meinish blood. The servants set out trays of cheeses and olives, small broiled fish, a carafe of lemon wine. He thought he would share this last meal with her, he said. The next day they would sail into Acacia and she would no longer be exclusively his.

  Mena found no reason to object. It was not that she liked Larken or wished for his company. He felt Mena’s fate was in his hands now and would soon be in Hanish’s hands. Mena herself had no say in the situation. But speaking from this assumption, Larken was somewhat careless in the things he said.

  “Is it true?” Mena asked. “The things he said about my siblings, I mean.”

  “Oh yes,” Larken said, running his fingers over his cheekbone, down and under his lips, a gesture he often made while talking. He sat on a stool, near enough that he could reach out and touch Mena if he leaned forward. “Maeander never lies. What he says is always true. It’s when he is silent that you have reason to fear things aren
’t well.”

  Mena lifted a glass of wine to her nose and inhaled it. The scent was familiar, but she was not sure why; she had never drunk wine before. “I look forward to seeing my sister. I will see her, won’t I? Hanish won’t keep me from her.”

  Larken considered the question, seeming to weigh not the answer itself but to turn over how much of it he should give her. “Let’s just say that Hanish has a purpose for you and Hanish has a purpose for Corinn. But they are different purposes, separate destinies.”

  Mena set the wineglass down, having consumed none of it. She realized the reason the wine scent had smelled familiar. It had often been on her father’s breath at night, when he told her and Dariel stories. He always had a glass of the wine nearby. He would sip it and talk, sip and talk, and when he kissed her good night she had tasted it on the warm air exhaled from inside him. “What makes you think my brother won’t have wiped Hanish Mein from the Known World before we get too far into these separate destinies?”

  “It will not take that long.” Larken grinned and looked down in a manner that indicated he was leaving things unsaid. “And beyond that it’s a matter of simple logic. I hate to tell you this, Mena, but we’re ready for him. We welcome it, really. Meins are fighters. They are not happy when the peace lingers too long. They never stop training, preparing, hungering for the next battle. The boys not old enough to fight last time are young men now. Oh, how they want to prove themselves! We still have the Numrek. I’ve been surprised at how well they take to a life of leisure, but they will be happy enough to pick up their spears and axes again. And we have other weapons as well. Not the same sort that Hanish unleashed the first time. One can do such things only once. But we’ve other weapons, believe me. The type of things that will wake you screaming in the night. But they are no nightmare. When Hanish releases them, they’ll roam through the bright daylight. Believe me, Hanish is quite ready to face Aliver Akaran and an untrained, polyglot horde, no matter how large it is or how much Aliver whips them into a frenzy.”