The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  Mena stared at him for a long time, fingering the eel pendant at her neck as she did. “Larken, tell me something…. You are an Acacian. You always will be. Don’t you have some wish to redeem your honor? Is that not in you somewhere? You could do so even now. You could join me and my brother and help take back the things you betrayed earlier. With your knowledge you would be an immense aid to my brother. You could null your crime.”

  “Hardly,” Larken said. “I hear you, though. I would not be the first to have a change of heart like that. But it’s not…a way of being that suits me. I’ve cast my lot with the Meins, and I’m quite happy with it. You should see my villa in Manil. I have servants for every purpose, Mena. Every purpose. I live a life I would never have achieved as a Marah guard. When Hanish or Maeander calls for me, I come and serve, but most days I am no different from the richest of nobles.”

  “You care only about yourself, then?”

  “Who else is there to care about? I am only myself….”

  “Change yourself to something better, then! You have only to do it, and it will be done. This is something I’ve discovered for myself.”

  Instead of answering directly, Larken asked her if she had ever heard the Meinish legend of the bear giant Thallach. This Thallach was an enormous northern bear, he said, against whom the first men of the Mein tested their valor. They went one after another into the mouth of his den and did single combat with him. They died one after another, such a steady feast that Thallach never even had to leave his den. His food came to him instead. This went on for many years. Many men died. One day a holy man convinced the people to try another way. Why send their best and strongest and most beloved to their deaths time and again? Why not make peace with the bear? The people, weakened and fearful, believed there was wisdom in this. The holy man went at the head of a delegation, offering Thallach a feather of peace, promising him that they would feed and care for him and worship him as a god from that day forward. “Do you know what Thallach said to them in answer?”

  Larken had moved his stool up close to Mena’s bench. He let the question hang a moment, although from his pleased expression he obviously did not mean for her to answer. “Thallach said—” he leaned forward, bared his teeth, and growled, a long, low rumble of sound and vibration and the heat of his breath on her ear. “Then he devoured them, one and all, just as he had done all the others. What else, really, would you expect a bear to say or to do? Thallach could not be anything but what he was. Nor can I. Nor do I wish to be! So don’t try to make me something that I am not. I’ll tell you something you don’t know about me. I’ll ask you afterward if you still think I can be redeemed.”

  He explained his role in handing Corinn over to Hanish. He wanted her to understand that he had not just switched sides from the standpoint of a defeated soldier. He had not just sworn loyalty to a new master. He had lived his life in preparation for just such a betrayal. He had behaved in such a way as to gain the highest degree of trust within the Marah hierarchy. He had been a perfect soldier, without a blemish on his record. He had honed his sword skills with a drive his teachers always commented on. He had withstood anything training threw at him without so much as a whimper of protest, and he had willingly put himself forward as a candidate for special assignments. But he had done all of this so that if the opportunity ever came to grasp for something grander, he would.

  He had watched Hanish Mein rampage into the world, and he knew fighting against him was a losing proposition. He got his hands on Corinn with joy in his heart. She had been so easy to trap. You can believe in me. I live only to protect you, was all he had to say. When he turned her over, he felt not the slightest remorse. He would have done the same with any of the rest of them, even with Mena herself, if she’d had the misfortune of falling into his hands.

  “I have had that misfortune,” Mena said, a joke spoken without mirth.

  She spent the night examining a thought that she had not considered before. What if Larken had captured her all those years before? What if she had grown up in the palace just as Corinn had? Would she be the same person she now was? Impossible. Might it be a better thing to have grown into something different? Of course not. She could not imagine that to be true. She could not conceive of not having grown to maturity on Vumu, with the villagers around her. She could not imagine never having become Maeben on earth. It was so much a part of her. Even though she had to break with the goddess, even though she had found her out as a fraud and cast her down to her death, she still would not want to be anybody but who she was now: the Mena who emerged from Maeben’s shadow.

  The destiny their father had intended for Corinn had been curtailed and warped even more than Mena’s had. Larken had robbed her of the challenge to become herself in a world away from Acacia. That was the gift their father had given them, but only now—an adult inside herself, just beginning to learn what her siblings had become in their respective exiles—did she begin to understand the gift for what it was. Because of Larken, Corinn had been denied it. Mena, who had not felt an emotion she could name for the man throughout their discussions, named one now. She hated him. She spent the night deciding what she would do about it.

  The next morning four Punisari guards gathered her. Larken stood waiting for her near the bow. He was in full military dress, his torso wrapped in a thalba, two swords of differing length at his waist, a small dagger sheathed horizontally across his flat abdomen. Her eyes were quick in studying him. If he noticed, it was only with a certain amount of vanity. “So, you’ve had the night to consider it,” he said. “Do you still think I’m redeemable?”

  “Yes,” Mena said, continuing toward him, “in a manner of speaking, you are.”

  “What manner is that?”

  Her strides were steady, unhurried. It took great effort to keep her eyes on his in the brilliance of the morning light and to block out the bombardment of motion and sound of a ship at sail. “It would not do to explain it to you now,” she said. “You may understand when it happens or you may not. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “You’ve become resigned. That’s almost sad, Princess. Almost sad—”

  Mena arrived before him. She stepped so close one might have thought she was about to kiss him. Instead, she reached forward and grasped the hilt of his long sword. The fingers of Larken’s sword hand twitched, but he did not reach to wrest her hand away. Even this he found amusing. “That’s an intimate touch, Mena. You should take care what you grasp hold of.”

  The blade sang free in one smooth pull.

  Larken held his arms up in a gesture of mock alarm. “Impressive, Mena. Do you know that drawing another man’s sword isn’t an easy thing? It’s the type of move one often botches: angle of pull wrong, the motion hasty or jerky—you know, that sort of thing….”

  Mena backed a few steps, testing the feel of the blade, weighing it. She knew guards rimmed the deck behind her, but Larken had stopped any attack with a motion of his fingers. She had calculated he would. She could feel their eyes pinned to her, but she also knew that the Talayan crewmen and Acacian servants watched her.

  “What now?” Larken said. “What do you mean to do with that?”

  “To kill you.”

  “I’m affronted, but that’s very unlikely. You have guts, Mena. I would never say otherwise. Your problem is that swordsmen don’t get much better than me. I don’t think a girl raised as a Vumu priestess has much of a chance. I’m just being honest with you. I could have stopped your hand before you ever drew. You know that, don’t you? And as you can see, you are surrounded by my guards and by an entire ship’s crew.”

  She said, “I’ll take care of them after.”

  Larken could not help but grin. “I wonder if your brothers are equally bold.” Motioning toward his companion sword, a blade shorter than the other but just as deadly in its own right, he said, “I also have another weapon.”

  Mena positioned herself as if to begin the First Form. “That’s why I took but one
.”

  Larken drew his sword as Mena began toward him. Slack wristed, he swept his sword low, from right to left in the motion to counter Edifus’s unusually low opening attack. It was a disdainful gesture on Larken’s part, and it was the last motion he was ever entirely in easy control of.

  Mena’s attack bore no resemblance to the Form. Her very first move broke out of it, a whipping motion of her blade. The tip drew a quick circle that caused Larken a moment of hesitation. Her sword bit into his wrist at an angle. The honed blade sliced up along the bones and cut free a sizable amount of flesh and muscle like it was soft cheese. His sword hand died, dropping the weapon.

  Despite the shock and pain of the cut, Larken was quick enough to extend his left hand for the hilt. He would have caught hold of it, too, except that Mena circled her sword back and sliced the grasping hand. His four fingers twirled into the air, each of them dragging thin loops of blood with them. Mena would never forget the look on his face just then, nor in the following moment, when she carved a smile into his abdomen.

  Before Larken had even crumpled to the deck, Mena severed the sword arm of the Punisari nearest her. A moment later she took a second one out with a jab that cut the neck artery and drained the man’s head of blood. There were two more to kill, she knew, but she had never felt more in control of her destiny. She circled away from the remaining guards, leaped up onto the railing, tiptoed along it, and came down on the other side of several crates. The move gave her enough time to speak a few words to the sailors and the servants, who all watched her with expressions of awe. She named herself and demanded—in the name of her father and in the cause of her brother who would be king—that they rise up at that moment and take the ship with her.

  When a beige-skinned man from Teh shouted her name joyously from the crow’s nest in which he watched the scene, Mena knew that the ship would be hers.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-SIX

  Hanish’s secretary returned to the chieftain’s offices in a whirl of motion, a sheaf of papers pressed to his chest, the royal stamp and wax sticks prickling from the fingers of his hand. He did not even acknowledge the man waiting for his return until this person cleared his throat. He paused, set the papers down, and sighed, as if Rialus Neptos had sorely tested his patience just by semivocalizing his presence.

  “He cannot see you now,” the secretary said. “You arrived a day too late, Neptos. He sent a message, though. He departs today for the Mainland on business that cannot be postponed. He will be happy to meet with you, or with Calrach himself, on his return. A week’s time, perhaps. Maybe a fortnight. In the meantime he counts on Numrek support through the coming conflict. The Numrek are his strong right arm, his battle-ax, and he won’t forget to reward them once Aliver is squashed. Calrach should answer to Maeander, as he will be in charge of the Meinish forces. All other details he’ll specify in due course. That’s the message.”

  The ambassador knew that he would regret anything he said in answer to this, but he could not help himself. “But Calrach himself asked me to put a proposal—”

  The young Mein partitioned the air with a motion of his fingers, as if he were spreading out a fan between himself and the ambassador. “I said everything Hanish asked me to. You may leave now.”

  The arrogant twit, Rialus thought. The twit! Don’t direct me out with a raised arm! Don’t you lay a hand on me and don’t you dare shut the door when I’ve not yet agreed to leave! He said none of this, of course, and the man did direct him out with a raised arm, did touch him at the elbow, and did shut the door firmly behind him.

  A moment later he stood in the hallway outside the office in the company of a brutish guard who looked down on him from beneath a cornice of golden eyebrows. The man unnerved him slightly, but Rialus did not move away. Besides the guard the hall was deserted, nothing but a few life-sized statues that somehow made the space seem that much more desolate. Rialus, not knowing what else to do, just stood there.

  Well, Rialus thought, that was a complete failure, one that was sure to cause him grief. Calrach had not just sent him to Hanish on a mundane assignment, or to clarify the details of how and where the Numrek would fight. He had charged the ambassador with broaching the subject of the Numrek receiving Quota payments. As far as Rialus was concerned, this was an absurd idea. The Numrek lived as freely as they wished. They regularly hunted the hill people who lived in the Teh Mountains. They used the captured peasants for the same purposes they would use Quota slaves. So what was the use of demanding yet more from Hanish, who had already been, to Rialus’s mind, quite generous to them?

  But there was no reasoning with Calrach. He had gotten the idea into his head and none of Rialus’s subtle attempts to dissuade him from it had worked. Now, however, the relief he might have felt about not having to speak to Hanish about this filled him with dread. He’d have to return with nothing for Calrach. Maybe he could pretend that he had spoken to Hanish. The chieftain was thinking it over, he could say. He’d have an answer when he returned, something like that. But that was a dangerous deception. For all he knew Hanish would summon Calrach personally, instead of going through Rialus. He’d done so before. They would meet and in the first few seconds the Numrek chieftain would know he’d lied. If that happened, he would not put much value on his own skin. Why did it seem that every situation in his life sat squarely at a convergence of several dilemmas? Always had, he thought, and perhaps always would.

  He stood there for a few minutes more—trying to remember a time when this had not been his fate—before he realized he was being watched. One of the shapes standing down the hall was not one of the life-sized statues he had assumed it was. It was a woman’s form. When she peeled away from the wall and motioned to him, he knew exactly who it was.

  “Princess Corinn?” he asked, walking toward her.

  She did not answer. She turned and led him down the hall, off into a side corridor, and through a small door. It all happened quickly, and it took Rialus a moment to recognize the large, jumbled chamber they had entered. It was the library, rank with book smell, lit by floor-to-ceiling windows. Judging by the silence and stillness of the air, it was empty.

  Corinn led him across the room to one of the window bays. There she turned and faced him. “Nobody comes here at this time of day. The other doors are locked, so we’re quite safe. If anybody starts to enter we’ll hear them and can slip away.” She said all of this with cool assurance, but as he began to question her she stepped toward him. “Rialus,” she asked, her body close to his, “will you be truthful with me?”

  Rialus inhaled the citrus scent of her breath. He had not actually spent very much time in her presence. He could not even have said for certain that she knew his name. The fact that she did and the perfection of her features stunned him. Each shape and proportion and shading was flawless, just as it was supposed to be. He stammered that of course he would be truthful.

  “Then tell me,” Corinn asked, “do you ever look back with longing?”

  “With longing, Princess?”

  She studied him a moment. He had the feeling she was sizing him up, measuring whether or not she could say what she wished to. Despite himself, he hoped she would find him to her liking. “I mean,” she said, “do you regret the fall of the Acacian Empire? You turned on your own people, Rialus.”

  “I had reason to,” he said defensively. “You have no idea what—”

  Corinn stopped his words by brushing her fingertips over his lips. “Don’t be harsh with me. I know, Rialus, that you felt slighted. I know you aspired to greater things than living up in that Meinish wasteland. I believe, though, that you blamed my father wrongly. Do you know that he spoke of you once that I remember? He did. He was saddened by one of your letters to him. He said that of course this Rialus Neptos was a good man; it was the council that exiled you to Cathgergen, not my father. He said he’d have to force the council to relieve you of your post and bring you back to a worthy position in Alecia. He would have
done that, Ambassador, except you did not give him enough time.”

  Words failed Rialus, but he managed to shake his head. He did not understand what she was trying to do, but what she was saying could not—could not—be true.

  “You don’t believe me?” she asked. “How would I know of the letters you sent him? How would I know you were unhappy in the north? I was close to my father, Rialus. I loved him very much and he loved me. He often spoke to me of the things that troubled him, including you. And I’ll tell you this—there is a reason I remembered your name. It is because just a few weeks later you were decried as a traitor. I thought, No, that cannot be. Not the Rialus my father spoke so highly of. But it was you. You did betray him, and here you stand because of it. What I want to understand is whether you feel you chose well. Is your life now all you dreamed it would be?”

  Rialus could not figure out just how to respond. Her words were insulting. He should lash out at her for them. He certainly had more than enough to say about how he had been slighted. But there was no condemnation in her tone or in her gestures or in her face, which seemed all openness and curiosity. He had expected her rancor, but he felt none coming from her. What he did feel was…well, it was something he had not felt from another person in a very long time. He was not even sure he remembered the word for it. At least not until Corinn reminded him of it.

  “I’m not asking because I wish to judge you. Truthfully, I empathize with you. I’ve betrayed ones I love also. I understand what it’s like to make honest mistakes, ones that you regret and wish, wish, wish you could make amends for. I thought perhaps you were the same, Rialus.”

  Empathy. That was the word. She empathized with him. It was too much to comprehend—both the emotion itself and the possibilities it suggested. In defense, he fell back to an old refrain. “We are hardly the same, Princess. I’m an ambassador. It’s a position of authority and importance—”