The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  He did not mention that the sorcerers had likely protected him personally—saving others because of their proximity to the prince. Nor did he reveal that they had only managed to do it so dramatically because the connection between them was fresh and new, the moment fortuitously timed. But a partial truth, he had learned, sometimes reached farther than the whole of the thing. He knew that the entire army would know of what happened within a few hours of the event. They would spin another tale of magic and prophecy around him. To them he was the magician. It was all his doing, they believed. Though he knew this to be false, he saw that it emboldened them. That, at least, was a worthy thing.

  With the towers abandoned, the three siblings walked toward the front ranks of the army. The troops were still forming up, tightening their ranks and marching over the rise and down onto the long slope that led to the field of battle. As they walked a messenger sent by Oubadal found the siblings and uttered a message that Aliver could make no sense of. It had to do with the enemy’s deployment, something about them not taking the field. They were close enough to a vantage point that Aliver just brushed past him and strode forward to see for himself. What he saw stunned him.

  Before him stretched row after row of his own soldiers, progressing down toward the established point of deployment. But beyond them the field was empty. Bare. A pale and dry expanse, dotted only with occasional shrubs and acacia trees. There was no massed army. Aliver yanked his spyglass from his chest pocket. In the distance the enemy camp sat quietly, dense with shapes and shadows he knew to be people. Fires sent plumes of smoke up here and there, straight lines that only gradually angled to the east. They were there, but they showed not the slightest sign that they intended to fight this day. Had there been a misunderstanding? Was the truce meant to last for more than two days?

  “What are those?” Mena asked.

  The moment she posed the question Aliver saw them. There were a few objects on the field, but at first they barely drew the eye. Compared to the host he had expected to see, these objects required a new focus, so much smaller were they in scale. At least, so they seemed until he studied them more carefully. There were four crates lined across where would have been the front ranks of the enemy army. They were built of wood and reinforced with an outward skeleton of thick metal beams. They stood as tall as two or three men and stretched about a hundred strides in length.

  Within a moment or two of study Aliver felt his pulse ramping up toward higher speeds. There were things inside the crates. He could not see what, but he could feel them. He sensed motion inside, felt the bulk of some hidden life-form pressed tight against the cages—yes, they were cages—that held them. He worked his jaw as if in preparation to deliver an order. Nothing came yet.

  Dariel said, “How kind of Maeander to leave us presents. A peace offering, perhaps?”

  Aliver did not answer.

  A half hour later they stood before the front ranks of their army, Oubadal’s Halaly warriors closest to them. They were always the first to muster for battle, proud race that they were. Behind them the entirety of their force stood at the ready. They were all in position now, looking like the same colorful array of diverse persons and garish garments that had presented themselves the first day. The crates stood but a hundred strides away. From this distance Aliver could see that a handful of men clustered around each container. Judging by the look of them they were not warriors. They wore simple leather garments of brown from head to toe, drab uniforms that blended with the sandy landscape. Some of them carried pikes with barbs at the ends. These were long, unwieldy weapons, not the type of thing intended for use on humans. Not one of them looked like a person of authority, nor was there any sign even of a Meinish officer, much less Maeander himself.

  “Have we a plan?” Dariel asked.

  As ever, there was a twist of ironic mirth in the question. Aliver liked this about his brother, but he did not get a chance to answer him. The near side of the four crates opened at the top corner and tilted forward. The handlers tugged them open with ropes. They jumped away as the sides slammed down to the ground, stirring up clouds of dust that billowed around the openings, hiding whatever shadowed inside. The handlers circled around to the sides of the structures. They snatched up their pikes and held them defensively before them.

  Aliver swallowed, waited. He could think of nothing else to do, not until he knew what he faced. The clouds drifted away, and there was nothing but the dark geometry of square openings. He felt the held breath of his entire army.

  “There,” Mena said, “the one at the eastern edge!”

  Yes. There was movement. Just a highlight back in the shadows at first, but then a muzzle pressed out into the daylight. A flat snout with two flexing nostrils, it had a swinish character to it, with such a crosshatched confusion of barbed tusks that it was hard to say which belonged to the upper or lower jaw, just that these mouth parts hung higher than a man’s head and were longer than an entire boar’s body. It came forward slowly, as did the others, Aliver knew, though his eyes stayed fixed on the first.

  The creature was massive. The distance did nothing to hide this fact. Its eyes sat close together above its snout, a hunter’s gaze, telescoping vision. Its forelegs were swinelike, shoulders joints of muscle and bone like nothing he had seen before. Its upper spine jutted up as if to push through its flesh. Ridges ran down its back toward a rear that sat much lower, with short, stout hind legs, bunched with fibrous bulges. They were a sprinter’s legs. It wore a natural armor plated across much of its torso, calloused lumps that looked like enormous warts that been sanded into calcified plates.

  Aliver knew what he was looking at. The rumored beast. The weapon a few had named but nobody had reasonably described. An unnatural, garbled form of life, worse, by far, than any laryx. A creature of foul sorcery. He gave orders for the troops to back away. Perhaps there was no need to fight the beasts. They were hundreds of paces away. If the army just backed up and over the rise, quietly, slowly…

  One of the creatures, the first to emerge, bellowed. The other three answered him. All four of them raised their heads, scented the air. They focused their eyes on the mass of humanity stacked before them on the slope, row after row. The sight excited them. The dun-colored keepers stood to the side and behind them, their pikes at the ready, but the creatures ignored them.

  Aliver reissued the order to back away. Such a maneuver was not easily accomplished, though, not with so many people to coordinate. They had barely moved at all when the creatures—the antoks—began to approach them at a trot. The sight of them was enough to panic the army. Soldiers who had fought bravely the days before turned and ran. Some dropped their weapons and tried to climb over others to get away. All three of the Akarans shouted for calm. Aliver reversed the order to retreat and tried to get them to form up, turn around, and face these things with weapons ready. Some took up his call, but not all.

  Thus the antoks arrived amid a grand confusion. They barreled right into and through the tight-packed humanity, their cloven feet beat the earth as if it were a skin drum, vibrating with each staccato impact. They squashed people underfoot, knocked them back, raked their jaws from side to side. They snapped people up from the ground and hurled them, bloody and screaming, into the air. The four each cut a different path of destruction. At times they went to their slaughter with such frenzy that they simply followed their nose on a course that could only be random, looking, strangely, like puppies in their boundless enthusiasm. On other occasions they worked together, with focused cunning, schooling their quarry like swordfish slicing through anchovies. They moved in bursts of speed entirely beyond the soldiers’ capacity to match or escape. They left scarred paths behind them, jumbled with the shattered bodies of the dead. The soldiers brave enough to face them with weapons drawn could do nothing. Arrows and spears skittered off their armor. Swordsmen could scarcely get within striking range without being trampled.

  One of them passed so close to Aliver that spit from i
ts muzzle splattered his face. By the time he had wiped the blood-tainted liquid from his eyes the creature was far away, raging. The prince’s gaze fell on a woman just a few strides away from him. She sat upright in a strange, broken-backed position. Her body had been smashed at her pelvis and pressed down into the ground. Tears rimmed her eyes and her lips moved, saying something he could not hear. Her arms tried to make sense of things, the lay of the land and her position in relation to it. The flat of her hands swept across the ground as if smoothing the wrinkles from a sheet. He had seen injuries in the previous days’ fighting, but the complete, pathetic frailty betrayed in her smashed form gripped him.

  He scanned the field again. Dariel was nowhere in sight. Mena he caught a glimpse of in the distance. She was running, sprinting after one of the creatures, hunting it, though it paid her no mind at all, there being so many bodies to rip apart. In the space of a few minutes the antoks had killed hundreds. They showed no fatigue. No interest in pausing over the dead. No desire to eat, even. They simply wanted to kill. He watched one of the antoks pin a soldier’s lower body beneath its hoof. It contemplated the thrashing for a moment and then bit down. It ripped the man in half, shook the torso about as if it were a plaything, and flung it in the air.

  Aliver knew he had to do something. The entire throng was gathered here in his name. He could not let them die. He pushed a steadying chant up and tried to hold the thought on his forehead. The Santoth. If he could reach them, they could provide protection. He could explain to them what was happening and they could work their sorcery to shrivel the beasts where they stood. He tried to contact them. Twice he felt his call unfurl from his body like great coils of rope tossed into the air, but both times the connection snapped. It was so hard to focus with shouts of horror buffeting him in waves.

  He had just started to try a third time when Kelis shouted for him. “Look,” he said, pointing with his chin at something off to the northeast. “Others come.”

  “What others?”

  Following the Talayan’s direction, Aliver spotted a company of men nearing the northern edge of the battlefield. His first thought was that it was the enemy coming, though the direction of their approach was not from Maeander’s camp nor were they very numerous. In the half second it took him to lift the spyglass to his eye, he considered the tremulous possibility that it was the Santoth already answering their desperate need. He searched the enlarged, jittery view of the world through the spyglass and realized it was neither of those two possibilities.

  What approached was a force of perhaps a hundred soldiers. They jogged across the plain directly toward the carnage. They were nearly naked, most of them brown-skinned and short of stature and slight. They carried no banner and wore no colors and were lightly armed with what looked like wooden training swords.

  One of the antoks had spotted the arriving soldiers. It peeled away from the swathe of destruction it had been carving and ran at them with a burst of joyous speed. Aliver tried to steady his spyglass. The soldiers, seeing the beast coming, stopped. They spoke among themselves, frantic, debating, their eyes never leaving the antok for long. One of them, taller than the rest, touched something in Aliver. He was familiar in some way, but he could not pause to consider it.

  For most of its sprint it looked like the antok would barrel right into the newcomers. But as it neared it slowed, slowed, and then broke its forward motion completely. It slid across the dry soil and skidded to a halt just before them. The soldiers held their wooden swords before them. Each stood still, unflinching, their torsos naked and brown and utterly defenseless. They were absurdly brave, and Aliver twisted with shame at what was about to happen to them.

  But it did not happen. The antok did not attack at all. It moved in close to them, sniffed, tilted its head this way and that. It walked some distance along the line of them. It pawed the earth in what looked like confusion, studied them from several angles, found none of them satisfactory. Then it turned and began to trot back toward the main army.

  Aliver—thankful, amazed, grateful—could not pull his eyes away from these newcomers. The antok had not touched them. Hadn’t harmed a hair on any of them! It had stood inches from their naked chests, before weapons that could not possibly have harmed it, and…and…what? There was a thought pressing against the back of his consciousness. It was almost painful knowing it was there, feeling the ridge of it trying to break through, something so very important. Something about the newcomers…and also about the handlers still standing beside the cages…. It was the reason they were not being attacked.

  He jerked his spyglass from the newcomers back to his army. The visual impact of this was all it took. He realized what it was. He only mulled it a moment. That was how long it took for him to become as sure of it as if he had trained the beasts himself. He whispered it to Kelis, and then lifted his voice to shout it to the others.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-TWO

  Mena had been pursuing the same antok for what already seemed like hours. There should have been guards beside her every step of the way, but she had bolted so quickly they lost her from the start. She had run across a field with the dead, slipping in their blood, at times tangled in entrails. She’d jumped over bodies and slammed through the screams and pleas of the injured. Drenched in sweat, her legs burning and chest heaving with the effort, she refused to stop. She tried not to hear or see anything but the creature she hunted, knowing that if she did, the horror of it all would be too much.

  No matter how she chose her course she never managed to close on her prey. Nor did she know what she would do if she did, except that it involved channeling her anger through the steel edge of her sword. She felt no fear of the creature at all. Her hatred was too complete. Maeben lashed at her from the inside, trying to burst through and rip the beast apart with furious talons, cursing Mena’s feeble body: wingless, short legged, slight as it was. This made the princess even more angry.

  She stopped long enough only to hear her brother’s instructions because a hand clamped on her shoulder. The pincer grip locked the joint to that particular spot in the world. The rest of her body had no choice but to snap to a halt. She spun, ready to lash whomever it was with her tongue. The face that met her was such a mask of creviced and fatigued stoicism—firm, soldierly, entreating, and irrefutable all at once—that her words evaporated.

  “Princess,” Leeka Alain said, “stop all your running about.” A handful of guards clustered behind him, panting and sweat drenched. To her surprise, they used the pause to begin unbuckling their armor vests, tilting off helmets, cutting the orange bicep bands from their arms. The general said, “Tell me, what people go to war nearly naked, with wooden swords? A brown-skinned, black-haired people?”

  The answer was out of her mouth before she had any grasp of why he would ask such a thing. “My people—Vumuans, I mean.”

  Leeka grunted. “Yes, well, your people have come after you, Princess. Good thing, too, because they’ve shown Aliver the way.”

  “The way to what?” Mena asked, distracted. Her eyes lifted and searched out the antok, its ridged back cutting through the masses like a shark’s fin jutting out of the sea.

  “The way to calm the bloody hogs and then, perhaps, to kill them. To begin with you must strip.”

  Her attention snapped back to him. “What?”

  “Down to the skin.”

  “Are you serious?”

  The old soldier frowned. “It’s not that my eyes won’t welcome it, Princess, but the order comes from your brother. Strip and follow me. It’s a mad idea, but it may be the only way to survive the day. You won’t be alone in nakedness.”

  He took off at a trot, ripping off his mail vest as he went. Mena followed, sheltered within the corps of disrobing soldiers protecting him, watching as the man yanked his undershirt over his head and tossed it away. He undid his sword belt, drew the blade, and let the scabbard fall. She was about to ask him what he could be thinking when he glanced back at her. He
explained what had happened while she had been bent on her hunt. As she listened she took in the changing scene around her.

  The antoks still rampaged, still sent soldiers fleeing, still tossed shattered bodies into the air, but everyone not directly facing the beasts had found a singular purpose. They were all shedding their clothing. They tore off garments, stamped themselves out of trousers and cut armbands free with daggers. People tossed the fabric from their bodies as if it scorched them with its touch. Only when they stood naked to the world did the army begin to regroup, not as the units they had been sectioned into. Instead they formed large, seething islands of humanity, standing shoulder to shoulder.

  If Mena understood what Leeka was saying correctly, Aliver believed that bright colors attracted the animals. The handlers, the Vumuans: neither had been attacked because they wore a color—brown—that the antoks considered neutral. Perhaps it was natural to them, Leeka was saying. Maybe they’d been tamed by brown-skinned people. Or perhaps they had been trained this way so that their handlers did not come under attack. Acacian armies—even this one filled with so many Talayans—had always worn the bright orange of Akaran royalty, making them easy, flaming targets. Whatever the explanation, it was worth trying. Their clothing and armor did not protect them from those tusks and hooves and that fury anyway.

  Mena, who had never been ashamed of her body on Vumu, was down to her skin in a few quick motions. As she rebuckled her scabbard she looked at herself. She was brown on the chest, arms, and legs, tanned a rich tone. Her upper thighs and pelvis were lighter. It made her wonder.