The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy

by David Anthony Durham

  The room was silent for a moment. The chieftains stared. The officers and assistants behind them craned forward. “Broke her neck?” Devoth asked.

  “With my bare hands.”

  A grin tugged at one corner of Devoth’s lips, and then won over the other as well. “All right, Rialus leagueman. All right.” He slapped Rialus on the back and shared his sudden humor with the others. “He is a lion killer,” he said. “Our Rialus. Who would have thought it?”

  “Lioness killer,” Sabeer corrected. The others guffawed, enjoying yet another joke at Rialus leagueman’s expense.

  Rialus sat looking at the scribbled words on the parchment before him, hating them.

  By the time he left the meeting, well into the night, he knew of the other significant development in the war. The night after the battle, Mena and the Acacian army had packed up their camp and departed. That was why there had been no continuation of the battle the next day. Mena had the tail end of her forces into the ice slabs before outriders on woolly rhinos could reach them. This was another thing the chieftains debated at length. Whether it was cowardice on Mena’s part or some design they could not fathom, there seemed only one course of action: to pursue. The Acacians ran toward the Auldek’s goal anyway, so why not chase them out onto the Mein Plateau, then on toward the heart of Acacia?

  The next morning the jarring sensation of his station grinding into motion awoke Rialus. Whips cracked like ice serpents, brutal, punishing sounds met by bellows of protest from the beasts. Flakes of dust rained down on him from the beams above. The engines of the station gurgled and groaned. All the familiar sounds and sensations. They were in motion again.

  “We’re going home,” he said out loud, knowing that Fingel would be sitting on her mat, engaged in some small work already. “We’re going home.”

  It proved to be a difficult homecoming. The clear weather of the recent days ran away, pursued by a blizzard of snow and ice crystals. Rialus stayed huddled in his station as much as he could. Though he was secure inside, Rialus could not escape Nawth’s anguished jabbering at being left behind. How could his voice travel so far, grate on the ears with such intensity? Nawth’s entreaties were so close to language. He sounded like he was fumbling with speech to make a case for himself. It was made worse by the cacophony of cries and moans and bellows of the other fréketes swooping in the air above. And his circling brothers … they heard him. They left him anyway. Rialus could not be certain, but he thought that even days later the wind brought snatches of Nawth’s ongoing misery to him, across miles of ice. Haunting. He would never forget the sound.

  Allek brought him news of the troubles they were having. Rialus could not have said why, but the Numrek youth seemed to like spending time with him, belittling him, teasing him. Allek could not do so to anybody else, so Rialus served the purpose.

  The weather was a frozen chaos. “You would get blown by the wind,” he said to himself. “The cats would chase you as you bounced and screamed.” Even without the storms, the ice fields would have been harder to navigate than anything they had faced so far. The enormous slabs of sea ice thrust up at chaotic angles. Dropped off into crevices they could not see the bottom of. Ice that looked thick shattered beneath the slightest touch. Animals slipped on the slopes and fell, wedged down below. They broke legs or bit each other or kicked their human handlers—to death in several cases.

  The stations that had rolled over so much now could barely progress at all. The ground was too irregular. “It’s not even ground at all!” It had none of the natural shape of mountains or hills or river channels. One of the stations was damaged beyond repair when the ice under one side collapsed, canting it sideways in a manner that broke its spine and sent pitch sloshing about, aflame, inside it.

  And came the time an entire station—one of the dining halls that fed the divine children in efficient shifts—fell through the ice and disappeared into a cauldron of glass-blue water. Everyone in or on the station went into the water. People and animals near it slipped screaming on the tilted slabs. Nearly everyone involved died. The divine children who managed to claw back to the surface and get pulled out were as pale as death by the time they did so.

  One Auldek was inside the station. Of him nothing was heard. Another had been on a kwedeir just beside it. Mount and rider went into the water. Neither came up. Allek had not been there, but you would think he had been by the glassy-eyed way he described the Auldek’s plunge. He imagined him stoic in the moment of realization, still instead of thrashing, looking up with stern acceptance of his fate as his iron-boned weight plunged him downward.

  More likely he was screaming like a girl and jabbering water words as he died. Again and again, Rialus thought.

  “If that had been one of the chieftains’ stations, or the temple of records … I can’t even imagine it. The Acacians did it,” Allek said.

  Rialus looked up. He noticed that Fingel did as well. “What?” he asked.

  “We think so. The ice was … weakened in places. Lines cut in it. Some of the pitch they stole from us, Sabeer said. They cut lines in the ice with it, made weak sections.” Allek scratched his neck, and then looked askance at Rialus. “Your people are wicked.”

  Wonderfully so, Rialus thought. He glanced at Fingel, who dropped her eyes back to the stitch work in her hands.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-ONE

  Kelis had not dreamed so vividly in years. He had not slept so long either, so deeply. Unlike other people, he had always been fully aware when he was dreaming. He knew the difference between the functioning of the waking world and the fluid shifting of dream logic. He knew, even while asleep, that in the waking world he was a miserable man with an iron club of a hand, an unwitting traitor who had led enemies to the very heart of his nation. Because of this—and because of the depths of the fatigue that had plunged him back into the dream world—he let himself swim from vision to vision, out of time.

  That was why he felt no fear standing on a leviathan’s back as it pushed through a furious ocean. He felt no strangeness in the fact that he was not himself, that he was a woman instead. He knew that what separated man from woman was a thin membrane, permeable in ways people’s waking minds were afraid of. But he was not. When the beast dove and the waters rushed up over her he did not flinch. She did not claw for the surface or for the light of day. She stayed standing, as if her feet were cemented to the creature. They plunged into the black depths. Luminous shapes swirled around her in the water. Far away first, they came closer and closer until she and the diving whale became the center of a vortex of glowing giants, sliding around one another as fast and numerous as anchovies schooling. It was beautiful.

  So was the sight of a sun setting from a sky like none he had seen before, purple hued and hung with floating objects, each of which looked like a child’s ball but which was, he knew, a world of its own. He lived through things fantastical and mundane, taking both extremes in with the same equanimity. He walked and loved and lived as himself, as men other than himself, as women, as a version of a child who was he but different than anyone he ever had been. For a time he forgot human shape and ran on four legs and experienced the world through scents that exploded in his mind like bursts of color.

  Many of the things he saw he forgot. He did remember that ride on the leviathan’s back. He knew even while experiencing it that it would stay with him. There was another thing he would not forget either, for he knew it to have been the purpose of his dreaming, a vision of something that was not yet, but could be. Might be. Having found it, he had no choice but to awake.

  He opened his eyes. He lay on his back, the ceiling above him white plaster cut into long rectangles by wooden beams. He stared at them long enough to see the movement of the air against old spiderwebs, to note the cracks in the dry wood. There were shapes there in the grain, elongated faces and eyes contained in knots.

  He was in a guest room of the palace. He knew, for he had stayed in such a room before. Whatever h
ad happened while he slept could not be avoided much longer. It waited for him just outside the door, down the corridor. He did not want to move. He did not even want to sit up, for he knew that doing so would mean moving his malformed limb. But he had to. He would rise and dress and walk from here to face what he had to face. He wanted his punishment just as much as he wanted to know the fate of the people important to him.

  Only … there was the shame of his mangled hand. He did not look at it, but he felt the weight of it there beside him, pressing upon the sheets. He imagined cutting the limb off above the wrist. Then he would be rid of it. He would be one armed, crippled forever, but he was that already. At least he would not have to carry the foulness of the Santoth curse for everyone to see. If there was a knife in the room, he would do it now, right here. If it killed him, no matter. That would be for the best.

  He heard a noise. It was just a small sound of a foot pressing against the floor, but hearing it he realized somebody was in the room with him. He turned his head.

  Aliver stood, leaning against the wall near the door, staring at nothing at all, lost in thought. Just the sight of him made Kelis’s pulse quicken. He wants to be here when I wake, to tell me to my face. He would tell him that none of the kind things he had said back in the room with the queen and the man with the stone eyes and the charlatan and the children had been true. Not the things he said about Kelis, at least. Those had been lies for the others’ benefit. Kelis began to close his eyes, knowing it would not help, but wanting his dreams back again.

  “Do you remember my laryx hunt?” Aliver asked.

  The second the words faded, Kelis doubted that he had heard them. Perhaps he was still asleep.

  The prince turned to him. “Do you, Kelis, remember it? I’ve been thinking about it as you slept. I realized that I’d never spoken to you about it, not truly, I mean. We celebrated together. I accepted the rewards thrown at me. I danced. You did as well. We both danced, didn’t we? Younger then, and beautiful. You were, at least. I was too pale to be a handsome Talayan.”

  He smiled and pushed off the wall. He walked forward a bit, turned on his heel, stopped. And then, as if the thought just occurred to him, he squatted in the center of the room and bounced on the balls of his feet. He looked to be preparing for a run, building energy in his bunched leg muscles. He tented his fingers together and touched them to his nose.

  “And then Thaddeus appeared and my life changed. I thought the laryx hunt marked the change, but that was because by then I thought myself a Talayan. I wanted nothing more than the approval of Talayan men and the love of Talayan women. Thaddeus changed all that. I never made the time to speak to you about what happened. When I could have later, I didn’t. And then nothing went as I planned. I want to speak of it now, though, if you’ll let me.”

  Kelis did not know what to make of his energy, his revelry, his tone. Nothing. He remained silent.

  Aliver seemed to expect that. He spoke for the both of them. He led Kelis through what he remembered of the hunt. The two of them were in the wild for three weeks before they found the nest of a lone laryx. Only young males ever were alone, those that had left their family group but not found a mate yet. As Kelis stood watch, Aliver fouled the nest. He spat on it and pulled it apart, peed and defecated on it. He left his scent all over the area.

  When Kelis saw the beast returning they both moved away a distance to watch. By the cackling yelps it responded with, it felt the insults keenly. The creature snarled and yipped. It was ugly, as all laryx are; misshapenly thick in the chest, stout necked, with small, powerful hind legs. It ran in circles, snout down on the ground and then up in the air, tracking already.

  Aliver came in close a few times and twice pricked it with arrows. Neither was enough to truly injure it. Its hide was too thick for arrows. It got its mouth around the shafts and yanked them out. No damage done. But the second one riled it enough to charge, just as Aliver had wished. As he ran before it, Kelis dropped away to the side. His part in the hunt was over.

  “Or it was supposed to be,” Aliver said. “You were to let me run the thing down alone. But you didn’t.”

  No, Kelis thought, I didn’t. And I’m glad I didn’t.

  Instead of leaving Aliver to his fate, Kelis ran behind the hunted and hunter, following them both across the plains, keeping them at the edge of his capacity to track, just barely in view. During the day he watched the dust kicked up by the laryx’s paws. At night Kelis kept track of them by their movement beneath the moonlight. One day into the next, and then on and over again. Three days in motion. Aliver kept the beast on his scent, kept it running, let it see or smell him when its attention wavered, as it grew fatigued. For that was what the run was about: to make the beast so tired it would collapse, exhausted, and receive the spear that would kill it without protest.

  “I almost did it right,” Aliver said.

  Almost, yes. But with a laryx almost is not good enough.

  Kelis hid in an outcropping of stones when the laryx first gave up its pursuit and lay down, panting in the shade of a lone acacia tree. Kelis watched, thinking, No, not yet, as Aliver circled back on the beast. No, don’t approach from behind it. Make it rise and chase you more. A laryx was never fully exhausted the first time it gave up. It had more in it and was dangerous still. He knew these things, and he knew that Aliver should, too. That’s why he held his tongue and stayed hidden.

  Aliver glanced at Kelis, and then went back to contemplating the images sheltered beneath the spread of his fingers. “But I was too tired. I let it cloud my judgment, and I let the beast trick me. You know what happened. When I approached to sink my spear in it, thinking it had fallen asleep, the thing opened its eyes and laughed at me. It ran at me and came close to ripping me apart right there. I was just lucky to avoid that first charge. I ran for the tree, jumped into it. I dropped my spear. You remember that, don’t you? I dropped my spear to cling to the branches of a tree almost too small to support me.”

  It had been as Aliver described. Kelis remembered everything. He had seen it with his own eyes, of course, from a different viewpoint. He saw it with fear beating in his heart, more afraid of the prospect of Aliver’s death than his own. If he had wished to, he could have admitted that when he ran at the laryx it was not just to distract the beast. It was in the full willingness to offer it his flesh instead of the prince’s. The fact that the beast turned toward him without fully charging was just a stroke of good fortune.

  It was the moment Aliver needed to come back to himself. He had dropped to the earth, grasped his spear, and sunk it into the beast’s side. The laryx spun with all the force of its massive frame, lifting Aliver into the air and tossing him away. This time, though, Aliver kept a grip on his spear, and it ripped out of the beast’s hide with a spray of blood. He still had it ready when the laryx lunged at him. This time he sank it in the monster’s shoulder. He stood holding it steady, the laryx’s mouth bristling with a carnivore’s teeth, lips and nose twitching. It even pawed the earth, pushing forward and driving Aliver back. But not enough. The wound in its side was too deep. The hole in its shoulder had severed an artery and cut through enough tendons to weaken it. The laryx died there, so close to Aliver’s face that he had only to lean forward to touch his nose to its snout.

  “The kill was yours,” Kelis said. His first words since he had awoken.

  “But it would not have been mine without you.”

  Kelis fixed his lips in a sour expression, not sure how to deny that.

  “Let me tell a few more things. First, you should know that I didn’t forget what you did. I didn’t fail to understand that you’d saved me. I think, now that I look back on it, that I felt … a failure, as if the kill wasn’t really mine. I think that’s why I agreed to fight Maeander Mein. I’m not saying I knew that it was because of the hunt. I didn’t, but how often do we do things without knowing our own reasons? I wanted to make sure I was worthy of all the things given to me—and being asked of me. Fo
olish, yes? It got me killed.”

  Kelis started to protest, but Aliver stopped him.

  “But here I am again, alive again. I would be a fool twice over not to learn from it. So here’s what I think. I think that the laryx was my kill.” He let this sit a moment, and then said, “But I needed your help to make it. You watched over me when I needed it. You put your life in danger to save mine. That’s what got me out of that tree so fast. I didn’t want your death on my hands. See what we have here? We succeeded because we care for each other and risked our lives for each other. It should never have been about doing it alone. When I fought Maeander, I forgot that. I will never do so again. I have you to thank for that. And I have you to thank for bringing Shen to me. Don’t make that face.”

  Kelis did not know what face he was making, but he must have frowned.

  “Don’t! I know what you are thinking and I don’t want to hear a single word of it. Don’t tell me anything about your responsibility for bringing the Santoth to Acacia. Don’t act like that’s your fault. It’s bigger than you, Kelis, so don’t be so vain. You think the Santoth wouldn’t have found a way here without you? They are a sickness that attached itself to something pure—to you and to Shen and to all the labors you and others went through to bring her to me. That is not—and never can or will be—your fault. So don’t be the person who wallows in self-pity that way. It’s not you, and I couldn’t bear it. Such a waste. I need you to march to war with me, not to be sitting here feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “To war?” Kelis rasped, lifting his metal-flesh hand. “I cannot be a warrior for you. Not with this.”

  Aliver stepped nearer. His voice dropped, tone softened. “You have a choice. This thing”—he placed his hand over Kelis’s metal one—“has become part of your destiny. It doesn’t end it; it changes it. Perhaps this is a gift. How can you know? It may be a gift to urge you to return to your destiny. Do you remember the boy you told me you were? The dreamer. You were born with that in your heart. You told me that in dreams you read the future, and that you spoke languages you could not speak when awake and that this gave you joy. So return to it. Don’t bemoan the loss of a spear arm. What is that compared to the gifts of a dreamer?”