The Sacred Band: Book Three of the Acacia Trilogy

by David Anthony Durham

  How very strange, the turning of fate.

  Shen said, “My mother is happy. She said this means I won’t have to worry about being queen.”

  “Would you have worried about it?”

  The girl caught the question on her lips and paused to consider it. “I’d rather you did it.”

  “Me, too,” Aaden said, glancing back. “Don’t tell Mother I …” The words fell from his mouth and dropped out of the air, the sentence unfinished. He began to turn away again, but his aunt did not let him.

  “Oh, dear, come,” Mena said. She pulled Aaden in, hugging him tight, and then looked up and motioned with her fingers that Shen should join the embrace. Arms around both of them, she whispered, “You two are good friends now, aren’t you? That would make your parents happy. It makes me happy. Listen, the world surprises us all. Me as much as you. It even surprised Corinn and Aliver. Again and again it finds ways to surprise. It makes things tough sometimes. That’s what it’s been lately. But it won’t always be so hard. We’ve come through so much. We really have.”

  “Aunt, what will become of us?” Shen asked.

  Mena drew back to see her niece’s face. “What a question to ask! I don’t know the future, child. I only know what’s been, and what I wish will be. And even then I know that I’ll never even really understand what’s been. It confounds me all the time. Nor will what I wish to be ever come to pass exactly as I imagine.”

  Shen crossed her eyes. It was such an unexpected, bizarre gesture that at first it alarmed Mena. When the girl’s eyes popped back to normal, Mena saw it for the joke it was. Smiling, she agreed, “You’re right. Life is confusing enough to make you go cross-eyed.”

  “But what do you imagine?” Aaden asked. “I know—it won’t happen just perfectly—but still. Tell us.”

  “You would have me lay the future before you, made only of my hopes and fears?” Both children nodded. “All right. Here …” Mena took a seat on a couch and motioned for the children to do the same. She had one sit on either side of her, turned them so that they rested their heads on her lap. Elya stopped preening to watch them.

  Mena looked up and away from them all. “What I imagine is that you will live magnificent lives,” she said, “and that you will live lives of quiet disappointment. You won’t be able to explain why, but there will always be some failures. You will strive for greatness and justice, and you will help to make our nation wondrous. I’m counting on that. Don’t let me down. You will both be great, but you will also fail at many of the things dearest to you, and people—even ones you love—will disappoint you. You will know great loves and you will have dear friends and you will be part of the great tree of Akaran. You will never be alone. And yet some of those you hold dearest will betray you, or envy you, or covet the things they perceive you to have that they do not. At times—even within a throng of people, despite the noise and clamor of attention—you will feel strangely lost. You will find gifts that are special to you, but you will never understand why such things were thrust upon you. You may curse the world for always, always spinning, never pausing, and yet this motion will be the music to which you dance. In the end, I hope, you will come to feel that none of the life you led could have been any different, any better or worse. You will find meaning in accepting many things you cannot understand or change. And if you live a long life, you’ll grow tired and that will be all right, because you will have done the best you could during your lives.”

  Aaden shifted his head as if to look up at her, but Mena stilled him with her palm and pressed him gently back against her knee.

  “You will take into the future all that ever has been for us. You will take your mothers and your fathers. You will take all that was Acacia, and all that was Talay, and all that was Mein, and you will take more than that—gifts and memories beyond measure. All of it lives inside you. Because of you, the days to come will be better than the days before this one.”

  Mena paused. She flexed her fingers where they touched the two children. “At least, that is how I imagine it. I may be wrong. I am not so old myself. Some say the greater portion of my life is before me. But, dear ones, that’s the future I imagine for you. I wish that it were more, and yet I also know it to be a vast thing, beyond what you can imagine now.” She paused again, unsure how they would respond, if they would be saddened unduly. She did not want that, but she could not lie to them.

  She was surprised, then, by the calm with which they answered.

  “Let that be so,” Shen said.

  And a moment later, Aaden echoed, “Yes, let that be so.”

  After a silence, Shen said, “Mena?”

  “Yes, love?”

  But it was Aaden who answered, “You’ve said many of the things that my mother wrote me in her letter. Shen read it, too. Did you read it, Mena?”

  “No.”

  “Funny,” Aaden said, “because she wrote the same thing. Almost.”

  “Only ‘almost’? What did she say that was different?”

  Shen responded. “She wrote all that, and then she said that it was our job to make it better than that. When we’re grown, she said, we should make it better in ways she could not imagine.”

  “We will,” Aaden said.

  Mena closed her eyes. She tilted her head up slightly, as if she needed to scent the air. When she opened her eyes she was glad the children couldn’t see the tears that escaped them. She was glad her hand—that was a gentle weight on their heads—could just as easily hold them in place. She said, “Of course you will. That’s what you were born for.”

  End of Book Four

  Epilogue

  Sire Dagon lingered on the dock after the others had departed the ceremony. He stepped out of the shadow of the Enrapture and stood gazing at the ship. There it was, the new home of His Eminence, the Enraptured Sire Grau. Stacked stories upon stories tall, the Enrapture was not the largest league brig, but it was the most revered, the most sacred. It never docked longer than a few days, never filed a plan of sail, and for most of each year it kept no contact whatsoever with the rest of league society. It floated the world’s seas, followed the currents. It rose and fell with the tides. All the time it did so, the enraptured leaguemen housed within it lived in a state of unending bliss. Sire Grau, having just joined them, had an eternity of floating, dreaming paradise stretching before him.

  The bastard, Dagon thought. You lying, conniving bastard. I hope the vessel sinks!

  He glanced around to make sure nobody heard his thoughts. He would never let such venom escape him in council, but he was not in council now. The leaguemen and Ishtat and workers draining away toward the town paid him no heed. He wished he did not have to hide his thoughts, as he just had throughout the ceremony. He had stood beside his brothers through the pomp of Grau’s Rapture, watching Grau climb into the casing that was to be his lasting paradise, watching as the casing was winched up into the vessel. Dagon had even intoned the sacred songs, honoring the sire for the life of service he had lived. Complete rubbish. Why would anyone think I’d have anything but hatred for him anyway? He’s ruined me.

  Thanks to Grau and his plotting, Dagon was a failure. Having been forced to forfeit his Rapture tithe—part of which went to conclude Grau’s payments—Dagon would never live long enough to earn admittance. The lowliest young league novice in the outer circles of the council had a brighter future than he.

  Dagon did not follow the others. He strolled out to the far end of the dock, looking to the west and also south across the open expanse of water. He set a hand on a pylon, a thick stump of wood that he knew was actually the very tip of a massive tree, one that extended far down into the depths of the deep-water dock. A brig caught his eye in the distance, coming in from the west. One of the large ones most often used for crossing the Gray Slopes. He did not recall a brig’s return being planned, but his mind had been on other matters recently.

  He tried to take some comfort from being able to absorb the news of the world f
rom the safety of Orlo. Tumultuous events were best studied from a safe distance. He much preferred mulling over the Known World’s turmoil while inhaling the sea breeze blowing in from the west, watching the sun slide toward the watery horizon, as he was doing now. He even took some satisfaction in finding himself somewhat vindicated by recent events. “Who among you, brothers,” he had asked at the last council meeting, “would prefer being prisoner in the Inner Sea to being free leaguemen perched between the two continents?” The answering silence had been gratifying, regardless of the grumbling undertone hidden just beneath it

  Watching the brig come in and waiting for the sun to dive into the horizon, he stood cataloging what he knew of recent events. For one, Queen Corinn was no more. Nobody knew what had happened to her, but she never returned from the confrontation with the Santoth. Dead, gone, and good riddance.

  Her dragon, Po, circled high over the isle of Acacia one evening, but he never landed. He flew north and gathered his siblings. All four of them ripped off their harnesses and lofted into the air, roaring themselves into freedom. Wild, monstrous freedom. Elya, their mother, could do nothing to restrain them, though she stayed true to Mena.

  Aliver had managed to arrange a truce with the Auldek. He even sent them home with his blessing, the Numrek orphans, and a box of children’s toys. Or so went the joke making the rounds among the leaguemen. The vintage had not proved to have the deadly apathetic withdrawals their trials had suggested. That, the people claimed, was Aliver’s doing, the same magical connection with the masses he had employed to help them off the mist during the war with Hanish Mein. The people went on. And then the king had promptly lain down and died! Dagon had tried to win some credit for that, but—injustice!—it all fell on Grau. None of the blame, all of the credit. Hail Grau!

  Dagon lofted a bit of phlegm into the air, watched it splat on the water below. It floated until the gaping oval of some fish’s mouth opened below it and sucked it in. The brig was near enough now that Dagon expected it to furl its mainsail. There were sailors up in the rigging, but whatever they were doing it was not tending the sails. Perhaps it was not going to dock at Orlo at all. On to Thrain, maybe.

  Then there was all the business about Mena becoming queen. A neat maneuver for her—it avoided all sorts of unpleasant manipulation of the two illegitimate children. The leaguemen were unsure whether the crown had been thrust upon her, or whether she had arranged it for herself. Mena had never seemed interested in rule, but Akarans—especially Akaran women—had proved surprising before.

  As for the whole notion of a “Sacred Band” of independent nations … Aliver’s work, obviously. Nathos doubted that it would result in anything but a new round of wars, but Revek had offered that it might actually be for the best. It made for an entire continent of individual monarchs, all of them new, even Mena. The potential for the league to enrich themselves exploiting them was considerable.

  Tired as the thought made Dagon, he had to admit it was true. The league would worm its way back into the commerce of the Known World. The Sires Faleen, El, and Lethel surely had hold on Ushen Brae by now. The Auldek might be marching back that way even now, but they were not to be feared anymore. Not really. For many in the league—the Raptured, of course, and the young as well—the future remained bright.

  “For yourself, Dagon, not so …”

  He paused midsentence, realizing that the brig really had not lessened its speed at all. It grew larger by the second, plowing through the water most recklessly. It was sure to pass too close to the docks. Shouts of alarm confirmed that others thought this, too. Dagon could hear the strange, almost inaudible hiss of the prow cutting through the water. He started to back away.

  He paused when he saw the sailors in the rigging release a flag. As it rolled out, and then snapped full, Dagon felt the color drain from his face. He knew it immediately. How could he not? He had lived years beneath it on Acacia. The Tree of Akaran, the black shape of an acacia tree against a yellow sunburst. Unmistakable, even if it lacked the perfect craftsmanship of the flag that flew atop the palace. It made no sense. A joke of some sort? Had one of the sires gone mad on the voyage home?

  A figure waved and shouted from the deck. Dagon ignored him, searching for the conical head that would distinguish a fellow leagueman.

  “Sire Dagon!” the person yelled. “Sire Dagon!”

  Dagon squinted him into sharper focus. The man moved along the deck as the ship slipped past. Others crowded the deck, shouting and waving also. But the single figure held Dagon’s attention now. As he ran, others leaped out of the way. He was in a state of mad euphoria, pointing to his chest and gesturing in the air. “Look at me! You see me?” Though Dagon could not make out his features, he could see that the man wore a smile as radiant as the sun. Watching him, Dagon failed to heed the warning shouted by those around him.

  The wave thrown up by the ship’s prow hit Dagon with a force that knocked him off his feet and sent him sprawling, sliding across the pier, grasping for something to hold on to. He slammed into a pylon. His breath escaped him, and for a few moments the tide of water held him in place, wrapped around the plug of wood. By the time he gained his feet again, breathless, sopping wet, and bareheaded, the brig was almost past the pier.

  “It’s me, your friend Dariel Akaran,” the madman on the brig shouted. “It’s Spratling. I’m in a hurry now. Can’t stop and chat. Too much good news to spread. I’ll come back soon and settle our business!”

  The stern of the brig cleared the pier. As it carried on, Dagon lost sight of the prince for a moment. Then he appeared once more, looking out from the rear deck. He yelled, “Tell your brothers that Spratling is back! And he’s brought friends!” He pointed at the bulky figure beside him, a gray man who climbed upon the railing, turned around, dropped his trousers, and wiggled his buttocks over the stern.

  As the ship charged away, Dagon barely heard the commotion of the others rushing around him and the leaguemen pouring out onto the pier to watch the ship as it carried on to the east. He sat down on a pylon. He went to take off his cap and hold it on his lap, but he did not have a cap. He glanced around for it, and then gave up and watched the vanishing brig. He could have thought a thousand things, but what came to him was something small, something that Grau had said back in Alecia. How had he worded it? He had said … What use is going to Rapture if it all comes crashing down in a few years?

  Sire Dagon chuckled. What use indeed? he thought. What use indeed?

  In a perverse way, despite the unfortunate magnitude of what had just been revealed, he felt a little better than he had just a moment before. He wondered if he might gain entrance to the Rapture vessel just long enough to find Grau’s chamber. He would knock on his casing and say, “I hate to wake you, brother, but guess what? Guess what …?”

  The End

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This trilogy was a long journey, both for me and for those who helped along the way. I would like to thank everyone I thanked in the previous volumes. For this one in particular, I have to begin with Gudrun, my first reader, the one who approved the novel before anyone else did, the one who made me believe in it. I had some great beta readers this time: Allison Hartman Adams, Hannah Strom-Martin, and Erin Underwood all made the book better than it would have been without them. Carola Strang and all the team at Le Pré aux clercs in France were wonderfully encouraging; and Gerry Howard and Sloan Harris worked through many trials and tribulations with me as we brought this home. Thank you all.

  About the Author

  David Anthony Durham received the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer of Science Fiction for Acacia and The Other Lands (the first two volumes of the Acacia Trilogy). Author of the historical novels Gabriel’s Story, Walk Through Darkness, and Pride of Carthage, he was handpicked by George R.R. Martin to write for his Wild Cards series of collaborative novels.

  e of the Acacia Trilogy