The greatest shock had come when the sword- and ax-wielding mass of them hit the still huddled Acacians. They were enormous, long-limbed, and powerful. Leeka saw in their motions a joy at killing that he had never imagined possible. It was almost childish, the way they killed. As when one boy with a toy sword pretends to slice off his companion’s arms and legs and head, and then thrusts his fist in the air, grinning at the damage he imagines himself to have accomplished. So did these beings go about their real work, hacking off limbs with glee, spinning themselves into grandiose strokes that nonetheless found their targets, clapping each other on the backs. Behind their matted mass of long black hair they were pale hued, like the snow. Leeka wanted to look one in the eye from up close, but he never got the chance.
He tried to remember what orders he had given. As much as he tried to match the totality of the slaughter with some reasoned response, he could neither recall any such response nor imagine what he could possibly have said in the few moments the slaughter took. There was simply nothing to it other than the enemy pouncing on them and his soldiers dying, blood spray all around, limbs kicked across the sodden snow, bodies like cloth dolls strewn about in broken-backed postures impossible for the living. It never appeared for a moment that any of the enemy worried for their own lives. Nothing touched them. Nothing frightened them in the slightest, and the damage they inflicted upon Leeka’s soldiers was nothing to them but a grand amusement.
Leeka had seen an enemy spearman pin an Acacian soldier beneath his foot. The foul thing studied the woman with primitive curiosity, and then jabbed the pronged point of his weapon straight down into her face. This had galled Leeka like nothing ever had before. He roared. He directed his fury up from his abdomen and hurled a scream across the tundra. The spearman heard him, yanked free the weapon, and moved on him. If the being loosed his spear and missed, Leeka promised as he ran toward him, he would find himself gutted on Acacian steel the moment after. The spearman, though, threw with accuracy. The missile sped toward him in an elongated blur. Leeka would have died if not for the actions of one of his soldiers, a man whose name he did not know beforehand and did not learn after.
The soldier stepped between the spearman and the general. He caught the lance full in his chest. It pierced through him and emerged from the other side in a burst of blood and jagged shards of rib. The spear point shifted just enough to the side that it passed through the hollow between Leeka’s side and his arm. The soldier’s body smashed against his. The force of that impact flung them both backward. The man’s helmet cracked Leeka on the forehead and knocked him unconscious. The two must have fallen together in a jumble, one looking just as dead as the other.
That, he assumed, was why he was not more carefully dispatched and why he opened his eyes many hours later to find himself layered well down inside a mound of bodies. Before he had been felled, he had noticed that some of the enemy grabbed slain soldiers by the ankles and slung them into piles, clearing the ground as if careful that corpses not clutter their playground, so he understood that he had been tossed into one of these mounds. Others were then piled on and around him. Immobile, stuck fast within a mound of the deceased, the blood-smeared men and women of his army intertwined under and over him; he drifted into and out of consciousness.
In waking moments he came to understand existence as one of suffering and great heat. He was so packed in that for some time he thought the heat was a product of this alone. Later, he was engulfed within an incredible furnace beyond anything the stiffening bodies could have been responsible for. He felt the corpses around him flex and shiver with it, belching the awful scent of flesh aflame. It was not until he had sweltered through this state for hours on hours, drifting into and out of fitful, nightmare-laden sleep, that he awoke to the startled realization that heat raged inside him as well as without. A fever pulsed with life from the center of his forehead. A bug was imbedded there. He was sure of it. An insect dipped its curved beak into his skull, pumping him full of some venom, the round, bulbous bottom of it heaving with the effort. He struggled to reach it, but he could not move. He sweated from every pore of his body. Salt tinge stung his eyes. He licked the corners of his mouth, frightened by the crusted leather that was his lips. His teeth had changed also. They were canine incisors that cut into his tongue, filling his mouth with mercury that, try as he might, he could not expel. He gagged on it, lost consciousness, awoke gasping, remembered the heat and the insect within his skull and realized that the flesh had begun to slough off his frame, rotten meat. And then he would pass out. Dream. Wake. Writhe. And on and on.
This was all before the time he awoke to coolness and to the square of light above him and to the bird cutting shadows across the sky. He had no idea how many days had passed when he struggled up from the ghastly stitch work of corpses under which he had lain. The bodies that had provided him lingering warmth were frozen stiff now. The mound was dusted with ice, but it was easy enough to see the charred remains underneath, the ashes kicked away by the wind. The bodies had been set aflame. Around him were many similar heaps.
The mound in which Leeka had been buried had burned less completely than the others; perhaps in this chance lay the reason he still breathed. All manner of debris cluttered the tundra-blood-fouled, shattered equipment; corpses of pack animals and dogs; portions of men and women. It was a scene of utter frozen desolation, not a moving creature in sight except for a few scavenging birds, the thick-necked, squat carrion eaters of these frigid climes. They had enormous beaks, short and visibly serrated. With a flicker of hope he considered the possibility that he was actually dead and all this around him was the afterdeath. But the world was too terribly solid for him to believe this.
He might have stood there for some time, supported up to the thighs by the charred remains, had a vulture not landed near at hand and yanked at one of his soldier’s curled finger joints. The thought of killing one or two of them warmed Leeka with purpose. Within the hour he had scavenged a bow and several arrows. He impaled three of them and set the rest circling overhead, crying out their rage from above. It did not take long to understand the task was futile, though. More birds appeared, dropping to the ground each time his back was turned to them.
He realized there were other creatures about: small white-furred foxes, stained pink around the jaws, a weasel-like creature with a striped black-and-white tail, even a species of hard-shelled insect that seemed impervious to the cold. He killed several of these by touching them. He scorched them with the warmth from his fingertips. Heat. Such a powerful force in this place, instrument of both life and death, of torture and salvation.
Thinking this last, he set about gathering the supplies to build a fire. It was not easy, weak as he was. He had often to stop and take sips from the water skin wrapped close to his abdomen and to nibble the hard flat bread, the only food he could stomach the possibility of. In the slanting light of the early dusk he fed a growing blaze. He tossed atop it the frozen, singed bodies of his soldiers. He ventured into the dark and cold and dragged back offerings to the flames. Again and again he did this, each time a small journey between extremes. His head reeled when he moved too quickly. Often he dropped to one knee, eyes closed, still, until the spinning stopped. A wind had kicked up again and with its shifting bluster it was impossible not to inhale smoke. Coughing and soot covered, he stayed at the task until the work was completed. His army was not to be food for the scavengers. Better they were freed to the air so that they might blow away and search for peace dispersed far across the Giver’s misbegotten creation.
Late that evening Leeka huddled near the blaze, his eyes tearful from ash. Grit caked on his lips and stuck to his teeth. Several times gusts of wind brought him the sound of women singing in the distance. Impossible, and yet he heard it with almost enough clarity to pick out individual words and to hum the tune inside himself. What to do now? He tried again and again to focus on this question. He was a general faced with a tragedy; before anything else he must
form a plan of action. But he never got further than asking the question before some memory of horror yanked his attention away. Though his mind roiled with scenes of the slaughter, he could not fix one single image in which he had seen one of those enemy men creatures fall. Throughout the work of the day he had not found any of their dead. All the limbs he had collected and tossed to the flames had been from his own men. He found nothing that proved even one of the enemies had been killed, nothing that even led him to believe they had been wounded.
The invader’s trail was easy to see in the burnished light of morning. Despite the blurring effects of snow and the wind, the path they had left was like a dry river cut into the tundra. Whatever wheeled vehicles they pushed or pulled must have been massive, for the tread of them cut diagonal ridges into the ice several feet deep. He saw the crisscrossing tracks of the rhinoceros creatures. In and around these were myriad footprints left by the enemies themselves. Some of these were larger than a man’s by half. Others were small enough to be children’s. Still some appeared from the tread of the boots to be those of Acacian soldiers. Prisoners?
Leeka set out down the trail. He marched with all the supplies he could salvage dragged behind him on one of the smaller sleds. He fashioned tent poles into walking sticks and slammed these into the ice with each step. He pushed his pace, a single figure jogging in pursuit of an army. It did not make much sense. He was not yet sure what he was trying to accomplish. He just had to do something. He was a soldier of the empire, after all, and there was an enemy afoot, a nation to warn.
CHAPTER
TEN
Like all the Aushenians that Aliver had thus far seen, Igguldan dressed proudly in his national garb: long leather trousers shrunk skintight to the legs, a green-sleeved shirt completed with a blue vest, a felt hat set at an angle on his head. They were simple garments really, like something worn on a hunt. This was in keeping with the national character. Aushenians loved the rolling forestland of their country and liked to think themselves still the huntsmen their ancestors had once been. From the strong, long-limbed look of him, Aliver felt perhaps they were that.
Aliver had once complained to his father that other nations should not have been allowed to maintain a royal class. What sense did it make for one king to rule over other kings? It undermined their authority, threatened to make others equal to them. Should there not be a single monarch for the empire? Leodan had answered with measured patience. No, he had said, that would not be better. All the nations of the Known World-other than Aushenia-were subservient to them in many ways, in all matters of importance. They were conquered peoples, but they were not without pride. Keeping their kings and queens, their customs and traits, allowed them to hold on to some of that pride. This was important because people without a sense of self were capable of anything. “It takes nothing from you to occasionally call another man royal,” he had said. “Let them be who they are, and let our rule over them feel as gentle as a father’s hand upon a son’s shoulder.”
It was not a full contingent of the King’s Council that met the Aushenian prince. A few senior members sent their secretaries instead-something Leodan murmured about under his breath. Thaddeus was there beside the king, along with Sire Dagon of the League of Vessels and enough others to grant the meeting the appropriate air of importance. The foreign prince was surrounded by other officials of his state, advisers and seasoned ambassadors. Aliver knew the prince to be only three years his senior, but in action he seemed a much more practiced dignitary. The older men deferred to him. Before they spoke they asked his permission with their eyes. He conversed freely with Leodan and Thaddeus, and he recited a long greeting from his father, Guldan, which sounded much like a poem in its rhythm and occasional use of rhyme. Aliver might have been put out to see a young man more comfortable than he yet was in such a role, except that Igguldan, with his open face and smiling manner, was hard not to like.
“Gentle councillors of Acacia,” Igguldan said, “in truth I have never looked upon a more beautiful island-nor more impressive palace-than this one. Yours is a blessed nation, and Acacia itself is the central jewel in the most lavish of crowns.”
For some time he spoke as if his only objective were to sing the praises of Acacian culture. How he loved each and every view the high citadels offered! How he marveled at the quality of the stonework, the functional artistry of Acacian architecture, the refined demonstration of wealth without pretense. He had never eaten a finer dish than on the previous night: swordfish grilled on an open flame right before him and drenched in the sauce of some sweet fruit he had never before imagined. Everyone he had met here had been so courteous and dignified that he would take back to his homeland a new perception of model comportment. Coming as he did from a smaller nation, one prey to nature’s shifting seasons and temperament, he stood in awe of the sublime merging of power and tranquillity that was Acacia.
He had a smooth tongue, so much so that Aliver was slow to notice at what point he shifted his focus to the true business of his visit. By the time he caught on, Igguldan was declaring that his nation took pride in its long history as a free and independent state. He knew he did not have to remind any gathered in the room about the role that Aushenia had played in securing the Acacian peace. It was the dual fronts and the combined power of Aushenia and Acacia that had defeated their common enemies years before. They might have had fractious relations on occasion since that distant time, but it was the spirit of their former relationship that his father wished their two nations to remember now.
“That is why I come bearing my father’s request that you admit Aushenia peacefully into the Acacian Empire, as a partner province on par with Candovia, Senival, or Talay. If you accept us, Guldan swears that your nation will profit from it and never regret the decision.”
There it was, Aliver thought, presented more clearly than he imagined such overtures would be. The Acacian response, however, was not similarly straightforward. The King’s Council members peppered the young man with questions. Asked whether Guldan would revoke Queen Elena’s Decree-that haughty declaration of eternal independence-Igguldan answered that her words spoke true for her time. One could not reach back into the past and change what had been. Guldan would never contradict Queen Elena, but he spoke of now, of this moment, of the days and years to come.
Thaddeus asked what misfortune had befallen Aushenia that after all this time she finally begged a place at the table.
“No great misfortune, sir, but we have lived long enough outside the trading circles of the empire. There is a new spirit among my people that chooses to look toward the future with fresh eyes. We see now opportunities that we did not before. My father acknowledges this foremost among us.”
“Umhmm,” Thaddeus said, unimpressed. “So your situation is that dire?”
There was an edge to the prince’s voice as he rebuffed this, just the slightest hint of aggravation. Aushenia, he said, was a modest nation, but it had never been poor. They were rich in amber, a valued gem known throughout the world. Their enormous pines were the best for sea vessels in the Known World. And their trees produced an oil that through a secret process they made into a pitch that sealed the hulls of ships against water and salt damage and worm damage. This, he knew, would be a boon to any nation that sailed the deep ocean.
Igguldan seemed primed to continue, but Sire Dagon cleared his throat to speak. Thus far he had sat silent and still at one end of the table, but Aliver had sensed the power of his presence the entire time. The League of Vessels. His father had once muttered that there was no more formidable force in the entire empire. “You think I rule the world?” he had asked, sardonic and cryptic at the same time. The league limped out of the chaos before Edifus’s time as a ragtag shipping union, a loose band of pirates, really. Under Tinhadin’s rule they won the contract to ship the new trade with the Lothan Aklun. With this legitimacy came such wealth that they evolved into a monopoly controlling all waterborne commerce. Before long, they were a diver
sified entity with influential fingers in every sector of the Known World. Once they won effective control over Acacia’s naval might-a deal brokered when the seventh Akaran monarch disbanded his troublesome navy and looked to the league as an efficient alternative-they made themselves a military power, complete with a private military, the Ishtat Inspectorate, which they claimed was a security force to protect their interests.
Sire Dagon was as strange looking as any of the leaguemen. His comportment was more that of a priest of some ancient sect than of a merchant. His skull had been bound so tightly in childhood it was squeezed into an elongated shape, the rear crown of it like the narrow point of an egg. His neck was unusually long and thin, an effect they managed by wearing a series of rings around it while they slept, their number increased slowly over a lifetime. His voice was just loud enough to be heard, strangely flat of tone, as if each word sought to deny that it was even being spoken. “Yours is a nation of how many persons?”
The Aushenian prince nodded at his aide and let the older man answer. Of free citizens they numbered thirty thousand men, forty thousand women, almost thirty thousand children, and an insubstantial number of elders, as Aushenians most often chose to end their lives once they felt themselves unproductive. They had a large population of foreign merchants within their borders, numbers unknown, and they kept a small servant class of perhaps ten to fifteen thousand souls.
When the man finished, Igguldan said, “But you know this. We have known for some time that we were being watched by league agents.”
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