Acacia,War with the Mein a-1

by David Anthony Durham

  What happened to the townspeople Dariel never knew. They were simply gone, and try as he might the guardian found no sign of the man he sought. He sat down on a log stool, taking in the place, and then he folded his head into his hands and stayed silent in thought for what seemed like hours. Dariel stood nearby, holding the pony’s reins as it cropped the sweet mountain grass.

  When the guardian looked up, he was full of purpose. He would go to the next town, he declared. It was over a day’s ride farther west. If he left at that moment he could reach the place by sunrise, and if he found the answers he needed to there, he would be back by nightfall. Perhaps somebody was looking for him. Best that the guardian check things out and return with a better idea how to proceed. He would have to ride fast, though, so he arranged to leave Dariel in a hut just a little way out of town. He left his shoulder bag for the boy, and said this was all for the best.

  The man rode away. Dariel heard the clack of the pony’s hooves for some time, and when the sound eventually faded, he was filled with dread. He had not even protested, said not a word. How could he when he knew the man was lying to him?

  He spent that night in blackness, trembling and fearful, as small as a mouse and just as helpless. It rained steady and chill for some hours, and when it abated, mist crept through the valley like wraiths. He made no fire, did not think to fetch the blanket from the pack the guardian left, did not even fully recognize the hunger in his belly for what it was. As the bleak reality of his situation was so beyond his power to face, he balked from doing so. Inside, he fantasized his father lived again and was on the way to rescue him. He entertained all sorts of fancies with ravenous hope. Perhaps it was a good thing, too, because when salvation came it was no more predictable or likely than any of his fancies, but he was ready to accept it with open arms.

  Sitting now on the stool beside his savior’s sickbed, Spratling asked, “Do you remember the night you found me?”

  “Like it was yesterday, lad.”

  “That is where I begin, you know? You were a shadow that pushed through the door and found my hiding place-”

  “That hovel!” Dovian interrupted. “A disgrace that you ever spent a night there.”

  “I remember your words exactly,” Spratling continued. “You said…”

  “Who would have thought,” the shadow had said, pushing into the hut behind a yellow lantern held high, “that you could find a prince just anywhere these days? I guess some of us are lucky.”

  Dariel might have remembered the words well, as he said, but that night it took him a moment to realize what was happening. He had been three days in hiding. Some portion of him still thought the guardian might return, though in deeper regions he had already started to give up on all hope. What a familiar voice, he’d thought. But whose was it, and how was it here? Dariel knew he recognized it, but for a few frightened moments he could not place it within the context of this mountain hut.

  The shadow moved closer. “Are you all right, rascal? Don’t be scared. It’s Val. It’s Val come to help you out.”

  Val? Dariel thought. Val from the caverns below the palace-the feeder of the kitchen ovens…His Val! He got to his feet, stumbled forward, and fell against the man’s chest. Once he inhaled the salty, pungent, coal-smoked largeness of him, he released a horde of pent-up fears in great sobs. He clenched Val’s shirt in his fists and rubbed his tears and snotty nose into the fabric, as would a baby ill to the point of delirium with cold and fever.

  “Oh, don’t do that, lad,” Val said softly. “Don’t do that. Things will be all right now.”

  And, true to his word, they were. At least, they were as all right as possible in the circumstances. It turned out that Val had been on his way home to Candovia, one of many in the migration spurred by the war. He had happened upon Dariel’s guardian by pure chance in a makeshift camp pitched at the side of the highway of fleeing refugees. The man was well into a bottle of plum wine and did not mind confessing to anyone around him that he had been personal guardian to one of the king’s children. Val had situated himself close enough to smell the man’s sickly-sweet breath. He probed him until he confessed just who he had been looking after and where he had left his duty and turned coward. He could not find the person he was meant to deliver the boy to! He was gone, probably dead, and the guardian had no further instructions as to how to proceed. And with the news coming from all around-Maeander in Candovia, Hanish having destroyed the army at Alecian Fields-there was nothing he could do for the boy anymore. Sure, he’d left him to his own fate, but what else could he have done?

  Val never exactly described what he did to the guardian, except to mutter something about how he would have to gum nothing harder than goat cheese for the rest of his days, or something like that. It did not make a bit of sense to the boy, but the visual image it conjured in him held his perplexed attention for much of the long walk Val led him on. He knew just the place for them, Val had said, a grand and expansive place in which to disappear. For much of the journey the boy rode atop the Candovian’s shoulders, a leg to either side of his neck, fingers intertwined in the man’s curly mass of hair.

  They were three days coming out of the mountains, and by the fourth Dariel could smell the salt in the air. That afternoon, half asleep on the man’s shoulders, Dariel heard Val say, “Look, lad. That’s no sea, there. That’s a place a whole race of men could hide upon.”

  They had paused on a bluff with a view of all the world to their west. Even though Dariel had lived all of his years on an island he could tell in a glance that the body of water before them was different. It was not the turquoise blue or the marine green that he was used to. Instead, the water was a slate-dark color a shade under black, undulating with swelling surges that conveyed their force through slow bulk. Near the shoreline, crests of countless waves rose like liquid mountains, seemed to hang stretched to the air for a moment, then curled over into a foaming chaos. Occasionally, the clap of the wave’s impact slapped against his ears, always strangely timed, in a way impossible to match sight with the sound. Staring from atop his giant’s shoulders, Dariel had never seen anything as awesome in its power and scale.

  “That’s the tongue of the Gray Slopes,” Val said. “It is a boundless ocean. That’s where you’ll vanish from your father’s world and emerge into mine instead.”

  Dariel had not said anything in response. For weeks now there had been a vague fear hanging over him, as ever present as the sky. Some portion of him had never believed he could carry on without his family. He would vanish without them. The world would swallow him. The Giver’s fingers would pluck him from the earth and flick him into nothingness. He feared he was of no more substance than a flame and just as easily extinguished. But here he was. The world carried on as it always had, and he still moved through it. He went on; he had something at his center just as solid and real as the rest of the world. He really could vanish from one world and emerge into another, he thought. Vanish and emerge anew…

  That was exactly what he had done. Val gave him a new life, bestowed on him a new name even as he took one for himself. He taught him that the tales he had told of being a blood-soaked pirate in his youth were not just make-believe, as the boy had thought. Val-Dovian, in short for his native country-came from the long line of raiders he had claimed. On arriving back among the Outer Isles it did not take him long to reestablish himself and set about building a fleet of ships and getting sailors to man them. The world was ripe for plunder. The Known World was in near chaos, grudgingly coming to terms with Hanish Mein’s new rule. Many groups jostled to find a place in the redistribution of power this entailed. Val sailed with Dariel tucked under his wing; taught him everything he could about sailing and fighting, pirating, commanding men; about surviving this cruelest of existences.

  That which came before-the palace of Acacia, his role as prince, his father’s empire, and three others born of him and his mother, Aleera Akaran-well, it seemed to be clearer in Val’s mind than in Dar
iel’s. Why try to hold on to people he would never see again? He had been so young that his memories had not stuck in his head with an ordered clarity. Yes, there were images. There were moments of emotion that seemed to take him by the neck and close off the air to his lungs. There were times when he awoke from dreams fearing that something was horribly wrong, but he grew to tolerate this as the years passed. Maybe such was just what it meant to be alive.

  Spratling-yes, that was his name now and there was no reason to slip back to that scared child persona any more than he had to-flipped open the small latch of the chest and tipped the contents onto Dovian’s bed, a slithering tumble of gold coins. The man stared at them, ran his fingers over them, tested their feel on his palm. He whispered that this was it. This was just what they had needed. This would fund everything…

  He plucked up an object between his fingers and held it up to a ribbon of sunlight. It was gold-gold colored at least, though the workmanship was almost too fine and sharp edged for such a soft metal. The shape of it was unusual. It was the thickness of a large coin, slightly square, ridged along one end, inscribed with markings that might have been writing but which bore no similarity to any language either of them had seen. There was a single hole at its center, just slightly oblong.

  Spratling had not noticed it before. “What is it?”

  Dovian thought on this for some time. Spratling could almost see him sorting through his memories, a lifetime’s catalog of labeled and priced treasures. “I’ve no idea,” he finally said. “It’s a fine thing, though.” He pressed it to the young man’s chest. “Here. Keep it there around your neck. If you ever get in trouble and need a fast fortune you can melt it down and make coins. It’s yours. The rest of this is more than we need for what we have planned. Bring me those charts and look them over.”

  Spratling did so, spreading the familiar images across the cot and sitting on the edge of the bed. He loved moments like this, when Val seemed to forget his ailments and the two of them got lost in contemplation, like a father and a son, scheming, planning, dreaming a swashbuckling world into existence. In many ways Spratling was still the boy Dariel had been. He had no inkling yet of how much that was soon to change.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  There was one particular Talayan acacia tree that was to haunt Thaddeus’s dreams afterward. It rose solitary out of the plain. It stood like an old, black-skinned man, leaning to one side as if gentling an infirmity. It was precariously thin, its limbs crooked and decrepit, its leaves so sparsely dispersed that Thaddeus was not sure until he stood under it that the thing still lived. It did. Acacia trees were hardy, slow growing, thorned against enemies, and stoic against the vagaries of weather. Perhaps there should have been something comforting in this, but, if so, Thaddeus could not find it. Nothing in this country comforted him. Never had the mute grandiosity of a landscape so pressed upon him as it did when he stood in the sparse shade beneath that tree. The curve of the earth seemed more gradual than elsewhere, distances greater, shapes of hills out there more massive. The vault of the sky seemed higher in Talay than it did anyplace else. It stretched up and up, shoved aloft by seething white clouds, stacked like pillars supporting some massive temple. Everywhere he looked-below and above him, at each point of the compass, near and far-creatures moved into and out of view. He could not number or name or categorize all of them, but he suspected each to be a spy intent on studying him.

  Of the six provinces of the former Akaran Empire none was more complex, nor more important, than Talay. In breadth it was as wide a land mass as Candovia, Senival, the Mainland, and Aushenia combined. It stretched away to the south in sun-baked folds of land, unmapped regions vast enough that the Acacians never charted all of it in their twenty-two generations of rule. Much of it was so arid that no rain fell to the earth at all. While the name of one particular tribe was assumed by the entire territory, in truth Talayans were just the favored nation among many others. Some have argued that Edifus was an ethnic Talayan, but Edifus himself never claimed such ancestry.

  What was indisputable is that the Talayans were the first people on the continent to align themselves with Edifus. In return, he granted them dominion over their neighbors and the responsibility of policing them. No small thing. The province was home to thirty-five other chiefdoms, with nearly the same number of languages and featuring four racial groups so distinct from one another that no generalities could apply to the people of the province as a whole. It was true that they all were dark skinned, but within this was considerable variety, not to mention greater physiological diversity than anywhere else in the Known World. Many of these nations were numerous enough to be military powers in their own right. The Halaly, the Balbara, the Bethuni: in the late Akaran age, each of these could field armies of ten thousand men. The Talayans themselves could call up nearly twenty-five thousand of their own, and, of course, they had the right to levy troops from the others. If their authority had held, the war with Hanish Mein might have taken a different course. It did not, however, for reasons rooted in the soil of antique history.

  Old animus does not die, Thaddeus thought. It just awaits opportunity.

  Such thoughts came to him unbidden, adding to his unease. Perhaps he had been too many years in hiding. Too long wormed into the cave systems of Candovia, in places dark and moist, with the earth close around him, hearing low grumbles like those deep in a fat man’s belly. But he had not felt so ill at ease when he first emerged and set about his work. He had felt confident enough in his abilities as he gathered information, as he pulled in his spies and learned all they could tell him. He had had no doubts about himself when he sought out the old general and set him on a new path. So why the dread clinging to him now?

  Perhaps, he tried to believe, it was just that he was so very far from home, getting farther each day from the latitudes in which he had spent his life. These lands were quite different even from the lush country he had already passed through in northern Talay. Rolling farmland had stretched off as far as his fading eyes could see, dotted by tree lines dividing the fields, with occasional villages. It was nature manicured, hemmed in, and tamed by generations of human effort. And it was more abundantly populated. Their numbers, Thaddeus knew, had been thinned by the contagion. They had been ravished by it and by the war, as had most of the provinces. There were markedly few men of middle age, but the women seemed to have fared better. And there were many children. The place had thronged with them, which must have pleased Hanish Mein. He had made it law that all women who could bear children had to bear them. The Known World needed to be repopulated. They required numbers to thrive, new loved ones to replace those lost, new citizens to help the world turn. Thaddeus understood better than anyone exactly why this mattered so much to Hanish.

  The former chancellor’s destination was farther south than he had ever been, well into the parched plains and rolling hills at the heart of Talay. It was a distance of several hundred miles, a long way for a man his age to trek. He chose to walk, however. Lone, rambling, and mind-addled madmen were no rarity in the world. He could have roamed indefinitely without drawing the slightest notice from the thinly spread soldiers of the Mein. Perhaps also there was an overture of penance in his march, though he did not define this even to himself.

  He arrived dust-covered in the court of Sangae Uluvara. Tucked into the shallow bowl beneath two bulbous ridges of volcanic rock, the village of Umae was made up of fifty-odd huts; a handful of warehouses and storage pits; and a central structure built of wood and thatch that served like a great canopy above the market, offering shade from the sun and cover from the rain alike. Sangae’s people numbered a couple of hundred souls. As they were a herding culture, rarely was all the population gathered together. The village was in a remote spot in the world, unmarked on many maps, perhaps unknown to the Mein altogether. Indeed, they would have had to have searched very deeply to find the place or to discover a record of the bond of friendship the late king Leodan had
once shared with Sangae, long ago, in their youth. No living person besides Thaddeus knew of the man’s importance to the Akaran legacy.

  Summoned from inside his shady compound, Sangae stepped out into the sun with fluttering eyelids. He stared at Thaddeus with the trembling intensity he might have beheld an apparition with. A tumult of thoughts passed across his features, emotions that seemed to writhe just beneath his skin. Thaddeus knew that even this far south the man would have heard rumors that cast aspersions on his reputation. Sangae might still be unsure which chancellor was before him now: the traitor or the savior. And this would only be part of the noise within him. This man had been an adoptive father for nine years now. He could not but fear what Thaddeus’s arrival meant for his son.

  But when Sangae spoke, he did so from a place of controlled formality. He said, “Old friend, the sun shines on you, but the water is sweet.”

  “The water is cool, old friend, and clear to look upon,” Thaddeus answered.

  It was a traditional greeting of southern Talay, and it pleased Sangae that the former chancellor responded to it so smoothly and in Talayan. But then he switched to Acacian. “It has been a long time,” he said. “Long enough that I wondered if you would come. Long enough that I hoped you might not.”

  Thaddeus found this statement harder to respond to than the first. The chieftain held the former chancellor’s eyes with his. His nose and lips, the round forehead and the wide wings of his cheekbones: each of his features seemed more full of generosity than a single face should have been able to contain. His features had a fullness at odds with his slim torso, his thin shoulders, taut-skinned chest. His eyes were no whiter than Thaddeus’s, no less veined and yellowed, yet they stood out in contrast to the night black of his skin. For a moment Thaddeus felt a spike of fear rise up through him. How would a royal child of Acacia have fared alone among these people? He could not grasp even the edge of such a concept and hold on to it. It might have been a terrible mistake. He turned from the thought, for doubt had no place in how he meant to present himself. “In the king’s name, friend,” he said, “I thank you for what you have done.”