Acacia,War with the Mein a-1

by David Anthony Durham

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  Aliver observed stone become living tissue with a muted sort of acceptance, as if just the fact that he was watching it made such amazing things mundanely possible. There was no terror. No confusion. From a place that felt removed from his true body he watched granite boulders stretch into vaguely anthropomorphic beings. They each stood on two pillarlike legs, swung limbs from shoulder joints, turned heads with black-holed eyes toward him. They moved with a slow, stiff-jointed fluidity. They approached him like some strange undertakers of rock and earth, come to clean his corpse, to dispose of him. For that was what this meant, right? He was dying here in the far south, sucked dry by the sun, defeated. He was as parched as the sand beneath him, and now the rock beings of the earth had come to claim him. He wondered why nobody had explained this to him before. There was no mention of it in any spiritual lore he had ever heard.

  These figures of moving stone surrounded him, crowding in close. They slipped slivers of their limbs beneath him and lifted him into the air. His weight shared among a number of them, they walked with him suspended above the earth. It was a feeling similar to floating. His head lolled back and for a time he watched the motion of an upside-down world. He thought that they might have been speaking, but again he could not say for sure. There was something passing between them, but it was more like exhaled breaths than any language he knew.

  He had no idea how long or how far they carried him. He did understand that the earth spun beneath him. He saw the sun pass by above, watched stars flare to life and careen away, but he did not ponder such things as the passing of time or meaning of movement. It was not an experience measured in passing moments. Rather, one instant of time flowed so smoothly into the next that there was constancy to it all. There were no future and present and past. All of these things were the same. He forgot who he was. He felt no burdens whatsoever. His life and all the pressures he lived with had no substance. This, more than anything else from his introduction to his saviors, would haunt him afterward, a promise dangling at the far side of life.

  When he awoke to true consciousness again it was with the aid of another’s prodding. Somebody spoke his name, his first name and then that of his family line. The voice asked him if he would wake now and explain himself. He had come to them-why? He felt a pressure on his sternum, a force strong enough to push a moaning breath up and out of his mouth. He opened his eyes.

  Above him was a night sky. A black ceiling beneath which a gauze of high cloud rippled, rimmed in by the lip of a bowl of pale red stone. He wanted to take in the world around him and to figure out where he was. This might be death, after all. He sat up with slow effort. Somebody sat just beside him, cross-legged and still. It was, at first glance, a humanlike shape, worn and aged, carved of stone and perhaps so ancient that ages and ages of windblown sand had smoothed its features and pocked depressions into weaknesses, causing bits and pieces to drop away over time. The eyes were smooth and had about them the slightest indication of color, as if they had once been brightly painted and a trace residue of brilliance remained. The statue was near enough to touch, and Aliver flexed his fingers with the latent desire to do so.

  The eyes of the figure blinked. It pursed its lips, like a carp sucking water, and then fell still again. Aliver felt a thought enter his head, and it took him a moment to organize it into words and a few moments more to make of them phrases that he understood. He knew-without grasping why-that the message had come from the living stone before him. It said that it was pleased he had awoken. The others would come now, for they all wanted to know.

  Aliver opened his mouth to speak. The figure snapped an arm into the air, a quick flash of a motion that placed the palm in the air before him, stilling him. Wait. The meaning and then the word that signified it formed in his head. Let the others come.

  A chill spread through Aliver’s body. He watched an otherworldly scene that he simply could not believe. The enclosed rock chamber in which he sat gradually filled with more and more figures like the one beside him. They were the same as those that had carried him here. He knew that; yet they were different also. Their movements were hard to pin down. As physical beings they seemed never to move, and yet the air was filled with motion, as if so many ghosts trailed their incorporeal bodies through the world and only became solidly visible when they ceased moving. Even when they sat still around him, Aliver could make out their individual forms or faces only when he stared directly at one of them. When his eyes drifted, however, they looked like the weathered stones he had first thought them to be, egg shaped and ancient. Thus he sat surrounded by moving ghostlike stone beings, all of whom had faces if only he stared hard enough, masks that betrayed life only intermittently.

  Forgive us, but we must know…Have you the book of the Giver’s tongue?

  Again, this formed first as meaning that he had to order into sentences to interpret. It came from a collective of voices, but Aliver already had some grasp of how to make sense of them. He began to respond, “The book of…” But the words sounded monstrous, like the grinding of boulders, as if he had shouted them at the top of his lungs. He could see that the figures around him thought so too. They seethed back from him, like underwater plants swaying as a wave passed over them.

  The one who had been beside him at the start suddenly had a hand on his shoulder. Our king, please do not speak like that. Speak with your mind. Think what you wish us to know, and then release the thought to us.

  The fore portion of his mind thought this a strange thing to ask, but Aliver knew he had already been hearing their thoughts himself. That was why the place was so silent. That was why their words seemed to originate inside his own head. He fumbled to formulate a response, afraid now that each thought, each misstep and confusion, would pass from himself to the others. What a jumble he would reveal himself to be! But they waited, calm, their faces unchanged, hungry. They were blank, and it was clear they had no access to his thoughts unless he allowed it.

  Finally, he formed a sentence in his mind, thought it with clarity, and then projected it outward. What is this book?

  The faces staring at him all rocked again, but this time they swayed toward him. He received a response from more than one mind. The book, they communicated, was The Song of Elenet. It was the text Elenet wrote with his hand, wherein he defined each word of the Giver’s tongue.

  Please, they said, reveal it to us.

  Aliver sat for some time in the silence after this. What was happening here? Part of him wanted to smack his face until he woke up from this dream. Another part of him wondered if these beings were the craven folk of the afterdeath and this the reception they gave to those newly arrived. It felt like they were asking him the secret to regaining life, knowledge he knew he did not have. But beyond all this he had another thought. He pushed past everything else and gave shape to it.

  Are you the Santoth?

  In a single motion every head around him-perhaps a hundred or twice that, the number growing with each passing moment-nodded. The stone faces cracked smiles.

  That, they said in a chorus, is the word that means us.

  All right, Aliver thought. That’s the word that means you. But, by the Giver, what happened to you? He did not let these thoughts escape him, and the grinning faces, frozen as they watched him, showed no sign of understanding. They simply waited for what came next. He wondered if he had the energy for this. Shouldn’t he eat? Drink? But his body did not trouble him. He was no longer starving or dehydrated, though he did not remember when he had last consumed anything. He looked about and proceeded as best he could. He could not take it all in. He just had to start someplace.

  The Song of Elenet. Tell me more of it.

  They did, most gratefully. Aliver would later not be able to say just how long his discourse with the Santoth lasted. It was not so much a back-and-forth communication as it was a spiraling communion. He did not learn the things he did in any linear fashion. But once he had pi
eced them all together, he had a story right out of legend. It was a tale, he would once have said, spun from the fancy of idle minds to entertain themselves and explain away the world’s ills. That’s what he would have said in his youth. But from the moment he saw stones walk upright, his youth was irrevocably behind him. This is what he learned from the Santoth.

  The Song of Elenet was the encyclopedia of the Giver’s language. It was the book wherein was written the spoken truth of the entire world. Despite his many flaws and the great mistakes he made as a practitioner of sorcery-that was the word most appropriate to describe human usurpation of divine language-Elenet was ravenous in his desire for knowledge and meticulous in keeping records of what he learned. As the legends told, he did live in a time when the Giver walked the earth. He did trail behind the divine personage. He did listen and learn the songs in the language of creation. Each word he stole from the Giver’s mouth he wrote down in a script of his own devising. For the few who could read the text, it gave all the precise instructions for working magic on the world. It was a manual to the form and shape of creation; as such, there had never been a more dangerous document written in marks on a page, before or since.

  When Elenet left this world to explore other ones, he left his book in care of his Santoth disciples. He never said where he was going or why, but he vanished from the earth, just as the Giver had done before him. The book was handed down through the generations, from one God Talker to another. They were, in those ancient times, caretakers of knowledge. Kings and princes ruled the world; Santoth wove spells to hold the fabric of it together, helping to ease the chaos men seemed to long for. It was a sacred responsibility, and for eons they practiced god talk only for the good of the Known World. This changed, however, when a young Santoth named Tinhadin eventually became the keeper of the book.

  He held it close to his chest, the Santoth told Aliver, and did not share it with us.

  Tinhadin loved the power of the book. He studied it exhaustively, excluding others more and more often. He became chief among the Santoth and grew much stronger than any of them. Eventually he was more powerful than all of them combined. With his hold on the text, only Tinhadin had access to the faithful translations, to the exact pronunciation and significance of each word in the Giver’s language. Any slight variation on this corrupted the magic, weakened it, and/or turned it in ways the speaker had not intended.

  Still, the other Santoth had loved Tinhadin as one of their own. He shared knowledge with them, but increasingly the Giver’s words came to them only through him. When he set about to reshape the world, they labored beside him. He wanted to bring peace to the world, he said. There was too much chaos, too much suffering, too much potential for humanity to ruin itself and return to a state like that of the beasts. The others aided Tinhadin in battling to control the world. But before they knew what was happening, Tinhadin had outstripped them. He placed a crown on his own head, and set himself apart from them.

  But this was not a joy, the Santoth said. Instead, it became the greatest of burdens.

  Like normal men before him, Tinhadin feared losing the power he had gained. And, even more, he became fatigued with how completely he embodied the language of creation. He was a sorcerer with the power to shape the world just by opening his mouth. But, the Santoth explained, he found the power too difficult to control, to unwieldy. Imagine, they said, living an existence where the words out of your mouth changed the very fabric of the world around you.

  Tinhadin grew too strong, the magic too much a part of the functioning of his mind. At times he altered the world just by thinking in the Giver’s tongue. Sometimes he would speak the language in his dreams and wake to find the results living around him. That was why he turned against the other Santoth. He grew to hate his magic. He wanted to live without it, but he could not do so in a world where other sorcerers still worked their spells. He banished the Santoth from the empire. They did not all go willingly. Indeed, he battled with a great many of them, destroying them. The rest he drove into exile. Then he worked upon them his last magic, the spell which kept them perpetually alive, trapped in these southern lands until he or a descendant decided to invite them back. That, of course, had never happened, and the Santoth had aged into the beings Aliver now communed with. They were the very same individuals that Tinhadin had expelled, living-if it could be called that-and waiting.

  When the prince asked them if they still knew magic, they answered that they did but that their knowledge had been so corrupted over the years that they knew not what would happen if they spoke the Giver’s words. Their knowledge had become a curse from which they spent their eternal lives hiding. Without the true knowledge found only in Elenet’s book, they risked opening a rent in the world that might never be mended. They had learned to speak like gods, but now they feared themselves to be devils instead.

  Now that you have heard it from us, the collective voice of the Santoth said, tell us where the book is. We suffer without the word. We need the Giver’s words, and then we can be complete again, and good.

  Aliver shook his head. He did not want to say what he had to. Already he felt a certain peace among the sorcerers. He felt their suffering even before they mentioned it. He understood that their banishment had been a terribly prolonged curse, and he no longer had the luxury to doubt even a portion of the things they had communicated to him. But the truth was simple.

  I’m sorry, Aliver said. I do not have this book.

  The Santoth were slow to respond to this. Your father…he did not tell you of it?

  No, he did not.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY

  Corinn tried to keep her hatred of Hanish Mein pinned to her forehead for the entire world to see. He was her family’s single greatest enemy. She would never forget it, never forgive. She loathed him. Nothing he did would change this. He was a villain of massive proportions, a murderer on an enormous scale, about whom some gentler people in the future would write entire chronicles of infamy.

  She had to make sure to remember this, because in the tranquil setting of Calfa Ven it was the insults of a more personal nature that jabbed her most intensely. Simply put, Hanish toyed with her, as he had the first night at the lodge. At times it seemed he went out of his way to please her-and to let her know that he was going out of his way to please her; at other moments he treated her with shocking indifference.

  A few days into their stay in the mountains, he asked her to join him for a ride the following afternoon. It was an invitation delivered with great show before a crowd of onlookers. She stood about the next day at the appointed hour-dressed to perfection in a cream-colored riding outfit, with a silken hat perched high on her head, chilled by the spring air but sure that the high color in her cheeks was worth it-only to discover that he had forgotten all about her. He had ridden out early that morning for the hunt with no apparent thought for her at all. Even Rhrenna, her erstwhile friend, could not help but show amusement at the way he belittled her.

  What did it matter, though? The Mein were a petty people who took pleasure in humiliating a race that generations had proven was superior. He could have his small amusements, and she would hold to spite. Spite and condescension. That was all she felt for him. Fortunately, their stay in the mountains was almost over. Corinn had been counting the days, ready to get back to Acacia, where she could put some distance between herself and this barbarian who called himself the ruler of the Known World.

  Strange, though, that when a servant next brought her a message from Hanish, she experienced a tingling in her chest and a quickening of her pulse that-had the situation been otherwise-she would have interpreted as exhilaration. He wished for her company that afternoon, the messenger said, to practice archery. He prayed that she would not leave him standing alone. That sounded like a fine idea, she thought. Leave him standing about, dejected, spurned. And yet she knew that would not work. Hanish was not easy to insult. He would find a way to playfully punish her for it at dinner that
evening. Not going, she decided, would be more easily ridiculed than answering his invitation would be.

  She found Hanish at the archery field. For once he was free of his entourage, accompanied only by a squire, who attended to the selection of bows, and by a boy, who stood some distance away in the heavy grass, waiting by the targets to retrieve arrows.

  “Ah, Princess!” Hanish said, all smiles and merriment on seeing her. “I was starting to wonder… Come and teach me what you know. This is agentle sport, yes? I understand from the servants here that you were quite the archer as a girl.”

  “I may have been once, but I’m neither an archer nor a girl anymore.”

  He offered her a bow that the squire had just handed him. “Well, you are at least half right. I’ll judge the other.”

  Corinn took the bow. The polished ash wood of the weapon felt good in her hands, the curves of the limbs familiar, light as if it were somehow made of bird bone. She ran her fingers down the taut string. She was some time in studying it before she motioned for an arrow.

  Plucking the missile from the squire’s hand, she nocked it, set it to rest, and lifted the bow to sight the target. She gripped the bow easily, her fingers settling in one after the other, her posture straight backed but easy, just as she had been instructed years before. She knew Hanish had paused to watch her. She did not care. She picked out a triangular target, one a little distance from where the boy stood. She drew her string hand back to her cheek, the arrow resting atop her fingers and the shaft a straight path out into the world. She loosed her fingers. The arrow flew. Vanished, it seemed. Only to appear a moment later, jutting from near the center of her chosen target.