Acacia,War with the Mein a-1

by David Anthony Durham

  And the world itself had not been the same since the Santoth were unleashed. Mena could not pinpoint exactly what was different or how it might affect the future, but she knew the ramifications of that dreadful day in Talay were not completely behind them. At times she could feel the rents they had torn in the fabric of creation. At other times it felt like the seams holding the world together threatened to burst. The passing days eased some of the confusion in the air, but it was not gone completely. The Santoth had let spell after spell out on the battlefield that day. They had only spent a few hours weaving magic, but who could say how the remnants of the Giver’s twisted tongue would change the world?

  When they climbed to the rolling plateau that stretched to the cliffs, Mena saw Corinn, who was ahead of her, look over her shoulder. She seemed to decide to slow so that Mena could catch up with her. What a revelation her sister was. Nothing at all like the girl Mena remembered. In truth, she felt little easy affection for her. There was an innate connection between them, a bond in the very blood essence of them, but it seemed an ever-prickly thing to navigate. It had been an incredible surprise to learn that Corinn had taken Acacia back from Hanish Mein. The fact that she had done so with the aid of the Numrek, and that she had forged some sort of agreement with the league, further stunned the younger siblings. The two of them had felt themselves in command just behind Aliver. They had been fighting the war, they thought. They had been at the center of all the struggle, or so they had believed. To discover that Corinn awaited them on a liberated Acacia, and that she was undeniably in power, with her own Numrek army and with a fleet of ships at her disposal…Mena had yet to come to terms with it all.

  She still thought of their reunion with unease. An event that should have been joyous in so many ways was…well, she was not sure exactly how to categorize the experience, but it was not what she would have imagined. It was a week after the Santoth had cleared the field of every Meinish soldier in sight. She and Dariel sailed into Acacia’s harbor, the two of them standing at the prow of the sloop she’d taken from Larken, gazing up at the terraced city that had once been their home. It was all as she remembered, really, but that still felt strange because she had spent so many years doubting the details she had recalled from her past.

  Behind them came a ragtag fleet bearing the remains of the great army. Though she knew they were weary, she felt propelled by the weight of them at her back, as if they were the wind that billowed the boat toward the docks. They were triumph. And relief. And fatigue. They bore grief with them as well, but this had already become inexorably commingled with victory. Mena doubted she would ever feel unadulterated joy. Thus far, life had not provided her this, not as Mena the girl princess, not as Maeben on earth, not as the sword-wielding warrior of the Talayan plains. Still, she watched the island approach with anticipation. She was finally going home.

  They docked and disembarked amid a reveling throng. The air rang with the music of flutes and cymbals, sweet with incense and fragrant with roasting meat, simmering stews, and frying fish. Corinn, they were told by the officials that met them, awaited them nearby. Indeed, after leaving the docks and cutting through crowds gathered in the lower town and up to the second terrace, there was no missing Corinn. She stood at the first landing of the granite stairway, the central one that led up toward the palace. An entourage flanked her. It was a mixed company that appeared to be made up of advisers and officials, with a contingent of Numrek officers conspicuously close to her, like personal guards. Though they did not wear particular uniforms, they were all clothed in sanguine colors, shades of crimson and brown and auburn. Mena knew a little of how Corinn had recaptured the palace and defeated Hanish, but it surprised her that her sister seemed to already have some sort of government in place.

  Corinn was the centerpiece of this arrangement. How marvelous she looked! Mena remembered that she had always thought her sister a beauty, but the sight of her was more astonishing than she had expected. She wore a long-sleeved gown of a light, shimmering fabric, a creamy color touched with a hint of orange. Her hair was intricately made up, ribbons woven into a tight bun, pierced through with a spray of quills and the white plume of some bird. Her features were perfectly formed, delicate, her bosom and the flare of her hips highlighted by the shapely gown. Her arms were sensuously formed-shapely but not overly lean or muscled, like Mena’s-her wrists and fingers as expressive as a dancer’s when she extended them in a gesture of greeting.

  Clearly, she was waiting for them to climb the steps. As they did so, Mena had an unforgivable thought. She did not know where it came from and thought it a coarseness of her war-weary mind. She imagined Corinn snatching one of those hairpins out and snapping it forward, a weapon, a poisoned dart. How frustrating and foul, she thought, that such an image would come to her at what should be a happy moment. What was wrong with her?

  With that question in mind, looking up at Corinn’s splendor, Mena realized what she herself looked like in comparison: half naked in a short skirt and sleeveless tunic, small and wiry, leather brown, her arms and legs scripted with all manner of cuts and abrasions, her hair an unkempt cascade. She suddenly felt the salt crusting her cheeks and the grime in the creases of her elbows and the film of dirt and sweat on her sandaled feet. She glanced at Dariel. Dashing as he was with his open raider’s shirt and sun-burnished skin, he too looked more a ruffian than a prince of Acacia. Why had they not thought to make themselves more presentable?

  Corinn finally began to descend toward them to close the last few steps. She stretched out both her arms, palms upward, her head listing to one side, her eyes gone kind. “Welcome home,” she said, “my sister, my brother. Welcome, Acacian warriors.”

  She carried on speaking, words that seemed strangely formal, as if they were part of a scripted greeting, meant more for the onlookers than for Mena and Dariel. Corinn brought them into a short embrace and then pulled them back and studied each of their faces in turn. Her eyes brimmed as she did so, her full lips trembling slightly. In everything she was courteous and loving and generous, and yet it also seemed wrong somehow. Even when she raised her voice and asked the crowd to welcome this “daughter and son of Acacia” home, and as she smiled down on them through the answering cacophony, Mena could not help feeling that behind the loving faзade Corinn was not actually pleased with what she saw in them.

  That was how it had been between them ever since. Mena could not point to any specific slight on Corinn’s part. Her words were never cruel, never less than appropriate. They spent evenings together over fine food and wine, talking of the past, all of them coming to know one another again. They rode horseback as they had done as children, and they sat together as a unit facing the myriad challenges of putting the empire back together again. Dariel seemed completely trusting of her, enough so that Mena never voiced her uneasiness to him. But through it all Mena feared that there would never be the easy, natural warmth between them that there had been with Aliver and that she still felt with Dariel. Corinn went through the motions of such a relationship but did not quite allow it in substance. If they were a triangle now-as Corinn herself said-three points of a family core, Corinn seemed to want them to understand that she was the apex; Mena and Dariel were the base that supported her.

  None of these things was far from her mind during the wind-buffeted funeral procession. Corinn smiled as she fell in step beside Mena. She lifted her arm from the now-obvious swelling of her pregnant belly and rested her fingers on Mena’s arm a moment. “Sister,” she said, “the day has finally come. We will make our father very happy today. You know that, don’t you? I’m sure he always hungered for the day that he would be released into the air like mother was years ago. He’ll blend with her and become part of the very soil of this island. He’ll be in every acacia tree. Remember that.”

  That, apparently, was all she meant to say. As she began to move away, Mena asked, “Are we going to make a better world?” Corinn looked at her, quizzical, and she fumbled for the
right way to explain the question. “You didn’t know Aliver-at the end, I mean. If you had heard the things he said…He had so many ideas of what we should do with power. He talked of a different order to the world. He believed we could eliminate things like the Quota-”

  “I don’t have quite as much time to ruminate on such things as you do,” Corinn said. “Are we going to make a better world? Of course. We rule it instead of Hanish. Who doubts that is an improvement already?”

  In her recent conversations with Corinn, Mena had grown wary of disputing her sister. It was not that Corinn grew angry or touchy, as she had done when she was younger. It just seemed that she had usually decided matters in her own way. Once decided, she was unassailable. “Of course it’s an improvement,” Mena conceded. And then gently added, “It’s just that we’ve not abolished the Quota. We haven’t closed the mines or-”

  “I don’t lack ideals,” Corinn said, “if that is what you’re suggesting. But speaking of ruling is a very different thing from actually ruling. There is no rest from my work. I will get to all the issues you have mentioned in time. For now, we are still hunting down fugitive Meins, those that fled Alecia and Manil with all the treasure they could pile on their yachts. And the provinces…you’d be amazed, Mena, how they turn against us, throw up barriers, insist on conditions, lay claim to things that are not theirs to claim. If they would just accept the order of things, we could get on with making the world-what did you say-‘better’? And the Lothan Aklun, whom none of us have ever seen, they are a worry hanging over all of this. The irony is that I find myself relying most heavily on two forces I had most loathed before: the league and my Numrek. In the end they made everything possible for me.”

  Mena almost said that an army fought and thousands upon thousands died for the cause as well. She almost invoked Aliver’s sacrifice, almost reminded her sister that the Santoth had a great deal to do with their victory as well. But Corinn had not mentioned their victory. She had claimed the Numrek as her own and used the word me instead of our. Mena could have challenged her on all these things, but instead she said, “I will help in any way I can. Just ask me.”

  “You are already helping. Carry on with organizing the army and training a new class of Elite. We will need superb warriors, ones with nobility and skill. Who better than you to instruct them?” Corinn smiled, thin lipped and curt. “I hear the storytellers are already spinning a legend about you. They talk of how you did battle with a goddess and tossed her down from her mountain perch. Those who wish to reopen the academy come to me promising that they will teach your swordsmanship methods as their highest Form. You, my little sister, are as much a legend as Aliver.”

  “It was just a tree, actually,” Mena said, “that the eagle nested in-not a mountain. And I did nothing more than manage to survive against it.”

  Corinn studied her a moment, amused, her eyebrows ridged like two identical peaks. “The storytellers never get it right, do they? In any event, I am glad that your gallantry was not the death of you.”

  Suspecting Corinn was about to break away, Mena asked another thing that had been troubling her. “Sister, what did you offer the Numrek for their allegiance? I still don’t understand it.”

  “They may govern a large portion of Talay as they see fit.”

  Mena thought a moment. “Yes, but that doesn’t seem like enough.”

  “So you say.” Corinn looked away, seeming to have lost interest. “Enough speaking, though. We are here to honor two men. Let us do so without distraction.”

  In many ways it was wonderful to look upon the polyglot diversity of the company that gathered beside the cliffs. They all stood rooted to the earth, trying not to grimace at the bird stink that roared up on the wind ascending the cliff, cold and damp from the sea below. Candovians stood touching shoulders with Senivalians, who, in turn, stood next to Aushenians, brilliant in their white garments. Outer Isles raiders mixed among Acacian aristocrats. Sangae, Aliver’s surrogate father, stood among a group of Talayans, beside a band of Halaly, and another of Balbara. Vumuans had tied eagle feathers into their hair. The Bethunis wore pale paint on their faces.

  In keeping with tradition, two honored persons not family members lifted the urns from the wagon. Dark-skinned Kelis, healed from the wound that almost took his life on the same day as his friend’s, carried Aliver’s urn; Melio, with his long brown hair whipped about by the wind, held Leodan’s remains: the two of them beautiful in the manner distinctive to their peoples. So young, Mena thought, youthful and strong, full of life. This was all as Aliver would have had it.

  She wondered, though, what he would have made of the more dubious guests, like Rialus Neptos, who hovered at the edges of the company, red faced and sniffling, the collar of his cloak pulled up around his ears. Sire Dagon and several other leaguemen also attended, each of them seated on stools carried out for them by servants. What place had those men here-men who had abandoned Leodan, who had for years hunted and tried to destroy Dariel? They watched the proceedings with their chins tilted, their eyes often drifting up into the cloud-heavy sky, as if their minds were already elsewhere.

  And Calrach and his Numrek contingent stood in a place of honor. Mena found it hard not to stare at them, almost more so because of the gentility of their demeanor, the neat clothing they wore, and the way each of them had his hair swept back from his face and fastened in a braided tail that hung down his back. Their faces were not actually that different than those of other races. Mena was not sure, however, if she thought they now looked more like other humans than before, or if she had come to feel that other humans resembled the Numrek more than she had acknowledged before.

  The ceremony was a simple one. They were gathered together as witnesses. There was no eulogy. No last rites. No words spoken in commemoration of the deceased. No music to play on the watchers’ emotions. All of these things had been dealt with previously, in the days leading up to this one. Here, at Haven’s Rock, the two dead men were to be released as had all Acacian kings. Corinn made it clear that she considered her brother to have been a king, even if the crown had never officially been placed upon his head.

  Once everyone was in place and watching, Corinn took the urn from Melio’s hands. She spoke her father’s name and wished him peace in returning to the substance of the earth and joy in finding his wife again and becoming one with her. From the moment the stopper was pulled free of the urn, fleeting streams of ashes escaped. When she tipped it down the plume sped away on the wind like smoke, flowing back over the assembled group, back over the island. A moment later, she released Aliver’s ashes the same way, thanking him for the feats of heroism he would always be remembered for. Corinn bowed her head and, in so doing, asked them all to hold to silence in remembrance of the dead.

  Mena tilted her head but did not close her eyes. She watched her sister, standing with one arm cradling her belly, fingers moving back and forth in small motions to a rhythm kept inside her head. She held still against the wind, as if better to cut through it with the sharp lines of her features. She looked untroubled by emotion. Impatient, yes, but detached in some fundamental way.

  The questions that had plagued Mena since Aliver’s death came to her again, disturbing what should have been a tranquil moment. She wondered if Aliver had made a mistake that morning when he had agreed to duel Maeander. Had he known that he would lose, or had he been so twisted with the desire for revenge that his judgment suffered? She hoped the latter was not true. She wanted to believe that somehow he had done just what he wished to, and that even this was all as he would have wanted it to be. She wanted to believe that her father, all those years before, had set in motion exactly the chain of events he chose to. She wanted to believe that this was all his doing. But, unlike her sister, Mena found it impossible to find solace in absolutes.

  Once the ashes were dispersed, Corinn turned and studied the doleful faces watching her. She seemed to have little patience for the emotions she read on them. “You here,�
� she said, having to speak loudly to be heard over the wind, “represent all the peoples of the Known World. Do so with pride, with hope for what is to come. These kings of Acacia…they are free, as is our nation. We have now the possibility of creating the world these two dreamers wished for.” Her gaze fell on Mena for a moment and then passed on. “So, my people, wipe the mourning from your faces and let us turn into the coming days as Leodan and Aliver would have wanted us to. Let us meet them together, with strength in our hearts, with confidence in everything we do.”

  A few moments later, Corinn stepped away from the cliff. She stopped beside Mena, leaned in close, and asked, “Do you really want to know what I offered the Numrek? There is one thing they want above all else-to return to their homeland and revenge themselves on the Lothan Aklun, who chased them up into the ice years before. This is a war I believe we must participate in, for our own reasons. When the time is right we will begin to prepare. We and the Numrek and the league will launch a fleet into the Gray Slopes against the Lothan Aklun. Once we defeat them, we will control the trade with the Other Lands. Then I will have enough power to change the world for the better.” Corinn drew back so that she could see her sister’s eyes. “Our battles are not over, Mena. We will not be safe until the whole world bows to us. Now you know what I intend.”

  With that she moved away, leaving Mena standing as the procession issued around her. She felt a person beside her and knew it to be Melio when he slipped his hand into hers and asked if she was well. Mena was not sure how to respond. Watching Corinn’s back as she receded, she realized that she had not fully acknowledged the world as it was now to be and who was to rule it. She understood for the first time just who her sister really was. She had heard the title before, but now it came to her like words engraved in the air before her. It stunned her. There before her, receding down the hill through the windswept light of dusk, went the Queen of Acacia, with her forearms cupped around her heir and her entourage close behind her, the future hers to shape.