Acacia, The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  What transpired in the room between the king and his four children was simple. He awaited them on his bed, propped by pillows into a seated position. Corinn hung back behind the others as they ran toward him and fell to their knees beside his bed. Even at a distance she could see a man more ravaged than she could have imagined. She had thought of him all throughout the previous night, imagining him in pain, in different postures and conditions, and even still in death. But finally seeing him…It was as if a cloaked demon that had haunted her dreams all night had been un-hooded in the light of day; instead of allaying her fears the demon had been shown to be a more hideous thing than she had yet imagined. She wanted to turn and flee. She might have, except that the king’s eyes were pinned to her the moment she entered and seemed to stare at her alone.

  Initially the others whispered their relief at seeing him, their horror at what had happened, their wishes that he gain his health again soon. But he could not listen to this for long. He motioned them to silence by lifting an arm and dragging his fingers through the air. The children waited, but it seemed there was nothing else he could offer them. She had realized before her siblings that he could not talk, that he was terribly weak and perhaps only hours from death. He could make no speeches to them. He could give them no last presents or words of wisdom. He could not, Corinn realized, keep the promises he had made to her.

  And she knew before the others the meaning of his upraised arms. He lifted them, trembling, a wide gesture, an opening. Aliver moved back a step, apparently thinking that the king was using his arms to open a discussion on some topic that required the acknowledgment of the largeness of things. But that was not it. He simply held them out to either side until his children saw the invitation for what it was. Then they crowded awkwardly together into the embrace he offered, Corinn the last to accept. It seemed that only she understood how ghastly it was to lie piled upon a dying man, saying nothing at all but only clinging to one another, tearful.

  That was how the Akaran children spent their last minutes with their father. Corinn, on exiting the room, ran before her peers, ignoring Mena’s entreaties that she stay with them. She could not. Instead of feeling the bonds between them stronger, the touch of those stung like tentacles. She fled as soon as she could. She hid herself away in her private quarters and ordered her guards to let no one disturb her.

  So it was from behind a closed door that she heard word of her father’s death later that day. It came to her first in a whisper. Then, a few moments later, the enormous bell housed in one of the higher towers began to toll, slow and deep and mournful. She had known it was there but had never heard it before. It was used for a single purpose: to announce the death of an Akaran king. Between its beats she heard the gathering chorus of the servants’ wailing, an audible manifestation of misery that crept across the palace and down into the lower town and to the port, to be carried out to the world from there. Corinn clamped her hands over her ears, but she could not block out the sounds.

  The following week passed in a dreary blur. Had she the choice, she would have locked herself up in her room immediately and rejected the world. But she did not have that choice. Her presence was required daily, at every hour, it seemed, although she did little more than occupy space, a vacant shell of herself that person after person embraced or bowed before or shed tears in front of. She stood beside her siblings as the masses sang with them the lament of her father’s passing. She stood trembling as the drummers beat out the slow, martial dirge performed only for deceased monarchs. She sat without listening through the endless string of funereal speeches, nobles sailing in from near and far, each of them pronouncing their grief in words that layered over and over one another and lost individual meaning. She knew that behind the somber façade an electric buzz of anxiety crackled and popped. She knew that people whispered about the horrible possibilities on the horizon, but her personal grief was more than enough to occupy her. She cared nothing for what happened in the larger world.

  At the end of the week the priestesses of Vada and their acolytes prepared and incinerated the king’s body. It was one of the only state roles remaining for them and they carried it out with solemnity. When they emerged with the king’s urn of ashes, it marked a reprieve from the rites. His ashes would not be released, Corinn knew, until a day in late autumn. She did not look forward to that ceremony, but it was some time away.

  As soon as she could, she invoked the old rites of mourning. She kept her windows closed and forbade even her servants from looking at her. Food and drink she had left outside her bedroom door, though she barely touched it. Days passed, one fading into the next without change. Mena came to her twice, Aliver once, and even Dariel sent a messenger to beg her to come forth, but she turned them all away. She drifted into and out of sleep, through dreams and memories, visions of the past that seemed so very distant. Occasionally she was struck by the realization of just how treacherous the illusion of time was. Things that were once could not be again. Things that she had clung to—her mother, her father—were no more substantial than the images conjured in her mind. And what good were those? They could not be touched. Could not be weighed in the palm or seen with true eyes or heard in the air. Her life was going to be just as she imagined in her dark moments: she was on the path to losing one beloved thing and then another. That was what life would be for her until she herself was swallowed by the maw of the same hungry oblivion. She could not face it. So she did not. Not, at least, until the world came to her in a form she did not wish to turn from.

  She heard the muffled sounds of shouts from her waiting room, the bang as some large object fell over, and the fast click of heels across the stones. She did not think enough of it to raise herself from where she lay spread across the expanse of her soft bed. At the first impact against the door she only lifted her head and looked sleepily toward it. But when it sprung open, it finally registered to her that somebody really was intent on getting in to see her.

  Igguldan tumbled in behind the opening door, nearly sprawling flat on the floor. He scrabbled forward on his knees, spun and twirled to an upright position, and dashed a few steps farther into the chamber. Behind him several guards shouldered through the doorway. They were so anxious to get at him that they stuck fast for a moment, swatting and cursing one another, their swords held awkwardly so as not to do themselves damage. Igguldan’s eyes darted around the chamber. He found Corinn standing at the foot of her bed with one hand poised across her heart. He took a small step closer and then stopped. The guards, free of the door and rushing toward him, pulled up. They stood looking at the two young people, at a loss for how to proceed.

  “Princess Corinn,” Igguldan said. “Forgive me for intruding. It is horrible of me, I know, but I had to see you. I had to see that you were all right and to…”

  One of the guards broke in. He, too, began to ask her forgiveness, to explain that the prince had dashed past them unheeding of their demands that he stop. Corinn cut him off with a gesture of her hand. “Leave us,” she said.

  Once they were alone Igguldan began to apologize again. The princess told him not to. He asked after her health and began to express his sympathies, but again Corinn asked him to stop. He stood a moment as if deciding what he had to say. Then he did so directly. “I have been recalled to Aushenia,” he said. “My father fears for my life, I think. Also, he seems on edge about other things, movements in the north. I received only the briefest command sent by pigeon. But I have to go, Corinn.” After a moment of hesitation, he added, “I do not want to leave you like this.”

  Corinn wrung her hands, nervous, unsure why she had received him at all. She knew she was unkempt, in a rumpled gown, hair tangled and unwashed. She looked down and motioned at something outside the room, hoping he might look away from her. “It feels as if the world is in turmoil.”

  “It is, more than you can imagine. The whole island is in turmoil. Vessels sail back and forth hourly to the Mainland. The governors in Alecia have been in
nonstop session. The treaty between our nations is not official, but it sounds like the governors want us as allies. There is a rumor that an army has laid siege to Cathgergen. Your brother is handling it all manfully. You should be proud of him, although he is in a strange position—no longer just a prince but not really a king either.”

  Corinn asked when he was to depart. He answered that he would sail for Alecia with the next rising of the sun. There they would pick up representatives his father wished to meet with and sail directly for Aushenia. He gave no more details than this, but as the two considered his journey in silence Corinn could not help but feel every sad mile of distance that it would put between them. She recalled the chill waters the prince had described swimming in, the rolling landscape thick with forest. How wonderful it must feel to ride among those massive trees on horseback. She imagined Igguldan doing just that. She saw him galloping through a wind-lashed wilderness totally different from the manicured jewel in the sea that was Acacia. Aushenia was so very far away, and not just in terms of distance. It was a wild place in which one could be lost or reinvented in a different form.

  “Do you think I could go with you?” she asked. “I would not burden you. It is just that I want to escape this place. I want to be with you, just with you.” She had not given this the slightest thought since her father’s death, but as she said the words she felt convinced they were true. That is exactly what she wanted now, more than anything.

  Igguldan slipped his hands around hers, clasping them firmly. Together, they lowered themselves to the edge of the bed and sat side by side. “I so wish the world were not so mad and that I had met you at a different time. Your father was a special man. After I watched him struck, I was sick. Just sick! But even so I kept thinking about you. Everything I heard or saw or felt reminded me of you. The world is falling apart, but all I can think of is you. I said to myself, ‘This is not right. Get control of yourself.’ But I could not. And then I thought, Perhaps this is love. That’s what it is. You are in love with Princess Corinn. I know it is inappropriate of me to say it like this. But time is so short. I just had to see you once more before we both fly off in different directions. I needed you to know that you are loved. Wherever you are to go in the world, you take my love with you.”

  Once again, the prince had managed to say the perfect thing. She was loved. He—brave and handsome and faithful—loved her. She squeezed his hand and inched forward slightly. “I am not going anywhere,” Corinn said, thinking he had misspoken. “I wish I were. I would go with you if you asked me.”

  The prince’s grip lessened slightly. “They have not told you yet? Corinn, you are to leave tomorrow, too. I only know because your brother told me in confidence. He was angry about it and could not hold it in. All the Akaran children are to leave the island for refuge. The chancellor thinks you will be safer somewhere other than Acacia, someplace secret.”

  “Someplace secret?” the princess whispered.

  The prince, thinking she was prompting him for more information, admitted that he knew no more, but Corinn had not actually expected him to answer. She was just considering the possibility of this secret place. Where might it be? She had dreamed so often of travel to distant places, wondering how she would be received there, whether or not she would be thought beautiful. Would they journey to Talay? The Candovian coast? Would they sail to the Outer Isles or some other place far from the heart of the empire? Or would it just be Alecia? Hardly a secret place, but maybe she was thinking too grandly. Maybe she would spend the next few weeks locked in a room in the capital. Though this news surprised her, she did not feel the sense of urgency she might have. At least it meant movement, change, getting away from the palace. These could not be bad things, could they?

  She asked Igguldan where he would go if he could go into hiding somewhere. He was slightly taken aback by the question, but he settled in to think about it. After a pause, he said that he would rather seclude himself away in the far north of his own country than anyplace else. There was a corner of Aushenia where the forest runs right up to the slabs at the base of the Gradthic Range. It was a cold country, but the air is so full of goodness that breathing it fills one with health and vigor. The mountains themselves are a northern wilderness most of the year, home of great brown bears and of a type of wolf different from the kind that frequented the forest. He had only been there once a few years ago, but he had never forgotten the feeling of standing on those rocks at sunset, with the mountains at his back and the ancient forestland stretching south right over the horizon, the whole scene alight with a play of colors, the darkening woods touched with brilliance by the fire of the sun, eagles above it, flying their high patrol. He had never been so aware of solitude as during that moment, but also he had felt an ancestral pride. Out of that land his people had emerged. It was feral and harsh, but it was also of his very flesh and blood. They had walked from the woods to the southern shore to found Aushenia. They had left behind the wolves and bears and took up their rightful place as caretakers of the land. It was something he had in common with all Aushenians.

  “You should see it,” he said.

  “I would like to,” Corinn said. “Say that you will take me, and I’ll go with you. You can be my caretaker and you can take me to that wild country of yours. You can hunt fresh meat for me and protect me from the bears and other creatures. The world can go on without us.”

  Igguldan’s hands were moist in hers. She noticed it when he pulled away, allowing cool air to touch the moisture. What had she just said? She did want it, but it was such a large prospect that she could not grasp it. It might be an absurd mistake; she could not tell. In any event, with the withdrawal of his hand Corinn was sure Igguldan was rejecting her offer. She waited to hear him indicate as much.

  The prince felt around in his chest pocket with his fingers and pulled out a small envelope, sealed with wax. “I wrote this for you,” he said. “I was not sure that I would be brave enough to give it to you. I am still not sure if I am brave enough…but I am doing it anyway.” He pressed the folded envelope into her palm and closed her fingers around it.

  “What is it?”

  “You will see when you read it, but do not do so now. Read it later.” He stood up and tugged her to her feet. “Now we must rise to this challenge. Corinn, I would like very much to show you my country and for everything you said to come true, but now is not the time. My father called me home because we face the threat of war. I have to answer to him. And you, you must do as the chancellor instructs. He is sure to be right about this.” He stopped Corinn’s protest, gripping her on the arms, a hard squeeze at first, but then a caress. “Please, Corinn. Let me first serve my father and the memory of yours. After that I will come for you. Will you receive me? I must know that I am fighting for you. If I am no one will be able to defeat me.”

  Corinn managed to nod. Igguldan pressed his face against hers, his hot skin smooth and soft. He kissed her on the cheek. Then he turned away and walked briskly to the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Rialus Neptos fled Cathgergen after what he would claim to have been a siege of several days. In a final action before departing, he tossed all manner of hard and heavy objects—his chair, a vase of copper flowers, a paperweight in the shape of an Ice Fields bear, an aged ax once bestowed on his father by the Aushenians—at the glass window that had so sorely embarrassed and betrayed his ego. It would not shatter into the cascade of shards he desired, but it cracked and chipped enough that he felt he had made his point. Whether the message was meant for the glass itself, for someone who would later view it, or for himself he did not consider. He took with him the meager entourage of officials, courtiers, and family members he had been able to maintain in the satrapy—only those so indebted to him that their silence was guaranteed. The Numrek whom he put behind him filled him with as much actual dread as he had feigned. As far as he could tell, few of his colleagues were even composed enough of mind to suspect that the governor himse
lf had any hand in the misfortune befalling them. Indeed, as he ran through the Gradthic Gap he almost felt himself a fugitive in fear for his life.

  Because of this Rialus arrived in Aushenia with all aspects of his deception in place. In hasty council with the realm’s king, Guldan, he told how the foreign invaders marched out of a squall of snow. He had been concerned for some time, Rialus claimed, by vague reports of movement as far north as the Ice Fields. This was why he had sent General Alain out to examine the territory and question the Mein brothers. He had not heard from him and therefore feared some mishap, but the actual attack had come as a complete surprise.

  The Numrek, he said, had arrived in a massive horde, hulking creatures, hidden beneath furs and skins, armed with pikes twice a man’s height and with swords curved and weighted toward the tip. Many of them rode horned beasts, naturally armored creatures covered with hairy coats. They poured through Cathgergen’s gates before the alarm had even been sounded. They did not explain or announce themselves at all; they just commenced the killing, a merciless slaughter they went at with relish and ravenous glee, bellowing as they fought and dancing to the beat of an unseen drum.

  None of this was far from the truth. The Numrek—his guests, as Maeander had called them—did arrive in a ravenous mob. Even though there was little military resistance to meet them, they still managed to find people to kill and did so with the glee Rialus described. He did not, of course, mention to Guldan that the entire Northern Guard had met their deaths in one monstrous trap. Instead, he claimed that the outnumbered troops of the guard fought in a frantic retreat, relinquishing one portion of the fortress and then another until all the remaining population stood cornered with their backs against the last granite wall of the place. It was only then, Rialus said, that he consented to parlay with whatever vile being led them.