Acacia, The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  None of this cooled the heat of Leeka’s hatred, but eventually he could fight no more. All his allies had died, put down their arms, or slunk away into hiding. His enemy turned from conquest to tasks of rebuilding and entrenching and managing their newfound wealth. If Leeka had known with surety on any particular day what his life would become, he would have leaned upon his sword and cut his bowels out. But he did not know. One day slipped with its veiled import into the next, so that his defeat clung to him in tiny increments, accrued day by day.

  He wandered the empire. He lost or abandoned the trappings of his rank: his vest traded for food, his dagger for wine, his helmet lost one hazy evening, his shoulder pack stolen by a youth much faster than he. Before long he looked like any other war-weary veteran. He was unkempt, lost, perhaps mind addled, obviously harmless to the Meinish military that now policed most of the Known World. He had always been a man who liked a drink. After the war, he no longer enjoyed drinking—there was none of the mirth in his inebriation that there had once been—but he drank alcohol like it was sustaining water. He might have died a drunkard’s death and been content with it. He was saved, ironically, by the introduction of a new addiction.

  The mist was more plentiful throughout the Meinish Empire than it had been during the Akaran reign. It was everywhere, constant as bread or water, cheaper than Candovian wine. He inhaled a pipefull one evening when there was nothing else to be had. What revelations! With mist in him, he understood he had been mistaken. He was not a failure. The war was not concluded. No, in truth he was a lone apostle of bloody retribution. He had killed Numreks before and he would do so again. He lay back and saw the images right there above him, cast on the screen that was the night sky. He strode through Aushenia with a sword in each hand. The earth had not seen the likes of him in ages. At some point the vision was not just an imagined thing. He lived within it. He felt ground beneath his feet and air pumping in his lungs. He traveled a thousand miles and fought until his face was red and dripping with Numrek blood, his fists so welded to his swords that the steel was an extension of his being. Such damage he did! Such holy, retributive carnage he unleashed…

  The first morning he awoke from such dreams anguished to find himself in his enfeebled body, no hero at all. He might have spurned the drug and cursed it, except that he could not help but hear the low heartbeat of the mist lingering thereafter, with it the promised possibility that there was truth in his vision. The mist dream was so very real. It was intimate in every detail, vivid as life. No, it was more tactile and real than the life he now led.

  There were prohibitions on using the drug during the daylight, working hours. Being found in mist haze by a soldier of the Mein could get one locked up and deprived of the stuff—which was punishment all devotees dreaded. Before long Leeka had contracted himself to his present arrangement—he would labor drunken among the animals through day to earn the few coins needed to dream the mist through the night. In this, he became one of millions in the Known World. He never even noticed that it was happening to him, never questioned this order of life. He could not truly have said at what moment he gave himself to it completely. The mist commands full devotion; Leeka, believing in no other god anymore, learned to worship at a new altar.

  It was this that he was thinking of as he approached the darkened shell in which he passed the evenings. Sometime earlier he had taken the packet of mist threads from his breast pocket and walked, caressing the fibers with his fingers. Once inside it would only take a few minutes’ preparation, and then he would inhale and inhale and inhale….

  Leeka stopped in his tracks and stilled himself. He sensed something, another breathing thing, close but hidden. He thought of the predators of the mountain night and knew that if this be one of those, he was likely dead on his feet.

  “Forgive me,” a voice said. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.” A hooded figure peeled away from the shadows beside his hut and stepped into the moonlight, arms raised in a gesture of innocence. “In fact, you surprised me, coming so quietly.”

  The man’s tone was kindly, but Leeka had a particular dislike for speaking to people wearing hoods, especially ones who stepped out of the shadows of his hovel late at night and blocked his path. He sought to convey as much with the full intensity of his glare.

  “Are you Leeka Alain?” the hooded man asked.

  The question caught Leeka off guard. His first thought was that the man must have heard him speaking on the outcropping, but that was scarcely possible. He tucked his mist threads back into his pocket.

  “Are you Leeka Alain, he who commanded Leodan’s army in the Mein? Leeka Alain that some call Beast Rider?”

  The man’s Acacian was fluid and spoken like a native of the island itself. Leeka had not heard the language uttered so perfectly in some time. Who would ask such a thing in such a tongue? Probably only a man who wished to hear his identity confirmed before killing him.

  “Are you he that claims to have been the first to kill a Numrek?”

  “No,” Leeka said, speaking the mountain dialect of the area, “I am not that man.”

  The hooded figure did not move. He was a statue that almost blended into the features of the night. For a moment Leeka wondered if he was hallucinating. Perhaps this statue had always stood just there, but he had forgotten it. Or perhaps it was no statue at all but just a trick his mist-hungry mind played with the light.

  The stranger spoke again, still in Acacian. “This news pains me. I had need of Leeka Alain’s services. It is true that you do not look much like him. Perhaps I was mistaken. I am sorry to have disturbed you. Let me offer you something to pay for my mistake. Here…”

  The figure’s hand came up, from it stretched the flickering, tumbling progress of a tossed coin, flaring each time its face caught the moonlight. Leeka’s eyes could not help but follow it. A thief’s trick, and he fell for it. Because of this he would not afterward be able to say that he really saw the man move. But he did feel the impact of something driving up into his abdomen with force enough to have run him through. A pinprick sensation at his neck released a flash of pain that scorched all the way through him like a fire across dry brush. Ignited, and then extinguished in the next moment. As it went, so did his hold of consciousness.

  * * * *

  He opened his eyes knowing that time had passed and his placement on the world had changed. He remembered the figure in the shadows, his voice, the airborne coin, the impact that lifted him. He lay with all this in his mind a moment, watching as his eyes gained clarity, focusing on the rough-hewn beams of a wooden ceiling. They were lit by the flickering glow of the fireplace. He knew the ceiling well, every irregularity in it, the knot that disfigured one beam, the lacework of ancient cobwebs hanging from another. He was on his cot, in his hovel, looking up at his ceiling. How very strange…

  A man’s form leaned over him. “You lied to me, Leeka Alain. I do not claim to be surprised by it. This is not an easy time to speak forthrightly to strangers, but I might have thought you would be more convincing.”

  The man brought a candle up near his face. Leeka stared at him, thoroughly confused. He saw an old man, skin creviced like tree bark, his hair gray, his beard—sparse thing that it was—woven into braids in the Senivalian fashion. If his body was a twin to his face he’d be a thin wisp of a man like any beggar he might pass without acknowledging on the street. How had this aged shell of a man even touched him? Had he fallen so very far from what he had once been?

  The old man seemed to read what he was thinking. “I am not as decrepit as I look. Nor are you. In a fair fight I would have no chance against you. This thing that happened here…let it not bruise your soldier’s vanity.” He paused a moment. “Look at my face, Leeka. Tell me if you recognize me. It may be that you remember me, for we did meet once, in a different time and place, in what seems like another world, really.”

  The realization that he did recognize him came to Leeka as the words left him. “You are the chancello
r…Thaddeus Clegg.”

  The older man smiled. “Good,” he said. “There is hope for you yet.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Yes, Corinn finally conceded to herself one afternoon as she rode horseback along the high trail that followed the serpentine ridgeline toward Haven’s Rock, Meinish women did have the potential for beauty. One just had to grow accustomed to the hard-edged angularity of their features. They had about them a similar bone structure and temperament as men of their race, but what looked chiseled, rugged, and handsome on their men was somewhat awkward on their women. Or so Corinn had thought for most of the years she had spent in their company. Only lately did she realize that she often measured herself against them. When this shift in her feelings had begun she could not say, but the rides she had lately been taking with an entourage of young Meinish women had done much to stir the feelings to the surface.

  It began as an order. Hanish Mein, a messenger told her, requested that Princess Corinn spend fair afternoons with his cousin, Rhrenna, and her entourage of young noblewomen, friends, and maids. The messenger used the word requested, although they both knew commanded would have suited the reality more precisely. And he had called her princess. Everyone called her princess, though in fact she was a prisoner on the island that had once been her father’s. She was being held in a lingering purgatory by the very man who had orchestrated her father’s assassination and the ruin of the Acacian Empire and Akaran family. She walked the same hallways now as she had all her life. She took in the same views down from the palace toward the lower town and out to the sea. Many evenings she dined at the great table in the central hall. But she was no longer of the host family. Another man sat in the place that had been her father’s. The invocation over dinner was spoken in a different tongue, and it called for the blessing of a menacing collective force Corinn had no true understanding of. Her daily life was a balance between what had been and what now was, the edges of each blurred by present reality, warped by memory. It was her own particular, uncomfortable circumstance, unique to her of all people in the world.

  This afternoon Rhrenna rode a chestnut mount she must have chosen to compliment her outfit: a vest of pastel blue and tan, with a split skirt that looked almost like a dress when she stood, but which split when she mounted. She was a pale, slim-boned girl composed of imperfect features that, fortunately for her, somehow combined to pleasant effect. She wore her hair long, in a braided fashion that took Corinn some time to separate from that of the men.

  For the first couple of years of the occupation, few Meinish women had ventured out of Tahalian. Meinish men, it could be said, were possessive and protective of their women. The Mein were not fond of mixing their blood with other races and could think of few greater sins than one of their women giving birth to a half-breed child. It was not much better when women of the newly conquered empire began to mother children paler than themselves, gray eyed and sharp featured. Though frowned on, such miscegenation proved impossible to prevent. No matter the praise they constantly heaped on their own women, Meinish men still mixed with foreign women. They seemed to love the taste and feel and shape of the skin tones and features they claimed indifference to. Even Maeander, Hanish’s brother, was said to have fathered a small tribe of children. Gradually more and more Meinish women journeyed down to fill roles as wives and concubines, to add a greater domestic normalcy to life both in the palace and among common soldiers, most of whom were now living uncommonly luxurious lives.

  Rhrenna had been in Acacia only a few months, but she seemed to have adapted to the place. One of her charms was her voice, high and gentle and better suited to the Acacian tongue than that of most of her people. “Hanish thinks you are beautiful,” she said. She wore a hat with a wide, meshed brim to protect her from the sun. She looked through the lace of it coyly. “But you must know that already. You understand men better than I, don’t you?”

  “I have understood very little during my life so far,” Corinn answered. She had little interest in discussing romance or courtly intrigue. It was not her court, for one thing. But also, more piercingly, such notions reminded her only of loss. Despite this, she heard herself ask, “Why do you say Hanish finds me beautiful?”

  “It’s obvious, Princess,” she said. “When you are in the room he cannot take his eyes off you. At the summer dance he barely paid attention to any partner but you.”

  Another young woman, a friend of Rhrenna’s from childhood, agreed. She turned in the saddle to the four women behind them and pulled echoes of the same opinion from them.

  Corinn would have none of it. “As if I impressed anyone that night! Stumbling around as I did…he had to pay attention, or else I’d have squashed his feet to pulp. Your dances make no sense to me.”

  Rhrenna thought about this a moment, rocking with the easy motion of her horse’s stride, and then said, “You are a more graceful stumbler than most.”

  Corinn tried several times to deflect Rhrenna’s praise, but the young woman always found a way to turn back her protests with glowing phrases. Corinn eventually fell silent, defeated at devaluing herself. And what should this admiration mean to her? She had been admired in the years before the war by women and men more refined than any of these girls. She understood her situation better than they did and was never entirely sure if they were aware of the falseness that tainted everything that passed between them. She knew that she was a trophy put on display for the pleasure of the Mein and for the edification of the new king’s subjects. Here, her presence said, is incontrovertible proof that the empire that came before the Mein has been defeated. See how this Akaran sits at our table. See her manners, her beauty, her refinement. See her and remember how mighty the Akarans were and how completely they have been whipped, tamed, and domesticated. That was the point that Corinn’s presence daily reinforced. What a misery it was! Her life had little physical hardship in it, no toil, all the luxuries and most of the privileges she had ever known. And yet she felt constantly set apart, possessed, owned—even by these young women who so claimed to adore her.

  They were near enough to Haven’s Rock that the bird-dung stench of the place swept past them on a gust of the breeze. One of the maids commented on it, holding her hand to her nose and querying whether they really had to go closer. Corinn rode on, tight-lipped, aware that she took offense at any slight given to her father’s island, even one directed at the habits of seabirds. She did not have to feign adoration of the landscape around her. The island was at the height of its summer colors. The grass blanketing the hills had crisped to a flaming, metallic yellow. The only things missing were the green crowns of acacia trees. They had all been cut down during the first year after Hanish’s victory: an act of symbolic spite and another thing Corinn would never forgive him for.

  Soon the dry season fires would flare up, sending up clouds of black smoke and attracting scavenging birds to pick through the charred streaks lashed across the hillsides like wounds. Corinn mentioned as much to her party, saying that they would soon have to choose the days they ventured out carefully. People had been caught in the quick-moving blazes before and incinerated where they stood. The young women heard this in silence, awed at the thought of a fire spontaneously combusting. It must have been a hellish thought to a people accustomed to nine-month winters and summers—as Igguldan had said—never free of the possibility of a sudden snowstorm. It pleased Corinn that they feared aspects of the island that she had known all her life, though she also felt the bite of remembrance that so often came with such thoughts. Igguldan. She could not bear thinking of him. What torture that she had come so near a great love, only to have it snatched from her by the callous actions of madmen.

  The wind picked up as they approached the cliffs of Haven’s Rock. By the time they reached the edge, Rhrenna and her countrywomen were all clutching at the crowns of their hats to keep them from flying free. Corinn, not needing the protection since her skin warmed and browned under the sun’s touch instead of blistering
and turning red, sat hatless and as composed as ever. Her amusement at this was short-lived, however.

  One of the maids said, “Look, Larken is back from Talay. See his ship, there.”

  It took Corinn only a moment to spot the vessel. It ran a crimson mainsail embossed with a short-handled pickax. It was Larken’s sign, bestowed on him by Hanish for his services during the war. The sight of that billow of red speeding toward them across a sea of shimmering, luminous hyacinth filled her with instant rancor.

  Larken. The thought of him always reminded her of the time before her captivity. It was he who had knocked on the door to her room in Kidnaban nine years earlier. He had stood before her, tall and wolfishly handsome in his Marah robes. He had spoken so earnestly, with a calm at his center that conveyed strength such as she had not seen in some time. He had come from Thaddeus Clegg, he’d said. He was to take her to safety, just her. Other guardians would deal with her siblings as they were to head to separate destinations. It was not wise that they all be together in a single place. Thaddeus and her father had made arrangements for them. He produced documents to this effect, with all the seals and signatures in order, blessed with an imprint she knew to be Thaddeus’s ring.

  “Come,” Larken had said. “You can believe in me. I live only to protect you.”

  She must have wanted to believe him so very badly. How, she wondered now, could she have consented to go with him without first speaking with her siblings? She had tried to, but he had been so convincing and earnest. Hanish Mein’s agents were closing on them, he had said. Betrayers were rife now throughout the empire. Even their host at the mines, Crenshal, could no longer be trusted, and that was why they had to fly. Speed was everything. Her brothers and her sister had already embarked on their journeys. If she came now she could feel confident she would see them again soon. It was the only way.