Acacia, The War with the Mein

by David Anthony Durham

  The time that had passed since Aliver’s death at Maeander’s hands had been the longest ordeal of Mena’s life. Nothing even slightly compared. She had not really had a chance to reckon with her brother’s killing. The world did not pause to grant her the moments she needed, and things had happened too fast following it. As Dariel had ordered, Maeander and his entire entourage were pounced upon. Mena stayed with Aliver, cradling him, trying to focus only on him, but she heard what happened. The Meins fought bravely. They formed a pronged-star formation, each of them facing out at the innumerable sea of Acacians and Talayans and Aushenians, as representatives from every corner of the Known World all turned against them. Maeander had ranted and laughed the entire time, calling them honorless bastards and whores, belittling them with a verbal dexterity that matched his martial prowess. They killed a great many before they were all cut down. Their dead bodies were abused, stabbed and stabbed again and again. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to wash their blades in Maeander’s blood, to punish him for what he had done and to try to forget the things he had said. Mena hated to hear of it, hated knowing that Dariel had been there among them, venting his misery and confusion on a corpse.

  This was not all the day had in store for them, though. Scarcely had the fervor died down before new shouts sprayed out through the masses. The Meinish army, using the distraction, had marched all the way across the field unnoticed. The Meins were emboldened, whipped into a frenzy by their leader’s death. They rushed in, shouting vengeance. They knew of his fate and of the treachery by which it was achieved before news could possibly have reached them. It had happened just moments before! Maeander must have told his generals exactly what would transpire before he set out that morning. Because of this, his army fought with a level of fury and indignation beyond anything they had shown previously. Maeander had made himself an instant hero, a leader of greater stature than he was in life. He had become a martyr. And, just as he had said, a martyr inspired devotion. A curious kind, he had said. What he meant was a ferocious kind.

  As soon as she had given orders to protect Aliver’s body, Mena grabbed up her weapons and ran to face the enemy. Try as they might, Mena, Dariel, Leeka, and the other generals could not muster their forces into order to meet the attack. The army had lost itself in grief and uncertainty. Even as they tried to respond to orders they seemed dazed, made tentative by the realization that Aliver would not be leading them to the victory. The Snow King was dead. He would not give to them all the myriad things he had promised. He would not sweep into Acacia with a righteous sword, victorious. And if he would not, how could they?

  The battle raged right among their tents, over cook fires and around latrines and amid stacks of supplies and foodstuffs. At some point Mena stopped trying to rally others and focused on her own deadly desires. She led by example, and quite an example she became. She ran deep into the Meinish ranks, filled with a hunger to kill and a rage of such humming intensity and heat that it felt like she would combust if she stopped moving even for a second. The sword that Melio had returned to her whirled around her with its own mind and deadly purpose. She but followed it, pushing farther and farther into the enemy, knowing that she had to stay away from her own. She was killing too fast to pick out friend from foe.

  And though it was rage that propelled her she felt no joy as she achieved this slaughter. Just the opposite. It was a nightmare battle. In everything around her she saw signs and sights of Aliver. As she hacked and sliced, severed limbs and peeled skin from faces and sent ears spiraling up from her blade and spilled bellies onto the dirt, she saw Aliver in all of it. She knew that she was slaying an enemy—his enemy—but he was there in every Mein killed, in the shape of limbs and the expressions in glazed eyes and in the voices crying out in anguish. It was maddening. It made her a whirlwind of violence, as if she could butcher her way through this notion of her brother’s violent death. The bodies she left around her in hacked piles numbered in the many dozens. If her blade had not been the finest of steel, she would have dulled and bent it before the day was out. Instead, however, even at the close of the day it had edge enough to slice through the crowns of skulls and cut clean through muscle and bone.

  Eventually, the Meins withdrew. They had not been defeated, not even beaten back. By the look of the camp and the heaps of Acacian dead the Meins could be assured of closing this business on the morrow. Oubadal’s Halaly had been the first to face the Meinish attack; word now was that they were no more, gone completely, killed to the last. This was a great blow. Even the tribes that had begun the war fearing or loathing them had learned to respect them these last few days. Now they were gone.

  Kelis, Aliver’s great friend, was grazed by a spear across the abdomen, a serious enough injury that he was bed bound and in great pain. How many more would die during the night? How many would slink away defeated, fleeing to their homes, wishing they had taken no part in this war?

  As she walked amid the carnage, her limbs trembling, every inch of her crusted in gore, Mena felt the eyes of her troops on her. Even Dariel, who had earlier ordered an honorless murder, stared at her in awe. Perhaps they were all seeing for the first time what a monster she actually was. She wanted to shout at them. What were they looking at? Of course she was a killer. She was Maeben. She would always be Maeben. Always better at rage than anything else. It was hard not to feel she had personally killed every corpse in sight herself.

  In the tent later that night, with Melio’s arms around her, his words close in her ears, his body rocking hers…then she found stillness enough to believe that she had not been killing Aliver over and over again on the field. She remembered holding his blood-slick body in her hands. He had been so hot, heat pouring from him like a furnace. She had tasted rust on her tongue and in her nostrils. There had been a terrible moment, she recalled, when her fingers—while trying to find the wound and measure its damage—actually slipped inside the fissure. It was the strangest of memories, for each time it came to her she remembered the incredible softness in the warmth of his tissues. Nothing she had ever felt before had been so soft, so delicate. And yet at the same time she felt a gut-wrenching revulsion rooted in the thought that her fingers had caused the wound, that they could cut just as easily as her blade.

  But all this was before. Now Melio lay in his fitful slumber, grasping her with one hand, protecting her. What a strange thought, that. What could she need protection from? Her body wanted desperately to sleep, but she would not let it. She feared that her unconscious mind would conjure something horrible with that slip of her fingers.

  “How can you be dead?” she asked again.

  In the silence after this she returned to something else she’d been spinning around in her mind, an exchange she had had with Aliver before the duel. He had pulled her aside as they were exiting the council tent. He waited for the others to move away slightly and then he fixed his eyes on hers. “If I die,” he said, “hold the King’s Trust for a time. When you think he is ready, give it to Dariel. I want him to have it. You don’t need it, right, Mena? You’ve created a mythic sword of your own.”

  He smiled. “Another thing, and this is important. You must be prepared to summon the Santoth.” She had started to protest, but Aliver silenced her. She had to accept this responsibility. If he died, he explained, everything fell upon her and Dariel. Dariel had great strength within him, but he was still too emotional. He was the youngest of them and would be too emotional until it was tempered out of him. Only she would have the focus to see above the turmoil and send a call out to the Santoth. She protested that she didn’t know how, but he told her she would learn how when the time came.

  He said, “I don’t plan to leave you today, Mena, but if I do—and if our cause seems on the verge of failure—call the Santoth. Speak to Nualo. He is one of the Santoth, a very good man, Mena.”

  “What about The Song of Elenet?” she had asked.

  Aliver had looked at her sadly. “I don’t know. You think I know how to
do all of this, Mena? I don’t. I wish we had that book, but call them even if you don’t have it. And then…see what happens.”

  After that he had walked to the arena of his death.

  Had he really said that? See what happens? It did not seem possible that such massive challenges could be overcome with vague, hopeful sentiments like that. Aliver had spoken of communicating with them but never clearly enough that Mena had imagined trying it herself. It required opening the mind. It involved reaching a quiet, meditative state, his consciousness empty of everything except thoughts of those he wanted to communicate with. He let his call uncoil from his body, he had said, and find direction on its own accord. It might take a long time, but eventually he would hear them within him, answering. Then he would speak to them directly from his being. They had read his mind to some extent, but he could also focus particular thoughts and transmit them. It required patience, faith….

  Yes, he had said that, too. It required faith, the same word she had whispered into Dariel’s ear. But Aliver’s death seemed to refute faith as powerless. Maybe it was, or maybe it counted only when it went in the face of adversity so great nothing else could be called upon. That was what she faced. By all reason she knew that in the morning the Meins would slaughter everyone gathered to face them. It would be but the mopping up of a victory already achieved. Knowing this, she resolved to try faith one more time. She had promised to, so she would.

  She looked about as if she might find some tools to aid her or should rearrange the objects in the tent or pull her ankle from Melio’s grasp. But there were no tools for something like this. Her surroundings were what they were, and she did not want to break the connection with Melio. She settled herself, pressed her thumbs against the spine of the eel pendant, and closed her eyes.

  She tried to still her thoughts. For some time she fought a barrage of violent images from the day’s fighting and of Aliver in death and in the duel moments just before, when anything was still possible…. Distractions like these seemed to have lain in wait to ambush her. Get past these things, she thought. Clear the mind. Think only of the Santoth. She could not visualize them since she had never seen them. Instead, she tried to locate the energy of them. She thought of it as a point of light in the empty heavens, and then as a hint of warmth in surrounding cold, and then as the beating of life in a silent eternity: all of these things she searched for inside her mind. It felt like no more than a mental exercise, all within her instead of out in the world. But she kept at it.

  At some point, she realized, she found that point of warm, beating light. No, she did not find it; she created it. She focused on it and brought it closer and closer and closer, until it was the palpable center of her. It was right there within her. She tried to formulate a thought to push into this, but there were too many different things to say. She could not narrow it down to one thing. Instead, she took in all of it: all her fears, hopes, and desires, wishes and dreams; all the horrors of the recent days, the scenes of bloodshed, the antoks, the duel; all the death and all the suffering promised on the morn. She spun them like a ball before her and pushed them into that light. If the Santoth were to understand anything, they might as well understand all of it.

  Once she was sure she had done the best she could with sending the message, she listened. Waited. Searched the answering silence. It seemed to have no end, but she waited, not knowing what else to do. She simply waited for a response.

  It did not come.

  She awoke as dawn’s light suffused her tent. Surprised that she had slept, she drew up from her crumpled position. Melio stirred beside her. Outside she heard the sounds of the camp awaking. Somebody walked by, feet crunching the dry earth. She realized that Melio was not gripping her ankle anymore, and this saddened her.

  With that, yesterday poured into her, memories of all of it, including what she had attempted to do. She had tried to summon the Santoth, just as Aliver had asked her to. But there had been no response. She had listened so hard and long that the act had finally lulled her into sleep. That was all that had happened. She was not even sure that the whole exercise had ever left the confines of her own skull. That light was just something she had imagined, that she had fantasized in her tent, sitting beside Melio in the early hours of what would be a terrible day. That, she thought, was the best she had managed to do. It would not be enough. Aliver had made two mistakes, then, not just the one of dueling Maeander.

  The reality of what the day offered crept back upon her. The coming day was completely unavoidable, already upon her. The only thing good about it was that at last this would all be concluded. At least she knew how she would die. Maeander had known how he would. That was where his calm had come from, his assurance. He had nodded to her, indicating as much, though she only now realized that was what he had been saying. He had been predicting his future. She should have cut his head from his shoulders right then. She should not have let him control their world as he had. That was where she had made her first mistake.

  Or was it? She had made mistakes earlier than that. And it wasn’t just her mistakes that mattered. There were so, so many things that should have been different, going back years. No, not years—decades and centuries. Back to the early ages, to when the Giver still walked the newly created earth. Somebody back then should have cut down Elenet before he stole that which he should never have stolen. But if that was true, then wasn’t the Giver truly to blame? This was all his creation. He was the one she wanted one day to stand before and take to task. Why did he let it all go foul so quickly? Barely was the dew of creation dry before he let his children betray him. And why didn’t he care that some now strived for right in the world, that some fought so that there could be a greater peace afterward? She feared the question. He might turn it all around on her and assault her claim at righteousness—she being the killer that she was, so easily enraged, so skilled at murder. Perhaps Hanish was no more a villain than she was. Perhaps there was no difference between good and bad…

  A hand yanked the flap open, a shaft of light blinding her for a second. And then she heard the voice of Leeka Alain, awed in a way unusual to it. “Princess, come. You should see this. Something is happening.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Rialus Neptos was a pathetic runt of a man. Never was this more obvious than when he stood flanked by Numrek warriors, tall men, shoulders wide, with balled knots of muscle at the joints, like grapefruits beneath their burgundy-tinted skin. He was a weasel in the company of wolves. Stooped to fit beneath the low ceiling of the palace’s hidden passageways, any of the Numreks could have grabbed the ambassador by the neck and shaken the life out of him with one of their hard-knuckled fists. Had Corinn not needed him to translate the instructions she was about to give, she might well have asked them to do just that. Strange, she thought, that her fortunes relied on such dubious allies.

  She’d rarely had occasion to stand so close to Numreks. She had sat near them at a few banquets over the nine years since the war, but what she remembered most vividly was the image of them in their former pallor. She had seen a party of them for the first time just after her capture and return to Acacia. Their complexions had been pale and blue-tinted, just starting to burn beneath the sun. They were like creatures from a subterranean cave abruptly shoved into the light of day. They had been so different from the smooth, dark-featured beings that she looked at now. She would almost have thought them different creatures, save that she recalled the stature and shape of them, their full heads of dark hair and their features, gaunt and muscular at the same time. She hated them with undiluted spite back then. She did not feel that different now. But her feelings were not the point; the work at hand was.

  A few hours before that she had lain in bed beside Hanish, her fingertips touching his, listening to him sleep. Before that she had been entwined with him in the bedsheets, their naked bodies slick with sweat, with tears and passion. She had panted in his ear, and he had said her name over and over. And before that the
y had just held each other, both of them reeling from the news of their respective brother’s deaths. The irony of it all took her breath away. Aliver and Maeander, mutual victims; Corinn and Hanish, lovers who pretended their affair had nothing to do with the struggle between them.

  But that was earlier, before the light of day. In truth it had everything to do with them, and she knew Hanish believed so as much as she did. When she parted with him a few minutes ago, she kissed him full on the mouth and wished him success at beginning the releasing ceremony. It was time, she said, to begin to heal, to stop the insanity of the war, to put to rest the old hatred between their people. It was time to honor the dead. She had promised to prepare herself and join him. Instead, she went to her room, closed the door behind her, and slipped into the hidden entrance Thaddeus had described to her. She found Rialus and the Numrek just where she had instructed them to be—inside the walls of the palace.

  They were actually here. Actually standing about in armor, weapons hanging on them, their breath fouling the enclosed air. She felt a momentary spasm of panic at what she was doing. She overcame it by thinking about the betrayal Hanish planned for her, by reminding herself of her vow never again to act like a lamb, by affirming that she had to avenge her brother, and by recalling the beautiful promises in the Song.

  Serving as translator, Rialus introduced her to their leader. Calrach looked her up and down, studying her shape, bemused. He said something that piqued the interest of those around him. Even Rialus looked at her with surprise. “Princess,” he said, “is it true that you’re carrying a child? I can hardly tell, but Numrek…have a nose for such things.”

  Corinn had no interest in beginning the conversation this way. She had to control the urge to slide her hand across her belly. “Calrach,” she said, “how many men do you have with you?”