The War With The Mein (14 page)

Leeka Alain’s meeting with the Numrek warrior began as a surprisingly muted affair. He had walked for so long through the soiled detritus that marked the horde’s passing that he had grown lax. Fatigue clung heavily to him. He no longer placed his feet with the grim determination he had on the first few days. Isolation and barrenness played tricks with his mind. He stopped, pausing to study the lay of the land and to examine the shapes against the snow from a distance. He had seen mirages out on the curve of the horizon several times already and none of the wavering shapes had come to anything. For greater and greater stretches of the day he occupied an imaginary world built out of the past. He almost forgot the purpose of his solitary arctic trek, forgot that he trailed a very real enemy, and forgot the recent massacre of his army. It already felt like a nightmare from a distant time, hard to credit as reality.

He trudged off the flats and onto the western edge of the Barrens without giving it much thought. The land before him was just as treeless as it had been before, but now it undulated like folds of wrinkled skin. Frozen riverbeds crisscrossed here and there, as yet unstirred by the coming spring. He lost sight of the horizon each time he dropped into a hollow. The horde’s path was easy enough to follow, however. It carried on right through the area, as unerringly straight as ever. Leeka trudged on, head down.

Thus he was when he crested a rise and started down into what would be a river in a few months. He saw the dark shapes against the white but was slow to lift his gaze to them. Not until something grunted. It was the first creature-made noise he had heard in some time. It was an exclamation of alarm, and it kicked Leeka’s senses alive. He froze. The sled behind him, propelled by the slant of the slope, slid forward and nudged his heels.

Before him were two living things and one dead. The noise had been made by one of the hairy rhinos. It stood about forty yards away, absurdly close, near enough that Leeka could imagine the feel of its coarse fur. He could make out the growth striations that ringed its horns and note etchings in the buckles of its saddle. The creature found Leeka’s sudden proximity unnerving. It shuffled backward, head whipping from side to side. A short distance behind him, one of the invaders crouched near a makeshift hearth. He looked up, first at the rhino as it looped around behind him and then at Leeka. Why he was there—whether in some official capacity, as a straggler for some unclear reason, or as a deserter—Leeka would never know. There was no chance of the two of them conversing. What his eyes showed him, however, turned his stomach like no carnage of war ever had.

The Numrek sat attending a banquet of human flesh. A young man’s body had been set atop a cauldron heated from below by the pitch Leeka had found traces of earlier. The body was splayed on its back. Its arms and legs stretched away so that the feet and hands rested on the ice while the midsection roasted, steamed, and stewed all at once. The Numrek had just reached up to scrape a portion of flesh and internal organs into the bubbling broth below when he spotted Leeka. He set the knife down and rose to his feet, stretching his arms to either side, like an aged worker rising to carry on some interminable task. He bent and fumbled about for a moment, then straightened, a spear in one hand, a curving sword in the other.

Leeka shuffled off the straps that bound him to the sled. He had stopped wearing his sword a few days before and had lashed it to the sled. He now slid it free of its sheath. He had a crossbow and bolts as well, but the Numrek closed on him far too quickly. He hurled the spear, which struck deep into the pack of supplies and tilted the sled over. Leeka jumped back and circled away, yanking off his gloves, testing the weight of his blade against the frigid air. The Numrek had not even tried to hit him with the spear. He had thrown it as an amusement and struck his chosen target, as was obvious by the apparent glee that now animated his gestures. He came forward with springing steps, almost skipping—if so childish a word could be ascribed to a creature of such size and murderous intent. He tossed his sword from hand to hand, demonstrating that he was equally skilled with either. His fur cloaks hung about his body, swaying with his motions and hiding the exact bulk of the body beneath. His features were still hard to make out behind the screen of his hair and the cap that sat well down on his brow, but his mouth was visibly split by a grin.

How do you kill a thing like this? The question reeled out in the back of Leeka’s mind. With the fore portion he concentrated on the fight of his life. The Numrek swung at him in great crescents of motion that audibly sliced through the air. Leeka ducked a blow aimed at his head, and the steel snagged some locks of his hair and snipped them clean. The first time he blocked a blow, the impact of their two blades caused a crushing pain at his hilt hand, wrenching his wrist savagely and coming near to snapping it. He kept hold of his sword only by slapping his other hand over the pain and fighting with a dual grip. If fighting it could be called. In truth, he backed up and shifted, stumbled and caught himself, never attacking. He did not meet blade to blade again except with glancing blocks. Otherwise he was a puppet dancing through contortions demanded by the other.

In no time at all Leeka was breathless and sweating, his eyes watering. It seemed he had already lived impossibly long against this foe. The enemy spoke as he fought. He uttered a barrage of guttural sounds just ordered enough to resemble words. Leeka searched for a way to attack, but his foe was too massive, too quick with each strike, too much a storm of motion. The smell off him was pungent and almost painful to inhale, like vinegar and urine and onions. When he stepped into the glare of the low sun he blocked it entirely and became a shadow warrior. Had a man ever killed a thing like this, such a giant as this?

And then Leeka remembered. The Eighth Form. Gerimus against the guards of Tulluck’s Hold. Those guards were supposed to have been giants. That was what the old lore said. Larger than humans in every way. Stronger. Inhuman in their disrespect for life. Warriors who lived to kill. They had terrorized the First Kingdom of Candeva, the predecessor to the Second Kingdom of Candovia. It was not until the hero Gerimus beat them back to the Hold and took on the two guards himself that a way to beat them was arrived at. They were too confident, Gerimus realized. Too strong and too eager. He used their impatience against them, taunting them by fighting purely defensively until they made errors caused by eagerness. It had worked once, perhaps it would do so again.

So into his defensive ballet Leeka tried to weave bits and pieces of the Form. At first he barely managed it without losing his head, until he found a merging between what he needed to do to live and Gerimus’s ancient maneuvers. It was complicated by the fact that in the Form he had fended off two opponents, but Leeka modified most of the moves related to the second giant. The enemy did not really seem to notice this at first. It was not until Leeka spun away in a mad, hacking attack on the air that the puzzled giant paused. He turned his massive head and studied the area Leeka slashed so viciously. He watched as Leeka sank home his blade into the foot of his imaginary foe and as he pulled the point out of the ice, flipped it skyward, and slammed it into the soft spot beneath an invisible chin. This done, Leeka faced him.

The invader, whatever he might have thought of the display, stepped forward and resumed his attack. As they fought, Leeka grew more into the skin of the Form. It felt good. If he was to die, at least he would have some dignity in his last moments. In this slight hint of confidence was an inkling of control. Leeka began to feel that at times he did not just anticipate his adversary’s actions, he caused them. Yes, he thought, Step toward me. The other did. Thrust and then slip right. Again, the other did. Swing as if to take off my legs. He jumped, and not a moment too soon. It was no perfect dance, but Leeka managed to fold the variations in with greater and greater ease. His foe showed no sign of recognizing a design in this, but he did grow wilder. Some of his joy faded. He fell silent except for the groans of his exertion. He even spit at Leeka several times, his saliva like a weapon and an insult at once.

When the moment came, it surprised Leeka. The enemy, struck by his greatest burst of rage yet, tossed his blade from his left to his right hand. He rushed forward, swinging his sword in a circle, his shoulder joint stressed by the move, bearing down onto the swinging blade the full force of his arm and shoulder and abdomen; the entire weight of his body, and the full measure of pure, impatient spite. The force was incredible, but Leeka slipped to the side. Such was the pressure of the blade passing through the air that he felt the tug of its wake almost pull him off balance. The blade smashed into the ice in a spray of crystals.

And there it was: just as the last of the Tulluck giants had cut the granite stone of the floor of the Hold. Leeka stepped upon the giant’s sword, one foot on the back of the blade, the next on the hilt. His third stride found purchase on the giant’s forearm. From this platform Leeka leaped into a twisting flourish of a strike. His blade hummed around him, a spinning blur so quick that he would never afterward remember the actual instant it sliced clean through his foe’s neck. But he always remembered the moment after, when he realized that that was just what he did. The foreigner’s head stayed perched on his shoulders for the duration of his fall. When the body finally crashed down, the head shot forward, propelled, it seemed, by a spurt of brilliantly crimson blood. Leeka’s practice of the Form had never quite been like that.

Watching the fluid seep, steaming, into the ice, he said, “Well then…that worked.”

Though he could barely manage it without retching, he pulled what was left of the human corpse away from the fire. He kicked the pot over with his foot. He used the shaft of the enemy’s spear to nudge the coals and the burning pitch into a stronger fire. He tossed flammable items from his own supplies onto it, and then tended to the slow, unpleasant work of turning human flesh to ash. This man was, after all, one of his soldiers. He could not recognize his frostbitten face or find any identifying papers, but he said what words he could over him. He thought what things he could to mourn him. His sadness was real enough. It came from the heart more clearly than ever before, his tears no less embarrassing to him for his solitude. He had not remembered the young man as he fought, but he was glad, now that he thought of it, to have avenged him.

Late in the day all that could be done for the soldier had been. Leeka turned to contemplate the rhinoceros, which had stayed a short distance away, watching. He walked toward it carrying the spear, trying to disguise the injury he now felt in his ankle. He must have twisted it at some point during the duel. The pain was sharp with each step, the joint stiff and swollen. He did not want to show the creature weakness, but each time he neared, it sidestepped, shuffled, rotated, backed up. It responded in kind to any move Leeka made, keeping him always at a distance, watching with either eye. Leeka looked around for something like food to offer it, but nothing obvious offered itself.

“Listen,” Leeka said, “I don’t have time for this. In case you haven’t noticed, your master’s lost his head. You and I, though, we could aid each other. I want to get somewhere fast, which would be hard on this ankle. And you…you look like you need somewhere to go.”

There was something like intelligence in the consideration the beast gave all this, but it was nothing like full understanding either. In answer the animal stamped the ice. Leeka was aware of his weakness, his feeble lightness compared to the creature’s girth and bulk, natural weapons, and the thickness of his defenses. He stared at the beast with all the annoyed exasperation he could muster. Better that it did not remember it could impale Leeka on that horn of his and walk about with a new ornament. Or that it could bowl him over and trample him to mush at will. There could be no violent contest between them. The winner was obvious enough that Leeka prayed the rhino did not consider it. Then he thought of something.

He turned, limped away, and came back a few moments later with his fist clenched in the dead warrior’s hair. He tossed the head out between him and the mount. It rolled in a wobbling, awkward motion that stopped soon enough. The creature studied it, turning side to side as if suspecting trickery. Leeka tested several possible witticisms. None quite fit the moment. He let the silence sink in. The beast had enough to consider with its dull mind anyway. He would give him a little while to think it all through.

Aliver dressed for the meeting with a military crispness. Though he was alone in his room, he snapped out the folds of his council vest audibly, as if his every move were being watched by elders keen to denounce him for slackness. It was dimly lit, because he had snuffed out most of the lamps, and chilly, because he had opened one of the large bay windows. He was to attend his first meeting of the king’s councillors, an abrupt gathering called because of the assassination attempt. Attempt, he made sure to tell himself. Attempt only. Though he had not been allowed to see his father for two days since the attack, Thaddeus had assured him the king lived and fought for his life with all his strength. For the time being, he had said, only the physicians could aid him. That fact in itself seemed absurd. How could Leodan Akaran’s life and the fate of an empire lie at the mercy of so few men? One with a knife, a few others with potions and tonics…

It was not as if Aliver had never been warned of such possibilities, but previous discussions of the rules of ascension had seemed distant notions, not soon to be relevant to his life. His tutor, Jason, had once said that a prince knows no greater time of danger than the days or weeks leading up to his crowning. Ofttimes, he claimed, princes were slain by their most trusted advisers, friends, even kin hungry for power themselves. Aliver could not remember the words he had responded to this with, but surely he had denied any such treachery would befall the Akarans. But Jason had an answer to this also. “Never in the historical record has a power of any nation, no matter how strong, maintained control indefinitely. Either you Akarans have broken the mold, or else history has dawdled a time before catching up with you.” Jason had bowed as he said this, almost joking, deferential and friendly, as he always was when he challenged the prince. But thinking of it now, Aliver felt a prickle of apprehension.

A sharp knock at the door startled him. A moment later a squire stood before him, displaying on his palms the sword called the King’s Trust. The prince knew the blade well. It was the very weapon that Edifus fought with at Carni. The black stain on the hilt leather, it was said, was blood from the first king’s own hand. At some point in his single combat with a tribal leader Edifus had stumbled, lost grip of his sword, and survived the moment only by catching his foe’s slashing blade pinched between his palm and fingers. Quite a move, one that had, for training purposes, been modified into a blocking motion, pushing on the flat of the opponent’s sword with the fat edge of the hand. Leodan had worn the sword only on the rare occasions that called for it, but Aliver had sought out the altar that displayed it in his father’s dressing chambers on many occasions. He had run his fingers over the ridged, soiled weave of the hilt, cupping his hand around it, hoping to find that his fingers fit perfectly into the worn grip of it.

Once he had lifted it out of its cradle, held it before him with one hand on the hilt and one on the sheath. He broke the seal between the two with a motion of his wrist and slid an inch or two of the blade into the light. He got no further. He had never been sure afterward, but he thought at the moment that the exposed portion of the blade sang out as air and light touched it. And it was not a cry of joy. It was sorrow conveyed through tempered steel. He felt sure the chamber was filled with ghosts about to materialize in wrath around him. He had done something wrong, touched an object he should not have, something not yet for him. The moment also left him with the fear that the martial history known to that blade was horrible in ways he had not yet been schooled in.

Now he stood with his arms upraised as the squire secured the sword around his waist, a weapon considered his until his father was well enough to take it up again. He tried to wear it with an appropriate ease, ignoring the way it banged against his thigh with each step. He had not expected to take his place at council until his seventeenth birthday. Only a few days ago he would have considered it a great honor to sit among the generals and advisers he was about to. Now the guilt of it sat inside him like a rough-edged stone. He had watched an assassin stab his father in the breast, and he had not done a thing about it. The vile creature had named his father a despot. A despot! What reason was there in that? He knew evil men twisted the world to their aims and could not be trusted to speak even a single truth, but the fact that the assassin had uttered such a phrase within the hearing of so many, with such apparent confidence…It galled Aliver. It set his blood to boiling.

He so wanted to step back into that moment and grab the man by the throat. Why hadn’t he? Instead, all he had managed to do was yell again and again for someone to stop the man. He could have pushed the guards aside if he had wanted to. He could have vaulted over the table. He could have done so many things that he might now be proud of. But he had not. He replayed the scene and all the possible variations on it a hundred times before the sun rose the next day. None of it did him any good. It only solidified his belief that his father’s wound was his fault more than anyone else’s.

In comparison to the expansive grandeur of most Acacian architecture the council chamber was a cramped, claustrophobic space barely large enough for the oval table at its center, a low surface of polished granite, around which sat the ten advisers of his father’s kingdom. Light entered from a single slotted window high on the southern wall. The shaft of it fell in such a way as to illuminate the center of the table and to cast up highlights on the councillors’ features. The brilliant contrast of this effect made the walls beyond into a dim boundary that felt to Aliver decidedly like a chamber for some sort of interrogation.

The prince, after a moment of hesitation as his eyes adjusted to the light, took his place in his father’s seat. He wondered if he should commence the meeting. He looked around at the shadow-dimmed and creviced faces of the elders gazing back at him and at others whom his eyes drifted past. He took them in not as the individuals they were but as if looking upon so many stone busts. How to start such a meeting?

He did not have to. Thaddeus Clegg called the meeting to order by invoking the names of the first five Acacian kings, reminding all in attendance that they here partook in a discourse of the highest order. It was to them that they should look for wisdom. Them upon whom to model themselves as they faced the turmoil now confronting them.

“Before we proceed to the matters we must discuss here, I am sure you all wish to know how the king fares.” There were murmurs all around. “All I can tell you is what the physicians have told me. At this moment the king lives. If he did not, they would come to us and we would know immediately. But he was almost certainly poisoned. They believe the blade that cut him was of the Ilhach, the old order of Meinish assassins. I know—they were disbanded by Edifus and outlawed. But still it may be their deadly poison that drains the life from him.” The chancellor touched Aliver with his roaming gaze, locked on him for a minute. He looked away before he continued. “The physicians are doing all they can. The king may survive; then again, he may not. We need to be prepared for either eventuality. As you all can see, Prince Aliver sits in his father’s place this day. Bid him welcome, even as you pray he will soon give his seat back to his father.”

Aliver tried to look around and return the greetings directed at him, but his eyes faltered before long. He heard some of the kind words with his gaze fixed on the tabletop.

His eyes continued to roam over the grain of the stone as he heard Thaddeus’s secretary give his report. There was scarcely a person on the island who could confirm the assassin’s identity, he said. By chance an official who had lived a year in Cathgergen auditing the satrapy’s books attested that the man was, indeed, Thasren Mein. But the matter was not without dispute. Speaking via messenger pigeons, Meinish representatives in Alecia issued a denial, swearing the assassin could not have been Thasren. They insisted that it was a plot by some other conspirators, but not by the Mein. They even announced their intention to sail promptly to Acacia and plead their innocence. This may have been a ploy, however, for the only Meinish official actually on the island had vanished. Gurnal and his family had fled, leaving his house a tomb for several servants. It was, to say the least, difficult to make sense of.

As the secretary concluded, Julian, one of the more senior councillors, said, “This is not enough information to form action on.” A few voices, seemingly exasperated with the elder already, pointed out that nobody had yet suggested any action. Julian continued undeterred. “Hanish Mein sending his brother to his death…and for what—to start a war he cannot hope to win? I can believe neither what my eyes saw nor what I’ve been told since. Hanish is barely more than a boy. I saw him at the winter rites a few years ago. He grew a downy beard on his cheeks, untrimmed like boys anxious to be men.”

Relos, the commander of the Acacian forces and a man Aliver knew his father trusted, said, “He is a boy no longer. I believe he is now in his twenty-ninth year.”

Julian’s eyes touched on Aliver for a second, and then he asked the general company, “If Hanish Mein did this, for what reason? What does he intend?”

“We cannot know what he intends,” Chales, another older soldier, said. “Julian, your love of peace is well known, but not all persons are as generous minded as you.”

“And boys are often foolish,” Relos said. “Full of pride. Folly.”

Thaddeus cut off Julian’s response. “No one here looks at the night and calls it day,” he said. “We should consider all possibilities, and Julian’s question is valid. Perhaps this is not Hanish Mein’s doing. Perhaps, but I have found the most obvious culprit is usually the actual culprit. The Mein are an ancient people. Ancient people have long memories. Hanish might believe he acts on his forefathers’ behalf. He is in contact with his ancestors, and they crave Acacian blood as much now as they ever did. At least, that is what men of the Mein believe. They delude themselves this way.”

“We are all ancient people, Thaddeus,” Relos said. “Some of us remember this and some don’t. Some can name their father’s father’s father and some cannot. But the blood in each of us began at the beginning and runs still. Age is no excuse for treachery.”

A quiet moment of hesitation prompted Aliver to speak. “We are circling the issue here without looking it in the face,” he said. “The man—the assassin—does anyone doubt he was of the Mein race? And that he spoke their language with ease? Did he not name himself?” The room answered this with silence, all seemingly surprised to hear the young man speak and not sure how to answer him. “Then why look at the night sky and wonder whether it is actually daytime disguised? We know who did this. A Mein stuck a blade in my father! We will do the same to them but with greater force. And I do not care why they did it. An act is an act, no matter the reasoning of the mind that commited it. They must be punished.”

“Just so, Prince,” Thaddeus said. “That is why we are here. We must form some sort of response. The governors will have their own ideas, but they will look to us for guidance and, ultimately, for approval of any course of action.”

“Then we are here to decide how to attack?” Aliver asked, gaining confidence from his own boldness. “How quickly can we have an army knocking on the door of Tahalian?”

Thaddeus deferred to Carver, the only Marah captain on the island, for his thoughts on military deployments. In his role as councillor Carver was the youngest in attendance, just in his mid-thirties. He had been born fortunate, the latest of a long line of warriors, and his skill and ambition had sped his way to prominence. He had volunteered to lead the army against the Candovian Discord a few years earlier. This was a rare military action, of which Aliver believed the stories were more fiction than truth, but Carver could claim to have commanded in battle. Few Acacians could say the same. Still, Aliver did not care for what he had to say.

No attack against the Mein could be rushed, he proclaimed. They had to consider the Mein’s military prowess, their isolated location, and the territory through which one had to travel to reach them. Acacian forces were spread through the empire in a way that allowed them police powers but not in concentrations sufficient to launch a military campaign without reorganization and transportation of troops. They could start pulling in units from the provinces, order call-ups of more, and they could marshal troops around Alecia in the early spring. Perhaps, if Aushenia was amenable, they could move troops into forward positions near the Gradthic Gap by the spring equinox. But this would be a defensive measure. They could not actually march onto the Mein Plateau until at least a month later, and then travel would be difficult over the sodden ground and with all the rivers at flood, not to mention the insects….

“Insects?” Aliver asked. “Are you mad? My father is stabbed by a Mein assassin and you speak to me of insects?”

Carver frowned in a way that drew his prominent eyebrows toward each other. “My lord, have you ever seen the tiny flies of the Meinish spring? They swarm the land, clouds so thick that men have suffocated just from inhaling them. And they bite. Men have died of blood loss. But the worst is that they cause disease, fevers, plagues…. There are many things to consider in a military campaign, many ways for soldiers to die other than on a sword. Insects, my prince, are one of them. Perhaps a forward force familiar with the winter conditions of the Mein could start movements earlier, before the thaw brings the pests of the place to life, but with General Alain missing I would not recommend it.”

Aliver shook his head, perplexed to hear a soldier voice such reluctance. He had always been taught to think in terms of a direct strike, especially as their army outnumbered the forces of any one province. He wanted to ask what had happened to General Alain, but from the way that Carver mentioned him, it was clear everyone else knew something of this already. He said, “The soldiers of the Mein number no more than twenty thousand, and ten of those are in our service throughout the empire. That was the decree. So my question is how quickly can we have a force large enough to defeat the ten thousand fighters in place? That hardly seems an impossible task.”