The War With The Mein (28 page)

“I don’t know how he’ll receive you,” the chieftain continued, “but do know that he has not forgotten why he was sent here. In truth, I think he ever thinks only of what the future holds for him. This angers him, and yet…that is how he is.”

“What of the contagion?”

“The prince burned with it like most of my people. He weathered it, though, and is no worse for it now.” Sangae was quiet a moment. He turned his gaze away and watched a bird hop through the glare of a lane some distance away. “What will you ask of him?”

“I ask nothing. His father has, and it is for Aliver alone to answer it. This laryx, is it dangerous to hunt?”

Sangae turned to gaze at him. “Few men ever accomplish a test so great.”

When hunting a laryx, Sangae explained, one actually becomes the hunted for most of the contest. One first riles the beast by finding a nest it is currently using for bedding. The hunter fouls the area, kicking the matted grasses with his feet, urinating on it, spitting, squatting to defecate. After that, he waits nearby until the creature returns, catches his scent, and pursues him. That is when the hunt begins.

“You see, a laryx does not take insult well. Once on a scent, it will follow it until it either kills the offender or drops from exhaustion. The hunter must run before it, staying near enough that the beast does not lose the scent. But not too close. One twisted ankle, a bad route chosen, or if one overestimates his stamina…any of these things mean death. The only way to kill the beast is to run it to complete exhaustion and then to attack it with all you have left, hoping that is enough. If Aliver triumphs, he will have been through a physical and mental ordeal that cannot really be imagined. He will have lived with a demon panting at his back for hours, with death one misstep away. This is not a challenge he had to take. He chose it, and I have been praying ever since that he was ready for it. Men die at this effort, Thaddeus. It may be that you never get a chance to take him from me. If you are blessed to look into his living eyes, you can know for certain that he is strong. Strong in a way no Akaran has been for many generations.”

“Do you believe he was ready for this hunt?”

“We will see,” Sangae answered.

The unease this response filled Thaddeus with remained throughout the three days he waited for Aliver’s return. How cruel, he mused, would it be if the prince died now, just before I invite him to find his destiny?

But he need not have worried. When Aliver arrived, he did so amid a cacophony of jubilation that could announce only triumph. Thaddeus stood in the small room Sangae had offered him, watching the scene through a window propped open with a stick. The tumult of black bodies was tremendous. They thronged into the streets like a school of fish in frenzy, all of them learning of the hunter’s return at once, each of them dropping whatever activity he had been engaged in. They seemed more numerous than the village population. Where had they all come from? Thaddeus almost stepped out and joined them, but he felt a need to stay hidden as yet, to observe from the shadows inside his open-air window.

They swarmed around some sort of wheeled conveyance. It was a cart pulled by several men, a thing large enough that normally it would have been harnessed to one of the long-horned oxen the villagers used for larger loads. But instead the men had grasped its leading poles with their bare hands. Thaddeus could not make out exactly what it bore until it passed by his vantage point. It was still a distance away but near enough that he drew back a step. It was a beast, a dead creature so large that at first he wondered if several of the things were piled on top of one another. There was something wolflike in its long limbs, something of a laughing dog in the thickness of its neck, something boarlike in its snout, but it was none of these creatures. Beneath its scraggly coat the beast was purple skinned, a dry, pocked, and scarred surface, scaled by peeling patches. It was a horrible thing, a monster. How could Aliver have killed such a thing with only a spear? It scarcely seemed possible.

A young boy climbed up onto the wagon and tugged the creature’s ears. Several others grabbed it by the hair around its neck and yanked the head this way and that, to roars from the crowd. Still another leaned his weight onto the lower jaw, opening the mouth enough that he could feign sticking his head inside it. But he thought better of this and leaped away in exaggerated fear, stirring still greater mirth.

All this was nothing compared to the reception the hunter himself received. He was easy to pick out. He marched through the throng like an epic hero brought back to life, returning to universal adoration. Or like the ghost of this hero, a paler form of man than those around him. He shouldered his way through arms patting him, faces pushing close to his, each person with some comment to make, so many white teeth moving close to him. They looked, for a strange instant, like creatures thrusting forward to take bites from him, but Thaddeus knew this to be a corruption of his own eyes and not true to the scene before him.

Thaddeus was surprised by Aliver’s height. He was a full head taller than his father had been. Under the constant burn of the sun, his skin had ripened like oiled leather, though it was still pale compared to that of Talayans. He was bare chested. The striations of his muscles carved fine, well-proportioned lines. His wavy hair was tinged with yellow highlights, making it much lighter than it ever would have been back in Acacia. Because of this he might have seemed out of place in a far southern Talayan village. And yet, at the same time he had never looked more at home within himself. He was a sculpted, sun-burnished, hard- and lean-muscled man, strong in the exuberant, absurd manner of youth. He wore that gold ring—the tuvey band—above his left bicep as if it were a part of him and had always been there. He took the attention well, smiling and answering comments in kind, but with no air of superiority.

For a moment Thaddeus wondered if there was a hint of humility in his expression, if in fact he had not killed the beast as these folks imagined. Many an Acacian noble took credit for kills made by their servants. Watching a little longer, he decided that whatever Aliver held back he did so for reasons other than shame. He sent word to Sangae that he did not wish to disrupt Aliver’s homecoming. He asked that Aliver be sent to him later that afternoon, once the commotion had died down.

When they did meet, nothing went as Thaddeus had expected. Months before, when he had imagined this meeting, Thaddeus had thought to greet Aliver with an embrace. He would pull the lad in and squelch any distance between them, any recrimination. The bond would be instant. A touch would do it, and everything else would fall into place. But as Aliver closed the last few steps that separated them, Thaddeus knew that had been a fantasy.

“Hello, Aliver,” he said. He was relieved that he still had some control, spotty though it had become. “I come to you with a call to your destiny. And I arrive at the proper moment. I see you are a monster slayer today. Congratulations. Your father would have been proud.”

How strange, Thaddeus thought, that so much of the boy lived in this man’s features—in the set of his eyes and the crinkle of his upper lip and in the full shape of his head. Yet the face was that of a stranger as well. Staring at him was like listening to a discordant note woven into a familiar song. He had lost all of his soft edges, though this effect was as much a matter of his severe demeanor as it was his sharp features. Was that defiance flaring behind his eyes? Anger? Surprise or disappointment? Thaddeus could not tell, though he held on through the prince’s answering silence, trying to read him.

“Did you really kill that beast yourself?”

When Aliver finally spoke, there was a hint of a Talayan accent in his voice, a looseness of the tongue around the vowels, but he had lost no fluency in his native tongue. “I have learned to do many things. So you are not dead?”

Not the greeting Thaddeus had hoped for. “Sit down, please,” he said. The words came out before he thought them, but he was glad. He still looked calm. He knew that. He still had some command. He waited until Aliver lowered himself, his legs scissored together, cross-legged, his back as straight as a board.

Thaddeus lifted a letter from the low table before him. “Let us begin with this, Prince. Read it. It is important that you do.”

“You know what it says?”

Thaddeus nodded. “But I am the only one.”

“This is not my father’s hand,” Aliver said, after glancing at the words briefly.

“It is my hand, but his words. Read them and judge.”

The young man bent his head to the paper. His eyes slid down it, rose, and slid down it again. Thaddeus looked away. It is not right to watch as another reads. He knew the words by heart anyway. He knew all the ways Leodan had expressed his love for his firstborn. He tried not to think of them, to allow Aliver that privacy. He could not, however, fight back the memory of the words the letter ended with, for he would have to address them when the prince looked up at him.

“This cannot be serious,” Aliver said. He had stopped reading. His eyes were dead on the page, neither looking up nor moving over the words any longer.

“It is all serious. Which portion do you doubt?”

The young man flicked the paper, just enough to indicate that all of it was in question. “This talk of the Santoth, the God Talkers…that cannot be serious. My father, if he meant to tell me this, must have been close to death. He was not thinking clearly. Look what this says. Son,” he pretended to quote flippantly, “now that you are grown, it’s time you save the world…and he asks me to do it by seeking out some mythic mad magicians.”

“The Santoth may be as real as you and I.”

Aliver set his gaze on the man. “May be? Have you seen one? Have you worked magic or seen it done?”

“There are records,” Thaddeus began and then had to lift his voice above Aliver’s rebuttal. “There are records—of which you know nothing—that testify to the Santoth in great detail.”

“Myth!” Aliver spat the word, making it a curse.

“Myth lives, Aliver! That is a truth as undeniable as the sun or the moon. Do you see the moon at this moment? No, but you believe you will again. Your father tells you the Santoth can walk the Known World again. They can help us win back power as they did before. All they need is for you—an Akaran prince who will be king—to remove their banishment. This is part of why you were sent to Talay, to be nearest to the Santoth, so that you would know this land and have the skills to search them out, to hunt for them. Your brother and sisters went each to their different places as well, although little of that went as we wished. I will tell you about all of it, Aliver. You will know everything I know. Everything. I will tell you news of Hanish Mein as well. He is planning something for his ancestors, the Tunishnevre. They are another force that you might think were no more than myth, and yet it is they who gave Hanish the power—”

“Who is this ‘us’ you mentioned?”

“There are many who await your return. In a manner of speaking, the whole world awaits you. There are reasons only you can—”

“Why should I care about your world or believe a word you say? I have found another life, with people who speak only truth.”

Thaddeus felt his pulse hammer along his neck. He had a momentary impulse to slap his hand over it, but he controlled it. “There was a time when you called me uncle. You loved me. You said so with your child’s mouth, and I loved you in return. I am still that man. And I know that you care about the fate of the world. You always have. Nothing could beat that out of you. Aliver, this is what your father intended. The things you have learned here…the man you have become…” Aliver’s face was unreadable, utterly unreadable, and it caused Thaddeus to pause. “I see you want to be a mystery to me, but you are not.” With greater certainty he repeated, “You are not.”

“You say what I do is my choice?”

“Yes.”

Aliver said, “Then you have already spoken half-truths to me. You know I have no choice. Nor have you admitted that you betrayed my father. An honest man would have done so from the start. Yes, I know. How could I not? The world knows of Thaddeus Clegg’s treachery. Hanish Mein himself declared it, and I heard of it before I even arrived here, while still in the camel caravan. Men debated whether you were evil or just a fool. I did not add my voice to theirs, but I know the truth: you are both. You may not have put the blade in his chest, but—but you might as well have. If you were a true servant of my father, you would drop to your knees and beg for forgiveness.”

The prince pushed himself to his feet with one smooth exertion, rising straight up as his legs disentangled themselves. He was finished. He was turning to go. He lifted a foot and leaned to stride away behind it. Thaddeus had not been prepared for this moment. He had not planned for it, had not imagined Aliver would say what he just had or that he would respond to it as he was about to.

He lunged from his seated position. He wrapped one hand around Aliver’s leg. His other hand scraped him forward, and in a few moments he had the young man’s legs gripped in a two-armed embrace. This was not at all what he had intended, but he did not let go. He held tight, ready to feel the prince’s fists crashing down on his head. Only then did he understand completely what he had waited all these years to do, what he had feared and wanted most, what mattered with an urgency greater than the fate of nations. Forgiveness. He needed to be forgiven. To be so, he would have to tell the truth entirely. That was what he would do. For once, he would rely on the entire truth. And if Aliver was the prince the Known World needed, he would know how to face it all.

The young woman watched the eel as it cut a squirming path through the glass-blue water. She lay on her stomach, naked save for a cloth wrapped snugly around her hips, the brittle, dry wood of the pier abrasive on her abdomen and chest and legs. The sun beat down upon her back with a force that made her flesh tingle. Her skin was brown from long exposure, peeling in spots, her thinner hairs bleached blond. She had not been a girl for some years now—hence the wrap around her waist—but at twenty-one she retained much that was boyish in her figure. Her breasts were shapely enough that the priests had trouble keeping their eyes off them, but they were small and really no bother to her, which suited her fine. She did not in any way look like the earthly embodiment of a goddess, but that was exactly what she was. She was the priestess of Maeben, the chief female deity of the Vumu people, revered throughout the splattering of islands known collectively as the Vumu Archipelago.

The eel she observed so intently was a study of curves and motion. It never paused, just slithered its way through the clear water for a distance it had fixed in its head, then turned and slithered back the same way, drawing and redrawing an oblong shape, pacing, as it were. The water was over a man’s head in depth and the eel near the surface, but the smooth whitish sand of the ocean bottom below was clear, rippling with a clarity of line and shape and texture. The young priestess could have watched the creature against that background indefinitely. Something in it brought her peace, something about it asked a question whose answer felt like the hum that the eel’s path would make if it were audible. She would have liked that, though as yet she had found life posed more questions than it provided answers.

She pushed herself up and began the walk through the network of piers that cut geometric chaos into the smooth arc of the bay. She knew from the placement of the sun that it was time for her to prepare for that evening’s ceremony. If she did not return to the temple soon, the priests would come looking for her. For a moment she considered letting them. They grew nervous, and it had once amused her to cause them unease. But that was before. Increasingly, she found herself more and more incapable of imagining a life in which she was not Maeben, in which the hours of the day were not ordered accordingly.

Leaving the shore behind, she had to cut through the center of the town, which was called Ruinat. It was little more than a fishing village, in many ways like any other settlement on Vumair, the main island of the archipelago. It was, however, home to the Temple of Maeben and therefore held a place of prominence out of proportion to its humble appearance. Galat, on the eastern shore of the island, served as a larger trading and commercial center, but there was nothing holy about that place. Ruinat was a place of humility, quiet now, for the heat of the midday sun baked the world with a shimmering, bleached intensity. Most of the villagers were in their shaded homes, lying still to dream these languid hours past.

The priestess walked right down the hard-packed dirt of the main street, bare chested and with nothing in the slightest to hide. Her earthly identity was not a secret kept from the common people. Everyone in the village knew her. They had watched her grow from the girl who had first arrived on the island, walking out of the sea with a sword clenched in her fist, speaking a strange language and not yet knowing her true name. They had laughed with her over the years, taught her how to speak Vumu, chased her through the streets, and tossed jokes—sometimes even lewd ones—to her. Once she was in Maeben’s finery, of course, none of them would be so bold. But each thing had its place, its time.

Approaching the temple, the priestess had to pass through the promenade of gods. The totems were enormous, made from the tallest trees of the goddess’s island, so lofty that the images toward the top were lost to the naked eye. They were not meant to be viewed from her earthbound point of view anyway. They were tributes to Maeben, to be noticed from a divine perspective, circling high in the sky above.

To name the goddess a sea eagle would have been a crass, sacrilegious mistake. She may take the form and have sisters and cousins that were truly avian creatures, but Maeben herself dwarfed them all. Her eyes were ever-seeing, keen and clear, able to focus in on any and all persons and see right into their centers. She deserved—demanded—their respect. And she had the power to remind them of this whenever she wished to.

Over the years, the young woman had learned that there were many gods in the Vumu pantheon. There were deities like Cress, who controlled the shifting of the tides. Uluva swam before the bonito, directing them on their yearly migration near the island. Banisha was the queen god of the sea turtles. It was only with her blessing that her daughters clambered up on the southern beaches each summer and buried their rich eggs in the warm sand. There was the crocodile, Bessis, that ate the moon bite by bite each night until it vanished; sated by this feast only until the moon fruit had grown again to full bounty, Bessis then rose from slumber and commenced his feast again. It was, she came to understand, a world in which the natural cycle of things was ever in question, depending as it did on the goodwill and health of so many different deities. She barely knew the names of them all, but this did not matter. Only two gods shared the apex of the Vumu pantheon, and only one of these was central to her life.

Maeben was not a goddess with a function in the natural world as were so many others. From the day she was born, she scorned being bound to such labor. She was the goddess of wrath, the jealous sister of the sky who everywhere believed herself slighted: by gods, by humans, by creatures, even by the elements. Maeben, the Furious One, was easily angered, ferocious in retaliation. She threw down storms, rain, and wind, snapping her beak to create the sparks that were lightning. Looking upon humans she had long ago found them too proud, too favored by the other gods. Only once did she find a human pleasing, but what unfolded from it was tragic.

The man’s name was Vaharinda. He was born of mortal parents, but for some reason he was blessed even before he had escaped the womb. Instead of his mother singing him to sleep, he sang to calm her. Instead of her stroking her belly to comfort him, he rubbed her from the inside. Vaharinda had a way with women; his mother knew this even before he was born. When he did emerge into the world, all were amazed to behold him. He was perfection. He grew like a weed, but in everything he was of a fine and shapely substance. By the time he was six or seven years old, grown women swooned on seeing him. By eleven, he had known hundreds of women sexually. By his fifteenth year a thousand women called him husband and claimed to have borne his children. He was a brave and skilled hunter also, a warrior that no other man could best. He hefted weapons other men could not even lift. His enemies knew only fear when they beheld him.

One day Maeben saw Vaharinda giving pleasure to one woman after another. She saw how they lay panting beneath him, enraptured, in awe and joy. She heard them call out the names of other gods, asking them to witness the wonder they were experiencing. All this made Maeben curious. She changed herself into human form and approached Vaharinda. She had not expected to lie with him, but once she looked into his eyes, she could not help herself. What a specimen! What a tool of pleasure curving up from between his legs! Why not climb on it and see for herself what joys the flesh could bring?

That was just what she did. And it was good. It was very good. She lay gasping on the sand afterward and only slowly realized that Vaharinda had not been equally moved. He was already chatting to another woman. Flaring with anger, Maeben called him back and demanded that he take her again. Vaharinda saw no reason to do so. He said that she was fine enough but not so much that he would forsake other women. Her eyes were pale blue like the sky, he said, but he preferred brown-eyed women. Her hair was wispy and thin like the high, high clouds that mark a change in the weather; he preferred thick black hair that he could twine around his great fingers. Her skin was the color of near-white sand; this was unusual, yes, but his tastes were more inclined toward hues of sun-burnished brown.

Hearing all this, Maeben grew enraged. She roared up out of her human form and became a great sea eagle of wrath instead. Her wings were the widest ever seen, her talons large enough to grasp a man around the waist, each claw like a curved sword. She asked him did he like her better thus? The people who witnessed this ran in fright. Only Vaharinda remained. He had never yet seen a thing to frighten him, and he was not inclined to change his ways yet. He grasped one of his spears, and they did mighty battle. They raged across the island and up the mountains. They fought in the branches of trees and jumped out into the sky and ran across the surface of the sea. Vaharinda fought like no man ever had, but in the end he could not prevail. He was a human after all; Maeben was divine. Eventually, she crushed him in her talons. She sat in a branch where the people of Vumu could see and she ate him piece by piece, until nothing was left. Then she flew away. Vaharinda’s story, however, did not end there.

The priestess left the promenade of the gods behind and ran the path that wound up toward the temple compound. At one point she paused and looked back at the harbor. There was life there now. Several boats sailed toward the docks, bearing religious pilgrims keen to view the goddess in earthly form. She would attend to them in a few hours, as she did every day.

Approaching the compound the young woman paused once more. She loved looking at Vaharinda’s statue, which sat on its pedestal beside the entrance, both a monument to him and a reminder of Maeben’s ultimate power. The people of Vumu had chosen to honor their hero. He had been the strongest of all of them, the most pleasing to the eye, the bravest, the most endowed with the capacity to pleasure women, the man whom other men most aspired to emulate. They had sent a gift of riches to the people of Teh on the Talayan coast and brought home a great block of stone, of a texture unlike anything on the island. From it they had carved a statue of Vaharinda. He was seated in the reclined posture he enjoyed while at rest, his muscles sculpted in the stone, his features just as they had been in life. He sat naked, and also—as had been his situation through much of his life—his penis stretched up erect, like a clenched fist aimed at the sky. It was a marvelous statue, like none in the world before or since.

With this beauty to behold, the people of Vumu soon began to worship Vaharinda as a god. They said prayers to him, asked favors of him, bestowed gifts of flowers and jewels and burnt offerings to him. Soon women, seeing in the stone the man they had loved, mounted astride his penis and pleasured themselves. They went to him even in preference to their husbands, and many claimed to have gotten living young from the seed of the stone god. They came to him so often and in such great numbers that the ridges and contours of his member were worn smooth and its length gradually diminished. But still he gave pleasure and—in his silent way—he received pleasure in return.

Maeben hated all of this. It angered her more than Vaharinda’s scorn of her had. She took it upon herself to humble them in a way that hurt them most. First, she swept in on the statue and wrapped her talons around Vaharinda’s penis and snapped it off in her grip. She carried the broken length of it out to sea and dropped it. A shark watched her do this. Thinking that she had dropped a prized morsel of food, the shark rose from the depths and swallowed the penis in one massive mouthful. Maeben rejoiced. Vaharinda would pleasure women no longer. She was not finished with her vendetta against humans yet, however. She took the gift that Vaharinda had given to the women who loved him. She took their children. She swept down from the sky and snatched little ones up in her talons and beat, beat, beat her wings until she rose, the child screaming and writhing in her grip, helpless against her wrath.

The young priestess, walking past the statue now and into the compound, could not help but eye the damaged privates of the statue. Some part of her knew better than to feel so, but she wished she had seen Vaharinda in his glory. She even dreamed of mounting him as other women were said to have done. In these dreams he was not only stone, however. He was living flesh, and the acts they carried out together were of such sensual excess that she often woke stunned to have ever imagined such things. She was, after all, a virgin. She had to be. She lived out a continuing part in all of this drama. Long ago the priests had divined that the only way to appease Maeben was to select a living symbol of her that could stand before the people every day so that they might never forget her. The priests said that humans had to be careful never to take too much joy from life. They must always remember that they lived and prospered only at the generous whim of Maeben. They must always look upon loved ones with a measure of sorrow. They must never enjoy good health without remembering that illness is but a breath away. They should never praise fair weather without knowing that late each summer storms come, wreaking damage without concern for human suffering. All of these daily hazards of life were necessary, the priests said, to appease a goddess with jealous eyes that missed little of what transpired on the earth below her. And the priestess, above all else, should never succumb to the lust Maeben had mistakenly felt for Vaharinda.

Perhaps because of these penitent ways, the Vumu islands were blessed with an abundance that filled the people with confidence in the rightness of their beliefs. They harvested oysters in one of the sheltered harbors. Catfish the length of tall men swarmed the muddy rivers flowing out of the hilly uplands, the backs of them plowing through the water, so visible that fishermen had only to stand in their canoes and fling spears at the passing mounds of water. From the sea, bonito filled their nets to bursting in the spring. In late summer the trees in the valleys groaned under the weight of their fruits. And even boy children of eight or nine were considered old enough to venture into the hills on hunting trips. They always came back laden with monkey meat, with tree squirrels, and with a flightless bird so plump it was difficult to carry under the arm. Maeben, in truth, had much to be jealous of and the people of Vumu much to be thankful for.