The War With The Mein (61 page)

Maeander had watched it all from a platform set up beside his tent back in the Meinish camp. He had his own seeing aid, two spyglasses strapped together to bring the distant scenes into binocular view. He had hummed as the Acacians marched down the slope in battle formation. He had smiled at their hesitation as they spotted the antok cages. He had imagined the bewildered expressions on their faces and laughed out loud in occasional, quick guffaws that startled the men around him.

Still, the destruction the beasts caused when unleashed stunned him. He thought he knew what to expect. Over the years since the league had brought antok pups as gifts from the Lothan Aklun, he personally checked on the training the creatures received. He watched them grow from the size of suckling pigs. He had instructed the trainers to prepare them for some moment like this. They taught them to hate all color, infused them with fear of visual variation. Through long months of work they forced them to equate orange and red, purple and green and blue with pain, with suffering. And they had taught them that the only way to answer such things was through fury. For the most part this had not been difficult. Fury was in their nature from the moment they kicked their belligerent ways out of their mothers’ wombs.

But what he watched during those first few hours went beyond his imaginings. With a view of the entire field, he saw the way the four monsters worked in loose coordination. They plowed through the dense concentrations of troops, but not with the random abandon the Acacians must have perceived. They also looped out to the edges, pulling in the fleeing, herding them back, controlling the entirety of the frenzy. Amazed, Maeander realized that the trainers hadn’t lied about their potential; the Lothan Aklun tales about these creatures were true. He was, he believed, going to watch them slaughter every last one of the Acacians and their allies. They would not stop until every scrap of moving color was squashed or shredded. He had felt, mixed in with the euphoria, a pulsing dread of the foreigners from across the Gray Slopes. If they gave weapons such as these away, what sort of powers did they keep for themselves?

This thought was cut short before it went too far. The small band of strangers arrived, Vumuans he soon learned. He knew exactly why the antok did not destroy them, but he did not anticipate that in all the confusion of battle the Acacians would be able to put together the clues themselves. He cursed when he saw them stripping off their clothes. He wanted to shout for them to stop. That won’t save you! Die with bravery, not with backsides exposed to the world! And yet he watched as they slowly brought the beasts under control, surrounded them, hemmed them in with walls made of their very flesh. Each and every one of them stood naked and vulnerable, their hearts exposed. By no other means than that they calmed the antoks’ savagery. He would never have imagined such a thing.

Nor could he believe his eyes as he watched Aliver find a way to kill the antoks. There he was, naked as the day he was born and looking much like the Talayans around him, wielding only two lengths of steel in a show of bravery that would have made Maeander himself proud. He could not see every detail precisely, but he saw Aliver leap on the beast’s side. He saw it charge Aliver a few moments later and could tell that when the creature collapsed whatever wound had dropped it had been fatal. The others of Aliver’s army simply followed his example, with variations. Within a half hour all four of the antoks lay dead. Triumphant Talayans climbed on them and danced their jubilation.

The generals who sat in council with him that evening sought to highlight the gains they had made. The Acacians would not be able to field an army the following day. The officers estimated the enemy had lost more than fifteen thousand souls to the antoks in the short space of time they had rampaged. It was a phenomenal number. About a quarter of their entire force. Also, there had been no sign of sorcery on the field. No outside force aided them. Perhaps the one who had been working magic for them had perished before the antoks. Or perhaps he had had only so much of the witchcraft at his disposal. It may have been used up, just as anything else can be used up.

“Aliver has delayed his defeat,” one general said, “but we’ll be ready to finish this now. We should march on them in full force in the morning. Overrun them. Even if they don’t take the field. Let us slaughter them in their camps and lay them beside their unburied dead.”

Several murmured agreement. Another, filling the silence where Maeander’s response should have been, said, “Remember, we lost not a single soldier today. Not one. Not even Hanish could have done better.”

But such things were cold comfort to Maeander. This time it was he, not his advisers, who saw the gains the enemy had made despite what looked like defeat. The tale of Aliver killing the first antok himself would course across the land with the speed of a contagion. It would make the prince a legend of gigantic proportions and stir the land into an even greater frenzy.

He got word of two other disturbing developments that night. The league-controlled vessels all along the coast had withdrawn. They gave no explanation and refused all efforts at dialogue offered by the few Meinish captains in control of their own boats. There was treachery in this, but it went as yet unexplained. It meant, of course, that Maeander could not evacuate his forces if they were driven up against the sea. Though he did not voice it aloud to anyone, he wondered if this was not his brother’s doing, a chastisement, a challenge. It did not make any sense, but that did not stop the thought from spinning about inside his head like a wheel in perpetual motion.

Even later that evening, sitting alone in his tent, his gaze fixed on the motionless flame of the oil lamp on his table, a messenger brought him another piece of correspondence. It was a letter from his brother, sent across the sea pinned to a messenger bird. It mentioned nothing about the league—perhaps Hanish had not yet heard what happened. Instead, he wrote with enthusiasm, reporting that he had already sailed from the Mainland. The Tunishnevre were with him. All of them. They were undamaged by the journey and writhing with life. They were bursting to be free. He would have them safely within the new chamber on Acacia within a few days’ time. And then he’d free them.

And then, Maeander thought, you’ll have completed your life’s work. And I—I’ll have done nothing more than helped secure your fame.

The thought filled him with despondency. Fast behind this came an old memory from when he was eleven years old and Hanish had just turned thirteen. Their father was still alive then, vocally proud of them both. In honor of Hanish’s birthday, Heberen had arranged for them to dance a Maseret before a revered group of veterans in the Calathrock. It was to be one of Hanish’s last duels as a novice—the last time it would not be a fight to the death. They used real knives, but they wore their thalbas over chain-mail vests. Spots on their chests marked their heart points. This was the target they were each to aim for to end the contest.

They were both lithe and strong, their bodies growing in exuberant bursts. Maeander was nearly Hanish’s height and strength and had suspected for some time that his skills at the dance surpassed his brother’s. On this occasion, before the roomful of elders, he could not help but push Hanish to the edge. He had not planned to do it. It just happened. Pride billowed in him and drove his actions. He moved faster than he had previously, with unexpected shifts in tempo. He marveled at how composed his brother’s face remained; even more impressive and annoying because Maeander felt the strain he was causing him. He did not attempt to win the duel. That would have been too overt an insult. But he did want to make sure the elders saw him, and so he drew Hanish’s blood. He nicked his left nostril with a backhanded maneuver, looking up at the crowd as he did so. A few moves later he let Hanish touch his heart point. He left the arena satisfied with himself. A face cut was not considered important in the rules of the dance nor was it a serious injury. But it would leave a lasting scar. He was pleased about this.

That night, however, he was yanked from his dreams. He awoke to instant fear. He felt a living weight pressed down against his back. Someone clenched his hair and wrenched back his head. The flat edge of a knife blade touched his skin, angled just enough that he could sense the edge of it tasting his flesh.

And then Hanish’s voice spoke from close to his ear, cold and precise. One way or another, he said, Maeander would never humiliate him again. “Don’t deny that you didn’t mean to! Everybody with eyes saw it. I felt it. You would have me know that you are my better. You wish me to fear you, don’t you? But I don’t fear you. It’s my knife at your neck, brother. It always has been and always will be. I could kill you right here, right now, if I wished to.”

Maeander did not doubt him. His brother might have spoken with the Giver’s voice, so complete was his assurance. Hanish told him that he had a choice to make. He could die right there—with no accomplishments to his name—or he could agree to help him change the world. “Swear to the ancestors that you’ll never work against me. Swear that you’ll always obey me. Swear it to them and I’ll let you live. Otherwise you die right here, right now. Nobody will question me for it. You know that.”

The answer poured out of Maeander to his lasting shame. Perhaps the one thing that had kept him true to the oath he swore that night was how much it shamed him. Faced with death, he balked. He lay there paralyzed with fear, horrified that he might miss out on the life of glory he so vividly imagined. It was, he knew, a moment of unforgivable weakness. Hanish had pressed him up against the only real thing a Meinish male could be made to fear—a death before having achieved greatness. Ironically, by the Meinish code, he should still have hissed defiance back at Hanish. He should have accepted that worst of fates with smiling indifference. He did not.

That fact would have been an unbearable disgrace, except for what Hanish did next. Having heard the pledge muttered, Hanish’s weight went limp on top of him. His breathing came in gasps. After a few mystified moments, Maeander realized his older brother was crying, bawling from someplace so deep within him that each sob wrenched upward from his gut. Maeander did not move, did not even mention that Hanish still held the blade to his throat. They had never spoken of that night since, though Maeander remembered it almost every day.

And now…now Hanish was on the verge of his greatest triumph. Maeander, by comparison, had failed. That was what it amounted to. He had failed. It did not mean defeat for his people. Nothing Aliver could do would stop Hanish from completing the ceremony to release the Tunishnevre. When the ancestors walked the earth again, they would be an invincible force. All the tricks and ploys and strategies he and his brother had devised would be nothing compared to the fury they would unleash. So by holding Aliver’s army in northern Talay he had aided his brother’s complete victory. That was fine enough. But that was not the point. The point was that Maeander Mein would have no true place of glory in the story anymore. Who would remember him? Who would sing of Maeander after Hanish accomplished the one thing his people had yearned for for more than twenty-two generations? It felt as if Hanish had never removed the blade from his throat.

Facing this, Maeander decided that there was only one honorable way left for him to redeem himself. He sent messengers to his generals, informing them that they would be launching a delayed assault in the morning. He had something in mind to open the day. He would not live through it, but that did not matter. If he joined the Tunishnevre now he would be unleashed with them in the days to come. He would be one of the Tunishnevre, one of the ancestors his brother must revere. Anyway, he had been too long without looking the enemy in the face. Even Hanish had never done that. And if he accomplished what he hoped to, Hanish would never be able to take it from him.

None of what he thought or planned was even remotely evident on his face or in his demeanor the next morning. He set out from camp at the vanguard of his personal force, just a handful of Punisari striding through the slant of the rising sun, all of them taller than the norm, their burned faces like stonework chiseled to match their musculature and bearing. Each of them had straw-blond hair down below their shoulders; a few wore the traditional knotted locks to remind them of the years their ancestors roamed the wilds in exile; all knew to what work they went and none showed the slightest sign of hesitation. Maeander had drawn together each of the three braids that, with their weave of colored ribbons, numbered the men he had killed with his own blade. His torso was wrapped in a gray thalba. The only weapon on his person was the Ilhach dagger secured horizontally across his abdomen.

So accompanied and armed, Maeander approached the Acacian camp across the scarred desolation that was the previous days’ battlefield. He carried a banner that indicated the desire to parlay, and he wore a façade of composed, smiling humility.

The paper swan was waiting just inside the portal. Somebody must have shoved it underneath the door. Just how this was accomplished was not clear, considering the object’s placement, the way it stood upright several inches from the crack beneath the door, a space not as tall as the stylized, geometric creature that must have passed beneath it. Also, there was a note beside it. Just a ribbon of paper so thin it was hard to pick up. Corinn did so carefully, pinching it between two fingernails. Accept this gift, she read, in the event that you need it.

It was unsigned, but Corinn knew who had sent it. How Sire Dagon’s agents had gotten past the outer guards she could not guess, and the feeling that perhaps they had actually been inside her room while she slept made her skin tingle. She held the swan to her nose and sniffed, carefully. No scent at all. Squeezing the paper between her fingers, she could feel the coarse texture of crystals inside it. She knew that the grains were distilled from the roots of a wildflower by a process known only to the league. They made from it a lethal poison, one that could not be tasted or smelled or detected afterward. She thought to look at the note again, but it had crumbled and flaked away. Nothing remained of it but a residue on her fingers and a few traces on the floor. The breath of air underneath the door was dispersing these already.

She was in her old room, where she sometimes spent the night when Hanish was away. It provided her greater privacy, and she had begun to need solitude more and more of late as she sought to master the swirl of thoughts inside her. She had awoken that morning believing that the next few days were going to change the course of her life completely. This swan message reinforced this belief. It was a small, silent, potent confirmation that forces at play in the world were moving in league with her. Knowing better than to handle it too much, she pressed the bird’s wings flat and slipped it under her belt.

She turned and walked back toward her dressing area, where she had been before noticing the swan. She sat on the stool at her makeup table, an array of mirrors reflecting variations of her image back at her. She intended to plan out the events to come, but she paused for a moment, looking into the mirrors. As she did often lately, she felt queasy. Each of the views of her face showed a different character. Depending on the angle, she looked miserable or stunning, delicate or agitated or self-assured or…wicked. Yes, viewed in near profile, from the left, she could not help but acknowledge a previously unnoticed cruelness in the tilt of her eyes and her mouth and in the manner with which she held her chin, as if it were a weapon protruding in warning. She hated what she saw there. Or sometimes she did. At other times she hated what she saw from the other angles instead. Which of these faces should she present to Hanish on his return?

Hanish was scheduled to arrive the next day. He would be sailing at the vanguard of a fleet of vessels bringing his fabled ancestors to the island. He had sent her a letter just the day before, filled with his enthusiasm, alluding to his plans for getting the ancestors into the newly constructed chamber as quickly as possible. He spoke of his joy at seeing ships loaded with the sarcophagi. What a wondrous sight, he had written. As if she would feel the same! He reminded her how much he hoped she would stay true to her promise to help him free them to their eternal rest. Once she did so, the rift that had scarred the Known World for centuries would finally be mended. Meins and Acacians would have a new chance to assuage their old animosities. The land, he promised, could finally start to heal. This was what his war had always been about. It was a long battle, an epic journey, but the end was near. He wrote: You, Corinn, will help to make it all possible. My people and yours will both revere you for it. And I will revere you for it.

“He knows nothing of what’s inside me,” Corinn said to the silent room around her. There was a time when the truth of this statement would have pained her. Now, however, everything she had planned hinged on it. Hanish thought he could play her for the world’s greatest fool; she, however, was resolved never to let that happen. “He knows nothing of what’s inside me.”

“No,” a voice said gently in answer, “no man does. No man ever could.”

Corinn snapped to her feet, spun around, and searched for the source of the voice. She saw nothing at first. The room was empty, crowded only with her family objects, safe beneath the pastoral murals on the ceiling, the walls softened by hangings dyed various colors. A man split the border between two wall tapestries and stepped into view. He was but a few strides away. His nearness, the concreteness of his presence was so shocking, her breath caught in her throat.

“Have no fear,” the man said. “Please, Princess, don’t call out. I’m here to help you. I serve your brother, and I serve you.”

She recognized him after only a few words. Thaddeus, the chancellor. Her father’s closest friend. His betrayer. By the Giver, he was old! His face was creviced, his cheeks sunken, his frame stooped. He looked so very fatigued, bags beneath his eyes, unsteady on his feet, swaying slightly, carrying a book cradled against his chest. Somehow she managed to speak through her surprise, asking the first thing that came to mind. “How did you get in here?”

Thaddeus asked if he could sit. He spoke softly, casting his words with a deadened lack of inflection. “I will happily tell you everything, Princess Cor—”

“You are in my room?” Corinn asked, growing more incredulous as the impossibility of it took hold of her. “How can you possibly be in my room?”

“Please, may I sit? If I don’t, I may well collapse. And…please, can you make sure we will not be disturbed? I cannot be discovered. I’ll explain why.”

Corinn stared at him. She knew she had to think quickly. Visitations such as this had an import she could not mistake. She could not stumble, for whatever brought this man out of the past and into her room simply could not be ignored or squandered. And he certainly did not look to be any physical threat to her. However he got here and whatever brought him and no matter how she was going to deal with it, she should listen to him, and she should do so alone. She whispered, “Wait here.”

She stepped into the hall and informed her servants that she did not wish to be disturbed for any reason. She had guards placed at the outer doors to her chambers, and she moved Thaddeus into the sheltered alcove just inside the balcony. There she had him sit in a high-backed chair as she paced in front of him. He told her everything. He explained how he had gotten into the palace and how he navigated the secret passages inside the walls. It took him hours upon hours to get into her room, but he had eventually found a low tunnel that opened in the corner behind her bed. She would be amazed to know that it was there all along, hidden by a simple trick in the architecture. But he was not starting at the beginning….

Aliver had sent him, he said, and then he launched into a breathless, earnest description of the man her brother had matured into. How he’d grown to fulfill, to exceed, anything Leodan might have imagined for him! He had a grand vision. He had a gift for moving masses. He was fired with urgency and purpose. He spoke of Mena and Dariel also, the sword-wielding priestess and the daring sea raider. Together they were engaged in a battle they could not lose. Aliver had inflamed the people with a belief that their fates were in their hands. He, when victorious, would not rule over them. He’d rule for them. By their permission and only in their interests. He’d wipe away all the hidden foulness that drove the Known World and find new ways to prosper. He’d build trust among nations, ennoble the downtrodden, break the spine of the league, do away with the Quota, abolish conscripted labor.

The old chancellor went on and on. Corinn listened, realizing that she was supposed to be suffused with relief, with joy, with anticipation. She tried to feel these things. The more he spoke, though, the more it all seemed to Corinn like mad ranting. Pure fancy. The stuff of children’s tales. A fantasy in which she did not feel she had any part. How could he believe any of these things could come to pass? She had heard some of this story before, from Rhrenna and Rialus. She had gleaned still more from overheard conversations. But it seemed less believable than ever now that this man actually sat before her in his aging flesh. He spoke like a newly converted disciple, worshipping a prophet of—of what? Equality? Liberation? It sounded like Aliver planned on building an empire in the sky, some idyllic kingdom that would float on clouds. Such a thing would vanish like the clouds, she wanted to say, blown away by the first strong breeze. She flared inside with a surprising degree of bitterness, but she made sure not to show it.

A golden monkey appeared on the balcony. It must have jumped from someplace high above, and it seemed startled to find them in the shaded alcove. It called out in a high, birdlike chirp. It was brilliantly colored against the blue background of the sky. Corinn turned her back to it.

“Hanish is returning tomorrow. He is bringing the Tunishnevre with him. He wants me to help him perform the ceremony that will end the curse. He says when this is done, much of the rift between Meins and Acacians will be healed. It will be history, he says. Not the present or the future anymore. What do you think of that?”

“He is bringing the Tunishnevre here?” Thaddeus asked. He sat in silence for a time, mouth hanging open, eyes glazed. “I should have known that. Of course he is…. He’s had the time to prepare a chamber here. He sent his brother to fight Aliver, not because he did not take the threat seriously, but because he had a greater purpose for himself. He has had you safely here all along…. I should have foreseen this. We have looked back into our own myths for allies; why would Hanish not do the same?”

He looked up at Corinn, his old, veined eyes fixed on her face. “You asked me what I think of it? I think Hanish is lying. The lore says that there are two ways to end the curse on the Tunishnevre. He could free them with a gift of your blood, a forgiveness offering. But that is not what he intends. If he takes your life from you unwillingly and slays you on the altar, then he will wake his ancestors, not free them to death. He will bring them back to life. They will get their bodies back and walk the earth again, Corinn. They will be incredibly powerful and vengeful in a way that has no bounds. If that happens, we have lost for good. This is why you must come with me.”

“Is that why you came here,” Corinn asked, “to rescue me?”

“I came for another reason,” the former chancellor said. He told her about the Santoth and the corruption of their knowledge and about the great, great need for The Song of Elenet. He had found it, he explained, because he finally put together the clues that Leodan had left for them. Aliver did not yet know of his success. He did not even know he had come here. He needed to get the book to him as quickly as possible, but now it was just as important that she flee the island with him. It would be risky, but if they escaped via the route he had come into the palace, they would emerge not far from the Temple of Vada. He could cross to the temple and, he was sure, he could convince the priests to give him some small vessel. He would return and pick her up and then they would fly with the wind. Perhaps he could even send word to Aliver from the temple, so that he could act accordingly.

Corinn kept her face blank. She did not want to address this notion of flight yet. “Is that book The Song of Elenet?” she asked, pointing to the volume sitting on the man’s thighs. It did not look like much, really, but she noticed that he had never taken his hand from atop its cover, as if he feared something might befall it even here, with just the two of them in the alcove.

Guardedly, he nodded.

She stretched out her hands toward it.

“Princess, we don’t have much time,” Thaddeus said. “I gather Hanish is to return tomorrow. We must—”

“Let me see the book,” she said, keeping her eyes focused on the chancellor’s and making sure her words had the ring of command to them. She was sure that if she had not been looking at him so intently he might have refused, delayed somehow, thought of an excuse, or changed the subject. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could she pulled the book from his grasp and moved away a few steps.

The book was much lighter than it looked. It opened with the slightest pull of her fingers. From the moment she looked upon its contents she knew for a certainty that nothing in her life would ever be the same. The page was full of script, curling, looping, dancing words. They moved before her eyes, growing and changing as she watched, becoming one word and then another, written in a foreign, beautiful language. The words she read struck her like notes ringing in her soul. She did not know what they meant, but as her eyes touched them, they rose off the page and filled her with song. They welcomed her. They praised her. They danced in the air around her like exotic birds. They assured her that they had been waiting for her. Waiting for her. Now everything would be all right. She, she, she could make it all all right. They rubbed the entirety of her being with the sensuous, humming intensity of a hungry housecat. She could not explain how she knew or heard or understood any of these sensations or declarations or promises at that moment. But the messages and the sublime radiance of the voices that spoke them were undeniable. This book was, without doubt, the very gift she had waited her entire life to receive.

When she folded it closed and the room returned to normal and she could again focus on Thaddeus, she already understood things she had not before. She already saw with clarity what had to be done. “This is wonderful,” she said, meaning it completely. “Tell me the truth—does anybody know of this book? That you have it and that it is here, with me?”

“No, you need not fear that. Only you and I know. By the look on your face…You—you saw something in it?”

She smiled warmly but did not answer him. “You have done a great thing. My father was right to love you.”

Whatever his doubts, this assertion brushed them away. His old eyes instantly brimmed with moisture. “Thank you,” Thaddeus said. “Thank you for saying so. You can forgive me, then?” Corinn said she did not know what he meant. What had she to forgive? She could only thank him. This caused a tear to drop from one of his eyes, which he wiped off his cheek. He fell into another discourse. A stream of words tumbled from his tongue, a whole explanation of what and why he had done it, how he had regretted and prayed and worked to see things put right.