Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Mena would never again be able to look at the eight-sided dice of the children’s game called rats running without feeling sick to her stomach. It was this game that she and her younger brother had been engaged in at the moment Leodan was attacked. Dariel had feared that their father might not honor his promise to entertain them after the dinner, and the princess had agreed to sit near the door with him so that they could pounce on the king as soon as he was free. They tipped the dice from their palms, watching time and again as the green glass octahedrons rolled to stillness, nestled into their bench’s silk contours. Mena did not particularly care for the game, nor see the point in being so involved with a simple act of chance, but she did enjoy the feel of the dice bouncing around within her loosely clasped fist. She often shook the dice long enough that Dariel grew impatient with her.

It happened no more than a few moments after the great doors had been closed. Mena had half registered the muffled sound of commotion inside the hall, but she jolted when the doors burst open again in one great thrust. They swung fully around and banged hard against the stone wall. Mena’s hand, which had been about to toss the dice, jerked so that she spilled them on the floor. For a moment she watched one of them roll across the carpet, feeling embarrassed and ready to spring up and retrieve it. But then she saw the huddle of men press through the door. They were close together, bent around a burden, their legs shuffling and awkward as they tried to speed along, one shouting to another and all in confusion. A voice rose above them yelling to make way for the king, make way for the stricken king! Mena had not yet fully registered the words when she realized that the burden they carried was a man. Her father…

The king’s skin had drained of color, the rich hue gone pale as that of a powdered corpse. His trembling lips were pursed, eyes naked with fear, crown askew. A white froth of spittle clung to his beard. There beneath all of the unrecognizable distortions was the person she loved foremost in the world, stripped bare of everything that was strong and fatherly and wise. She pulled Dariel to her and covered his eyes. With him hugged tight against her she turned away, as if through the movement she might manage to shake loose what she had just witnessed.

Later that night in Dariel’s room she sat on his bed with her arms cradling the sobbing boy. She repeated many times that it was all right. Father would be all right. He would be, of course. It was just a pinprick, they said. Did he really think a pinprick could harm the king of Acacia? “Come now,” she said, “don’t be silly. Father will find you in the morning and laugh at the puffy eyes you get when you cry before sleeping.”

Once Dariel’s breathing fell into the steady rhythm of sleep she untangled herself from him. She set her back against the wall and watched the slow rise and fall of the boy’s chest. She studied the slack features of his face. She loved him so, so much. This realization brought tears to her eyes for the first time that evening. He could not truly understand, could he? She actually knew little of what had happened or whether or not her father was in mortal danger, but the details did not seem to matter. Her father’s face had explained things completely. No matter what happened tomorrow or the next day the look of fear she had witnessed was irradicable. She would always see it beneath the surface of his presence. It felt as if she had caught him in some lewd act, something degrading enough that she could never step back into the innocence of moments before. The ease between them would never be the same.

She crawled out of bed and paced the large room for a while, looking at the stones of the floor, unsure what to do, where to go, if there even was anything to do or anyplace to go. She knew nobody would tell her anything tonight. She considered sneaking out of the room and into her father’s quarters, but she would certainly be stopped, especially in the dead of night and after such events. She would not be able to get anywhere near him until the morning, and perhaps not even then.

Eventually, she strode across the room and climbed into the lower branches of the acacia tree that occupied one corner of the room. It was a strange thing to find inside a palace. It had been a birthday present from Leodan to Dariel the winter before. The king had come up with the idea himself, spoke of it to craftsmen and woodworkers, and had the project worked on secretly while he and the children sailed to Alecia for a short stay. On returning, all the children entered Dariel’s room to find that the bulk of an old, gnarled acacia tree had been salvaged after its slow death and embedded in the stone floor. Its branches twisted above and in places seemed to merge into the walls and provide them support. It had been sanded down and the thorns blunted so that just the knobbed remnants of them remained. The wood was stained a reddish brown with oil infused with sandalwood. It was adorned with ribbons and studded with green leaves made from silk, so that the tree might appear to live forever. Platforms were set into the branches with ropes, ladders, and swings to move between them. All this simply to surprise a boy with a grand structure for him to climb and play upon. It was an unheard-of idea, a strange extravagance in a culture that generally ignored children until they were old enough to emerge as adults. It had gotten more than a few tongues wagging about the king’s sanity.

From the bowed beam of a platform she looked back across the room. Low-burning wall lamps cast the room in orange light. Dariel slept on undisturbed, beside him a tray of food and tea brought by the maids. They had bustled around them when they first returned, anxious eyed and nervous. They asked over and over as to their needs, but they could not answer the only question either child actually deemed important. None of them would whisper a word about the state of the king. All would be better in the morning, they said. Let the king and his people do what they must and all would be better in the morning. If they had not repeated this so often, Mena might have believed them. Instead, she knew that nothing was as they said. The maids had always whispered about the king. Even within her hearing they had made innuendos about his desires or motives or actions. Usually they had been wrong, but this was different. They were scared. They were confused. And they were lying.

“But what do they matter?” Mena asked the room. They were small-minded women that treated the younger children like they were…well, like they were children. Mena had always known that she was older than her years. She understood things they did not. This was something she shared in common with her father. She knew that he was far from weak-minded. He was sane and kind and intelligent in a way few others ever managed, and he knew that she was no child to be spoken down to. Sometimes-when they were alone and the mood was upon him-he spoke to her as if she were an adult. She knew this to be something unusual between them, an understanding that they had and that they gave into only in private.

Thus he had spoken plainly, meditatively, when he sat in this very tree with her and declared that he did not care if the nobles or the servants or anybody else thought him mad. When had this been? Early in last spring? In the first weeks of summer? He had said that in truth the world itself was mad. It was full of spite, of malice and greed and duplicity. These things were the components of the world just as the letters in her notebooks were the keys that unlocked the language they spoke. It had taken him some time to learn this, but he knew it to be true now.

“When I was young,” he had said, leaning against the branch below her, running his hands across the smooth grain of the wood, “I thought I could change the world. I believed that when I became king I would write decrees and laws to take away the people’s suffering. I did not think I could make a perfect world. Not exactly. But I would make one as close to perfect as a human can imagine.”

She asked him if he had done that. Her father looked up at her with a pained expression of pity and love. It took him a few moments to answer. He thanked her for asking, for the implication that she might think he was as great a man as that and for suggesting that her life had thus far been blessed enough that she still imagined such things possible. But, no, he had not achieved any of the dreams he had had as a boy. He could not pinpoint why or how, but each of his grand notions had evaporated right before his eyes. He felt, thinking back, that the words with which he described such things were no more lasting than the vapor that escapes with one’s breath on a winter day. He spoke, but his words had no lasting substance. They faded almost from the moment they left his mouth. Thus he had sat at council and been met by polite patient faces. He had proposed reforms even in the great chamber at Alecia to the governors, who all pledged fealty to him. His words were heard, the truth of them acknowledged, his wisdom praised. He would leave these meetings feeling the world was about to change, and yet year after year passed and the world remained as it had been, no better a place, unaffected by any of his heart’s desires. Nobody ever denied him, but nothing ever happened either. He realized then how truly powerless he was. Between him and the workings of the world were thousands of other hands. Each of them feigned loyalty to him, yet none of them did his bidding. Perhaps, he admitted, that was why he had lowered his ambitions and found meaning in the love of a woman and in the wonder of the children they produced.

“Mena, my wise daughter, I am not so strong a man as you may think.” He reached up and tugged on her chin. “I could not change the world. I could not stop others from committing crimes-terrible crimes-in my name. I could not stop your mother from leaving us when illness took her. But I love my children. So you are my work now, all four of you. I thought, ‘Why not build within my house the world as I would have it?’ If I can raise you to adulthood in bliss unusual to the world, I will have accomplished something. You will see what foulness men do to one another eventually, but before then, why not know joy? You want to be a child for whom dreams come true, don’t you?”

Dariel had come into the room then. Her father had called out to him and the brief intimacy between them was suspended until chance allowed for it again. Remembering this now made her tears flow again. She had not answered him. She had not asked just what these horrors of the world were. She had never seen them and knew only of the old struggles written of in the triumphant eloquence of her history books. But she wished she had answered him. She did want-very badly-to be a child for whom dreams come true.

She was sure she would not be able to sleep, but at some point she drifted off, still perched high in the tree, leaning back against wood sculpted to comfort. She dreamed of something that even as she experienced it she thought of as a memory, although she would not later be sure whether it was a recollection of an earlier event or of an earlier dream. She and a girl whose name she did not recall crawled over the rocks of the northern shoreline and out onto the stone pier that jutted into the sea. The girl carried a fishing net with the childish notion that they would bring in the evening’s dinner. They knew they should not be down there on the jagged rocks, with the sea heaving below them, billowing with fronds of seaweed, crawling with blue-shelled crabs, and bristling with mussels. But all would be right if they brought home a living treasure in their net.

As they neared the end of the pier Mena saw a strange commotion in the water. Just below the surface swam a teeming school of fish. They moved past in a great mass, so many that she could neither see the beginning of the school nor where it might end. They were side by side and stacked many deep, each fish perhaps two or three feet long. The upper ones were so near that sometimes their tails sliced through the air. She could see between them far down into the depths. She had not known the sea was so deep here, but it was fathomless and teeming with fish.

The princess called for the net from the other girl, grasped it, and bent in preparation to cast it. The girl whispered that they should not catch these fish. “They journey to the sea god,” she said. “It would curse us to eat of them.” Mena did not care. What sea god, anyway? Nonsense. She splashed the net down into the water, bracing herself for the impact of writhing life that she expected to fill it. A moment later she pulled up the net, empty. The fish swam on, teeming just as before, but not one of them had entered the trap. She swung the net in from another angle, pulled it up, dripping: nothing. No matter how she moved her net below the surface-side to side, thrusting down deep into the water, jerking it up-she could not catch even a single fish. They just hurtled by, so close that she could see the minute adjustments of their fins and the flexion of their large scales as they slipped over one another. She watched their eyes roll up to study her in passing, sorrow in them. Something about those eyes drew her. She set the net aside and tumbled forward into the water, sure that this way, at least, she would manage to touch the fish, sure that they wanted her to do so. If they went at the call of some sea god, they did not do so willingly. She could help. This seemed a very important thing as she punched through the water and plunged downward…

Mena started awake. Her arms jerked out, and she almost fell from the tree. For a few moments the world hung around her without context. She felt the dream fade and knew that there was something more important to remember, but it was only through staring and waiting that the evening’s events came back to her. Looking up through a narrow, high window she saw the sky had brightened with the coming dawn. Thin clouds tiled the sky with touches of salmon pink. It was a new day, she thought. How much of yesterday’s damage will now be mended? How much would be shown in the bright light of morning as nothing more than tricks of shadows and nighttime gloom?

She had started to climb down when the door opened. Corinn entered, moving hesitantly, looking around the room as if she did not know it well. She stared at Dariel’s sleeping form. One of her hands rose up and touched her lips. She whispered something, like a superstitious peasant on witnessing a violent act of nature. In her stillness she became an island surrounded by motion. Servants stepped in behind her and fanned out to prepare the room for the day, throwing back the curtains and snuffing out the lamps, taking away the tray of uneaten food and replacing it with another laden with fruit and juices.

Corinn roused when she saw Mena walking toward her. Her face was blotched and puffy, her lips pouting and soft. “He will not die,” she said. “He told me he wouldn’t. He said that he would never leave me. He promised Mother he wouldn’t, not until he had met all my children and they knew him so…not until they knew him and had heard from him all about Mother. He said he would tell us about Mother. About how she had been when she was young and they were first married…”

“You spoke to him?”

Corinn’s hand danced in an explanatory way. “Not since it happened. I mean before he promised me. I mean before all of this-”

Sensing that she might carry on in such manner, Mena interrupted. “But what of him now? Tell me what you know. How is he?”

“What do you want to know?” Corinn’s eyes would not settle but bounced nervously around the room. “Father was stabbed. Some assassin from the Mein…They claim the blade was poisoned, but I don’t believe it. ‘What poison?’ I asked, but no one could answer. They don’t know anything. No one would tell me the truth. And they wouldn’t let me in to see him. Even Thaddeus wouldn’t see me! They are all acting mad. They have called Aliver to council, as if father was gone already. But he’s not. I’m sure he’s not!”

She is more frightened than I, Mena thought. She took one of Corinn’s hands in both of hers and squeezed it. The touch seemed to comfort Corinn, enough so that her voice dropped and words slowed, her eyes fixed for a moment on her sister’s shoulder, closer to meeting her eyes than they had so far.

“Mena, it was horrible. I saw it happen. I saw the man before he revealed himself. I watched him move through the crowd. I thought him handsome. I thought, ‘That’s Gurnal, isn’t it? He looks younger than I remember. How strange I never noticed that he was comely before.’ And then I saw him pull his knife. What was he doing with a knife at a banquet? If I had yelled at that first moment…I didn’t realize…I don’t understand anything.”

Mena squeezed again, pulling her closer. Instinctually, she knew it might be better not to say anything in response to such a declaration, but something in her felt that the roles each occupied were no longer as they had been. She thought of the dream again and in a burst of revelation realized that the girl with her on the rocks had not been a stranger at all. It had been Corinn, some different version of Corinn. How could that have been? She had been there with her sister and yet thought her some other person entirely. It did not make sense, but the sleeping mind rarely did. She pushed the dreamworld away. Right now, she realized, it fell to her to comfort her older sister. The problem was that she could not comfort her with lies, and it took her some hushed, fidgeting moments to find the right tone to proceed. “We will be all right,” she said. “If Father-”

“Stop it!” Corinn snapped. Her eyes fixed on her, wide and fierce. “Father will not die. Stop wishing he would! Don’t even say that he might!”

Mena was aghast. She had started all wrong. “I-I did not say that. I don’t wish that. It’s all so frightening. That’s what-what…”

For a moment it seemed Corinn might strike her, but instead she stepped forward and pulled her younger sister into her arms. There Mena experienced the first inkling of comfort since the banquet. It was a sad thing, really, but there was something soothing in the awareness that the two of them felt at least the same fear and sorrow with a shared clarity reflected in no other aspect of their relationship.