Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

The chosen vessel was one of the larger fishing rigs, with two square mainsails near the midpoint and a triangular jib that danced before the prow like a kite at play, rippling and shifting so that the simple insignia that named its owner snapped into and out of view. Anyone watching from shore knew the boat well enough. It had plied Acacian waters for more than thirty years. The crewmen working the deck were slightly more numerous than usual, but it was not uncommon for the rigs to take on trainees in the late winter months, before the bonito returned from the Talayan Shoals, followed by mainland ships in need of spring crews. It floated high above the waterline, as was typical of empty hulls waiting to be filled; the time of its embarkation standard to begin the five-day loop necessary during the slack season. But none of these things were actually as they appeared.

The men dressed as fishermen were in fact Marah guards. The cargo was not to be the yellow-tailed fish the vessel normally trolled the winter seas for. Instead it carried the four Akaran children. They hid for the early part of the journey in the foul-smelling hold of the ship, each of them sullen and dead eyed, breathing through their mouths as much as possible. They wore the same look of worry under their skin, like a genetic trait passed to each of them at birth but only lately emerging. Mena kept feeling the impulse to speak, to share, to say something to break the tension. She was stopped every time by the indisputable fact that she could think of nothing reasonable to say.

Once out of the sheltered curve of the northern harbor, the vessel set a barb into the wind and flew hooked to its underbelly. It cut the glass-blue, frosted water, behind it a squall of seabirds, raucous creatures shouting out their demands. The captain of the guard invited the children up onto the deck once they had put the island some distance behind them, saying there were no eyes to spot them anymore. Mena watched the guards from the back of the boat, tasting the salty air on the wall of her throat. She wondered which of the men or few women she could see had killed before. Some among them had a part in putting down the uprising of the Meinish soldiers. The rebels had been defeated within a bloody hour, the last of them chased careening down the stairways and finally captured and slain in the streets of the lower town. Aliver, she knew, had been spirited away from the mкlйe. He did not speak about it, but she could tell he felt shamed by it. Nor was it the only insult to his pride.

She turned away from the guards and watched the wake of the boat. She was not sure what to think of this journey. Thaddeus had explained they were fleeing the island temporarily, for a week or so, no more than a month. They would be safer out of the public view and needed to stay away only long enough for the rebellion to be crushed and for the culprits who killed their father to be punished and for any other schemers on the island to be found out and dealt with. They would sail to the northern tip of Kidnaban and stay in quiet seclusion with the mine’s chairman there. Thaddeus promised that they would return to Acacia as soon as possible. For some reason Mena had not believed him. There was some other truth behind his faзade and his reasoned words, but she could not imagine what it was.

Aliver did not seem to doubt the man’s sincerity, but he had rebelled against the plan with more anger than Mena had ever seen him display before. He had shouted about the coming battle, saying it was his duty to lead the army. He was the king! The responsibility was his, even if he died in the effort! It took all of Thaddeus’s persuasive efforts just to soothe Aliver down to a normal volume. Thaddeus invoked his powers as sitting chancellor with interim responsibilities. He chastised Aliver, claiming the orders came directly from Leodan himself, saying that they were both honor bound to abide by them. In the end, though, it was not persuasion but force that got the prince onto the boat. He was escorted, along with the other children, by disguised Marah guards who made it clear they had to follow the king’s orders as handed to them by the chancellor. It was all Aliver could do to temporarily accept his exile, though he fumed and reddened at the perceived insult of it.

Late on the first day at sea they came in sight of the Cape of Fallon. It was a shoreline of crumbly cliffs, above which lay a landscape of gentle undulations, tall with grasses, splashed here and there with the colors of winter wildflowers. Dariel sat beside Mena near the stern of the ship. The two of them shared a spread of spiced sardines on crackers. Dariel picked at the fish more than he ate them, trying with the point of a knife to separate the soft bones from the flesh, collecting them in a pile that he occasionally scooped up on the blade and flicked overboard. Something about this filled her with love for the boy. The feeling swelled in her with the power of nostalgia for something lost, as if she were not sitting beside him at that very moment, still every bit his sister, as he was every bit her brother. She wondered why she looked at him with emotion that suggested this was no longer so.

Aliver strolled toward them, conspicuously wearing the ancient sword of Edifus, the King’s Trust. It looked too big on him, a strange appendage more cumbersome than useful. He was doing his best to shake off his sulky anger and to regain an appearance of control. Mena wanted to hug him for it, but she knew that would not please him. “We are coming up on the mines,” he said, gesturing with a nod of his head. “They are worked by criminals, as punishment. There is an even bigger one on Kidnaban and a chain of them in Senival.”

Mena craned her head to see over the railing. As they rounded a promontory, the low sun cast the landscape in enough shadow and highlight that it took her a moment to configure the scene. The great shadows in the land were actually a series of enormous pits. They were open to the sky, how deep she could not guess as she could only see the exposed far wall, which was crisscrossed with cuts and lines. Beacons flared up here and there, large fires encased in glass that fractured and amplified the light, sending bright shards into the sky. By the look of them, the work would not end with the dying day. She wondered how it was possible that there were so many criminals, so many foolish people who would steal from or harm others. Perhaps when she was of age she would do something about it. She would travel in her father’s name and demand that they do better with the opportunities offered them and not waste the long peace in petty actions.

They spent that night in the shelter between Kidnaban and the mainland. The following afternoon the vessel nudged into the harbor of Crall on Kidnaban’s northern coast. That evening, in the modest comfort of the chairman’s compound on the hill looking down on the town, they met Crenshal Vadal. He was not much to look at. Below his lower lip his face ended quite abruptly. It slid back toward his neck in a sheer diagonal. He spoke with a rigid formality, but at the same time he seemed to be wishing himself someplace else entirely, as if his entire body wanted to slide backward and slip around a corner. She noticed that some minutes passed before the man expressed sorrow for Leodan’s fate, and she suspected that one of his aides had reminded him to do this with a facial gesture.

As they ate dinner, Crenshal gave them more specifics of their fate. They were, quite simply, to seclude themselves in a portion of the chairman’s compound. That was all. They were there to wait. They would receive no visitors, because nobody was to know where they were. Thaddeus would send regular messages as to any changes or developments. They would send or receive no other correspondence. They would have to manage without luxuries, fine food, or entertainments, without any extravagances that might attract attention. Nor would it be wise for them to roam the lower town. It would be a simple existence, far from the aged opulence of Acacia. All Crenshal could offer were the somewhat drafty rooms of a facility meant to house the administrative and managerial staff of the mines, simple meals, and the pleasure of his company. He said this last in jest but with such incomplete vigor that it fell flat.

Aliver added that he wished to be kept apprised of all developments. His tone was haughty, as if he spoke from a position of authority different from his siblings. Mena glanced around, wondering if the others noticed his poorly disguised uncertainty. He feared that he was being shuttled to outside the flow of events and kept out of decision making. He was in a position of limbo: more than the prince he had been a few weeks ago but certainly not the king he hoped to become. To Mena’s eyes he had yet to come to terms with his situation.

He did lighten his tone when he asked, “Have you horses we can borrow? We should get out and explore the island. It will do us all good to get some air in our lungs.”

Dariel was well into an enthusiastic endorsement of this suggestion when the chairman broke in. “I’m afraid you cannot tour the island. It’s…well, it is your safety that matters most, Prince. Pleasures like riding will have to be forsaken for the time being. Surely the chancellor explained all of this to you.”

“And what of the mines?” Aliver asked. “I’d like to inspect them. We do not need to make a show of it or-”

“Inspect them?” Crenshal had apparently never heard these two words before. “But…young prince, this is also impossible. The mines are teeming with degenerates. They hold nothing of interest for you anyway. We will find entertainments for you within the compound. You will not be bored, young ones. I promise you that.”

Over the next few days, however, this proved quite false. They saw little of the chairman. He ate with them each evening, but other than that he was absent all day and left the children with few opportunities for distraction. The officials and managers usually housed in the compound had been relocated, leaving the simple halls and rooms echoingly empty. Mena had never even seen any of these phantom people, though in her room she found telltale signs that someone had left the place hastily: a half-empty bottle of scented oil by the basin, a single sock stuffed under her bedding, a toenail on the floor beside the dresser.

Board games helped them through the first few afternoons. Books from the former chairman’s collection-Crenshal himself had no interest in literature-provided some diversion the third day, when Dariel persuaded Aliver to read aloud to the group from a collection of epic poems. The boy was entranced, but Mena could not help but think of her father. Corinn might have experienced something similar. She rose abruptly and stalked away, giving no explanation. Corinn had barely said anything since leaving Acacia. When she did, she spoke in flat, matter-of-fact tones, as if she acknowledged nothing unusual in their circumstances.

The closest they came to having a meaningful exchange was on the third afternoon. Corinn entered the common room they passed most of the day in and glanced around with heavy-lidded eyes. Mena was surprised when Corinn drifted over toward her, plopped down on the couch near her, and exhaled a bored breath.

“Did you hear? One of the soldiers said that two men had been found trying to leave the village. He said they were ‘trussed for it’ and the other laughed and said it served them right. What do you think that means?”

“I am sure it means they were punished,” Mena said.

“Of course it means that!” Corinn snapped. “You always say the most obvious things. Punished how? That’s what I was asking.”

“I don’t say the most obvious things,” Mena said, fearful that this unexpected interaction was about to turn sour. If anyone said the most obvious things it was Corinn herself.

Corinn made a noise low in her throat, a sort of moaning protest. “It is so strange here, Mena. Nothing is as it should be. I cannot stand the way the people look here. They look like-like they’re dumb, like they have the brains of animals instead of people. I so want to go home. I hate this limbo. I have too much to do. Important things.”

“Like what?” Mena asked, trying to cast her voice in a way that would not offend.

Somehow she managed to anyway. Corinn looked askance at her. “You would not understand.”

On the fourth day, when a servant of the chairman brought them dice to play rats running, Mena truly gave up the pretense of finding diversion inside the compound’s bare walls. She counted the days just as precisely as Aliver, both of them waiting for the next bit of news from Thaddeus, hoping he would call them home. When the first terse, cryptic dispatch from the chancellor arrived, however, it brought them no change whatsoever. The situation was still unstable, he wrote. They should remain where they were. He promised them that he would alert them to any change, but while he said that, he provided them not a single indication of what had transpired since they left. Not one piece of news about the war. No indication of whether the situation was better or worse than before.

Mena noticed a pall in the sky one afternoon, and feared that her foreboding had somehow reached into the world in physical form. There were shadows in the air, cloudlike formations that rippled and flowed on low currents of air. Seeing them through the small window in her room, she realized they had always been there. She just had not stopped to study them before. The sky was not simply overcast, as she had assumed. Beyond the shifting darkness was a screen of light blue, clear all the way to the heavens. How strange, she thought. On this first glimpse she could not help but look away, those shapes in the sky too much like harbingers of ill, too much like swirls and currents that might materialize as something more ominous if she stared too long.

On waking in the morning she went to the window before doing anything else. The dark vapors were still there, clear and obvious now that she had learned to see them. They even grew heavier toward the evening. The longer she watched it, the more aware she became of the clouds’ presence in myriad ways around her. Mostly they shifted with currents she could not feel, but at still moments particles of the stuff fell all around her, settling on flat spaces and collecting on the rough contours of the walls. It was a form of dust, so light that it moved propelled by breaths of air. She felt the touch of tiny crystals on her cheeks and in her eyelids and collecting on her brow. She could taste it in her lungs, a grit that she inhaled with each breath. It was everywhere. It amazed her that it took her so long to notice it.

Mena asked the servant who changed the bed linen if she had noticed it. The girl did not seem at all happy with being spoken to. She almost backed out of the room. “Princess, what you see is dust rising from the mines. It just comes from the work, is all.”

Mena asked if the mines were near, and the young woman nodded. Just beyond the hills above the compound, she explained. Where were all the workers, then? Mena asked. Why had she not seen any signs that the mines even existed?

“You have seen a sign. You read it in the air. But for you it need not be any more real than that. The workers? I don’t know, lady. Perhaps there are no workers. It’s not for me to say.”

The young woman used the pause as Mena considered this to slip out of the room. Annoying behavior. A servant should not leave once she had been engaged in conversation. On the other hand, the woman’s boldness in sneaking away might have been the thing that inspired Mena’s own actions a few hours later.

She left the compound well after dark, cloaked in an overcoat she had found in her closet. She avoided the guard posted outside her door by squeezing out her window, dropping down onto the patio there, and then opening the gate to freedom. She took no light, but the moon was high and, though nervous and alive to even the slightest sound, she had little difficulty following the bone-white paths away from the compound.

There was a second guard to get past just up the pathway a little. He was a dense form in the darkness. She sensed the details of his body, the position of his head, and probable direction of his gaze. There was even a musty scent on a gust of air blowing toward her-his odor. She slipped off the path when she dared proceed on it no farther. She walked, crouched low through grasses, feeling with her hands and feet and finding a crease in the landscape that took her past the soldier.

She kept hearing sounds that set her heart beating faster: the rasp of her coat; the bonelike snap of the shoots of grass beneath her feet; the way the press of her weight caused grains of sand to shift and protest; the explosion of sound as a rodent, startled by her proximity, fled. She never stopped expecting the man to call out to her. She had heard before that it was difficult to travel silently at night and that Marah guards were trained to hear any concealed irregularity in night sounds. Now she wondered who had said it. For all of her rapid breathing, despite the violence the tiniest of sounds did to her ears, even though her calves ached from the effort of the strange squatting posture of her stealth-in truth her escape did not really feel that difficult. She kept moving and was soon beyond him and rising back up toward the main path. Her feet and hands and fingers and muscles seemed to know what to do of their own accord. She was half inclined to sit down and ponder on this, but she had yet to reach the goal she had set out for.

A series of staircases climbed away from the compound. It had been sunk into the hillside so that in her crouched position she could proceed without fear of being spotted. The stairs ended at a junction with a stone road. She cut straight across it and climbed up the steep bank on the other side, clawing handfuls of the long grass.

All told, the climb took only a few minutes, but still, what relief to feel the angle of the slope lessen and to see that there was nothing above her. She breathed heavily the last few steps, taking them slowly, as one does when a goal is reached. She stretched to full height, which helped her see over the rise to the landscape beyond. She knew what was supposed to be there, the very thing that she had been curious about, the reason-if there was one-for this night journey. And yet she was not ready for what she saw.

Gone was the quiet night on the other side of the ridge behind her. The moon was nowhere to be seen, nor the clear sky she had just traveled under. Instead the earth seemed contained beneath a flowing, dust-laden billowing, a cloudlike seething of motion. Beneath this sprawled a great pit, many mouthed and enormous. It took up the entirety of the view before her, a crater of caved desolation like nothing she had seen or imagined before, alive with a throbbing, cacophonous, angry clamor.

She was looking over the northern rim of the mines of Kidnaban. The sight of them struck her with a type of horror that she had forgotten existed, the same fear she had felt when a silly maid had told her tales of a demon race of people who lived inside a steaming mountain, feeding the fires within it with naughty children snatched from their beds. As in her imaginings, hundreds of different fires illumed the place. Sheets of curved glass set around cauldrons of flaming oil shot beams up into the sky. By the light of these she again made out the confusion of crisscrossing diagonal lines that she had seen at the Cape of Fallon. But she was so much nearer now. The lines shifted as she stared, blurred by a barely perceptible form of movement. She thought this was an effect of the light. It took her a moment to understand it was something more than that.

The lines were stairways and ledges, wide tracks for machinery, ramps and ladder systems stories upon stories tall. The objects in motion were not tricks of the light. They were people. Hundreds of them. So small that they could not be perceived as individuals but took form only because of their collective movement, as a line of ants from a distance is one being. Maybe they numbered more than hundreds. Thousands was more likely. Tens of thousands. And even this might only be a small portion of the number. She had no idea how extensive the mines were, how much was hidden from view.

She inched over the lip and then slid down the other side to a solid ridge of rock. She had to climb forward on her belly to look over this. As her head pushed out beyond the edge she froze, surprised to find that just below her, some twenty or thirty feet, ran an avenue cut from the stone. It thronged with workers. They carried objects on their shoulders, sacks on their backs, their skin and clothing all the same gray-black of the mine, tainted by the reddish light and etched in shadow.

Off to the south stood a tower, beyond it some distance another. It sat squat and thick, hooded with a roof that looked somewhat like a mushroom, emblazoned with the gilded insignia of the Akaran bloodline. It was her family’s symbol, the Tree of Akaran, the silhouette of an acacia against a yellow sunburst. It was her symbol. It was a shape she had doodled a thousand times onto tabletops and napkins.

Beneath the roof were balconies peopled by moving figures. Looking to the south along the lip of the mine she saw another watchtower and beyond, all around the rim of the pit-many more watchtowers. The figures were lookouts, guards. Many of them were archers. She could just make out the way they stood with their bows hanging easy in their grip, each with an arrow ready to be drawn. It should not have been a surprise. Criminals must be guarded. But there were so many. Towers were everywhere in the distance, the far ones just bulbous shapes on the horizon. The tiny workers beneath them had no chance of escape, no option but to bend to what promised to be unending labor.

Her eyes, losing the will to scan the largeness of it, drifted of their own accord and settled on the lines of moving forms just below her. There was something unsettling about the sight of them. They looked exhausted. They walked with heads down turned. Not one talked to another. Not one lifted his or her eyes to the sky. The longer she stared, the more she believed she could see individual features and attributes, the shapes of faces and the lay of collarbones thinly draped with flesh. It was because of this growing intimacy that she realized the most ghastly thing was not the staggering numbers of them nor their dejected faзades nor their smallness compared to the project that bound them. There was another reason the line looked so irregular to her eyes. There were children among the laborers. Every third or fourth person she saw was a child no older than herself, some no taller than Dariel. This was too much to bear.

Back in the fresh night air, Mena took a few steps down toward the compound. She lowered herself to her backside. She could not go back to the compound with any sign of what she had just witnessed written on her face. She was not supposed to have seen it. None of them were. Clearly, the world was not as she had been led to believe. She thought of her father in his melancholy moments. Was this why? This was an Acacian mine. It was her father’s mine. It was her family’s. Those people, those children…they worked for her. There were beings who snatched the young from their beds and sent them to fuel the world’s fires. They worked in her name. She wondered if that errant nurse years before had known this. Was that why she felt the right to frighten her, to tease her, and to corrupt her dreams?

She returned to the compound just in time. She had barely stepped into her room and thrown off her overcoat before a hard knock broke the predawn silence. They were to be moved, a voice she did not recognize said, speaking through the door. It was most urgent that she be moved. “Princess, your safety depends on it.”

Why did she not recognize the voice? It was not any of the Marah that had escorted them nor a servant nor anyone she recalled from Crenshal’s staff. And yet she was quite certain that it spoke honestly. Her safety did depend on it. She scooped up her overcoat and glanced around the room, wondering if she needed to make arrangements to bring her things. She thought she would ask whomever it was that summoned her, but when she opened the door she felt strangely prepared to step through it as she was, still flushed from having been outside, coat over her arm, ready. Simply ready.

She did not know that by stepping through that door she was placing one portion of her life behind her forever. She did not know that for years to come she would not lay eyes on her brothers or sister or anybody she had known up until that point. She could not have imagined that crossing that threshold was akin to stepping into obscurity, vanishing from the map, moving out of her skin, away from her home and country and name, into another life entirely.

End of Book One