Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

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.

“Priestess!” a voice called from the top of the temple steps. “Come, come, you dally too much.” It was Vandi, the priest chiefly responsible for getting her accoutred for the ceremony. He liked to look fierce, but in truth he was soft on her, like an uncle who dotes on a niece he knows he only has limited authority over. He held her underrobe out as if she were near enough to step into it.

The young woman took the stone steps two or three at a time. They were cut shallow so that one approached the temple with slow, measured, and reverent steps. But this applied to the worshippers, not to the one being worshipped. “Calm yourself, Vandi,” she said. “Remember who serves whom here.”

Vandi, like most Vumuans, was short of stature, with night-black hair, greenish eyes, and a tight pucker of a mouth. As he was a priest and often indoors, his skin did not quite match the villagers’ coppery complexions, but he was still remarkable to behold. “We all serve the goddess,” he quipped.

She slipped inside the garment offered her and let herself be bustled deeper into the temple. In the deep, incense-pungent seclusion of her chambers, attendants set about dressing her. They draped her in the various, feathered layers of her office, securing each with quick fingers. Others painted her face and fit the bird’s beak mask over her mouth, making sure that she could breathe. Perfumers hovered around them all, taking sips from precious gourds and exhaling the scented water in a fine spray it took them years to master the delivery of. They slipped talons onto her fingers, tugged them into place, and fastened them with wraps of leather around her hand and up her wrist. Each hand bore three of these, two partnered fingers and a thumb supporting the weight of the curving crescents. They were fearsome relics of an actual sea eagle, a creature so large it must have approached the goddess in grandeur.

Through it all the young woman stood still, her arms raised out to either side, impassive as they worked. She remembered that her long-ago father had sometimes stood in a similar posture as he was dressed. Perhaps, she thought, she had not come so far from her origins as she believed. Before she became the priestess, she had answered to the name Mena. Now she was Maeben. Not so different. She sometimes remembered her family with a clarity that stunned her, but most of the time she saw them as still images that resided within frames, like portraits hung on the wall of her mind. She even saw herself this way. Princess Mena, dressed in too much clothing, a jeweled brooch at her neck, and royal pins in her hair. She recalled two of her siblings well, but again her memory kept them frozen in differing postures: earnest Aliver, so concerned over his place in the world, and good-hearted Dariel, innocent and eager to please. Corinn she could not picture entirely. This troubled her. She should have known her sister best of all, but in fact she was the hardest to pin to an identifiable character. None of it mattered, though. Whether she liked it or not, that existence was behind her. Her life was now about something else entirely.

One morning years ago she woke from sleep, knowing before she opened her eyes that she was afloat on a tiny, bucking skiff. She looked up at the boundless white-blue sky. If she lifted her head, she would see all around her the same heaving whitecaps of the open ocean that she had scanned for days already, and for the first time this filled her more with weariness than with fear. She sat up. Her Talayan guardian was a taciturn man. He conspicuously avoided looking at her, keeping his dark eyes turned toward the far horizon or up at the billowing sail or off to either side, taking in the shape of the swells.

She felt no inhibition about staring at him candidly, studying his lean face, watching how skillfully he functioned even with two fingers missing from his left hand. He used it without hesitation but with strange hooked motions that trapped her eyes and would not let them move on. She had rarely seen any sort of bodily deformity on Acacia. Never among the servants, certainly, and visiting dignitaries would have hidden any such wound. He did not seem as large a man as she had first thought, but maybe she was just losing perspective, he being the only figure in view inside a small boat and against the backdrop of the ocean’s vastness. Large or not, he was a soldier. He wore his short sword at his waist. The hilt of his long sword was just visible from where it jutted out of a compartment in the deck. From its placement it almost seemed that he had tried to hide it.

For the hundredth time she felt compelled to shake her head at the absurdity of it all. She had believed his claim that this plan was all of her father’s devising, but that did not make it seem any more sensible. It was this man’s face that she had first beheld when she opened the door to her room on Kidnaban. Him that she had chosen to trust as they mounted two ponies and made off on a coastal road. In the woods he had shorn her hair with goat shears. He had her put on rough clothes and explained that their story-should they need one-was that she was a boy indentured to him to pay a familial debt. As it turned out, nobody asked about her anyway.

They sailed from port to port, booking passage where and when they could, and it was not until they reached Bocoum that the man opted to purchase the small vessel they now sailed in. He haggled for it for nearly an hour, as she watched it all, mystified. She asked him several times why they were traveling this way, but he ever directed her only to read the letter he had presented to her. In it, written in Thaddeus’s hand, was an all-too-brief explanation. The best way for her to slip into hiding was to do so without fanfare, drawing no unwanted attention, requesting no luxuries. Nobody would dream that the Akaran children would travel with only a single protector; thus they could hide in plain sight and proceed unmolested. It was imperative that they leave no signs somebody could later piece together and follow. This, she reasoned, was why they could no longer appear to have the kingdom’s finances to draw upon. The pretense, to say the least, was becoming tiresome.

“Where are you taking me?” Mena asked.

The guardian craned his neck around and took in the sea behind them for a moment. Mena noticed he did this often, every minute or so, as if it were a compulsion that his reserved manner could not subdue. “I am doing as ordered,” he said.

“I know that. But where have you been ordered to take me?”

“To the Vumu Archipelago. Just as I told you yesterday and the day before, Princess.”

“Why?”

“I do not know. I am just doing as ordered.”

“Will you take me home instead?”

His eyes touched on her for a moment, an emotion in them that she could not read. Then he looked back out over the sea again. “I cannot. Even if I wanted to…I cannot. I understand that you are scared, but all that I can do to help you I am doing.”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“A few more days. It depends on the wind, the currents.” He motioned with his hand as if he distrusted these things, was not even quite sure where they were located.

Mena stared at him, unimpressed. “Anyway, I did not say that I was scared. You are the one who is scared. Why do you keep peering about? What are you looking at?”

He scowled at her and then set his eyes forward as if he would not answer. But something in his respect for her family-however it might have been altered by recent events-chastened him. “There is a boat,” he finally said, “behind us. And closing.”

And so there was. It was tiny as yet. She would have passed her eyes across it, thinking it just the whitecaps on some wave. It surged into and out of view as it, and they, rose and fell. At first she did not believe that it was following them. How could he tell that for certain on such a heaving expanse? But an hour later she thought perhaps it was and maybe it was somewhat nearer already. Each time it emerged from a trough and cut through the peak of a wave it seemed to have closed distance. Mena asked the Talayan if they should wait for it. Perhaps it had been sent from Acacia to find them. Maybe they could turn back now. The guardian did not answer, neither did he alter their course or lower the sail. It did not much matter, though. The other boat was faster. It had longer lines and a wider billow of sail. It gained on them steadily, propelled by a gathering storm. Or perhaps it dragged the storm behind it. It was hard to say which directed the other.

Gusts of wind ripped talons across the water and buffeted the boat like a toy. The waves rose to increasing heights. By late in the afternoon the other boat had pulled abreast of them and cut the water at the same rate, separated by a hundred yards and then less, then still less. A lone man crewed the vessel. Mena had scarcely picked him out and was straining to observe details about him-still hoping to find him a messenger from her father-when he rose to his feet. He stood a moment, finding his equilibrium. He held what looked like a pole in his hand. The guardian must have seen this, too. He hissed a curse under his breath. He motioned for Mena to come near him, saying something she could not understand. She thought he wanted her to take hold of the tiller he held clenched under his armpit. Or perhaps the rope his hands fumbled and yanked at. Either way, the alarm in his voice and gestures froze her. She did neither. They climbed the face of a wave and launched screaming onto its back, their sail so filled with angry air, Mena feared they might lift out of the water and fly away like a kite untethered.

For a moment they were alone in a valley. Then they were two again. The other vessel came sliding down the back of a wave toward them, the prow hissing as it cut the slick back of the water. The pursuer flung the pole-now obviously a spear-with a force that almost toppled him forward out of the boat. It flew toward and pierced the center of the guardian’s breast as if it belonged in no other portion of the world. He released the tiller and grasped the spear shaft. He did not try to pull it out, but he did seem to want to support the weight of it. He coughed up a gush of blood, and then, reaching behind with one hand, he pulled himself backward, over the lip of the gunwale. He plopped into the water and was gone.

The boat swung around, directionless, pitching side to side. It leaned over and slurped in a gush of the sea and then righted and spun again. Mena had to throw herself to the deck to avoid being hit by the yardarm. The sailcloth thrashed about like a frantic animal, but it did not catch the air the way it had a moment ago. Mena had no idea what to do with it. She stared up at the snarling life in the fabric, paralyzed. Then she felt something she had not in days-the impact of the boat against something solid. This snapped her upright.

The other boat was beside hers, gunwale to gunwale, each smacking against the other as if each wished a fight. The attacking sailor leaped from his boat and landed sure-footed inside hers. He took her in with a quick glance, but came no nearer. He held a rope, with which he bound the vessels together, with enough slack between them that they could float apart. He was out of sight for a moment, then rose back into view, fumbling in the guardian’s shoulder bag. What did he want? What did he want with her? What would he do to her? She could not possibly imagine, but the specifics hardly mattered. Whatever the answer was, it would be a horror. At first she did not realize that her hands had found a weapon, and yet they had. She clenched her guardian’s long sword in both her hands. She tugged at it and just managed to pull it from its stowed place. But it was too heavy to actually lift. She could not even get it unsheathed, though the scabbard point dragged a jagged line across the boards. She had never felt so powerless.

How strange, then, that the man turned his back to her. He tugged at the rope for some time, and then leaped from the gunwale back into his boat. The two crafts crashed together again. The man reached out a quick hand and tugged loose the knot that attached his boat to hers. He seemed to have no interest in her whatsoever.

“What are you doing?” Mena shouted.

The soldier paused and looked at her, holding the two boats together with a single wrap around the cleat beside his foot. He clearly had wished to avoid speaking to her, but, once questioned, he could not fail to answer. “I wish you no harm, Princess,” he said, shouting back to be heard over the wind and water. “What happened here was between this man and myself. I have no quarrel with you.”

“You know who I am?”

The man nodded.

“Why did you kill this man? What are you going to do with me?”

“He and I had a-a dispute. With you I have no wish to do anything.”

They rose up over a wave and all was chaos for a moment. When she could see the man’s face again Mena spoke. “You will leave me here to die?”

The man shook his head. “You won’t die. You are in a current that drags you east. It runs through Vumu as if through a sieve. Even if you raise no sail but just float, you will sight land in a few days’ time. You will find land again. And people. What passes between you and them is for you to decide.”

“I don’t understand,” Mena said, emotion rising in her voice.

The man looked at her, something mocking in his eyes. “You are not the only one with a story. What happened here was mine and his.” He thrust his chin scornfully toward the depths. “It is an old debt, settled now.”

“Are you my father’s enemy?”

“No.”

“Then you are his subject! I order you not to leave me here!”

“Your father is dead, and I take orders no more.” He flung the loose coils of rope into her boat. “Princess, I don’t know what your father intended by sending you out here, but the world is not what it once was. Make your way as best you can; I will do the same.”

After that he spoke no more. He turned his back to her and unfurled his sail. It snapped full and his boat carved away, cutting a diagonal line up the face of an oncoming wave. Mena watched him slip over the edge and out of sight, feeling his words like a slap across the face. She realized that she had naпvely believed that the workings of the world revolved around her and her family. Never before had she acknowledged that somebody else’s life might alter hers. How foolish. That was exactly what was happening! Had not Hanish Mein’s actions changed her life? And her guardian and his killer had stories too, lives too, fates too. She realized that the world was a dance of a million fates. In this dance she was but a single soul. This, at least, was how she would come to remember the event and its effect on her.

As it happened she stared after the killer at each rise, watching him fade into the distance. Eventually, he was beyond her view. She was alone, nothing around her save the featureless sky and moving liquid mountains that at that moment made up the entirety of the world. And it stayed that way for five more days, until she first spotted the island that was to become her home, her destiny.

“There,” Vandi said, stepping back to examine the fully costumed priestess, “you are the goddess once more. May she be praised and find us humble!”

The attendants who had dressed her echoed this in mumbles. They drew back from her reverently. This moment always seemed strange to Mena. These young women had themselves transformed her. They had put each portion of her costume onto her near-naked body, and yet once they finished their work they went weak with fear over what they had created. She walked between them behind Vandi, toward the cymbals and chimes that announced the ceremony. Vumuans were a strange people, she thought. But still, she had always liked them and felt some amount of comfort with them. She had since she had first laid eyes on them.

Her arrival on the island had been a rough one. She might easily have died; the fact that she lived and the way that she emerged from the sea became the basis of all that followed. Alone in the boat with scant provision left her, she had watched the island draw nearer for two full days. The seas were calmer now, but around the island ran a barrier reef constructed in such a way that the ocean tossed a fury of waves over it. From the heights of these as she approached, Mena thought she might be able to ride the froth all the way into the calm water beyond the breakers. But it was not to be so easy. The boat snagged on the bottom. She lost her hold on the tiller and hurtled forward, smashing her shoulder against the decking. The pain of it was immense, complete, almost enough to block out the tumult around her. She rolled onto her back, wedged herself in as best she could, and stared up as waves poured over the boat. She felt the hull catch and grind across the reef until the boat turned sideways and rolled. For a moment she was suspended in the boiling water, her mouth full of the stuff, breathing it and choking on it at the same time. The mast must have snapped, allowing the boat to roll around. But it did not stop when it got upright. Instead, it rolled over again and again, over and over until the world made no sense at all.

She was sucked from the boat, flipped and tumbled and wrenched about by the soft muscle of the water. Her face pressed against the coral once, her arms and legs many times. She clasped something in her hand, an object that caught and twisted and wrenched her arm about. She thought it was a part of the boat and would not let it go. It was a vain hope, but she felt if she held on to a board or pole or whatever it was, she might make it through this. She changed her mind when whatever she held yanked her arm from the socket at that shoulder.

She must have gone unconscious. She was not sure, but at some point she just awoke, gasping in the calm. She sucked air furiously, all of her focused on the frantic need to inhale. Only after she had done so for a while did she realize there was sand beneath her feet. The water around her was warm and peaceful. The waves broke not far away at all, but she had gotten past them and could make out individual trees on the shore. Even more, she saw the smoke of a fire and the thatched roofs of huts and a boat moving along the shoreline. She remembered the searing pain of her shoulder, but the arm was home again and the dull throb in the joint hardly registered.

As she began to wade forward she noticed that her left arm dragged an object behind it, an awkward weight in the water. Her hand was clenched around a leather rope. Actually, this rope knotted around her wrist, enough so that her hand was bluish and swollen. Lifting it, she pulled the guardian’s long sword to the surface. The rope around her wrist was the sling used to carry it over one’s back. It was the sword that she had clung to, not a piece of the boat at all. She might have been holding the sword for a while, but it was the knotted cords that assured it stayed with her, as if the weapon itself feared the depths and had refused to let her go.

So she came to the island armed with a warrior’s sword, a girl of twelve, newly orphaned and cut off from every person she had ever known in her life. What was left of her clothing clung to her in tatters. Her hair was knotted and wild. The villagers who gathered on the shore and watched her walk toward them had never seen her likes before. It seemed she had crossed the ocean without a boat to transport her. When she opened her mouth, a foreign tongue escaped her. None of them could make sense of it. Thus a myth was born.

By the time she arrived at Ruinat a tale beyond her wildest imagining preceded her, one that she understood only later. It seemed her timing was fortuitous and unusual enough that it could be explained only with a strange blend of logic and faith. The villagers had begun whispering. Did not Vaharinda say that Maeben in human form had pale blue eyes, just like this girl? Did he not call her hair thin and wispy? And was her skin not the color of light sand? Fine, so the girl was darker than that, slightly, but overall the effect was convincing. They needed a new Maeben. They had for some time, but the priests had been unable to find a suitable girl. Usually one was born among them. In this instance the goddess had given herself to them in an even truer form. Her arrival was not perfect in its symbology, but some things were ignored, others embellished, still other details fabricated. She would eventually learn to favor her legend over the story she knew to be the truth. She welcomed the power it gave her, the right to wrath, the status as a misfortunate child of the gods, ill suited to the joys others took for granted but necessary to the maintenance of life. Special.

Nine years later, as she stepped onto the platform above the throng of worshippers below, there was little doubt that that was just what she was. They stared up at her. There she was, lit by torchlight in the enclosed chamber. She paced the platform in feathered glory, dyed fifty different colors, with massive talons curving from her fingers. The eyes that stared at them from behind the hook of her beak mask were farseeing and intense. Spikes thrust up into the air from the crown of her head, a mad, jagged chaos of a headdress. She was a nightmare of beauty and menace living right there above them, a being part raptor, part human, part divine. She knew without question that she could sweep down on them and inflict upon all of them a terrible vengeance if she wished. She had the capacity for violence within her, residing beside her heart.

The second to the head priest announced her arrival. He chastised the worshippers for their insignificance. Mena thrust her arms up above her head at the appointed moment, the feathered flaps of fabric snapping and fluttering. Every head below tilted toward the floor. Some fell to their knees. Others lay prostrate on the ground. All begged for her mercy. They adored her, they said, doing so in a chant that cut against the rhythm of the chimes. They loved her. They feared her. The priest berated them, cut them to pieces, reminded them of the follies of humanity, asked them if they understood that vengeance came from the sky with the speed of an eagle’s cry. The discordant music picked up, and between the questions and answers and the moaning and beseeching of the prostrate worshippers the chamber pulsed and trembled.

Looking out over the heads of the priests, past them to the masses of noblemen, the common folk behind, the women and children along the edges-all of them bent low in reverent bows to her, long acts of devotion that they could not end until she signaled that they could do so-she thought that perhaps she really was Maeben. She had been her all along. It just took her some time to find herself. This was her home now. This was her role. She was Maeben, the child stealer, the vengeance flung out of the sky. It was she to whom the people divulged their fears and swore their adoration.

She cried out that the faithful might rise and behold her once more. She spoke clear voiced as she did when Maeben talked through her, cutting through the other sounds. At such moments she had never been anybody else. When she spread her wings and leaped screeching into the air she had not the slightest doubt that every hand below her would stretch to catch her. And if one could leap from a height with no fear of falling, could one not be said to possess the secret of flight? Just like a bird, just like a god.