Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

The man who was to accompany the prince found him squatting outside his tent in the predawn darkness. Without speaking, Aliver gathered his few supplies in a goatskin sack and slung it over his back. He tugged the leather cord until the load settled as he liked it to. Other than that he wore only the short woven skirt of a hunter. This journey was to be a hunt of sorts, and he was dressed accordingly, exactly the same as he had been a few weeks ago when he ventured out to find a laryx. He had thought that earlier morning that he had never embarked on a task more dangerous, more important. Now it was almost forgotten.

“You are ready?” Kelis asked. His features were sharp edged in a manner that Aliver had long thought was constant judgment, although lately he had not been as sure that the man’s visage betrayed anything of the thoughts behind it.

“Of course,” Aliver answered.

The other man nodded and moved off. Aliver fell in beside him. He matched his stride and kept tempo with him. They progressed from a walk into an easy jog and then to the light-footed run these southern people were famous for. They moved out of the village, past the last of the shadow mounds of the huts. They rose up to the crest of an incline that, had it been lighter, would have shown before them a rolling stretch of tree-dotted pastureland, roasted to gold by the dry season. They would need to cover more than a hundred miles just to get into territory to begin the hunt. The entirety of this day and more thereafter stretched before Aliver as one of continuous motion. But he had been trained for such feats. Each breath of air brought strength into him. He felt the slap of the earth beneath his bare feet and knew he was suited to this life, this place in the world.

How different he had been when he arrived in Talay. His flight from Kidnaban had been harrowing, but at least he had made it to his goal. He had been dragged by a guardian all the way to the court of Sangae Umae, such as it was. What had he thought was happening to him back then? He barely remembered. He had been angry and scared-he knew that. But mostly he remembered random things, like finding a sand-colored snake in his boot his first morning in the village, back when he still wore boots. It was poisonous, he had learned, deadly. It was one of the reasons Talayans did not wear shoes. He thought about this often, mulling over the fact that he did not wear shoes anymore either, hadn’t in years and could barely imagine doing so again.

He remembered how hard it had been to balance himself above the hole the villagers shat in. Such a simple thing, squatting to release his bowels, but he had hated doing it, hated that he could not seem to wipe himself properly with leaves or stones, as everyone else here did. He remembered watching the boys of the village playing a game that he could make no sense of. There was nothing to it other than that each of them took turns getting smacked with a stout stick. They hit each other hard, their bodies cringing from the blows in obvious pain. But they laughed, taunted one another, and tilted their so-white teeth to the sky in mirth that seemed to have no end.

He remembered the menace he had seen in the lean, black-bodied youths he had trained with. He had been weak compared to them. He lost his breath before they did. They were all hard edges, knobs of thrusting knees and elbows as they wrestled, chins like knives wedged in his back. He remembered the girls of the village, round eyed as they watched him, whispering among themselves, sometimes breaking into peals of laughter more painful to his pride than anything the boys inflicted on him. He remembered how hard it was to pronounce Talayan words correctly. Again and again he had repeated exactly what he believed the other to have said, only to be answered by needling ridicule. There was something feminine in the way he rolled his r’s, something childish in his hard g’s, something of the imbecile in the way he could not master the timing of silences that gave identical phrases vastly different meanings. He remembered how he hated the sand blown on the evening breeze. It dusted his face and tracked his tears, no matter how he tried to wipe and wipe and wipe all traces of them away.

But all of that was years ago. Why even think about it now? Now he was a hunter, a man, a Talayan. He ran beside a warrior whom he cherished as a brother. He breathed steadily and flowed along, mile after mile, a film of sweat coming on to him as the sun rose. Those menacing boys were his companions now; those large-eyed girls were now women who looked upon him favorably, lovers who danced for him, a few who vied to be the first to bear him a child. He spoke the people’s tongue like a native. He did not entirely remember how he had worked this transformation. The fact that he had killed a laryx marked his maturation in the eyes of his community. True enough, he had never been more alive than during that hunt, never more aware of his mortality and his undeniable hunger to survive. And not just to survive, to win glory. But even this was only one episode, with many, many smaller ones to consider also. Who can explain just how he became the person he is? It does not happen this day or that one. It is a gradual evolution that happens largely unheralded. He simply was who he now was.

Except that this was not entirely true. He thought of those early days because of Thaddeus and all the things he had brought with him. Thaddeus, whom he loved and loathed in equal measure. The people of the village called him the Acacian. Aliver, when speaking to them in Talayan, used that name as well. It did not seem to occur to any of them that this was odd. Nor did it seem strange to him that he should feel so at home with-and challenged by-a people he had been raised to believe were inferior. But each afternoon that he sat down across from Thaddeus and spoke the language of his birth he knew he was not one of these people, not entirely, not as he wished he was. He was also the Acacian. And more, if Thaddeus was to be believed, he was a pivot on which the fate of the world was to turn.

Aliver and Kelis kept moving for the greater portion of the day, pausing only to drink and eat lightly, letting the food settle and then starting up again. They rested in the shade of an acacia tree through the afternoon’s burning hours, napped briefly, but then kicked dust right through twilight and for some time into the early evening. There were moments when Aliver, in a trancelike state, forgot the purpose of this journey and just ran, floating on the strength of his legs, aware of nothing but movement and of the visual panorama of the living world around him.

When they stopped to camp late that evening, however, he felt the weight of the responsibilities Thaddeus had pushed upon him. The two men made a small fire, just enough to remind the beasts that they were humans and better left alone. They carried nothing in the way of bedding with them. They dug two hollow spaces into the sand, side by side with their heads near the fire. The night could be chilly, but the ground retained enough heat to warm them through until morning. They ate a paste made from mixing their precious water with the pounded sedi grain they carried. It tasted like nothing at all, but it was nourishing. Aliver used a strip of dried beef as a utensil and ate it afterward. Kelis found the tuber the Talayans called knuckle root because of its shape. He sliced it clean at the joint, and the two of them sat sucking on their portions, the liquid inside it sweet and sharp, cleansing.

“Sometimes I feel like this is all madness,” Aliver said. “This cannot be real, what we are doing, what I am supposed to do. It’s a tale meant for children, a myth like those told to me as a boy.”

Kelis took the root from his mouth to say, “This is your story now. You are the myth.”

“So I’ve been told. Do you think us foolish,” he asked, “we Acacians? Hunting for banished magicians and all that? Are we a joke to you?”

“A joke?” The features of the man’s face were hard to read in the dim firelight, but his voice suggested no possibility of humor.

“Kelis, I have been sent to find five-hundred-year-old magicians and to convince them to help me regain the empire my father lost. Do you understand such a loss? There is nothing here, around us, which could possibly show you how much my father lost. He was the monarch who forfeited the world’s greatest empire. And now he speaks from the grave to ask me to win it all back. Is that not something to laugh at?”

A cacophony of jackal calls erupted in a wide semicircle around them. The canines saw the humor apparently. Kelis still acknowledged none. He tossed away his knuckle root and said, “Our storytellers teach of the God Talkers, too. They are of our legends as well as yours. You have heard these.”

“And you believe, then?”

Kelis did not answer, but Aliver knew what he would say if pressed. Of course he believed. To Talayans truth lived in spoken words. It did not matter that at times their legends were highly improbable or that they often contradicted one another. If they were spoken-if they had been handed down to them by those who came before-there was nothing to do for a Talayan but believe. There was no reason not to. Aliver had heard a great many of their legends over the years.

He knew that the God Talkers were supposed to have marched through Talay and into exile. They were enraged, the legend went, at their banishment. They had helped Tinhadin win the world, but now he-the greatest of them-had turned on them and forbade them from using their god speech. They cursed under their breath, quietly so that Tinhadin would not hear them. But even these whispered curses had power. They had torn swathes out of the land; they had tilted slabs of the earth’s crust; they had sparked fire with waves of their arms; they had touched their eyes on the beasts of the plains, corrupting them, twisting them into creatures like the laryx. They had done much damage, the legends went, but fortunately they walked on past the inhabited regions into the truly arid, baking flats to the south. According to myth, the Santoth still lived there. Nobody had ever ventured there to verify this. Why should they? Only one person would ever have reason to go in search of them-a prince of the Akaran line going to rescind their sentence.

“You want to hear someone else’s story instead of yours?” Kelis asked. “Listen to this one then. There was a young Talayan whose father was a very proud man, a warrior. He lived for war and he wished his son to do the same. His son, however, was a dreamer, one who predicts when the rains arrive, when children will be born healthy, one whose sleeping life is as vivid as the waking. The boy dreamed things before they happened. He spoke with creatures in his dreams and sometimes awoke, still remembering the animal’s language, for a few moments at least. The son wanted badly to learn more about his gift. The father, you might think, would have been proud his son was chosen for this. But he was not. When the father slept he was dead to life; only awake did he find meaning, only in war were all things clear to him.

“He forbade his son to dream. He did it with all the spite he could direct through his eyes. He did it through ridicule, with biting words and with scorn. He stood over his son when he slept. Whenever he saw the boy’s eyes move, the sign that he’d entered the dreamworld, he jabbed him with his spear shaft. He awoke him to pain again and again. Soon the boy feared sleep. Dreams sometimes came to him anyway, even in the light of day when he was otherwise awake. The father learned to recognize dreams in his son’s eyes, and he would slap him if he suspected the boy’s mind had wandered. None of it stopped the boy. He simply could not help being who he was. But the father found a way.”

Kelis paused to listen to a sound nearby, the scrape of sharp-clawed feet across the dry ground. They both listened for a moment, until the serrated trilling of a black-backed cricket cut through the faint sounds. The scraping was likely a lizard. Nothing that would bother them.

Aliver prompted, “The father found a way…”

Kelis continued. “He adopted a dead man’s son, and he put that dead man’s son before his own son. He called him firstborn, which meant that everything that was the father’s-his name, ancestors, belongings-would go to this adopted son. If the dreamer son wanted to live a prosperous life, he could do only one thing. He called the adopted one to the circle and killed him. He thrust his spear through his chest and watched his new brother drain of life. Instead of being angry, the father was pleased. It was just as he thought. His true firstborn son had a warrior within him, whether he liked it or not. The father got what he wanted. After that his son truly hated sleep. In sleep he still dreamed, but only ever of the same thing. He dreamed of that fight, of sinking his spear home, of the blood, of watching a man’s face as he dies. So the dreamer was squashed; only the warrior remained.”

“I have not heard this tale before,” Aliver said.

The other cocked his head to the side, straightened it. “None of us choose our fathers. Neither you nor I, nor anybody else. But, believe me, when one is born to a calling, it should not be refused. To not do the thing one was born to do is a heavy burden to bear.”

Aliver’s legs were stiff the next morning, but they loosened readily enough when put to work. The pace of the second day matched the first. The land through which they traveled shared the same tree-dotted and wide-valleyed rolling contours. But on the third day a pack of four laryx caught their scent and fell in behind them in pursuit. The loping beasts yelped their garbled speech and grew near enough that, glancing back, Aliver could see their individual features. One of them was missing an ear. Another ran on a weakened foreleg. The leader was a larger beast than the one he had killed, and the fourth tended to flank out toward one side, as if already anticipating rounding on them. If the four of them caught up with and surrounded the men, there would be no hope of their escaping alive. Laryx’s hatred of humans went hand in hand with their fear. Like a lion hunting the cubs of lesser cats, they seemed to hunt men out of spite.

Running before them, Aliver realized how different he was now from when he had hunted one of these beasts just a few weeks before. Back then, he had faced with clarity the reality that if he failed in any action, he would die horribly as a consequence. The strange thing was that at his core this feeling was entirely familiar to him. At some level he had lived with such a fear since the evening his father was stabbed in the chest. There had always been an unseen monster pursuing him. Facing a real one, in the bright light of day, liberated something in him. He had run the beast into the ground and then turned on it and drawn close enough that he could smell the creature’s breath. He had looked at the foul entirety of it and…he had done what he was supposed to do. He sank his spear deep into its chest and held it in place as the laryx bucked and protested with the last of its strength. He was not sure exactly how, but he knew this deed had altered something within him for the better.

Kelis pressed the pace. They did not stop at midday. Instead, they ran on through the rippling heat. Though laryx had the capacity to run for hours they only did so when truly provoked. They lost the laryx pack when easier prey-warthogs-came to the beasts’ attention. The two men ran on with little rest and did not pause until several hours after dark.

On the fifth day they traversed a salt flat and came across a mass migration of pink birds. Thousands and thousands of them marched across the land, an enormous flock shimmering in the sun’s glare, each of them long necked and graceful, with black legs that stepped high and formal. Why they did not fly, Aliver could not guess. They just parted as the two runners passed through them, watching them sidelong and without comment.

Late the sixth morning they came to the great river that drained the western hills of water. It was a wide, shallow trench more than a mile across. In the rainy season it was a formidable barrier. Even now it served as the southern boundary of inhabited Talay. The river itself was but a trickle now, a narrow vein of moisture a few strides wide, ankle deep. The two men stood in the water. Aliver enjoyed the feel of the smooth stones beneath his feet, slick against his skin. Had the horizon around them not been an endless stretch of pale, coarse soil, sparsely vegetated and crisped by the long tenure of the sun, Aliver might have closed his eyes and let the feel of the stones and the water conjure memories of times and places very far from here.

“Brother,” Kelis said, “I go no farther than this.”

Aliver turned toward him and watched him as he scooped another gourd of water and lifted it to his lips. “What?”

“My people do not venture south of this river. The Giver will run with you from here. He is a better companion than I.”

Aliver stared at him.

“I’ll wait for you,” Kelis said. “Believe me, Aliver, when you return to this point I will be here to meet you.”

Aliver was stunned enough by this that he did not dispute it. Kelis left him with the list of things to do and not do, reminders of how to conserve water and where to search for roots that held moisture and which animals might likewise offer him a drink of blood. Aliver already knew everything the man recited, but he stood as if listening, lingering in each moment that delayed his departure.

“Sangae gave me a message for you,” Kelis said, as he lifted Aliver’s sack and helped him string it over his back. “He said you are a son to him. And you are a son to Leodan Akaran. And you are a prince to the world. He said he knows you will meet the challenges facing you with bravery. He said that when you lift the crown of Acacia to your head he hopes you will allow him to be among the first to bow before you.”

“Sangae does not need to bow before me.”

“Perhaps you don’t need him to bow before you. But he might-for himself. Respect flows two ways and can mean as much to the giver as to the one receiving. Go now. You have far to travel before the sun sets. You should find hills to shelter in at night, rock outcroppings. The laryx fear such places at night.”

“How do I find the Santoth? Nobody has told me.”

Kelis smiled. “Nobody could tell, Aliver. Nobody knows.”

His first few days alone Aliver experienced even longer periods of trance than previously. It was not so much thoughts of his mission or memories from the past that stirred him as it was glimpses of the chaotic grandeur trapped in the silent flesh of the world, in the air breathing and creatures moving across the land. Once, in a landscape pocked with massive craters, Aliver watched the sky as contained in the bowl through which he progressed. Above him clouds gathered, seethed. They did not move on as clouds usually did. They seemed trapped in this particular spot in the world, ever changing but never escaping.

Moments like this one struck him with import. He did not regard it as a sign to read for prophecy. The meaning was simply there in the viewing, in his watching moments of life with eyes so very opened, so appreciative. In his youth he had never been one to study sunsets or vistas, or to pay much attention to the changing colors of leaves on the Mainland. In this regard he was a very different person from the one he had been.

In the middle of his fourth night alone Aliver awoke, having realized something while asleep that drove him up into consciousness. When Kelis told the story of that dreamer denied his path by his father…he had been talking about himself. Kelis was the dreamer denied his destiny. Perhaps this should have been obvious from his tone, but Kelis had never revealed things about himself before. He had never asked for another person’s pity. He had not been doing so by telling that story either, Aliver knew. Why hadn’t Aliver realized this at the time and said something?

Later that night he had a dream of his own, and he spent the entirety of the next day recalling the actual conversations that had sparked it. During the week or so that he had met each afternoon with Thaddeus, they had talked of more than just Aliver’s challenges. The old man had unburdened himself of his deceit. He explained the tale Hanish Mein had detailed for him of how Aliver’s grandfather might have killed Thaddeus’s wife and child. Yes, he said, despite the source that brought him the news, he did believe that Gridulan had had his family murdered. Because of it, Thaddeus had wanted revenge. He had, for a brief moment, betrayed the Akarans.

Aliver had barely been able to respond, either with renewed anger or with the forgiveness the man obviously craved. He was not sure if he should hate the man for conspiring with Hanish Mein or if he should apologize for his own treacherous family or if he should thank Thaddeus for being the instrument of his and his siblings’ rescue.

In the course of these conversations Thaddeus had revealed the complex web of crimes that truly held the world together. This, painful as it was, Aliver was thankful to finally hear. He had always feared the unspoken, the unexplained. He had heard words like Quota and whispers about the Lothan Aklun without ever succeeding in pinning them to concrete facts. Now, however, he heard everything that Thaddeus could tell him. Acacia was a slaving empire. They traded in flesh and thrived on forced labor. They peddled drugs to suppress the masses. The Akarans were not the benevolent leaders he had always been taught to believe they were. What, he wondered, did all of this mean for him? Could he be sure that a new Akaran rule would be better than that of Hanish Mein?

Eventually the landscape took on a different character. It grew even drier, and he moved, weaving through a region of broken ground. The sparse grass was bleached almost silver and contrasted sharply with the mounds of rocks that dotted the land, blackened, volcanic stone that looked like the droppings of some ancient creatures from the previous world. Aliver was not sure if he thought of that comparison himself or if he had heard such a tale told before. He seemed to have some memory of this and even a vague notion of watching the creatures turn from this place and walk, great legged, over the horizon in search of a better land. Between the rocks, solitary acacia trees grew, short versions of the species, stunted and terribly gnarled. They were aged grandfathers of the race, abandoned here some time ago and standing still, their arms upraised in unanswered supplication.

Nowhere among any of this did he see signs of humans. There were no villages here, no traces of agriculture or discarded tools. There were not even animals. It was a terribly lonely landscape, each day more so. The Santoth had been men, humans just like Edifus, a man whose blood flowed in Aliver’s veins. If they lived anywhere near here, there would have been some sign of them. But there was nothing.

One morning a week into his solitary journey Aliver realized that he would not survive this search. Part of him had never expected to find these Santoth, but it had not occurred to him until he sorted through his meager supplies-a palm-sized portion of sedi grain, a few mouthfuls of warm water, a small packet of dried herbs for making soup-that he did not have enough to live more than another day or two. He had not seen a trace of a water source in three days. There had been no sign of knuckle root or of any of the plants that trapped even small sips of water. He had never been in a drier place. Just sitting there he felt the air pulling moisture from his skin. He could try to retrace his steps back to the boundary river, but how many days was he from it? Try as he might he could not say, except that it was farther away than he was capable of walking.

He stood on his aching legs and surveyed the land. The world stretched out before him in uniform desolation, to the horizon and beyond. Nothing. Nothing in it but sand and rock and the sky above it all. He took a step. And then another. He did not try to run. He just felt he had to move, walking slowly, stumbling. He left his supplies where they lay. They would not help him for long, and without them he would get past this ordeal quicker. He noted the position of the sun and gauged the time of the day, and then decided that none of it mattered. The Santoth-as he had suspected all along-were nothing but vapors from the past kept alive by superstitious minds. And he was just a walking dead man. The surprising thing was he did not really mind that much. He felt vindicated in a way. He had been right all along. He was not destined for some mythic greatness. Maybe that mantle would fall upon Corinn or Mena or even Dariel, or maybe the Akaran line did not deserve the power they had wielded.

This all made perfect sense to him, and accepting it granted him a calm he had never felt before. He thought fondly of his sisters and brother. He wished he had seen them grow to adulthood. He hoped they would succeed at whatever they attempted. He, Aliver, had always been the weak link, no matter how hard he tried to be otherwise. His father had put too much faith in him.

Around midday he stumbled and fell. He pushed himself up to his knees, around him a flat expanse of sand, dotted here and there with oblong rocks the same tan color as everything else, standing or on their sides or leaning against each other. He half wondered at the geological oddities they were, but his throat was so very dry and that seemed more of note. His skin had stopped sweating some time ago. His head pounded with his heartbeat, and at times the pulse of it dimmed and brightened his vision.

He lay down. None of this would be so bad if he did not have to feel it from inside his body anymore. He lay like this for some time, content not to have a purpose any longer. That was why from the first sign of movement, of change, he felt an emotion wash through him, a coloring of the world that he experienced as…not as fear, as he might have expected. Not as awe or disbelief. The emotion was harder to define. It was something like regret. What caused it was the fact that the stones all around him awoke. They awoke and began walking slowly toward him.