Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Mena grabbed hold of the loops of rusty metal and pressed her bottom to the sand. Thus anchored she tilted her head and gazed up through columns of living mollusks. She sat, as she often did, on the sandy floor of the harbor, some thirty feet from the surface, her breath clamped tight inside her. Her hair floated around her in sinuous tendrils. Around her rose a towering forest of shadows, each of them a chain suspended from the surface and anchored to the ground. Oysters hung from the links by the thousands. Full grown, the creatures were as large around as a child’s head. Though much of this bulk was composed of shell, each of them could feed three or four diners, simmered in a coconut milk sauce and served with transparent noodles. They were a delicacy around which the temple controlled a monopoly. The export market in black oysters filled the temple coffers each time the floating merchants passed the archipelago.

Her lungs began to burn. They heaved against her chest. Every muscle out to her fingertips and toes twitched in protest, every part of her shouted in anger. Beyond the oysters, the brilliant turquoise of the surface glow highlighted the weight and size of the mollusks, as if the world above was a blessed place of light that she could regain only by the most perilous of ascents. She unclenched her hands and floated free. As she flew upward toward the light she blew a stream of bubbles preceding her. She was never sure if it was the bubbles themselves or if the oysters sensed her coming, but one by one the creatures folded their gaping shells closed, opening a passageway for her all the way to the surface. The last few moments were the worst, the most frantic, the entirety of her being screaming to get out of her skin, sure she had hung on too long.

She broke into the air with her mouth a gaping oval. Air engulfed her, as did light and sound and movement, as did life. She could not explain her need for this strange ordeal, but it always left her feeling temporarily secure about the purity of her soul. This was a thing that concerned her, especially on a day like this one, when she would look into the face of grieving parents and swear that a child’s death was a boon to them all, a necessary sacrifice, and a gift any parent should wish to give.

She left the oyster farm mid-morning. For nearly half an hour she negotiated the labyrinth of piers and floating docks that clogged the shallow, crescent harbor. The portion of the docks owned by the temple was a solitary domain in which Mena spent hours. But in the commercial harbor she entered a bustling throng of merchants and seamen, fisherfolk and net weavers. She wove through stalls offering all manner of foodstuffs: fish and crustaceans, fruit from the coastal plantations and jungle meat from the inner mountains. Salesmen cried their wares in the singsong cadence of Vumu speech. She moved through it with quiet purpose, accepting the mumbled greetings directed at her, the respectful bowed heads, and the prayerful invocations. Maeben on earth walked among them. Usually this made people joyful, but this afternoon there was veiled import behind the eyes watching her.

As she walked the last stretch of pier to the shore, Mena noticed the stillness of a sailor who had paused to look at her. He stood on the railing of a trading barge, one hand grasped around a rigging rope to steady him. She glanced up at him just long enough to take in his shirtless torso; his clean-shaven, angular jaw; steady eyes; and head wrapped in strips of white cloth, the ends of which hung down to below his shoulders and stuck to the sweat on his chest. He was not from Vumu, but sailors were always a polyglot bunch. There was nothing kind in his countenance nor lecherous, but his attentive silence made Mena uneasy. She quickened her step.

At the temple she dressed in all the accoutrements of her guise as Maeben: talons fastened to her fingers; layers of feather robes; the spiky headdress that capped off her fierce, flamboyant appearance. As she felt the hands working around her she waited to feel the divine presence animate her form, place words in her, use her tongue to speak with, and form in her mind the resolution of complete belief. Thus far, however, the goddess refused to enter her when she was most needed. She held to her silence, and Mena was left to answer for her as best she could.

At first Mena had thought herself deficient. The senior priest assured her the goddess was just testing her, harsh mistress that she was. It was only a matter of time, he had said, until Maeben truly came to live inside her at all moments-not only during the frenzy of ceremonies. Though that had not happened, Mena had grown more and more comfortable with her role. All around her seemed complete in their belief, and that was usually sufficient to buoy her. Today was different, however, and she could not help but dread the meeting awaiting her.

A short while after dressing she sat on a thronelike chair in the anteroom of the temple. The head priest of Maeben’s order, Vaminee, stood beside her. He was dark skinned. His complexion was so smooth as to betray no obvious hints at his age, though Mena knew he had held his post for more than forty years. He wore a thin robe that fell from his shoulders in diaphanous folds, and he stood so still he might have been a statue. This was not the first time they had waited for a meeting like this to begin. In truth, they had shared this same silence three times in the last few years.

The young couple entered, flanked by lesser priests. Heads down, hands held before them with palms upraised, they approached slowly. Mena could not help but note how small they looked. They were but children themselves! How could they have borne-and now lost-a child? They knelt at the foot of the dais.

Without ceremony, Vaminee asked, “Who are you? Of what place? What circumstance?”

The father answered in a high-pitched voice, choked with emotion. They were inlanders, he explained. They lived in a village in the mountains. He hunted birds for the feathers used in temple ceremonies; she wove palm fibers for baskets and various wares that they sent to market in Galat. Their daughter, Ria, had been a good girl, round faced like her mother, shy among other children. They had loved her more than life. He would have given his own soul instead of the child’s without a moment of hesitation. He could not understand why-

“You have another child,” Vaminee said. “A boy who is twin to the girl. Be thankful of that.”

“And we had another before that,” the father said, anxious that this point be understood. “Our children came all three at one time. We lost our first to the foreigner’s offering. They took Tan from us. So why would Maeben punish us yet again?”

Oh, Mena thought, they had given a child to the Quota already. Now they had lost a second!

Vaminee was not moved. “Three children in one womb is too rich a bounty to go unnoticed. But tell us exactly what happened to the girl.”

This fell to the mother to answer. She showed little of her husband’s visible emotions. Her voice was like her eyes, flat and weary, as if she had passed beyond grief and found herself in another place. She had been walking a ridgeline with her daughter, she said. Ria had trailed some distance behind her, but she knew the trail well. She could hear her singing, repeating a few simple verses over and over and over. At some point her song stopped. Simply clipped in mid-phrase. She looked back to the spot where her child should have been, but it was empty. When she looked to the sky, she saw her daughter’s legs. She saw them dangling as if from the sky itself. And then she saw the spread of wings that carried her away. And then she heard the beat of them.

Her eyes touched on Mena briefly, before tilting to the floor in front of her. “I knew then that Maeben had stolen her.”

“Maeben steals nothing,” Vaminee said. “What she takes becomes hers the moment she touches it.”

“I had thought,” the mother said, glancing up, “that Ria was my own. She came from-”

Vaminee’s voice rose to cut her off. “Drop your eyes! You forget where you are. You think that your grief belongs to only you. You are wrong! Grief belongs to Maeben. What you feel is only a portion of what she endures. It is like a single grain of sand from all the beaches of Vumu. Maeben took your child to keep her company on Uvumal. One day you will understand it as a gift-to the girl and to you as well. Is this not so, Furious One?”

This was the sign Mena had dreaded, the signal that she had now to enter the exchange. She rose and moved toward them with her arms raised out to either side, wings held as if in preparation for flight. Her face was as still as she could keep it, though inside her mind raced to find the right words to justify the deeds of an angry deity. She still did not have them. She felt the beaked monstrosity of her mask. A pang of shame ripped through her.

She stopped just before the two, both of whom had flattened their foreheads to the floor. She saw the tattoo on the man’s arm, the vertebrae nudging through the thin skin of the woman’s back. How she loved these people-all the Vumu people! She loved the look of them, the smell of their skin and shape of their mouths in laughter, the quiet grace with which they moved. These two before her, at the moment, represented all of them who lived under the tyranny of the goddess she embodied. She hoped they would not look up at her. They did not have to. They could just keep their heads bowed and listen as she justified Maeben’s actions. She had only to say a few sentences, just enough to remind them that Maeben answers to nobody, that she feels anger still for the slight humanity did to her. There was nothing for her to apologize for, and these two-she had been taught-would thank her later for showing strength in the face of their grief.

But the words that finally escaped her surprised her. She did not speak them in Vumu. She used the language she sometimes dreamed in, the language of her half-forgotten childhood. She said that she was sorry for them. She could not begin to understand their sadness. If she could undo it, she would. She would give them back their round-faced girl. She truly would.

“But I cannot,” she said. “Maeben cares for your daughter now. You, though, should love your son twice as much. You have given to the goddess. Now your lives will be blessed and your son will be a joy to you always.”

Leaving the chamber later, Mena wondered what the priest would have done to her if he had understood the language she had spoken in. It was bad enough that he had heard her speak the other language. He would likely chastise her for it later, but this never frightened her as much as the priest thought it did. Sometimes as he spoke she imagined herself drawing the old Marah sword she had arrived on the island with and cutting off his head. She saw just how she would do it, even imagining the blood and gore of it. It surprised her that her thoughts could turn so violent, but perhaps that was just a result of living so long as a representative of Maeben’s anger.

She wondered if her speech had done any good for the couple. Certainly her words had been gibberish to them. Perhaps it was just a cowardly act, an incomplete confession. Why was she always drawn to this other language when faced with the most difficult of moments?

She was still wrapped up in these thoughts that evening as she left the main temple building and headed for her private quarters. She was dressed in a simple shift to ward off the sea breeze. Her bare feet padded on the packed sand, the path before her lit to bone gray by the stars, hemmed in on one side by a hedge of low bushes. She knew the way by heart and never carried a light with her.

She froze in mid-step, thinking she heard something-a whisper, perhaps, some sound that did not belong and had already vanished. But there was nothing except near silence, an insect chirping in the undergrowth and the quick scrabble of a rodent alarmed at her sudden immobility, a dog barking in town and some voices from back at the temple: that was it. The longer she listened the more she doubted that there had been a sound of any consequence at all. She had almost settled in to the comfort of this, when there was a rustling in the brush behind her.

She spun around to see a man’s shape step into silhouetted being behind her. He must have hidden in the bushes until after she passed. He was taller than any Vumu in the village. He had to be an off islander, a sailor or raider, someone who meant her harm. Why else would he come upon her in the dark, alone? She calculated the distance to the village and considered her prospects of darting around him and back to the compound. She could scream. If so, how long would she have before someone reached her? She clenched her hands into fists, feeling the sharpness of her nails against her flesh, feeling the quick-beating calm that she understood as anger. She felt more the goddess at that moment than she had earlier, when she had worn her finery.

“Mena? It is you, isn’t it?”

She understood him clearly enough, and for a moment she noted that his accent was indeed not of the island. But then she understood something else. He had not spoken to her in Vumu. He spoke…he spoke that other language. She recognized the words and knew their meaning even as she tasted the strangeness of hearing them spoken by another. He had called her by her first name, something known to few on the island. For a moment she feared she had brought a demon upon herself. Perhaps the goddess abhorred her for speaking in that foreign tongue. Perhaps this one who addressed her was here to punish.

“What do you want?” she asked, consciously speaking in Vumu. “I have nothing you can have, so leave me. I serve the goddess. Her wrath is keen.”

“So I have heard,” he said. “But you don’t look like a giant sea eagle that snatches up young children. You don’t look like that at all.” The man took a step closer. She backed up, and he held up a hand to calm her. There was a noise in the compound. As the stranger cocked his head, the light on his profile was just strong enough for her to recognize the sailor who had stared at her that morning. For some reason, this mystified her more than it frightened her. “You speak Vumu like a native, but you are not, are you? Tell me I am not wrong. You are Mena Akaran, of the Tree of Acacia.”

Mena shook her head, saying “I am Maeben on earth” several times, but not loudly enough to interrupt him.

“Your brother was Aliver. Your sister, Corinn. Dariel was the youngest. Your father was Leodan-”

“What do you want?” she snapped, not a question at all but a sudden shout that burst from her chest, a need to silence him because the names he was saying and the language he was speaking so calmly did not reach her calmly at all.

“You know me, Mena. I was your brother’s companion, from his training group. My father was Althenos. He handled records for your father in the palace library. I danced with you when you were ten. Remember? You stood on the flat of my feet and caused me no end of pain. Say that you remember me. Please, Mena.”

All through this speech he moved closer to her. Though the light got no better, his nearness drew out his features. She could only partially recall the things he said. They jostled and shoved about in her mind, arguing with the impossibility that he was standing before her uttering such things. And yet she did know his face. She recognized the boy he had once been in his eyes, still so large on his face, wide set and calming. His lips were parted, but her internal vision remembered what they looked like when he smiled, the way mirth transformed his features.

“Princess,” the man said, dropping to his knees, “I had given up hope… Tell me you are you and that I am not mistaken.”

“What is your name?” she asked, her voice calmer than she felt. She could see his eyes reflecting the starlight. She watched something change in them and realized they had filled with tears.

He said, “I am Melio.”