Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

As his horse kicked up the last few feet of the rise to the top of the Methalian Rim, Haleeven Mein could feel the nearness of home again. A breeze braced him and seemed to caress the fissures of his pock-marked visage, looking for signs of familiarity. The scent of the land was moist and fetid, rank with the boggy rot of the lower Mein summer. He dismounted and bent to the ground. He grasped the turf in his fists and whispered a prayer of thanks to his nephew. Hanish had given him a great gift by allowing him to see his home again for the first time in years. Better yet, he had returned to begin the transport that would lead to his ancestors finally winning the release they deserved. There were aspects of his mission that he had misgivings about, but he tried not to think of these things much. Instead, he swore that he would see to his ancestors’ wishes.

The world before him was damp with spring. Layers of snow had melted and still continued to do so beneath the tentative warmth of the slanting sun. In this area of the plateau the earth was a thick blubber of living peat. Sopping as a drenched sponge, it squelched underfoot. Haleeven, the company of mounted soldiers around him, and the long train of plodding conscripts behind them had to stay on established paths, where the earth had been packed to hardness. The air thrummed with newly awakened insect life, tiny things that seemed to like nothing better than pasting themselves to the whites of people’s eyes. They flew headlong into mouths and up through inhaling nostrils. And they bit as well.

Haleeven looked about him at blood-spotted faces. He saw several men cover their mouths with bits of fabric. Others swatted their flesh, smearing their own blood from the insects’ burst bellies. Haleeven tried to be impervious to the discomfort. He let the welts emerge unmolested on his exposed skin and let his eyes convey his disdain for those of lesser discipline. He did not even bother to look back at the foreign laborers, miserable lot that they were. He knew they would likely drop in number as they marched, prey to fevers carried by the insects.

A few days of northerly travel and he watched the ridges of the Black Mountains lacerate their way up out of the horizon. Gusty winds skimmed down their heights and buffeted man and horse, blowing the insect hordes into sidelong oblivion. A little farther on they rode upon the firmer plains of the central plateau, a place of tundralike grasslands, home to reindeer and wolves, foxes and white bears, and to the arctic oxen the Meins had domesticated long ago. The landscape was largely empty of these creatures at present, but Haleeven knew they were there somewhere, out of sight, just over the horizon. Had he the time, or had leisure been appropriate at all, he would have kicked his mount into a run and lost himself in the wilds that had shaped his race.

Tahalian. Haleeven surprised himself in realizing he at least partially looked upon his home fortress with the eyes of a foreigner. The place looked like a creature long dead, like the corpse of a ragged beast, trapped years before within a cage of massive pines, ripped and debarked and stained. Half covered in snow, not a sprig of green to be seen, a gray-brown hovel, dug in defiance of a land that had never smiled upon it: such was Tahalian.

Haleeven entered the gates to a modest, though grateful, welcome. Hanish’s second cousin, a young man named Hayvar, served as regent in the fortress. He was a handsome youth, though thin framed, possessing tremulous eyes unusual for a race that preferred a look of outward calm in all circumstances. He had barely loosened his embrace before he was peppering Haleeven with queries. How was Hanish? Had he truly readied a chamber for the ancestors on Acacia? What was that island really like? Was it the bounty the returning soldiers always claimed? Were the women all olive skinned, with oval faces and large eyes?

“I’m happy,” he said, “that I’ll finally get to see for myself. I’ll be returning with you. Hanish has agreed to it. I’ve had a note from him to that effect. He wants all of us there to see the curse lifted.”

The young man seemed too anxious, Haleeven thought, to leave his homeland, even if the reason was worthy. But he was young. He had felt deprived of his place in the world’s drama. Had not the soldiers who sailed with Hanish or marched with Maeander left hungry to see the land below the plateau? Hayvar was no different. Had he not been but a boy when the war began, he would have left years before.

Haleeven answered his questions, though he made sure to edge his voice with a disapproving tone and to keep his eyes toward the ground when forced to describe the beauties he had seen in the outside world. He feared he might betray something-he was not sure what-if he met the young man’s eyes at such moments.

He followed Hayvar up onto the battlements of the fortress. They looked back upon the train of laborers trudging reluctantly into view. Feeling the rough grain of the pine beams beneath his palms, inhaling the resinous scent cut with decay, looking out over the patchwork landscape, copper grasslands emerging through the old snow, a mottled sky draped low over it all: ah, this was home!

For a few moments he swam in nostalgia. How to explain why this view lacked nothing compared to the shimmering blue waters around Acacia? He did not love this place for its soft virtues and pleasures. Nor did he believe anymore that his people were the finest on earth. He had witnessed too much bravery in others and seen too much beauty in foreign things to hold to this narrow belief. He loved the Mein simply because…well, because it needed to be loved. Perhaps this was a foolish thought, but it was the best he could do to explain it. Even if he had the words to express himself, he doubted the young man beside him would take them to heart. Even their ancestors set their sights someplace else…

“Brother of Heberen,” a voice said, “the ancestors foretold your coming.”

Haleeven knew who spoke without even looking. He must have approached in his fur-lined slippers. Only a Tunishnevre priest would insult him by not using his given name, and only they would claim to have received word of him through the Tunishnevre, when everybody else took their news from the more earthly means of dispatches and messengers. His pleasant reveries vanished.

“First priest,” he said, managing a smile, “the ancestors not only foretold my coming, they commanded it.”

The priest’s lips crinkled, two thin lines of chapped, peeling skin. His complexion was the ghostly white preferred by men of his order. His hair was a straw blond, intentionally plucked thin so that his scalp showed through it. With the sunken quality of his features, he looked much like the preserved remains of the ancestors he served. He said, “Yes, but Hanish took his time in sending you. Nine years. An absurd delay…”

“There were so very many things to see to.”

“An absurd delay,” the priest said again, stretching out the last word as if Haleeven’s understanding of it was in question. “There can be no excuse for it. Hanish will know my displeasure, believe me.” He turned and stared out, cold-eyed, at the approaching horde. “These are our workers?”

“Fifty thousand of them,” Haleeven said, “give or take a few hundred.”

“You have brought southern foreigners?” the priest asked, squinting.

Haleeven had expected the query. “Yes, but only to carry baggage and supplies. To maintain the road and accomplish the myriad tasks ahead of us. They will not handle the ancestors or any sacred objects.” The first priest probed him with his eyes, unimpressed by the assurances. Haleeven added, “You will oversee all the arrangements personally, I hope, to assure that the foreigners profane nothing nor insult the ancestors. But it’s appropriate, don’t you think, that Acacians should break their backs on the Tunishnevre’s behalf?”

The priest did not say exactly what he thought about this, but he voiced no further objections.

Late that evening, Haleeven, alone in a torch-lit passageway, approached the underground hold that contained his ancestors. He had already met with the rest of the priests. He had handed over presents to the few nobles still in Tahalian and visited the Calathrock. There he had watched a feeble display put on by a corps of young soldiers. The enormous chamber was still a marvel of hardwood construction, but it was meant to house many more bodies, those of burly-armed, long-haired men-not thin-shouldered children who had only ever dreamed of battle. Haleeven could tell that the people welcomed him and longed to impress upon him their steadfast resilience and faith in the old ways. Something in their fervent intentions saddened him, as it did to walk nearly empty hallways, being struck time and again with memories of persons either dead or far from Tahalian now. He did not often think disapprovingly of Hanish. On the upkeep of his home fortress, however, the young chieftain may have become lax and forgetful.

Reaching the chamber door, Haleeven paused to steady himself. His heart beat with what seemed an irregular frequency. His legs were stiff and aching, something he had not noticed until just that moment. He was an aging man, and he was tired. At the same time he tingled with nervous energy. He had ridden hundreds of miles to get to this very spot. He had imagined this moment endless times. He leaned against the door and felt it shift. He stepped inside, knelt at the edge of the chamber, and pressed his forehead to the chill stones of the place. He held it there until the cold touch began to feel like heat instead. Only then did he straighten and let his gaze rise.

Dimly lit by a bluish glow from no obvious source, the scene made Haleeven’s skin crawl. Above him stretched a cylinder imbedded with stacked protuberances, row upon row, layer upon layer, each jutting out of the earthen wall, arranged in uniformity, like an enormous beehive with hundreds of chambers. The area directly above him rose into fading perspective, perhaps a hundred layers tall. But this was only one alcove. Before him opened another, and beyond that another and yet another. Each of the shadowy shapes was a preserved corpse, a dried shell that had once been a Mein, wrapped in gauze and preserved both by the priests’ efforts and by the power of the curse that bound the souls within those shells to death without release, to the physical plane but without the pulse and warmth of life. They were no different from Haleeven himself. They were men like he. Whether they had lived fifty years before or five hundred years before, they had spoken his language and roamed this high plateau. And they all had lived briefly beneath the threat of an eternal punishment. As did he.

Haleeven walked forward and began to intone the words that Hanish had sent him with. They would already know why he was there, but he went through the formality of announcing himself. He asked forgiveness for disturbing them and testified as to his oath to serve them. He promised them that tomorrow he would meet with the engineers, the architects, the drivers. There was a monumental undertaking awaiting them. He would waste no time starting the move. They were only a short time away from ultimate release and final revenge.

The Tunishnevre did not acknowledge him overtly, but there was a shift in the air that in his heightened awareness he could not help but note. They seemed to whisper, sounds that were like groans from deep in the earth. He sensed the sounds, but he could not say he actually heard them. Each time he paused to listen, there was naught but dead silence. Only when he formed words enough to fill his head did the chamber seem to echo with comments thrown at him, indecipherable though they were. Laced with malice. He felt himself threatened with extinction, with complete obliteration. But for all of this he could not pinpoint one true sound, one true motion as small as an exhalation of breath in the entire chamber.

So strange, the power of them. Haleeven could not say he understood it completely. He had never been blessed with that knowledge. They were dead. He was in a massive tomb, bodies stacked row upon row, as cold and lifeless as the earth around them, incapable of effecting change upon the world. In truth, they were a mystery to him. Had circumstance been different he might have communed with the Tunishnevre himself. He had only been one step away from the chieftaincy in his youth, one dance. But it was an enormous step, one that he could not manage. No one could say that Haleeven was a coward; yet he would never have been able to commit to taking the life of someone he loved. Because of that he never grasped for his rough people’s throne.

Looking at the shadows above him, he knew the vagaries of his path did not matter. He was proud to have served his brother, and he was proud to follow his nephew’s leadership now. He believed himself to be the young chieftain’s main confidant. Maeander officially held that post, but Haleeven sensed the unacknowledged friction between the two. Perhaps Hanish did not even recognize it. This seemed unlikely, sharp as he was, but we are often blind to animus in those closest to us. It nagged at him that he had not brought these things up with Hanish before departing for the north, but there would be time after he returned. Maeander would not harm his brother before the Tunishnevre were satisfied. And the Akaran princess…well, whatever Hanish felt for her, it would not stop his blade from slitting her neck. He had spent his entire life striving to please the ancestors. Haleeven was confident Hanish would not fall short now.

But he should not be thinking any of these things now, not in this chamber. He whispered words of temporary parting. He rose to his feet, spun slowly on his heel, and moved for the portal. Nothing stopped him. Of course not. Powerful as they were, they were also helpless without him.