Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

That first night Mena only listened. She allowed the man who called himself Melio, and who claimed to know her and her family, into the inner courtyard of her compound. She had never done such a thing before with any man. It was an act forbidden the priestess of Maeben, one that the day before would have seemed impossible. But in this one’s company unthought-of things happened. They sat together on the hard-packed earthen floor. Unnerved by a male presence, her servants lingered in the shadows, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. Mena just stared at the young man; he, seemingly encouraged by her silence, let flow a rambling discourse.

He spoke Acacian, and so Mena knew her servants would not understand a word. What amazed her was that she did. She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing.

He had been a soldier of Acacia, a young Marah faced with the first mass attack upon the empire in many, many generations. The things he witnessed in the war were too horrible to speak of in any but the most general terms. He had lost everything a man can lose except his life. He had seen most of the people he cared about killed or enslaved, or watched them betray their nation for a new master. He had held Acacian superiority as a given, and it still amazed him that Hanish Mein dismantled his nation’s military might so completely.

He had been wounded in one of the small skirmishes after Alecian Fields. While in pathetic retreat, the fever caught up with him. When he woke from it, the world around him had changed completely. He had been so defeated, he said, that if the will to die was sufficient to cause death, he would not be before her now. He would even have taken his own life, except that such an action was all but impossible for a soldier trained as he was. He joined the resistance in Aushenia for a time, using the work to try to win himself an honorable death. He failed at this too.

He was eventually saved from orchestrating his own death by the power of rumor. One drunken night a Teh mercenary informed him that the Akaran children had been spirited to safety. The bearer of this news could name no credible source to verify his claim, but he laid out a simple logic. Only Corinn had been captured, yes? The fact that Hanish put her on display only highlighted the absence of the others. He would have done the same with the others if he’d caught them, wouldn’t he? On the other hand, could anyone prove that they’d been killed? Had bodies or heads been produced? Had anything been displayed to the public to confirm the Akarans’ fate one way or another? The answers were obvious, and with them new possibilities dawned. The simplest of them-the one that Melio hitched himself to-was that if the Akaran line was not extinguished it could be returned to power again.

He decided to stay alive as best he could, to wait out the passing of time in the hopes that there might be some truth to the tales. For the last three years he worked for the floating merchants. His route followed the seasonal currents that circulated the Inner Sea. He had thrice ventured as far out as the Vumu Archipelago, with whom the merchants traded. He never stayed long and had never beheld the priestess of Maeben before. How fortunate it was that he had found her. She was alive! So there was reason to believe that Dariel was alive also. And surely Aliver lived and even now was planning to regain the throne. The rumors were true, and Melio thanked the Giver that he had not died before discovering this for himself.

She sent him away as dawn approached, promising nothing, admitting nothing, betraying no sign of the effect he had on her. She lay on her cot as the day came on, hot and bright as always. Her mind was surprisingly empty. She knew it should be raging with fears and doubts, memories stirred, questions raised. But she simply could not grasp onto any one thought long enough to face its import. She lay until she slept, woke when her servant warned her of the late afternoon hour, rose, and did her duties as priestess.

She returned in the early evening to find that the Acacian waited for her on the path again. Once more she let him into her compound and sat down to hear him speak. When she sent him away hours later she had still not promised anything. She admitted nothing, betrayed no sign that she thought anything of the tales he told. She slept hard through the morning, woke to the heat of noon, and stared at the ceiling above her, listening to the rustle of lizards hunting insects in the thatch. Melio had an unremarkable face, she decided. Unremarkable, and yet for some reason she very much wanted to see it again.

The next evening he awaited her at the gate to her compound. He rose from squatting as she approached, called her “Princess,” and stepped inside when she nodded that he could do so. Once they were seated across from each other, in the same arrangement as the previous evenings, the young man resumed his discourse. Amazing, really, that after two nights of talking he still found things to say. He’d heard that the prince’s agents were afoot in the land, he said, working covertly to bring divergent sectors of the resistance together. There had even been a revolt in the Kidnaban mines, led by a prophet who swore he had dreamed of Aliver’s return. Soon Aliver would summon his siblings to unite their armies, he said. Many were anxious to believe him.

Mena heard and filed away the things he told her. She also spent some time confirming that his face was, in fact, unexceptional, studying him feature by feature to be sure. Hair long and unkempt, often falling over his eyes so that he had to flick it away, brown eyes of no particular note, teeth too prominent when he smiled, cheeks that look cherubic, but only viewed from certain angles: average in every way. Not unattractive but not particularly noble or strong or suggestive of great wisdom. So there it was, confirmed. It seemed strange that she had wondered about his appearance at all.

And with this question behind her, Mena interrupted him. “You say that a prophet of the mines dreamed of Aliver? Tell me, did this prophet describe his features? Did he know what my brother looked like, how he spoke? Did he know of his character? My brother never saw the mines up close; how is it that somebody in the mines knows so much about him?”

It was hard to tell whether Melio’s stunned expression was in reaction to what she had said or just to the fact that she had strung that many sentences together. He stared at her more fixedly than he did while speaking, when his eyes tended to bounce around from object to object. “I cannot say from where a prophet’s gift comes,” he said, “but I believe there is something to it. And I believe your brother has strengths he has yet to discover. I always thought that about him, even when we were boys. To the people at large he is a symbol. Few people in the Known World ever set eyes upon your brother, but they all know his name. They all imagine him as they wish him to be. He is hope in a time when people desperately need hope. Maybe that is as much what the resistance is about as anything. We meet secretly, spread our messages by word of mouth, seek one another out through personal references. I met with a group in a household near Aos once. There were perhaps fifteen of us, but as soon as the doors were closed and we felt safe in one another’s company we opened up and spoke like old friends. We spoke of the hardships we’d seen and the loved ones we’d lost and the dreams we have for the future. It was a wonderful evening, and at the center of it was the hope embodied by the young Akarans. It doesn’t surprise me that you know nothing of this here. There are few in the resistance living as far out as Vumu. Although, fortunately, I am here, and here you are as well.”

Without drawing attention to the act, Mena ran her fingers through her hair, parting it in the back and pulling strands over her shoulders. Thus she hid her breasts. She had never before felt embarrassed by her semi-nudity. With Melio, however, she was increasingly aware of her body. She said, “You say that we-the Akaran children-are poised to appear again, leading an army that will overthrow Hanish Mein’s empire. What are you talking about? Look at me. I’m an Akaran. We both know that much. So where is my army? Look around. Do I look like I’m about to wage a war?”

“I’ve thought about that,” Melio said, making sure his eyes stayed fixed on hers. “I cannot explain it. Perhaps in your case something went amiss.”

Her dead guardian certainly qualified as something gone amiss. But Mena admitted nothing. Instead, she told him he had to go. He could, however, return in the morning. They might as well speak in the light of day for once. She had not planned to say this. The words rose out of her of their own accord. Afterward, she wondered why. And then she realized, and it seemed strange to her that she might act in a certain way and only know afterward what had prompted her.

The next morning Melio stood at her gate. She signaled for him to be let in. As he walked toward her, squinting in the sun until reaching the shade, she said, “I never caught the fever.”

“Everybody got the fever,” Melio said. “It swept the world.”

“Yes, it came through the archipelago. But it did not sweep me.” She said this matter-of-factly with a clipped tone that closed off any dissent. She changed tack with the next breath. “In Vumu culture women are not allowed to wield weapons. That was not so in Acacia, was it?”

Melio, reluctant to leave her earlier statement, took a moment before deciding to answer. “In our country any girl who was inclined could receive training. So long as they met the men’s standard they weren’t restricted from service.”

“Did many meet the standard?”

“Most who tried did, I believe. The Seventh Form is that of Gerta. She fought the twin brothers Talack and Tullus and their three wolf dogs. It took her two hundred and sixteen moves to defeat them, but she did. Both brothers lost their heads, and the dogs each a limb or two. So at times women did not just meet the standard, they set it.”

Mena stared into the middle distance, lost in thought for a moment. She knew why she had arranged for Melio to be here and what she was going to ask him. She had regained herself enough to control the moment. Even so, her own desires surprised and confused her. They had nothing in common with the role she had grown so accustomed to. She was a priestess of Maeben. She had been so for years now and been content. But still she opened her mouth and moved closer to what she wanted to ask. “And you know all the Forms?”

“I learned only the first five properly.”

“And the rest?”

“I know them,” Melio said. “I learned the last Forms in a rush, more from texts than from real training. The world was already falling apart then…”

“Melio, I want you to teach me to use a sword.” There. She’d said it. She knew it as a betrayal and departure from all that she had become, but she had to admit that she felt calmer at the center than she would have imagined. She did want to learn. She had wanted to for a long time. She had often entertained violent thoughts while Vaminee lectured her or dreamed of dancing about with her Marah sword at night, waking to wonder if something was wrong with her.

“Are you serious?”

The question bolstered her certainty. “Of course I am.”

“Princess, I’m no instructor. And I have no weapons anymore. I cannot teach without-”

Mena cut him off by shooting to her feet. “What you lack the goddess will provide. Come.”

A short time later, in a storeroom at the rear of her compound, with light filtering down through the thatch of the walls and roof, dust thick in the air between them, Mena stood with her arms stretched out before her. Her palms cradled the sheathed sword she had swam to the shore of Vumu with nine years before. It was stained with a rust taint in some of the engraving. There was not the shine on it that there should have been, but still there was much underlying beauty in the artistry of it.

“This was the only thing I carried with me from Acacia,” she said. “It would not let me go. The priests never dared to take it from me. It must have seemed a sort of charm to them. So long as I agreed to hide it, they left it with me and have not spoken of it since. Do you know this weapon? Ones like it, I mean.”

Melio’s eyes nodded before his head did. “It’s a Marah sword. It is much like one I had myself once.”

Mena gripped the hilt and tugged the blade free of the scabbard. The sound it made as it slid was absurdly loud in the hushed space, a grating noise that rose to a lilt as the blade cut naked into the air.

Melio pulled away and said, “I thought that being Maeben was your destiny.”

“Why do you back away from me? You came and found me, remember?”

“Of course, but-”

“You may not have found me as you expected, and now this thing I ask of you may also surprise you. But so what? You’ve been surprised by life before.”

He had no direct rebuttal for that. “The priests will-”

“They have nothing to do with it.”

The wrinkled expression on Melio’s face managed to say that the flaws in such a statement were obvious. Before he could try to put them into words, Mena continued. “I’ll worry about the priests. They are of no concern to you. Have you any other excuses?”

Melio appeared to be stumped, unable to withdraw but at a loss for how to proceed. He looked behind him toward the door by which they had entered the storeroom, as if it might be possible to retrace his steps and gain the more stable ground he had stood on only a few moments before. Mena, impatient now, asked him what the First Form was. Edifus at Carni, he responded. Was it a sword Form? Yes, of course, he said. Most of the Forms are.

“Show me,” Mena said, tossing him the scabbard without warning. He caught it spryly enough. A moment later she stepped out into the center of the room, her own sword in hand. She kicked a few crates to mark out a cleared space. It was not as if she’d never come here before, never unsheathed the sword and swung it around her. She had done so many times over the years. It had been little more than a test of her growing strength, or so she’d thought. Now, it seemed, part of her had felt a need to touch the weapon, to remind her she had not entirely forgotten it. Since she had held it often she knew well how best it fit her hand. She chose to hold it awkwardly, however, with a finger hooked over the guard, with her wrist cocked over as if the blade were too heavy for her. The point of it traced a short, jagged scar on the dirt floor.

To a swordsman it was not a pleasing picture. Melio could not help but correct her grip on the hilt, as she had known he would do. That was only a start, of course. He taught her how to set her feet, demonstrated proper posture. He named the various parts of the sword and explained the function of each. Within just a few minutes he had lost a good deal of his reluctance.

He explained to her that Edifus personally fought with the champion of the Gaqua, a tribe that had controlled the Gradthic Gap, the route through the mountains between Aushenia and the Mein Plateau. Just how this duel was arranged was lost to history, but the battle itself was detailed down to the slightest move. Melio had never taught the moves to someone completely unfamiliar with them, but within a few stops and starts he managed to take on the Gaquan’s skin. He held the scabbard like he would a sword, and moved through the series of strikes and parries at quarter speed. Mena was quick to anticipate his moves, and showed him as much.

Despite himself, Melio warmed to the work. He seemed to forget his reluctance and the slight stature of his pupil and the strange, shadowed space they occupied. The words formed on his lips and his mind seemed to welcome them, to hum with the return of skills long neglected. Whenever he paused or seemed to falter, Mena pinned him with her eyes until he continued. If he was embarrassed by her naked torso he did a good job of hiding it. By the late morning Mena had worked through the entire sequence and knew the early portions by heart.

Eventually, they paused by mutual, silent agreement, both of them slick with sweat. They stood for some time, catching their breath. Melio wiped the perspiration from his forehead with his palm, though the moisture returned in an instant. Now that they had paused, a look of confusion seeped across his features. He peered at the scabbard clenched in his fist, flipping it from side to side as if he were not quite sure how it came to be there.

“How long before my brother summons us?” Mena asked.

“I thought you did not believe it would ever happen.”

“I don’t, but how long until the summons that you believe will come?”

“If it happens, as I’ve been told, he will start searching for you this spring. And in the summer he’ll call the armies together. There are many of us who speak of it. When he calls, I’ll hear of it through people I know among the traveling merchants.”

“So,” Mena said, “a few months. Not much time. How good a swordswoman do you think I can become in a few months?”

Melio could not shake his look of bafflement. He did not try, nor did he answer the question. Instead, he said, “We should oil that blade. The rust is a crime. Though, of course, we should make training swords. There’s likely good wood in the hills…”