Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Though Mena made sure never to waver in her duties as Maeben, the greater portion of her attention now went to her lessons with Melio. He met her in her compound every day, after she had completed her duties to the goddess. Instead of talking as they had done in their first few encounters, he tutored her solely in swordplay. He claimed to be out of practice and to never have been a teacher, but he dropped right into the role as if he had been born for it.

Within a few days of Mena stating her interest, Melio had ventured up into the interior highlands in search of suitable wood for practice swords. Though it was different from the ash used on Acacia, he did find a strong-grained timber of a reddish hue that served nicely. By the end of the first week they both danced about with training swords. They were lighter than he wished, but Melio was still pleased. His fingers caressed the gentle curves of the blades as if they wished to memorize each inch of them. He returned each day having made small refinements, added accoutrements, carved and sanded, oiled and honed the weapons in ways both functional and aesthetic.

Mena had little difficulty learning the postures, in getting her grip right, and setting her feet well. Any mistake that Melio corrected was banished forever. She never needed to be told a thing twice. At first this had surprised the tutor, but with the passing days he took her aptitude more and more as a given. They flew forward from one lesson to the next. Working on the various strokes, on how to best channel power from the legs up through the coiled tension of the torso and out to the blade. Her swims in the harbor and dives among the oysters had kept her fit, but Melio pushed her to use previously undiscovered muscles.

The First Form, that of Edifus at Carni, Mena committed to physical memory in three days. The fight between Aliss and the Madman of Careven took all of two days. Melio suggested they skip the Third Form, wherein the knight Bethenri went to battle with devil’s forks, but Mena would not hear of it. She helped him fashion versions of the short, daggerlike weapons. The two of them cut and slashed, bent and twirled, thrust and retreated throughout one long afternoon. They stirred up clouds of dust and attracted the eyes of the servants, who stood at respectful distances completely transfixed by the sight of their mistress spinning through the deadly motions of warcraft. She did her best to work through the exercises with the goddess’s calm faзade. She voiced no fatigue. She never protested against a challenge. She wiped sweat from her face and stood straight even while her chest heaved and billowed.

In the solitude of her chambers at night she curled on her side and hugged her legs to her chest and cried at her body’s torment. She did not recognize her own arms. They were thinner in some places, thicker in others, more angular, cut around the muscle in new ways. Fortunately, she could always recognize herself in the new shapes. The altered contours of her forearms, the shapes of the veins on the back of her hand, the striated cords at the base of her neck: it was always her, Mena. She was not so much changing into something different as she was emerging from beneath a long-held disguise. In the privacy of her inner rooms she stood unclothed, admiring the changes. In public, of course, she did her best to hide them.

If the priests knew anything of her daily routine-and they must have-they did not speak of it. Mena gave them no excuse to find fault with her. She was prompter in her duties than before. She was always on time for the evening ceremonies, for the special displays put on for visiting dignitaries, and she was more easily found inside her compound than previously, when she had spent her free moments in solitary exploration of the harbor floor. She sat through meetings in Maeben’s garments without so much as a crack in her resolve. In the space of two weeks she had to twice meet with grieving parents, ones whose children had been taken by the goddess. She found herself speaking through the goddess in ways meant to please the priests. She had never quite done this before, and she did not like to recall some of the things she had intoned before the tearful, penitent parents. “Look not at the sky,” she said once, “if you wish Maeben to see your reverence.”

How unfair, she thought, to tell people to fear something as ever present as the heavens above them. She herself often searched out the raptor form aloft over the inner mountains. Why had she forbade the people from doing the same? Her words, she realized, would flow from one mouth to another. Soon the whole village, and eventually the entire archipelago, would know Maeben on earth’s new proclamation. They would walk through their daily lives with bowed heads. Vaminee, the first priest, must have been pleased with her, though, if so, he did not deign to show it.

Melio, on the other hand, was not shy in voicing his disapproval of her service to the goddess. They still met at night to talk through what they practiced during the day and to plan for the future. They were both Acacians, he reminded her. These island deities were nothing to them. They were petty powers-if powers at all. Worshipping them did nothing to heal the rift between humankind and the Giver. That was what was important. That, perhaps, could help restore rightful order to the world. If Mena wished to pray, she should do so in Acacian and to the Giver. Aliver would summon her any day now; she had to be ready in every way possible.

“But instead you worship a sea eagle?”

Mena sat across from him in the dim light of a handful of candles, the night air around them still enough that the flames stood straight.

“What of the children? Your Maeben snatches children and carries them screaming to-”

“Don’t!” Mena snapped. The word burst from her as forceful as a sword thrust. She could not listen to him speak so flippantly of the taken children. “I’ve no choice. I am Maeben. She happened to me. She came into me and I became her. I was nobody when-”

“You were a princess of Acacia.”

“-I arrived here. I knew nothing. I had nothing. I was nothing but an orphan child! I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t know a soul. I was alone! Can you understand what that was like?”

“So the goddess snatched you up as well. And you are thankful for it?” When Mena did not answer, Melio shook his head, turned away, and took in the night sky. “No, I don’t understand any of it. You’re a young woman, Mena. That child you speak of is no longer. You’re no goddess and you know it. The priests know it. The poor fools who revere you know it. You’re all playacting some shared delusion. Maeben taking children to serve her in her palace? How absurd. Your goddess is nothing but a voracious bird. It lives on the isle north of here, and not in a palace either. Instead of worshipping it, somebody should shoot it from the sky. I have seen her aloft myself. If I had had a bow I would not have hesitated to use it.”

Mena was silent for some time and then said, “You’re right. You don’t understand.”

Whatever differences they had during the evening, they were forgotten as they carried on with their martial sessions during the day. Mena learned the Fourth Form-that of Gethack the Hateful-with ease. By the Fifth, however, she found herself struggling. It was not that her ability was any less-just the opposite. Her skills, she felt, were increasingly hampered by the Form. What did it matter how the Priest of Adaval went to work on the twenty wolf-headed guards of the rebellious cult of Andar? Learning the Sixth Form just made her doubts even clearer. She came to feel that there was a difference between the strokes she made during fencing and the way she would attack if her goal was actually to kill the person she faced. Having distinguished this difference, she wondered why one would ever waste time attacking in a manner that the partner already expected. Yes, the motions of dueling back and forth through the preordained motions of the Form strengthened the body and honed the reflexes, but such practice seemed beside the point.

She broke off in the middle of the Sixth Form one afternoon, exasperated. “This is too much dancing. No wonder our army fell so easily.” Melio started to protest, but Mena gestured that she meant no offense. She wiped sweat from her brow and thought for a moment how best to express herself. “Why should we learn the steps of myth? The Early One casting back the gods of Ithem? What has that to do with anything? We won’t be fighting the gods of Ithem. Why pretend that we will?”

Melio had an answer for this, but Mena did not pause to hear it.

“These things you are teaching me are all very well,” she said, “but it seems to me that they constrict the sword instead of freeing it. You’ve taught me that the Forms are the basis of our military system?”

Melio nodded.

“Then you see the problem.”

Melio was not sure that he did.

“I know I’m holding in my hand a wooden sword. But I’m supposed to think of it as a real blade, one that was conceived, fired, pounded, and honed to an edge all for one reason, yes? What is that reason?”

The tutor’s answer had about it the tones of memorized maxims. “It’s the link between the swordsman and his opponent,” he said. “Properly used, the blade is an extension of the body, of the mind. A sharp blade is the tool of a sharp mind-”

“No.” Mena shook her head, impatient. “To cut! That is the reason. I don’t know anything about ‘an extension of the mind.’ Whenever it comes unsheathed, the intent should be to cut. Not to parry, not to dance, not to aim a blow that your opponent already knows is coming. A sword is a weapon. I want to learn to use it as one.”

“True swordplay is not like the fencing we do here,” Melio answered, “especially against opponents ignorant of the Forms. But having a host of known responses makes one quick when speed is needed.”

Mena’s head bowed slightly; her eyes canted upward to study Melio as he spoke on, his voice heavy with a tutor’s authority. She lowered her gaze to the ground, pursed her lips as if the gesture was necessary to clip words that wished to escape her.

Eventually she broke in. “Raise your sword. Try to cut me-if you can do so before I cut you.”

“This is a race to the cut, then?”

“Yes,” Mena said, “you could say that.”

They both stood in ready position. Mena nodded; Melio did likewise. A moment passed and then, they both knew, the duel could commence. One of them was more prepared for it than the other. Mena’s strike was simple. Direct and executed without hesitation. She stooped low and sliced hard at Melio’s left leg just below the knee. He did not have a chance to parry, and as the leg came out from under him, he twisted over the pain of it. He dropped to the hard-packed soil. Mena stood above him, the tip of her sword nudging his abdomen.

“I’m sorry, but here’s my point: why dance through fifty moves when a single one will suffice?”

Melio stared at her with a look of alarm in his eyes. She reached out a hand and pulled him to his feet, smiling as if all she had just said had been some sort of joke.

From then on their fencing was never as it had been. Mena learned the rest of the Forms, memorizing and mastering the moves quickly. She did so in a perfunctory way, as if she was simply appeasing him. She focused her full attention on fencing, convincing Melio to fight again and again “to the cut.” Initially, Mena scored more strikes. Melio seemed reluctant to commit to the stated rules, which were that from the moment they began each of them tried to immediately strike their blade into the other’s flesh. Smarting from blow after blow, he quickened to match her. Soon their quick bouts of three or four moves had stretched to seven or eight. Before long their matches went into double digits.

Mena writhed at night, sleepless, her body like a weed twisting with rapid growth. She was raw with bruises, with abrasions, with stressed bones and muscles daily shredding and knitting anew. But she knew she was improving. She began to think of techniques Melio had not taught her, as when she pressed her body close to his and stuck like glue against him so that for some time neither of them could strike effectively against the other. Another time she abruptly dashed him with her shoulder, using it as if it were a weapon also, springing away from the impact with a vigor that caught him by surprise. She learned how to smack his blade with a collision that several times knocked it from his hands, and how to touch blades in a manner that made the two stick together instead of bounce apart. At times she slowed the rate of her movements unexpectedly, feeling that the center of her timing was in her abdomen. With a deep internal contraction she changed her rhythm so completely it left Melio stumbling to adjust.

Mena could not be sure how skilled her tutor actually was, but on a morning toward the end of the last month of spring the two fenced their way to a standstill. She stunned him by striking at several different points on his body with a single cut. Though Melio parried her, the shock on his face registered. He realized as well as she that with a single downward blow she had nearly cut him at the neck, on the side, and at the back of the knee, without losing any of her initial momentum.

After this, Melio stood some time, panting, watching her from behind the dark locks of his hair that stuck to the sweat of his forehead. “Who would have thought that Princess Mena Akaran would be the first to challenge me with the true use of the sword?”

“Don’t look so surprised about it,” Mena said. “All I’ve proved is that we are equals.”

“Easily enough said, but perhaps you don’t know what it means.”

“Of course I do. It means I’ll have to find someone else to fight. You know of the stick fighters?”

Melio voiced his opposition to the idea over and over again. He explained things she already knew but which he could not help but voice, as they seemed too important for her to ignore. She had not been trained to stick fight. The art and technique of it was vastly different from the swordplay they had been practicing. The sticks didn’t cut, but this didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous, even deadly. Stick fighters came from the hill villages of the islands. They were the poorest of men. They claimed warriors’ blood but could do nothing with it but test themselves against one another, trying to earn quick bounty from betting. They danced as if they were entertainers, strutting and preening and catering to the betting crowd, but when they attacked they did so with all the force they could muster. They dislocated shoulders with downward blows, broke forearms with twirls, thrust into abdomens so hard that the bodies bled on the inside. He had seen a man’s skull cracked open, watched another man blinded in one eye, another with his collarbone smashed to pieces so that it would never heal properly. And yet another fighter, a master of the craft, had managed such force in his whirling strike to a man’s back that the victim was unable to walk thereafter. He crumpled to the ground, devastated by what had just happened to him, and never again rose to stand on his legs.

“These are men you want to test yourself against?”

If she entered the circle with one of them, she risked a hundred injuries and would gain nothing for it. Why do that? It simply did not make sense. She was vain beyond all reason if she believed a month of sword training had prepared her for such a test. And, anyway, if found out, the wrath of the priests would fall upon her, endangering everything.

Thus was Melio’s rant. It did not do the least bit of good. Mena chose the day she appeared in the rough ring of the stick fighters. She dyed her skin with blackberry juice, leaving it a strange tint but not entirely unnatural. She wrapped her torso in a binding cloth that flattened her small breasts, dressed as a laborer, and bound her hair as Vumu men did. She held her open eyes above a smoky fire long enough to redden them, like those of a mist smoker. No doubt she looked unusual, but none who saw her imagined her to be the priestess of Maeben.

With Melio as a guide, she found the stick fighting gathering at the far side of Ruinat. Discovering it was the easy part. Getting into the ring, she thought, might be more difficult. She shouldered her way into the throng of men. They were young and old, laborers and dockworkers, hill farmers and urchins of the town, the smell of them rank and thick, the air clouded with sweat and mist smoke. She knew these people. She recognized faces from ceremonies. But she was not Maeben now. There was no distance separating them now. She was not arrayed in the guise of a goddess.

The ring man approached her, taking her in from head to toe, grinning. She thought he might ask her to explain herself, to justify being there. But he had no interest in her credentials. He was all business. He informed her that all new fighters had to earn the right to compete. Their first match was always with the one who held the ring’s title. The new fighter had to put up the entry fee. The sum, of course, was essentially forfeit. She would lose, but afterward she would be able to compete with lesser fighters.

“If I win,” Mena said, keeping her voice clipped and low, “am I then the title holder?”

The man laughed. “If you win, you’ve earned a place at the bottom, that’s all. Do you still wish to fight?”

“Of course.”

“Then you fight Teto,” the ring man said.

Teto, the said champion of the ring, was happy to oblige. He pushed through the sweaty bodies and stepped into the circle of cleared sand, where Mena awaited him. His stick, which he held toward the point and carried pressed up against the back of his arm, slid through his loosened fingers until his fist tightened around the hide-wrapped hilt. He moved with a demeanor quite different from Melio’s. His bare feet were careful in their placement but playful. He was light upon the toes, his legs rubbery bands of muscles that supported a floating, tranquil torso. His head seemed the weightiest portion of his body, eyes deep set in the skull and hard on her.

Mena did not have time to think much. Teto opened the duel; she responded. Within a few seconds she decided to fight him with the deadening defense. It was not something she had practiced before or named in advance. But from the first moments she knew that his strength was his greatest attribute and his pride in this was likely his greatest flaw. Instead of exerting extra energy in the impact of their sticks, she let her own force give when she parried. She stopped his strike but without the normal impact he was used to. He struck again harder and harder, his anger showing on his face and in the quickening pace of his strikes. But each time he touched her stick, it gave against his with a limpness he clearly found disturbing, as if he had struck a heavy rope that somehow diffused his force.

The end of the match came so quickly that the onlookers stood stunned afterward. Teto rushed her, his stick straight before him, intent on impaling her with his blade or flattening her with the rush of his body. Mena simply touched his stick with hers, slipped to the side, kept his weapon in place with the pressure of hers sliding over it. She lifted to clear his hilt and then snapped her stick across the base of his exposed neck with all the force her body could muster. And that was it.

Teto dropped to the sand, his hands clasped to his throat, writhing in agony, his cries of angry pain the only sound within the hushed arena of bodies. For some moments the spectators stared about confused, looking from one another to the two fighters and then around again, trying from the scene before them to understand the blinding motion that had preceded it, each of them blinking as if in so doing the world would snap into the rightful order, the outcome of the match reversed. Mena let them study this for a few moments, and then she turned on her heel in the sand and pushed through the crowd.

“Where was your fear?” Melio asked, jogging to keep up with her as they wove the back alley trail toward the temple compound.

“I don’t know,” Mena said. And it was true. She had forgotten there even was such a thing as fear. She’d felt only exhilaration and purpose as she faced Teto. Now she jogged with a positively giddy energy. “I just knew I could beat him. I had to be careful, yes. But I did not fear.”

“He would have liked to have hurt you.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

They carried on in silence for a time. As they came out of the shrubs near the compound wall, Melio said, “Can I convince you not to do that again?”

Mena stopped and turned toward him. Looking at his brown eyes and crooked lips and disheveled hair she realized that she felt very different in his presence now from the way she had when he first arrived. She was more at home within herself, more at peace, especially so when in his company. Strange that all the hours fighting could bring them closer. All the time with their bodies pressed close together in physical contest, moist with sweat, each trying to best the other, pain and humiliation only a mistake away. Part of her wanted to acknowledge that there was something special in what they had become to each other. But she was not sure just what to say or how to say it.

She spoke simply. “Thank you for the things you’ve taught me.”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure that I taught you anything, Mena. It feels more like I just reminded you of things you already knew. You may have been born to wield a sword. Do not laugh. I’m not joking…”

He hesitated a moment. The deepening furrows in his forehead suggested he might have something more to say. He did have something more to say! The same sort of thoughts she herself had. She read it all on his face in an instant. Though it sent a trilling of excitement through her body, Mena moved before he could speak. She patted his arm and turned and jogged the last stretch to the compound.

Arriving back at the gate, she found Vandi waiting for her. The summons he bore was the one she had come to most dread. She was needed in the anteroom of the temple in little more than two hours. It could only mean that Maeben had taken another child. It was the fourth in less than two months.

She parted from Melio without a word, shutting him out of the compound. Inside, Vandi waited to one side as she stripped naked and stepped into her bath, scrubbing her skin furiously to remove the berry tint from her skin. Vandi watched her with his greenish eyes, his lips tightly clamped. He offered neither comment nor question, though he must have noted every detail of her disguise. He had even seen her hand her stick to Melio.

Mena scrubbed her face raw without actually getting all the stain off. But when she could take it no more she gave up. She and Vandi walked briskly to the temple, where he dressed her as the goddess. The makeup appliers lathered unguents on liberally. By the time they set her headdress in place she looked firmly within her role. Only then did she remember to slow her breathing and cool her body and think away the beads of sweat that threatened to smear her faзade. She thought back to her claim that she had not been afraid to fight Teto. It had been true at the time, she was sure. She tried to summon such courage again. Looking into the faces of grieving parents, however, was not something she would ever grow comfortable with.

She seated herself on the large chair in the anteroom of the temple. Vaminee stood in his usual place beside her. He tugged his robes snug and showed Mena his chin in profile, nothing unusual in that. Tanin, the second priest, took up a position at her left hand. He was not usually a part of these interviews. He watched her with an intense consideration that made her skin itch.

“Priestess, you may be interested to learn,” Tanin said, “that a delegation of foreign warriors arrived in Galat yesterday.”

Mena felt a need to reach out and steady herself, but she knew she was already seated, already steadied. Being careful to keep her voice neutral, blandly uninterested, she asked, “What do they want?”

“We thought you might have an opinion on them,” Vaminee said.

“How could I know anything about them?”

Neither priest responded.

“I-I’ve heard rumors that war may be coming to the foreign lands. If that’s true, perhaps these soldiers want our aid.”

“That may be true,” Vaminee said, “and it may not be true. They claim to seek a lost child and believe she may be living on Vumu. In any event, it’s none of our affair. I’ve told the foreigners nothing as yet. The goddess is displeased with the islanders. That’s all we need concern ourselves with. We must first appease Maeben. Then we will decide on a course for dealing with the delegation.”

This was meant to end the subject, but Mena had to know at least a little more. “The foreigners…what nation are they from?”

“How should I know?” Vaminee asked.

“They are pale,” Tanin said. “They have skin like pig flesh.”

An ugly description, but coming from Tanin it was hard to know its accuracy. “I should meet with them,” Mena said. “As Maeben, I mean…Perhaps it is Maeben’s wish that Vumu play a role in the world. If I see them while in the goddess’s garb I might understand what she would wish.”

“You’ve done poorly at that lately. The fourth child taken since-”

“That’s no fault of mine! I hate that the goddess takes children. I’d do anything to make her stop.”

Vaminee closed his eyes, head tilted slightly, the muscles of his jaw rigid with anger. “You forget yourself entirely, girl. I didn’t want to believe it, but it’s whispered that you’ve been playing about with wooden swords. Is this true?”

“Within the walls of my compound I’m free to-”

“So it’s true.” Vaminee exchanged glances with the other priest. “You must stop this at once. People talk, Priestess. You may do as you wish in your compound up to a point. You cannot dishonor Maeben.”

The curtain at the far side of the room parted, indicating that the grieving parents were about to enter.

Vaminee noted it but continued. “You will stop immediately. And your friend-yes, I know of him-will leave next week when the floating merchants embark. If he remains, he will suffer for it. And you will suffer for it.”

The procession stepped through the entrance. The two parents, flanked by lesser priests, moved forward slowly, with grief-drenched reverence. From the instant Mena saw the couple she felt her heart accelerate. It took her a moment to truly understand why. They stepped forward slowly, faces tilted toward the floor, hands held before them beseechingly. They seemed so very familiar. Their shapes and movements…she’d seen them before! It was the same couple she’d seen weeks before when they’d lost their baby girl. If her eyes weren’t lying…if it was really them…

“No,” Mena said. “Not them…I promised them the goddess wouldn’t take their second child.”

Vaminee snapped his head toward her. “Foolish girl! That promise was not yours to make. Look these two in the face and see the results of your false pride.”