Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

The cliffside resorts of Manil were amazing to behold. As black as the night sky, the basalt walls rose more than two thousand feet into the air from the sea swells, vertical all the way to their heights. Residences had been wedged into fissures up and down the expanse of stone. Some actually hung from protrusions, slung in place by intricacies of architecture Corinn could only marvel at. They were painted pale blues and violets, hung with banners that danced in the air’s tumultuous currents.

As the homes were playgrounds in which rich merchants mingled with nobility, the Akarans had never deigned to buy a property here, but others among the extended royal family had. A girlhood friend whose family had a holiday home at Manil had bragged that the lower floors were made of thick glass panes that provided views of the waves hundreds of feet below. She claimed she could step out of bed and walk across her room, all the time watching the paths winged by gulls beneath her feet. Corinn had never visited that particular villa. She had been wary of believing the girl, but the memory had lingered, enough so that she recalled it from the moment she set eyes on Manil.

To reach the estates from the sea, one docked within the protection of a gated port, hemmed in by great blocks that had been lowered to serve as breakwaters. One morning well into the Acacian spring, Corinn stepped from a pleasure vessel onto this stone pier, Hanish Mein at her side. The two climbed into an open-top carriage and began the switchback ascent up a series of ramps. Though she still tried, it was getting more and more difficult to hold to her aloofness. Hanish was constant in his attentions, more so recently than ever. In the weeks since Calfa Ven he had requested her company on every journey. And there had been several. He had somehow managed to get her to serve as a guide to the high circles of Bocoum. With carefully placed questions-during what must have been orchestrated moments of solitude-Hanish again and again got her to open her mouth and speak civilly to him. She still planted barbs in him when she could, but he proved more consistent with his courteousness than she could be at rebutting him.

The villa they were to stay in was lavish in the way only vacation homes ever were, designed to attest to the owner’s wealth, to pamper guests for short periods. It would have belonged to an Acacian family, perhaps one known to her. She did not ask. Such things failed to trouble Corinn as they once had. Everything, it seemed, had once belonged to Acacians. Now it belonged to Meins. She knew she should consider this a personal affront, but indignation was hard to hold on to year after year. She had been fluent in the Meinish language for some time. Aspects of their culture that had once seemed foreign to her now blended-in courtly circles, at least-so intricately with Acacian ways that it was hard to know where one ended and the other began.

The villa had been anchored to the plains above the cliffs. It draped over the upper rim and stretched down several stories. One room flowed into the next with a sensation almost like sliding, as if the rooms moved to adjust to your progress. One reached a room simply by initiating a motion toward it. Corinn found it all somewhat disconcerting, yet pleasurably so. All the walls facing the sea made full use of the vistas, with building-length patios or windows set low on the walls to reveal the heaving sea far below. The mosaic pattern on the floor simulated ocean waves, whitecapped and frothy. Porpoises leaped into and out of the swells. Fishermen clung to tiny boats, tilted at precarious angles that would have overturned actual vessels. Left alone in her room, Corinn spent a portion of the afternoon on her knees, studying the details, dragging her fingertips across the tumultuous motion. It was so well done. She loved the way the fishermen seemed always on the verge of destruction, loved that their smiling faces suggested they thought it all a great game.

The first evening, she and Hanish attended a banquet hosted by a newly rich Meinish family. In times past Hanish would have entertained the gathering at her expense, finding something to needle her about. But the usual entourage had not come on this trip. Hanish was cordial enough with his hosts, but he never truly engaged with them, despite their repeated efforts to bring him to the center of things. He simply did not seem that interested, neither in them nor in the music; nor in the food and drink so abundant around them; nor in the fawning gestures of men and women alike, all of them so eager to praise Hanish Mein, their hero, the only Mein to ever ascend to the throne of an empire, the one who might yet lift the old curse. He was the greatest chieftain in the history of their people, and folk such as these never tired of praising him for it.

Instead of paying them any mind, he blocked out a space for himself and Corinn to share privately. She could no longer deny-at least not to herself-that she enjoyed speaking as he listened. She enjoyed answering queries, liked to have his gray eyes upon her, liked knowing that the rest of the room watched from outside the pull of his gravity. The confidence which she had once thought of only as arrogance actually had an allure to it.

And Hanish relaxed in her presence, even as troubling affairs of state crowded his mind. He told her of the league’s ongoing campaign against the Outer Isles raiders. It had not gone as easily as the league had predicted, he said. Not at all. One captain of the bandits called himself “Spratling”-an ironic play on words, no doubt, as there was a tiny, inconsequential fish that went by that name. This Spratling was not at all inconsequential. In addition to hobbling a warship and actually killing a leagueman, he had exploded a portion of the league platforms. The initial blast tore the warehouses to pieces and threw up a spray of flaming pitch that set the entire structure ablaze. Even the stuff that fell into the sea continued to burn. It floated on the surface and came riding the swells toward the other platforms with each shift in the tides. The fires, his sources said, burned for a week before they were contained or dissipated. The raiders had done so much damage that the league postponed the spring shipment of mist. They would be months working to recover, backlogged in every province.

“All because of a little spratling.” Hanish dismissed it all with a wave of his hand. “Anyway, it’s only a temporary setback. The league has a thousand weapons to bring to bear. That’s what they’re saying; I’d like to believe them. When they’re crippled, we’re crippled as well.”

“Have you considered doing away with them?”

“With the league?” Hanish asked.

Corinn hesitated a moment. “I know the league has been around for ages, but if they cannot even defend themselves against a band of raiders…why not handle the trade directly?”

“No chance of that. You cannot imagine how entrenched the league is. They have steel hooks planted in every aspect of the world’s affairs. They are efficient at what they do usually. Perhaps most to the point, they’ve made many powerful persons rich beyond their dreams. This was true in your father’s time; so it is true in ours.”

“You never miss a chance to point out that my people began the world’s injustices,” Corinn said, feeling a flare of her old anger. “We were the villains who created the Quota, who brought mist to the Known World, who conscripted slave labor to work the mines. You want me to know that this foulness was inside me all along. You act as if you had a righteous mandate to overthrow it, but how have you made the world better? You’ve killed the slave master, but instead of freeing the slaves you’ve stepped into his place-”

Hanish interrupted, speaking in a flippant tone that ignored the import of her argument altogether. “Will you dance with me?”

Corinn showed her annoyance with a cold stare. “Meinish music isn’t fit for dancing.” This was not just an insult. Their tunes were still strange to her ears. Compared to the lush, all-encompassing fullness of Acacian ensemble groups, the plucked notes of the Meinish instruments were discordant, the melodies spare and unpredictable. She could not imagine how to dance to it. Nobody else was.

“So you would dance, had we the proper music?”

When she did not answer immediately, Hanish took her by the wrist. He squeezed her fine bones between his thumb and forefinger and tugged her toward the center of the room. “In all the many centuries that musicians have played Meinish tunes, I’m sure that someone has danced to this one. Someone has felt within the sounds a rhythm suited to the movement of two bodies. That’s how I like to think of it. One must find rhythms others’ ears don’t hear.”

The hand at her wrist slid somehow into the grip of her palm. The other swept around her back. He pulled her close. She yanked her arm to loose it from his and stepped back, but instead of breaking free she found Hanish swept forward, the movement of her arm a gesture in what was suddenly choreography. Her backward step had been so perfectly timed to his forward motion that she almost believed she had initiated the intimacy. Try as she might she could not manage to break the flow of their movements. Before long she stopped trying. It was amazing, really, how well he moved and how much her body enjoyed the swirling pattern they cut across the floor.

“Corinn,” Hanish said, “I cannot pretend to have a noble answer to your question. I have not made the world better. I know that. But I’ve made it better for my people. Believe me, we deserve it. No other people has suffered like mine has.”

“I suppose that’s my fault also.”

Hanish waited a few moments after this, moving through the dance, his eyes furtive in a way Corinn had never seen them, canted off to the side. “Not you, but your people, yes. Your people gave birth to the Tunishnevre. They created it. On winning the throne through all manner of deceit-and if you think I’m treacherous, you should know your own blood, Corinn-Tinhadin turned on my ancestors and cursed them. He was a sorcerer. He had but to speak a thing to make it happen.”

“Santoth,” Corinn said. “You’re talking about the Santoth.”

Hanish nodded. “Tinhadin had a gift that perhaps you have as well, if you knew how to use it. He cursed the line of Mein with everlasting purgatory. No man of my family has found peace in death since-not one in over twenty generations. Our bodies don’t rot. Our dead flesh doesn’t burn. Our souls remain trapped within. We’re not alive, but we linger. Just linger.”

Several other couples had joined them in the open space. They twirled about in imitation of Hanish’s dance, their faces eager for the eye contact he denied them. Corinn thought he might change the subject for fear of being overheard, but he carried on without even lowering his voice.

“There is no greater curse than being forever trapped between life and death,” he said, “allowed neither one nor the other. Can you imagine what it means to be a spirit contained within a corpse for year after year, no end of it in sight? Death comes for all things. All things-humans and beasts, trees and fish-everything is promised release except my ancestors. Except me. This is what the Tunishnevre is. This is why it grows greater with each passing year. This is why your people make sure their own corpses are made into dust and cast out into the wind. Your customs remember the curse and fear it, even if you don’t. I find that’s often the way of things. Collective memory has a wisdom individuals cannot match. I’d like to find a way to free them so that they could truly find the peace and rest of death. Perhaps-should you ever find it in your heart-you could help me do this.”

“Me?”

Hanish nodded. “You may have an importance you have not yet imagined.” “Is it true that you speak with them?”

“In a manner, yes.”

“What do they tell you?”

They bumped against a couple that had gotten too close. Hanish stopped moving, dropped his arms, and spoke quietly in a way that made his voice an intimacy. “They tell me a great many things, Corinn. Right now they are telling me it’s getting too crowded here, Princess. They suggest that we retire.”

They spent the entirety of the next day together. Hanish seemed to have nothing to do except entertain her. On horseback they rode the coast road to the north, flowing over the contours of the plateau, sea to one side, manicured farmland stretching off to the west. His escort of Punisari guards kept a good distance behind them, well out of earshot of their conversation. For the first time they truly spoke without the possibility of anybody overhearing them. They did not, however, use the solitude to speak of anything of any significance.

At a famous spot they stood above a fissure in the rock face that channeled the power of the swells into a foaming eruption of spray. It came rhythmically, like blasts blown up from some undersea bellows. And after lunch they shot quail released one by one for their pleasure. The birds took to flight in a frenzy, the flapping of their wings audible even from a distance. By no means were they easy targets with a bow and arrow. Hanish made only one grazing contact with a bird; Corinn pinned five. There was something satisfying about making a hit: the way the bird’s wings stopped instantly, its course altered, the way it dropped from the sky, a dead weight that twirled with the awkward appendage of the shaft imbedded in it. Once her arrow passed directly through a bird, so smoothly it carried on into the distance and sank into the ground long after the bird had thudded down. Hanish applauded, and she found ready occasions to tease him, which clearly gave him pleasure.

When he proposed that they refuse the evening’s invitation to dinner Corinn did not object. They ate together at the far ends of a too-long table. The main course was scallops simmered in a chili sauce, topped with fragrant herbs. It was wonderful on the palate, a play of sweet and fierce that sent Corinn’s body temperature soaring. They drank a dry, pale wine that made Corinn suck her cheeks absently. Hanish imitated her; Corinn accused him of selecting the fare just to make her look a fool. He did not deny it.

Later, they shared a sweet liqueur on the villa’s main balcony. Below them the sea darkened as the sun passed from view. Before long the moon appeared and shone behind a lacy weave of thin clouds. The breeze carried a chill with it, but not uncomfortably so. Just enough to pimple the skin. Corinn stood near enough to Hanish to smell the scented oils that had been rubbed into his skin. She brushed her shoulder against his absently. Once she felt the electric shock of her breast grazing his arm. Did she intend such moments? Did she orchestrate them or had wine and liqueur-which had pleasantly blurred the edges of the world-made her so clumsy with her body as that? She was not sure.

Holding her small glass out to accept Hanish’s offer of a refill, Corinn asked, “What next? Will you offer me a draw on a mist pipe?”

The question was posed playfully, but Hanish rubbed the grain of the weathered balcony abutment nervously, looking for a moment like a child trying to leave an indentation with just the pressure of his fingers. “Never.”

“Did you bring me here to seduce me? Is that what this is all about?”

Blood rose to Hanish’s cheeks. Even his forehead reddened. She had never seen such an involuntary display register on his features before. “I brought you here to offer you a gift. I fear you’ll throw it back in my face.”

“I strike fear in you, then?”

“You fill me with trepidation, Corinn, in a way that nobody has before.”

Corinn looked at him, her face giving nothing away, waiting. Hanish motioned for her to sit beside him on a nearby bench, from which they leaned forward and gazed over the railing. They sat side by side, near enough that their legs touched at the knee.

“What if I said that this was all yours?” Hanish asked. “This villa, I mean. There is no reason you shouldn’t have the best of everything. You were a princess; you are still a princess. It confounds me that you won’t take me at my word on this. I imagine a day when you and your siblings will gather here and enjoy-”

“You need not buy me, lord. I’m your slave anyway.”

“Please, Corinn,” Hanish said. “This home belonged to a family called Anthalar. You knew them, yes?”

Corinn nodded.

Hanish admitted that he had met one of them himself. It was during the war, before a battle. He had given the young man death, he said. He had always regretted that death. He saw strength in him, pride. He reminded him of his brother Thasren. So angry, so intent on doing right for his people. But it could not have been any other way. Being where he was that day, the young man simply had to die. A life lived truly created regrets such as this. There was no way around it. He regretted the things done to Corinn also.

“I know you cannot be bought,” he said, “but if you have any kindness within you, you’ll understand this gift is one I must try and give. If I’ve kept you penned up in the palace for too long I apologize. I used to fear to let you out of my sight.”

“Why?”

He shook his head, just enough to indicate he was not going to answer that question just now. “But you’re not a slave. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, actually I do know that.” Corinn drew her knees in, breaking the contact between them. She no longer felt giddy or elated from the drink. “I saw real slaves once. I was staying with a noble’s family in a village near Bocoum. I knew I was wrong to do it, but my friend and I stole out late at night and climbed onto the roof. We did this sometimes back then to look at the stars and tell stories. But this night we found a spot from which to watch the street below and there we saw a strange…Well, at first I thought it was a parade. But who has a parade in the middle of the night? In complete silence? And in what parade are the marchers all connected by chains? They were the same age as I was then. Ten, eleven, just on the verge of starting the change. They were chained at the necks, one to another to another, hundreds of them. Men drove them with drawn swords. They made not a sound over the shuffling of their feet and the tinkle of chains and…I never forgot that silence. It was dreadfully loud.”

“This sounds like a dream to me,” Hanish offered.

Corinn shook her head. “Don’t even allow me that much. It was no dream. Some part of me knew it, even back then. I did not know details, but I knew not to ask any adult what that procession had been. It was the Quota, of course. The Quota, upon which everything depends.” She stared at Hanish for a long moment. The small scar on his nostril was more pronounced than usual, his nose flushed from the liqueur, perhaps. “Why do the foreigners want our children so badly? What do they do with them?”

“Some questions are best left unanswered. But listen, you’ve confessed to me. Let me do the same. I want you to understand me and my people. We suffered so terribly during the Retribution. Do you understand that level of suffering? Twenty-two generations-as many in my line as in yours. But yours reigned supreme; mine struggled just to survive. And eventually we began to dream that old wrongs could be set right. All of that disruption we caused over the years-the petty squabbles and hijackings, the raids on Aushenia-none of that was true to our character. That was all just noise we made with drums and horns, behind which we hid our true objectives. We wanted Acacians to believe they knew us. I know our success gives you no joy. I’m just trying to explain myself. It is your right to judge us, but it is mine to want you to judge us fairly.”

“And so you killed my father,” Corinn said. She intended her voice to sound cold, angry, but instead she heard something pitiful in it, a desire to be comforted.

“I wish every day that there could have been an alternative. You do not know how much I wish I could have come to know you in some other way. But what I did against the beast that was the Acacian Empire I did not do against you. I’m no monster. Sometimes I wish the world to believe me so, but in truth my only distortion is that I feel the sorrow of an entire people. I must think of them first, understand that? I don’t love that I now send thousands of children into bondage. I hate it. But my own people have to come first. Understand that and you understand me.”

It was not that Corinn was untouched by what he said. It was not that she did not believe him or that she did not warm at the thought of this softness in his heart. She felt all these things, but habit had so sharpened her tongue that she responded with a meaner thought, one meant to defend herself even now.

“This is a strange method of seduction,” she said.

Hanish lifted his face to hers, his eyes brimming with moisture. The weight of his tears shifted as he moved and broke free from both eyes, spilling down his cheeks. It was so achingly pathetic a transformation that Corinn reached out to him. She touched him at the shoulder blade. She slid her fingers in line with the bone, across the fabric of his shirt, and onto the bare skin of his neck. She had wanted to touch him there for so long. His flesh was warm, soft as she imagined few parts of him were. She thought she could feel his pulse through his skin, but it may have been her own throbbing at her fingertips.

It was tiring being faithful to her father, she thought, exhausting to hope that her siblings would appear and have some influence on her life. Her stomach churned with the acids she daily nurtured. Why not just give herself to Hanish? Who better than he? She wished that Hanish actually had the power to make her whatever he wanted. She wished that she had the temperament to accept whatever role he shaped for her. He did have a capacity for cruelty. That would remain, no matter this show of intimate vulnerability. In the morning he would be Hanish Mein again, and the world would never know of the cracks beneath his faзade of complete control. But for some reason-and despite everything she knew to be right and true-she wanted to learn this very trait from him. She wanted to eat it piece by piece from his mouth and take it inside her and be a partner to it.

She did not retreat when he looked into her face. There was, in fact, an expression on her face like defiance. “How did you know to bring me to this villa?”

“I’ve made it my business to know. Tell me it pleases you and I’ll be happy.”

“Are there rooms here with glass floors?” she asked, knowing the answer already.

Hanish nodded. “In the children’s bedrooms. They are below us.”

“Show me them,” Corinn said, in barely more than a whisper.