Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

The seas below the southern coast of Talay were blacker and more violent than any the raiders of the Outer Isles had ever seen. Currents converged from two sides of the continent, mixing with the waters chilled from being in the shadow of the earth’s curve. For five days running, mountainous waves lifted and dipped the Ballan. The ship tilted on each rise, crested like a bird taking flight, and then crashed down the other side in a momentary rush toward the depths. Sailors who had never been sick in their lives went weak-kneed, turned yellow, gave up all pretense and swagger. They spit up everything they had eaten. After that, they produced things they could not recognize and still later tried to loosen their internal organs and offer them to the sea as well.

Off to the north the coastline of Talay stretched in featureless desolation, nothing but a distant smudge of sand-duned shore, no trees or mountains or human settlements to break the monotony. Forlorn as it was, Spratling longed to drag himself onto its shores, to sit sodden and snot nosed on his backside and wave the Ballan into the distance. If nothing else, such improbable fantasies helped pass the hours.

They witnessed things they had previously heard only tales of. Lights rippled across the heavens at night, multihued flapping ribbons. Spratling tried to hear the sound of them, sure that such massive contortions of color must tear the air like thunder. The silence of them never seemed right. Once a family of whales performed an aerial ballet off to starboard: leaping one after another into the air, canting to the side, and crashing down in a foam of spray. Another time they sailed past an enormous island of floating ice. The lookout who spotted it cried an alarm in a rising adolescent voice. He later admitted that he feared they had come upon a land of ghosts, a thing people of the Known World should not see, a trespass for which they would be punished. Spratling had tousled the young man’s hair. Inside, however, he tingled with the same thought himself. What a venture they were on! He scarcely believed it was happening, and it still amazed him to recall how easy his crew had actually made it for him.

It had happened just a couple of days after the attack on the platforms. Gathered together on the deck of the Ballan as the sun set, he’d looked up from his tea and said, “I’ve things to say. You may think some of them are mad, but here it goes anyway.”

He began by swearing that he had loved every minute of his time among them. It had been wonderful the way they moved from place to place throughout the Outer Isles, living dangerous and free, by no laws except the ones they held to mutually. He considered each of them his brother or sister, aunt or uncle. He cited individuals by name. He recalled moments shared in the past. They had been a nation unto themselves, hadn’t they? They’d had a true enemy in the League of Vessels, and they’d bested them on more than their fair share of occasions. He was proud of that.

The trouble was, he had said, he could not go on like this forever. He had come from the Inner Sea, from the heart of workings of the Known World. He had fled a great turmoil and tried to forget it. He had tried to put it behind him and to pretend he owned no part of it. It had almost worked. But not quite. He had never really forgotten. He could not pretend not to have to answer to his native country, his blood, and his destiny. The time had come for him to reckon with the fate he had delayed for some years now. So that was what he was going to do.

Almost apologetically, he noted that with Dovian gone the Ballan was his. He would not command anyone who did not want to join him, but he was going to take the ship down around Talay, back up its eastern coastline, and into the Inner Sea. If Leeka Alain was right, a war was brewing. He had reason to hate Hanish Mein, and if it was in his power, he was going to help bring his rule to an end. He hoped at least a few of those listening to him would come with him. But everyone had to make up his own mind. It would be dangerous and the chances of victory were slim and the rewards at the end of it uncertain, but…

“Well, that’s about all I can say about it.”

He had sat a moment in a silence. Truth was, there was more to say. Truth was, the only part of this that was really hard for him was the part still left to say. Dovian had prompted him toward it-made him promise he would do it, actually-and he had come to believe in it himself. He had to say it. He needed to claim his identity.

“Before you make up your minds, there’s something else…”

He hesitated again. A man cannot become a boy again, and yet that was what this felt like, like stepping back into a child’s fearful existence, an act of faith in a world that offered little proof that faith was merited. If he said what he wanted to, he would be admitting to being the child who had been left shivering and tearful and alone in a broken-down hut in the mountains. Powerless. Abandoned. Staring through the cracks at a massive world that didn’t give a damn about him. And who would save him this time?

“Spratling, we’re not inside your head, man,” Nineas said, cantankerous as usual. “Whatever you’re thinking, spit it out so we can hear it.”

“What I’m asking is that you not call me Spratling anymore.” There, he’d said the first part. It wasn’t so bad. The faces watching him did not seem surprised or judgmental or disdainful. He saw no mirth in their eyes. “That was a name for a boy in hiding. I’m thankful for it, but I’m not in hiding anymore. If you call me anything from now on, call me Dariel. Dariel Akaran. That’s who I am.”

He hated the moments of silence this was met with. Where was his confidence? Where the surety he felt when in command of battle? Something about the simple act of being asked to be called by his true name humbled him so completely that he wanted to fold back into himself. But he did not regret it. His leadership of these fighting men and women meant nothing if they did not acknowledge who he was. The battle against Hanish Mein wasn’t theirs to take on if they did not want it, and the least he could do was level with them.

A voice said, “If you are a prince, then all of us around you are members of your court. That right?”

“I always knew I had nobility in my blood,” Geena piped, wrinkling her eyes in what passed for her expression of mirth.

Clytus stood up, smiling, and stepped toward Dariel. “Don’t look so surprised, Prince Dariel Akaran. You’ll get no argument from any of us. Most of us have always known who you were. We always believed it. Dovian made sure of it.”

The mention of Dovian-of Val, now that he was Dariel again-nearly brought him to tears. He hid it by taking on a swagger. He asked which of them, then, had the balls to take war to Hanish Mein. Wren’s was the first voice to answer, followed by many others.

That was how this journey had started, with glib enthusiasm and camaraderie. Dariel was thankful for the memory of it. He did not for one moment take his crew’s loyalty for granted. Nor did he hold himself apart from them. He was their captain, right enough. They all knew that. But this “prince” business did not change a thing between them. He took on no airs, and they offered no new degree of reverence. So things were exactly the way he wished.

Coming around the curve of Talay and finally heading north again, the Ballan passed right by a league trader heading south. The vessel racked its crossbowmen and showed every sign that they would welcome a skirmish. But the raiders had the wind behind them, and they blew past without so much as a nod of acknowledgment. Dariel had the ship’s flag hoisted. Let them know who we are and wonder what we’re up to, he thought.

They were a week ripping north into the warming seas. For another few days they nosed along the coastline south of Teh, debating where to dock. On Leeka’s council, Dariel did not sail around the cape. Teh itself was populated by hordes of sun-loving Numreks. And beyond it the Inner Sea bustled with far too many ships. So the Ballan came to dock at a trading town called Falik, a Balbara port that served as a conduit from eastern Talay into the interior.

From the moment he stepped onto the pier and began negotiating docking fees, there was no doubt he was at the edge of a great, populous, and distinctly different culture. Dariel felt the palpable foreignness of the place all around him. He was no stranger to cultures other than his Acacian ancestry. His crew was a mixed-raced bunch, with origins and customs they held to with a sort of immigrant pride. But he had mostly faced diversity on a small scale, among a handful of people bound by common inclinations. In Falik a wall of dark faces punched him in the eye no matter where he looked. Scents of foods strange to him followed his nose, competing one against the other to distract him, confuse him. He could not quite be sure if the speech that bombarded his ears was of a single tongue or many languages thrown together. Either way, he had never heard such an unintelligible confusion of human speech.

As wide-eyed and staring as he was, the Balbara showed little interest in him. They went about their business as if he were but a vapor of a man, meriting no more attention than their brief exchange required. He felt sadly pale in comparison, a glass of weak tea floating in a sea of black coffee. It was not even that the population was entirely Balbara or even homogeneously Talayan. There were many other races among the throng. Perhaps four out of ten persons showed their distant origins in some way. But the Balbara were so forceful in their presence-with the solid impact of their skin color and the breadth of their features and the muscular bulk of their bodies-that they always seemed more populous than their actual numbers.

Dariel left most of the crew with the Ballan. With a small company, including Leeka and Wren and Clytus, he set out for the village his brother was supposed to have called home all these years. On the first day of his arrival at Palishdock, Leeka had named the village of Umae as Aliver’s hiding place. Thaddeus, the old soldier claimed, had known all along where Aliver was. He had ordered Leeka to bring Dariel to him when the young man was ready. Now, it seemed, Dariel was ready, though he did not entirely feel like it.

Leaving Falik, they fell into the flow of caravans heading inland, dusty travelers who likewise covered the miles on foot, some tugging camels and horses and mules laden with all manner of goods. For the sake of anonymity, it felt good to move within the traffic of people, just one of many beating the hard-packed path across a coppered landscape of shrub and acacia. Dariel expected the numbers to dissipate once away from the port, individuals turning toward their differing destinations. Three, four days in, there was no sign of this happening. He had no way of gauging what the normal flow of pilgrims and merchants might have been in the region, but he soon realized that the migration in which he flowed was not a normal thing. Their numbers were increasing. On waking each morning he found more tents had sprouted around him during the night. People, he came to understand, were speaking of revolt, of change, of war. They were heading toward the same conflagration Dariel was.

Leeka walked beside him at greater ease than ever before. Now that they were in motion, the man seemed to relax. His long work of convincing Dariel to confront his fate was behind him. This, it appeared, was something of a pleasure jaunt. His stern features mellowed. For the first time Dariel wondered if the man had been a father. Had he been married? He could be a grandfather now, and he might, from the look of him, have been a pleasant one.

He once said, “You look rather pleased with yourself.”

“I am pleased with the world,” was Leeka’s response.

Late on the fifth day Dariel asked him if they were approaching a great city or trading outpost. He thought there would be only small villages all the way to Umae, which was a small village itself. Leeka answered that this route connected the dots from village to village. But no, he said, there was no great city on the horizon.

Dariel studied the distance as if he doubted this, as if through looking hard enough he would see buildings rising from between the spaced acacia crowns. “Maybe we should cut away from the main route and travel alone,” he said. He did not offer a reason for this. He was not sure he had one. He felt safe enough. It was just that throughout his life as a raider Dariel had always been among small bands of people. They had lived scattered throughout the island chains. It was beginning to unnerve him to have so much humanity around him, especially when they were supposed to be navigating the wilds of the Talayan bush country.

“We cannot cut away from them and yet still reach our destination,” Leeka said, humor in his eyes. “Even if we did, we’d find others walking beside us.”

That evening their small group built a fire. Wren went off to buy meat and returned with an entourage of several adolescent Balbara boys. They were obviously enamored of her, clamoring over each other to be useful. Dariel offered no greeting to them, but they settled in and the others seemed happy enough to jest with them. The boys spoke Acacian proficiently, except when reverting to their native tongue to share peals of laughter at the foreigners’ expense. Before long a flutist joined them, offering music in exchange for food. By dusk they hosted a festive gathering, from which people came and went as they wished.

Dariel sat at the edge of it, feeling strangely deflated. He could not put a finger on why. Nobody else seemed to feel the same melancholy. Clytus-mildly intoxicated at this point-led the boys in a raunchy song about an old peasant who loved one of his hens in an inappropriate way and got into all manner of trouble for it. Leeka sat in quiet conversation with a honey-pale man whose origins Dariel could not place. Even Wren seemed at home among these people, laughing with them. She looked up at him and smiled every so often, but she took no notice of his mood. And that was part of his problem. Nobody noticed him. Nobody looked at his features and read his identity on his forehead. He had wanted to remain anonymous until finding his brother, but now that it was clear he was anonymous, he began to doubt this whole venture. How could he be central to the workings of the world when nobody even knew who he was?

Still, listening to the roundabout flow of the conversation he did hear a few things that interested him. Several people claimed to have just recently come off the mist. They did not know how it happened. They had not planned it, and each of them admitted they had committed their lives to the opiate. They would have worked all day forever just so long as they could dream their nights through in mist trance. But something had changed. Each of them had a different story, but all amounted to the same thing. The mist, instead of providing them joy, became a nightmare. Instead of losing themselves in their most cherished fantasies, they were thrown into the most vivid versions of their greatest fears. This happened night after night, getting worse each time. Within a week the nightmares were so bad that every one of them stopped the drug and chose instead to suffer through the near-death experience of withdrawal. It was an ordeal they would never forget, but they did not die because of it. And now, clear headed and free from the hunger, they had found joys in living they had forgotten about entirely. It was a miracle of sorts, and it seemed to be spreading across the world just like a contagion.

At some point an Acacian joined them. He offered to tell a tale of the Snow King in exchange for a few strips of goat meat. In between pauses in which he chewed or drank, the man told of how the Snow King decided that only the ancient, banished magicians could bring balance back into the world. He went in search of them, ranging all through Talay, fighting back packs of laryx, going days without food or water, stumbling through regions that would have withered most men. He told of how he eventually found them, rocklike giants that they were, and how he had to use tricks and cunning to convince them to join in the coming war.

Dariel sat listening, fascinated by what seemed like a distant legend. But he had never heard it before. He could recall no mention of this Snow King, which surprised him. The epic tales he had learned in childhood were clearer to him now than most things from those times. Besides that, the title the storyteller had given this king made no sense at all. There was nothing in the dry, sun-ripened landscape that had anything to do with snow. Why would such a land produce someone called by that name?

Eventually, during a lull, he asked as much. “The Snow King? Who do you mean by that?”

The Acacian set his eyes on Dariel. His face showed the disdain for what he observed: the loose-fitting shirt of a sea brigand, open down to the navel, longish hair caught up loosely in a ponytail. But he was eating their food and could not give offense.

The Snow King, he explained, was Aliver Akaran himself, the heir to the throne of Acacia. He took that name on the night his father was stabbed by the assassin’s blade. “That night it snowed in Acacia. Snowed, understand? When white balls of ice fall from the sky. It hadn’t done so in a hundred years, but the royal children were so fearless they wished to play in the snow, to toss it at one another and test themselves, yes? Well, Aliver-the oldest-said that by the end of that night he’d be crowned Snow King. It was a prophecy, see? A prophecy because his father was killed that very night. That is why we call him the Snow King. It’s a name he gave himself. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it. Most of us here are on our way to join the Snow King. He pledges that if we fight for him, we can make the world a more just place. I believe him.”

“We all do,” said one of the boys, a sentiment that several others echoed.

“He says it doesn’t matter that we are each small compared to the might of the Mein. He reminds us to think of the ants that live in the acacia tree. They bore holes into the thorns and live inside them, and they defend the trees against any who would harm it. To them the tree is life. It’s their world. They live their entire lives high up in the branches. The Snow King says to think of those ants and the power they have when they all remember their purpose and answer the call. That’s what we’re doing. That’s why we’re here, to defend the tree that gives us all life.”

Dariel did not sleep a wink that evening. He walked through the next day with an uncertain hold on reality. He was not troubled by thoughts or memories, nor was he elated and anticipatory. He simply felt a blankness at his center. He realized this space had been there within him for years. It had inflated inside him as he lay trembling in the mountain hut, and he had lived with it ever since. He knew that he was approaching the place and the moment when this void would be filled in one way or another. This nearness awed him. Whatever came, he would accept it. Perhaps that was why he stopped imagining, hoping, or dreading what was to come.

Leeka promised that they were near their goal, so they walked on through the dusk and for an hour or so after dark. The land took on a rolling, pastoral quality. They must have gained some altitude, for the evening was cool and pleasantly breezy. And then came the moment when, with Leeka at his elbow, Dariel crested a hillock and gazed out over Umae. The sight that opened up before them caused him to stop in his tracks. The land was filled with as many points of light as the sky. Hundreds of them, dotting everything in his wide view.

“They are just fires, Dariel,” Leeka said. “Campfires and lamps.”

“But so many of them! It’s like a city.”

“No, not a city. It’s just a village, but around it is the beginning of your brother’s army. And yours, as well.”

Together they walked down toward the sea of lights, the individual points bobbing and rising with each step. Their entry into the camp and progress farther into the town was a blur. Leeka handled it entirely. Dariel could not have said how long it took, but at some point he found himself approaching a particular compound. Leeka whispered that this was the place they were searching for.

A Talayan squatted on his heels a little distance from the door. He did not move anything except his eyes as Dariel approached, following him each step of the way forward. The man’s expression did not change in any overt way, but there was something in the quality of how he stared that altered. By the time Dariel stopped before the man, he was sure that there was something like a glimmer of humor behind the stillness of his handsome, dark-skinned faзade. Dariel opened his mouth to speak, but the Talayan beat him to it.

He said something in his native language. Dariel started to say he did not understand him, but the man smiled and motioned for him to enter. In accented Acacian, he said, “Welcome, Prince. Inside. Please, go inside.”

The tent stretched off a considerable distance, supported here and there by gnarled beams of wood that lifted the fabric. Lit by oil lamps, it was crowded with stools and couches, tables and charts that made walking into the space feel like entering a maze. Dariel stopped and stood, looking around.

At about the same time that he spotted a human shape bent over a small desk, the man raised his head and saw him as well. His hair was close-cropped like a Talayan’s, but his skin was a lighter shade of brown, a sort of tanned richness. His face conveyed intelligence, and for a moment Dariel imagined him to be an adviser of some sort, perhaps a scholar with a specialty useful to the war planning.

Then the man was moving toward him. In motion he was fluid and strong, like a Talayan runner. A warrior after all, then. He wore a sword at his side, a gently curved blade unlike anything Dariel had yet seen in Talay. But there was nothing aggressive in the man’s motions. He walked with his chest exposed, arms held out to either side. His hands were empty and his legs pushed carelessly through the footstools that clogged the space between them. It almost seemed like he was rushing forward to embrace him. This was such an unlikely possibility that Dariel just watched as the man’s face got closer. It was smiling and pained at the same time, and terribly, terribly familiar.

And then he understood.