Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

The note lay on the pallet beside him. The corner of it was warm from where his forearm had rested on top of it. It was impossible for Melio to believe that anyone could have placed it there. He was a light sleeper, likely to wake at no more than the sound of another person’s breathing. As part of his Marah training, he had learned how to be watchful of the world even while he walked through dreams. Yet there it was. A square of paper that could have been placed there only by someone’s stealthy hand. He would have grabbed the missive up quickly, except that he dreaded its mysterious placement was a harbinger of news he could not face. When he noticed Mena’s Marah sword leaning against the wall he was even more worried.

He lay propped on his elbow for a time, staring at the letter, at the weapon, hearing the sounds of the waking world outside the open windows and through the thin walls, the drip, drip caused by the night’s heavy rains. Since Mena had disappeared a week earlier, he had been staying inside the priestess’s compound. The servants, fearful and superstitious, had accepted his presence. They even took comfort from it. They had grown more dependent on him than any of them would have predicted. They had been taking orders from Mena for so long, they were at a loss for how to act without direction. They needed the focus he provided as he organized a search effort. Even as he lay there, Melio knew they were but a word away. He almost called to ask how the letter might have gotten there beside him and to have their company as he read it.

Eventually though, he unfolded the paper and read it in solitude. As soon as he had digested the words, he bolted from the pallet. He sprinted from building to building, room to room, calling Mena’s name. His voice alternated between rising and choked, desperate and sternly controlled. The servants followed him. They fanned out to every corner of the priestess’s compound.

Within a few minutes it was clear Mena was nowhere on the premises. None of the servants had seen or heard anything of her, and they were most distressed that Melio had a piece of physical evidence that she had been among them. He did not divulge the contents of the letter. He crumpled it tight in his fist and sat down on the wet dirt of the courtyard. To the horror of the servants, he cried into his clenched hands. He knew it was unfair not to tell them what drew the tears. He knew that they could only misinterpret his emotion in the ways most frightening to them. But he could not help himself.

His breakdown was short-lived. The man who regularly made the first morning trip to the markets returned, shaken by something he had seen outside the temple. On looking at the man’s face, which was a pale, ashen shade of his natural reddish brown, Melio found a way to act again.

By the time he and the servants arrived at the main entrance to Maeben’s temple, a small crowd had gathered and was growing moment by moment. The gates were closed, but it was not entry to the sacred grounds that the people wished for. They all stared-silent and slope shouldered, some with hands to their mouths, a few on their knees, one with an arm raised and pointing, as if he doubted that the others could possibly see what he did-the corpse of a large sea eagle.

The rope attached to the corpse had been flung over one of the carved figures of Maeben’s head. The dead eagle half hung beneath this, leaning awkwardly against the wooden pillar, its head crooked at an angle only the deceased could manage. It was sodden from the night’s rains and bloody and mud stained. Its open eyes were crusted with filth, immobile, staring. As a once-live predator it had been massive, impressive, and frightening, but Melio knew that was not what drew the slack-jawed wonder out of these people.

“Look at your goddess,” Melio whispered.

The woman just next to him turned. She had heard him. Her greenish, gold-flecked eyes half hid behind a crosshatch of black hair, but they were intense, probing. He could not help but answer them.

“That’s what you fear, isn’t it? That this bird is the one you call Maeben. I think she is. You are right.” He turned back to the corpse, feeling pieces of the cryptic missive falling into place. “Your Maeben is dead, and I know who killed her.”

The villagers had begun to back from him as if a dangerous animal had materialized in their midst. Their eyes shifted between him and the corpse, unsure which was a greater threat.

Melio tried to gentle his voice. He wanted them to understand, not to fear. He needed them to trust him, although he was not sure why yet. “Mena-the priestess you called Maeben on earth. She did this-”

“Silence!” a voice bellowed. The first priest, Vaminee, arrived, shrouded in the trappings of his office. The peasants parted for the priest, bowing and deferential. Tanin stood just behind his shoulder. Melio had never seen either of them, but he knew them without introduction. In vulnerable moments Mena had described them with words that suited the figures before him exactly. Temple guards flanked them. Instead of metal blades their swords were wooden, with edges only as sharp as the material would bear. They were skilled, Melio knew, at their own style of swordsmanship, a technique something like stick fighting.

“But it’s true,” Melio said, forcing his voice to steady. “This is her doing. This is a message to-”

Tanin answered. “You are not a prophet of Maeben! You’ve no right to speak for the priestess. Nor for the goddess. First Priest, I charge that this man is defiling Maeben through some trickery. He has killed…one of Maeben’s warriors.”

The expression on Vaminee’s face never wavered. His features were rigid, anger trapped in stone. He said, “Find the priestess. Bring her to me. The rest of you, crawl from here on your knees. Pray forgiveness for having witnessed this vileness.” The peasants began to drop into the mud as instructed. Vaminee turned and locked eyes with one of the temple guards.

Melio understood enough what message passed between them. He would be seized and bound in a few moments, perhaps beaten or ceremonially killed. He knew that it would look criminal to the villagers around him, but he could not let himself be captured. These priests would twist everything. Even Mena would not be able to stop them.

Just to his left stood another guard, a young man who had forgotten the sternness of his office on seeing the dangling raptor. Melio rounded on him with an open expression on his face, as if he were about to offer a word of apology or explanation. He drove the flat of his left hand up into his nose with force enough to shatter it. His other hand found the man’s stick hilt and drew the weapon as the youth fell, howling and spraying blood.

“Kill him!” Tanin said.

His words carried enough authority that the rest of the guards swarmed. They drew their weapons and created a circle around Melio and steadily closed the perimeter. By design their weapons were meant to inflict punishment and demand obedience, but they had been trained to use them to lethal effect also. Melio kept up a constant motion, spinning this way and that on sure feet. He tried to recall his lessons on fighting multiple opponents, but nothing in his recollection addressed fighting out of a circle of fourteen foes.

“You’re making a mistake!” he cried, both for the guards to hear and for the priests and the crowd. “Harm me and the priestess will rage at you. Don’t you see what’s happened here?”

The guards faltered, slowed.

“I said kill him,” Tanin repeated.

Melio took one hand from the stick hilt long enough to point at the corpse. “This Maeben is no more. This Maeben will never take your children again. The priestess did this for you.”

“Kill him this instant!”

One of the guards leaped forward behind a downward strike. Melio twisted his torso to avoid the blow. He snapped his stick hard and fast, hitting the man with the blade flat across his cheek. The force of it spun the man into the air-head first and body following-and dropped him limply to the ground.

The others had not moved. “I don’t wish to fight with you,” Melio said, addressing them. “I don’t even wish to fight with the priests. If Maeben was a goddess, then the priestess is a god slayer. It’s the truth. The priestess will tell you so herself.”

Tanin had had enough. He pushed through the crowd to the space left open by the fallen guard. He snatched up the man’s stick, holding it in a manner that showed he knew how to use it. With him inspiring them, the circle began to close again.

Talking was over. Melio picked out one stick at random and smacked it so hard he almost knocked it from the hand that grasped it. He felt another attack coming from behind and he spun to face it. He took one man out at the knee and hit another with a downward strike that audibly snapped his collarbone. Tanin yelled for his death over and over. Melio tried to find him in the seething crowd of bodies and weapons, but it was too much of a blur. He ceased to think of his actions. He just let his body whirl and leap, duck and thrust and slash. His movements arose directly from a quick place in his instinctual mind, faster than the plodding engine of his consciousness. He heard the crack of wood on wood. He knew that his stick often touched flesh, snapped bone, but the attackers came on and he could see no end to it.

This may have gone on for many minutes, or may have been no more than a few seconds. He lost track of time until the barrage of weapons began to fall off one by one. Soon he was spinning and slashing, spinning and blocking in a dance with no actual attackers.

He stopped moving. He stood panting, drenched in sweat, eyes darting, stick held in a ready position. The guards had drawn back. Most of them weren’t even looking at him anymore. They gazed at something beyond him. Only Tanin stared fixedly at him, his face twisted with rage and disbelief, his mouth an oval hungry for oxygen. Melio understood the look. They had not touched him. Not one of them had gotten through his defenses and touched wood to flesh. He had left men on the ground all around him without ever suffering a single injury. This obviously mystified Tanin. But it was not the reason they’d stopped.

A Vumuan woman pressed forward through the crowd, a shock wave of confusion preceding her. People shouted as she passed, grabbed at her, questioned her. She ranted as she pushed through them. Whatever she said whipped the frenzy higher, but she did not stop until she reached Vaminee.

She knelt before the priest and began an impassioned speech. Melio had to concentrate hard to understand her. There were others behind her, running from the same direction she’d come, likely bearing the same news.

Just an hour ago, the woman reported, Maeben on earth had arrived at the magistrate’s home. She’d walked through the gates in all her finery. She’d strode past the stunned guards and demanded to see the foreigners who were staying there as his guests. They’d spoken to her in their strange tongue for a few minutes, and then the foreigners seized her. One of them, the tall one with hair like gold thread, actually placed his hand on her divine person. They left immediately for their vessel and were already sailing away on the receding tide.

Melio heard the whole of this in one inhalation and did not understand it until the woman finished. Then it hit him in the chest, the first blow to land on him that morning.

“They have the priestess?” Tanin asked, still breathing heavily.

“Yes,” a man, a new arrival, said. “She tried to speak. I heard her. I was closer than this one.” He motioned toward the woman dismissively. Then, remembering himself, he dropped to his knees facing Vaminee. “Honorable Priest, she turned her eyes to me and she said, ‘People of Vumu…’” He stopped without finishing the sentence.

“People of Vumu?” the first priest demanded. He finally lost his menacing calm. “What more did she say?”

“That’s all. They pulled her away. They did not let her speak any more.”

Melio only half listened to the chaotic discourse that followed, but he knew they were tossing about a version of events that escalated minute by minute. The foreigners had grabbed her, abducted her, dragged her away to their strange nation. Somebody began a moan that spread from person to person. Another shrieked that the foreigners had killed Maeben. The goddess was dead to them and the priestess was a prisoner of evildoers.

Melio sensed dawning possibility. There was something in this. Something he could do with these events, perhaps something Mena had only half envisioned when she’d set out on it. He steered away from the sorrow he knew hovered just behind his shoulder. He could give in to that later. But now-right here-he had to seize the moment before it was gone forever.

He pushed between two of the guards who had just been out to kill him and closed on the eagle’s corpse. He smacked it with his palm, clenched, and tore away a handful of feathers. He tossed them in the air above the crowd. Eyes turned toward him. Voices died down. Even the two priests fixed on him, waiting for what he might say. He was not sure himself until he opened his mouth.

“The goddess lives in the one called Mena,” he said. “Do you hear me? The goddess lives in Mena! She went to fight the foreigners and to challenge the people of Vumu to prove themselves.” He paused, only now understanding the question to which his oration was leading him. “People of Vumu, the priestess is in danger. She’s in the hands of an enemy. People of Vumu…what will you do to save her?”