Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Thaddeus Clegg could not have been happier with the man Aliver Akaran had become. Perhaps nobody but the former chancellor recognized how much the prince resembled his father in his features and timbre of voice, in the intensity and intelligence of his brown eyes, and the upright carriage of his torso. He was very much like Leodan had been in his youth. But Aliver had taken all these traits and honed them to a greater level of sharpness. Leodan had dreamed of and cogitated on action, reform, justice, but never truly acted; Aliver now lived and breathed all of these things and strove to shape the world accordingly. Thaddeus had been concerned over Aliver’s initial reticence to fully take up his mantle of responsibility, but that seemed ancient history now. Since returning from his search for the Santoth, the prince had not faltered. When he asked to again wear the King’s Trust, Sangae did not hesitate to retrieve it for him. With it hanging from his side Aliver Akaran looked every bit a hero in the making.

Aliver’s first task-that of winning the Halaly to his cause-had not been an easy one. He refused to join them in a petty war to exterminate their neighbors. Instead, he convinced them to put provincial squabbles behind them. They shared a common enemy far worse than any threat one Talayan tribe posed another. Defeating Hanish Mein, he argued, would be the single greatest thing any of them could do to change their fortunes. He promised that when he was king he would remember every deed done for him and every deed done against him. He would reward them all in manifold ways. The Halaly, he had said, could be leaders among Talayans, or they could be the sole people left without a say in the coming world. They’d be laughed at by future generations who would look back with ridicule on a people so blind to the changes at hand, who had been rendered inconsequential because of it. It could not have been easy to look Oubadal in the face and say such things, but Aliver managed it.

The chancellor had first heard reports of all of this from others. When the prince returned from Halaly and began to march north, he witnessed it himself. Aliver held forth to the ever-increasing throng flocking to him. People gathered to hear him each afternoon, when he issued rambling discourses to whomever sought him out. He spoke with a prophet’s fervor and made greater and greater leaps of vision each day. He detailed beliefs and intentions that Thaddeus had not expected, had not planted in him, or imagined himself. Yet they were ideas of such nobility that he could not fault the young man in the slightest.

When Aliver said he would reward those who aided him, he did not mean to do so in the old ways: with riches, by bestowing power on one tribe instead of another, by elevating one upon the shoulders of another. He wanted to break the old way along its twisted spine and throw the pieces out. He asked tribes-whether in Talay or Candovia, Aushenia or Senival or anyplace else-to think of one another as members of extended families. They did not have to love one another unquestioningly or agree upon everything or give without the expectation of receiving. But he would have them sit down at council together and seek out ways that they could mutually gain from policies meant to benefit them all. Each of them could find prosperity themselves, and smile upon their neighbors’ boons as well. Why should it be any other way?

“Edifus was wrong,” Aliver said one afternoon, in words that played again and again in Thaddeus’s mind afterward. “Tinhadin was wrong. Too many generations following them accepted the same inequities. My father, Leodan Akaran, even he could not see how to break free from the tyranny of his own stature in the world. He knew it to be wrong. I felt this to be so; I knew it without knowing it; I fought not to see it because I knew nobody wished me to see it. But then came Hanish Mein. Then came the greater evil that burned through the land and left it charred and damaged in so many ways. I abhor Hanish Mein for the suffering he inflicted upon the world. I hate that even now I must ask for thousands to give their lives in fighting him. But for one thing I thank him. When Hanish Mein broke the chain of Akaran rule he set the stage for a shift in the fortunes of the world. Hanish himself is not the beginning of a new age. He is only the pause between two sentences. The earlier Akarans spoke the first sentence and it was a disappointment; I and those who come after me will speak the second sentence and it will be one of justice.”

Hanish Mein nothing but the pause between two sentences…Thaddeus had never imagined laying the situation out so boldly. Nor did Aliver stop there. He promised to do away with conscripted labor in the mines. He’d cancel the Quota and never trade for the mist again. He swore his ultimate responsibility would be to rule in a manner that benefited as many as possible. He did not accept the belief that the natural order of humanity was that of a few benefiting from the work and suffering of the masses. He loved his ancestors-let no one say otherwise. They were wrong to have structured the world like this, but they also made him possible. In his name-and in theirs-he would shape a better future.

Whatever hesitancy Aliver may have had as a youth had vanished. He had burned it away like baby fat from his lean body, and during the daylight hours he moved with unflagging vigor. Sometimes, at night, in close company, his face and body showed fatigue, worry. But that, Thaddeus thought, was to be expected.

By the time they reached the open plains that stretched all the way north to Bocoum many were calling Aliver more than just the Snow King. He was proclaimed a prophet of the Giver. Nobody, people said, had ever spoken such noble truths to so many ears. The Giver worked through him. With this war the Giver was testing the world for righteousness. Perhaps when they triumphed, the Giver would return to the world and walk among people again.

Aliver never made such proclamations himself, but the ideas caught like flames touching the dry Talayan grasslands. It flowed from person to person, village to village, into and out of different languages. It leaped mountain ranges and sailed across seas. The people were hungry for a message such as this one. They ate it with ravenous mouths and received it with clear eyes, especially as person after person shook off their mist dependence. Thaddeus sometimes woke in the night, fearing that events were rolling forward too rapidly, but there was no going back now.

The old man still counseled the emergent king, but increasingly he found himself carrying out Aliver’s wishes instead of the other way around. Thaddeus handled communications with the wider world through all the channels he could. He alerted the hushed resistance in every corner of the Known World that Aliver Akaran had announced himself. They need not be hushed any longer. He imagined the scenes being played out as the news spread. Quick guerrilla strikes against Meinish interests. Trade convoys attacked. Outposts torched. Miners rising in rebellion. Soldiers picked off by ones and twos. Aliver wanted life made hard for the Meins in every way possible and in every place possible. But these acts of resistance should be kept small, he said. He wanted to sow clear-headed discord in every distant corner, while at the same time building his army and pushing up from the heart of Talay. He would arrange it so that his force was such a massive wave, Hanish Mein would have no choice but to meet him in what promised to be as great a battle as anything fought in the first war.

Aliver’s new army spoke different languages, had different customs, made war in differing ways. They were young and old, men and women, experienced soldiers and rank novices. They were fishermen and laborers and mine workers, herders and farmers; they were of all professions imaginable. Unifying such diverse groups into a fighting force posed an incredibly complex set of problems. Hanish did not contest their northern progress, but he drew his provincial guards in toward a central point. They received reports that he was massing troops along the Talayan coast. The time when the two forces would clash was very near.

Fortunately, Leeka Alain was itching to be in military command again. The legend of the rhinoceros-riding general had not been forgotten. Leeka was, after all, the first man to separate a Numrek head from the neck that supported it. He had outlived an entire army and fought in battle after battle throughout the first war. Though a few years older now, he was still a general whom others would follow into the fray. He threw himself into ordering and training Aliver’s growing army.

He broke them into units meant to use their diverse talents. He instructed the officers beneath him to think creatively about how each person could be used to strengthen the whole. He simplified the battle commands, selecting the best words from a variety of languages so that the calls were crisp and understandable and so that each people heard at least one of their words spoken on their officers’ lips. He trained them through drills that got them used to functioning as units. By staging mock battles in which newer troops faced an onslaught of veterans, he accustomed them to the close-up tumult of two armies smashing together. He worked them hard but always left them just enough energy so that they could march the day’s allotment as they moved north. New troops were accepted the very moment they offered themselves and were thrown into the routine without delay. He might not get them completely ready to face units of Punisari or hordes of Numrek warriors-who could be truly ready for such things?-but he would have them as prepared as humanly possible, even if he had to throw out much of Acacian military tradition and rethink the entire endeavor.

More than any other thing, though, Dariel’s arrival had done a great deal for Aliver. It bolstered him like no other single thing had. The night of Dariel’s arrival, Thaddeus had rushed to the council tent and found the two brothers locked in an embrace. They must have been holding each other for some time. They sat on stools, arms entwined, speaking to each other in whispers. Shyly, Thaddeus drew up close to them. He was not sure what to do until Aliver’s eyes touched on him. The prince reached out with one hand and pulled the old chancellor in to hug. Dariel-his face that of a man now, though the child was still there in the shape of his eyes-welcomed him with a sad smile. Thaddeus managed to whisper a greeting to the young prince before emotion choked his words away.

In the days that followed, the brothers got reacquainted amid the flow of daily events. They were together often during the day, touching at elbows, listening to the same councils, making decisions together, weaving the years they had spent apart into the fabric of their daily, busy existence. Thaddeus had wondered if there would be any friction between them. Would they be strangers to each other? Would they size each other up, men now and perhaps competitive, considering the possibility that one of them might soon be king? Would the years apart have damaged their relationship in ways not easily remedied? But Thaddeus saw nothing like this. There was a great deal of catching up to do, yes, but neither of them seemed at all awkward with the other. Perhaps Leodan had shaped them, in those early years, to be better siblings than most.

Pausing in the entranceway to Aliver’s tent one evening, Thaddeus could not keep himself from eavesdropping on the two. He had not meant to do so, and he certainly had no ill intent. But hearing Aliver’s low voice on the other side of the flap stopped him in his tracks. It was not the same voice the prince usually spoke with. There was an open frankness to it, an undisguised sincerity. It was the voice of a man speaking to his brother, to one of the few people in the world from whom he did not need to hide anything.

Aliver was talking about how hard it had been for him to be thrust into Talayan culture. It was overwhelming. Early on, he had hated his pale skin and straight hair and thin lips. For a time he had shaved his head and spent too many hours in the sun and even pouted his lips to make them seem fuller when talking with young women. Fortunately, this was years ago. He had grown more comfortable in his skin the last few years. He knew who he was now, knew what he had to do, and, finally, he could look at Dariel and see his family reflected back at him. That was a wonderful gift. Speaking through a laugh, he said, “So I thank you for living this long. Please, continue to do so.”

Dariel shared just as much with Aliver, detailing how strangely lonely he had felt growing up among the raiders. There had been people around him all the time, coming and going in the swirl of adventure and camaraderie, and yet he had been lonely. He loved them all, he said, especially Val. The giant of a man had been all the father he could. He had given his life for Dariel, in more ways than one. Things like that could not be repaid. Such gifts could not even be earned, he said. “I’ve no idea what I ever did to deserve it.”

“Val had a life to live, too, right?” Aliver asked. “Maybe doing what he did was his way of living with honor, his way of finding meaning. Often, I think, the men who do the most with their lives are the most afraid of…not being worthy of the faith of those that love them. Of course, it makes our lives harder as well. You and I, we have to be better than we might have been otherwise. We are links in a chain, aren’t we?”

Hearing this, Thaddeus felt sure that to some extent the prince was talking about him. It embarrassed him, and furthermore he knew that no matter what he did for them he could never be as close to these Akaran children as they were to each other. He loved them absurdly, with an intensity that had increased over the years. It felt like he had taken Leodan’s feelings for his children and added them to his own and mixed them within the great hollowness left by the death of his wife and son. He was father and uncle, mourner and penitent for past crimes all at once; the combination was almost too much to bear. A fitting punishment, he thought.

As the younger Akaran heir needed to be brought into the fold, to know everything, to have a hand in all that was happening, Thaddeus took over from Leeka Alain and carried on the young man’s education. One evening, while encamped about a hundred miles from Bocoum and the Talayan coastline, he shared a tent with Dariel and Aliver and Kelis, who in many ways seemed a third brother now. Dariel asked about the Numrek, beings that he had not yet laid eyes on. He asked if the tales told about them were true.

“Depends which tales you mean,” Thaddeus said. “Some are decidedly true. Others are decidedly not.”

“Is it true that they were forced out of their land?” Dariel asked. “I’ve heard that was why they came across the Ice Fields and joined with Hanish.”

Thaddeus nodded. “Those whom the Acacians never defeated on the field of battle came to this land as a vanquished people, fleeing forces they feared enough to trudge into the unknown.” He let the significance of this sit for a moment. “This world is larger than we know, with more in it to fear than we have yet imagined. Don’t let this cloud your thoughts, though. For the moment Hanish Mein is the enemy. If we don’t defeat him first, we’ll never have to worry about what might come after.”

“Well,” Dariel said, “if they were never defeated during the first war, how do we plan to defeat them now?”

He had asked Thaddeus the question, but the chancellor deferred to Aliver for the answer. The prince sat on a three-legged stool, his legs planted widely, leaning forward, an elbow propped on one of his knees as his fingers massaged his forehead. He indicated that he heard the question only by balling his hand into a fist and pressing his knuckles flat against his skull. Studying him, Thaddeus realized something was weighing on him more heavily than usual.

“I’m not sure,” Aliver finally said. “I hate that answer, but it’s the truth. I wish I could have all the pieces in place before putting any lives in danger…”

“But you cannot,” Kelis said, speaking Acacian for the others’ benefit. “If you waited to have everything in place, you’d be forever waiting. There are many things we have only partial knowledge of. Some speak of creatures the Meins received as presents from the Lothan Aklun. Antoks, they call them. But nobody can tell us what these are. We cannot know, but neither can we wait forever.”

Aliver let the interruption sit for a moment, showing neither agreement nor disagreement with it. “There are the Santoth. They are why I’ve not fought against how rapidly things are moving. I know their power. I believe they will help us. I don’t know exactly how, but if anybody can defeat the Numrek, they can. If they join us on the battlefield, they will find a way.”

Again, Dariel found something to question. “You said if the Santoth join the battle. Is it possible they won’t?”

“They promised they would, but there’s a condition attached. I told them that I’d give them The Song of Elenet. They need it, they say, in order to get the impurities out of their magic. They won’t leave the south until I tell them I have the book.”

“But we move farther north each day,” Dariel said.

“The distance doesn’t matter. I’m never out of contact with them. My bond with them is stretched by the miles, but it’s not broken. Believe me-they can hear my thoughts when I send them, and I can receive theirs when they wish. If the book dropped in my lap tomorrow I could summon them immediately. The problem is that the book isn’t going to drop into my lap. I’ve no idea where it is, and nobody has stepped forward to tell me. I’ve been too lax about this. I did not let everyone know how unequivocal they were… I used to think I would simply summon them whether I found the book or not. Once they joined us, they’d have no choice but to help. Afterward-once we won-I’d find The Song of Elenet and give it to them. I’d honor the promise, just change the order of the events to get there. But I’m not sure of this anymore.”

“What is different now?” Thaddeus asked, feeling this might be the core of what troubled him, wishing that he himself had given all of this more thought. When he was younger, and his mind sharper, he would have probed everything. Waiting for the prince’s answer, he knew he had not done so as completely as he should.

Aliver looked up, straightened, and seemed to take in the room anew. He wiped under his eyes with his fingertips. “The way people have been coming off the mist…it’s because the Santoth are aiding them. I told them that I could not fight with an army drugged and groggy every night. In answer they whispered out a spell. I heard it inside my head and felt the way it slipped out across the sleeping land each night. It moved like a thousand serpents, each seeking a user.”

“That’s incredible,” Dariel murmured. “I heard how people were breaking free of the mist, but…”

“Yes, it is incredible,” Aliver said. Having agreed, though, he struggled a moment with how to express the further things he had to say. He illustrated his thoughts with his fingers a moment, but then gave up on the effort and let his hands rest on his knees. “I could sense that there was corruption in the spell. It’s what they always told me. I don’t know how to explain it. I could not actually understand the language. It barely even seemed a language at all. It’s a sort of music, as if voices plucked tunes from millions of different notes. The notes were like words. And they weren’t like words…”

He glanced around from face to face, searching them, hoping that they understood him better than his capacity to put it into words. He seemed disappointed by the incomprehension he saw looking back at him. Thaddeus felt he should say something, but he had already understood Aliver’s point. Instead of refuting it, he sat, feeling its import grow on him.

“I cannot explain it,” Aliver continued, “but the Santoth were right, of course. The spell was garbled at the edges. They didn’t intend to make the mist dream into a horror, but that’s what happened. They made the mist state a living nightmare that preyed on each person’s greatest fears and weaknesses. They made it such a torment that the users feared the drug more than the torture of withdrawal, more than losing forever the dreams that they always sought the mist for. Understand me? It may have worked, but that was not the song they wanted to sing. They would have gentled them off with a loving pressure. Instead, by the time the spell took hold, it had twisted into something malevolent. If that’s what happens when they’re reaching out to our allies to help them, what might they unleash when they strike out to slay our enemies, when the song they intend is one of death and destruction?”

What a question, Thaddeus thought. Exactly as he would have put it himself. He had no answer to it, and sat in silence with the others.

“You know,” Dariel eventually said, a tinge of humor in his voice, “if this all ends well for us, we’ll have a most amazing story to tell. A most amazing story. One to sit on the shelf beside The Tale of Bashar and Cashen, as father used to say. Remember how he said that? ‘The most amazing tale is yet to be written,’ he said. ‘But it will be, and it will deserve the space beside Bashar and Cashen.’”

Aliver said that he understood that tale differently now. He began to explain what the Santoth had taught him, but Thaddeus could not listen to him. He knew the instant the words were out of Dariel’s mouth that something crucial had been said. It sent a shiver up from his lower back that fanned out across his musculature. He’d heard Leodan use just those words, but in a different context.

Somebody approached the tent door. The guard posted there gruffly asked the person’s business. A woman’s voice piped up in answer. Thaddeus could not hear her words, but there was a confident tone to them. Thaddeus assumed he understood the situation. The princes were young men, handsome and powerful. There were certainly women who vied for their attention. It surprised him neither brother had paid much attention to-

The woman shouted something. Thaddeus did not catch it, but Aliver and Dariel both shot to their feet and rushed toward the tent flap. They were out past it before Thaddeus could make sense of it. He sat forward in his seat, listening to the excited sounds that followed, but it wasn’t until Dariel called for him that he actually rose. Pushing through the tent flap into the torch- and star-lit night, he saw the two princes sharing a multi-limbed embrace with a young woman. She was as sun-burnished as they, as lithe and strong. She wore the dual swords of the Punisari at her waist. The fact that she went thus armed drew so much of his attention that he failed to realize a far more important thing.

“Thaddeus,” Aliver said on noticing him, “look, it’s Mena.”

By the Giver-when had he become so dim-witted? So slow? When had his eyes lost their ability to see what mattered? Mena. It was Mena. She disentangled herself from her brothers and walked toward him. Her strides were so determined and the swords so prominent at her side that he half believed she was about to cut him down. Mena, who had always been so smart. Who’d always understood people intuitively, even as a child. Mena, whom he’d feared he’d lost, whom he’d spoken to sometimes in his dreams, who’d named his crimes in those nightmares by counting them off one by one on her small fingers…For that Mena he would stand still and accept whatever havoc she would wreak upon him.

But if this young woman remembered all the ways that Thaddeus had betrayed her, she gave no sign of it. She closed on him with open arms. She smashed against his chest, arms thrown around him, her head nestled beneath his chin. Thaddeus’s eyes moistened immediately. It took a great deal of effort to balance his head in such a way that the tears did not break over the rims of his eyes. She could have squeezed the air out of him and he’d not have moved until he lost consciousness and crumpled to the ground.

Drawing back from him, Mena slipped her hands up his neck and clamped them around his head. Her grip was surprisingly strong. She tilted his head forward, spilling the tears onto his cheeks. “You are exactly the same,” she said. Her voice had a foreign accent to it, a bit of the thickness of Vumu that she somehow transformed to music. “Not a new wrinkle on your face. Not a blemish or freckle I don’t remember.”

Thaddeus gave up all pretense at controlling his emotion. He let it flow, more completely even than he had on reuniting with Aliver or on embracing Dariel. Three of Leodan’s children were together now; all of them-all of them-were alive! It was simply too much joy, too much relief and sorrow to contain. He let it flow.

What he did later that night was not the rash action it might have seemed. Or so he told himself. At some level he had known for a while that he had done all he could to help Aliver onto the path of his destiny. That job was complete. Aliver would either fail or succeed, but he would not turn away from either result. He had everything he needed to win this war except for one thing. He needed the book that would help his sorcerers sing his cause to victory. Though others had been asked to hunt for the book, there was nobody more likely to actually find it than he himself.

In the early hours of the next morning, before the sun had risen, Thaddeus Clegg set out to find this book, marching north ahead of the army, toward Acacia and the palace in which he hoped the volume might still lie hidden.