Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

There was nothing of the familiar, natural order of the world to be heard in the dawning day. None of his usual awareness that creatures of the night were bedding down as the day laborers took their place. No morning birdsongs. No cockerels with their heads lifted to announce their ownership of the brightening world. No barking of village dogs. He heard no children with their instant enthusiasm, their shouts and laughter. Nowhere did he hear the lilting of women’s voices as they greeted each other in ways and with words that were themselves ancient Talayan customs. Nor was the air brushed with the sound of threshing, that rhythm that over the years had become a gentle enticement to awake, as constant as the rising sun and just as welcome.

On the morning that his contest with Maeander Mein was to resume, Aliver lay awake on his pallet in his war tent, missing all these things. Such moments felt as far gone now as memories from his childhood. They were glimpses of an innocent world that he could scarcely believe in anymore. Back then, he had thought of himself as suffering through an exile, but now every day of his years in Talay seemed idyllic. Remembering that he had once lived like any other person in a normal world pained him physically, a bodily ache that had plagued him through the night, even during his short bouts of sleep. All the troubles and worries and fears that had seemed to matter back then were inconsequential compared to what he now faced.

He rolled himself upright and pressed the fatigue from his eyes with the knuckles of his fists. A few minutes later he pushed through his tent flap. Around him spread the throng of humanity that had rallied to his cause. Hundreds of tents and shelters, thousands of men, women, and children rising for another day of his war. The Halaly guards, who by their own initiative shadowed his every motion, nodded greetings to him. He saw faces all around lift toward him, smiling and hopeful. They all believed that this war was as good as won. They trusted him completely now, felt he was like Edifus returned, like Tinhadin. Though he explained that it was not so, they seemed to think he was the power protecting them, not the unseen Santoth.

He kept his eyes moving, afraid lest his gaze rest too long on any one of his faithful followers. He could show them no uncertainty. You can feel it, Thaddeus had said shortly before he disappeared, but never show it. Aliver had not realized how he had come to lean on the old chancellor until he departed. In a way it felt like his father had spoken through his betrayer’s mouth, strange as that seemed. He had said that all people were fumblers at life, even kings. But an effective king moves as if he were a hero of old. Such heroes never doubted themselves. Not as far as the world could tell, at least. Aliver missed the man greatly. Thaddeus had not said a word of parting, but the prince knew what he searched for. He prayed him speed in finding it.

He found Mena and Dariel conversing over breakfast. They sat side by side, touching at the knee, both of them cupping their wooden bowls in one hand and spooning porridge with the other. Mena so petite, yet honed to a keen-edged strength her scant clothing did not hide, dangerous even though she presented to the world a kind, wise face, sword at her side within easy grasping range; Dariel with his ready smile and energy, a devious twinkle always close behind his eyes, his shirt open right down to his flat abdomen. They leaned in close together and spoke as they ate. They looked like…well, like two unlikely siblings at ease with each other. The years they had spent apart seemed to have faded into insignificance.

A seizure of emotion racked Aliver. He wanted to leap the space between them and tackle them both in an embrace. If he did so, he’d end up rolling on the ground with them. He’d pour tears all over them. He’d blubber and cry, and he was not sure that he’d be able to rise from such an embrace and do the things he had to do. He, or they, might die in the hours to come. He knew it. Part of him wanted to say a whole host of things to them in preparation. He should crack open whatever part of him was most fragile and share it with them, so that they would understand and remember him. He yearned to spend days and days with them, learning everything about the lives they had lived, probing them to help him understand the life he had lived, seeking in their memories a more complete picture of everything they’d each been through.

He had opened up some of his vision of the future to them. When they prevailed, he had said, he would not rule over them. He would not be a tyrant who left them no say in the running of the empire. They would share all decisions among the four of them. They would reach decisions by consensus, by compromise. They would find within long conversations with one another a wisdom greater than what they could come up with singly. They would take greater responsibility for the workings of the empire at the same time as they provided for increased representation from its diverse regions. Everyone would have more say in shaping the future.

All of this he meant and believed, but it was the prince, Aliver Akaran, speaking, not the brother. The brother still had a great many things he hungered to share with his siblings. As he proceeded to walk toward them he acknowledged that nothing in his life had ever fallen in line with his imaginings; whatever was to happen, that fact would stay a constant. The very fact of the day awaiting them made it impossible for him to launch that embrace or let flow those tears. Such emotion was for later, for quiet times when thousands of lives did not hang in the balance. Instead, he spoke wryly, as any older brother to his younger siblings.

“How is it that you two are always up before me?” he asked.

Mena rose, smiling, and squeezed his elbow.

Dariel said, “The question is how you manage to sleep at all.”

“Lightly, brother,” Aliver said, using an old Talayan saying. “I sleep lightly and tread to keep my head out of the sea of dreams.”

Within the hour the three of them were armed and dressed for their roles. Previously, they had each headed portions of the army. Mena and Dariel were new to massed warfare, but they were quick and seemed to see with far-reaching eyes. Mena had fought in the front lines of the battle, amazing everyone with her skills as a swordswoman and with her ability to kill without remorse and yet maintain a humble, human character. Dariel had a flair about him that inspired almost comical glee among the troops. The tales his raiders had spun about him had the masses believing he was impervious to injury, untouchable, blessed. They were symbols the people were keen to rally around. Aliver’s instructions-passed through them and voiced to the masses-had an uplifting effect that not even veteran generals like Leeka Alain could duplicate.

That was part of what the towers had been for. From them the three siblings sent messages to one another with mirrors and by raising different colored flags. They also allowed Aliver to communicate with the Santoth, the elevation making it easier for his consciousness to reach out to theirs. But after the last day of battle, when Maeander had focused his catapults on them systematically, the towers had to be abandoned. They had turned into deadly targets. The second day Mena had just escaped being trapped in one by chance. She had been held up as she approached the tower. Instead of being up in it, she watched it being destroyed from just outside the catapult’s explosive range.

Aliver himself had been in the last one hit on the third day. He had only just climbed to the top and opened his mind to the Santoth and felt the connection between them uncoil and snap fast. The next moment the soldiers about him all dove for the floor. And then it felt as if the sun had fallen to earth. The roof buckled and slammed down upon him. Flames hurtled in from each opening, buffeting him about like plumes of molten liquid. The world viewed through his eyes went from golden flame to charred blackness and past that to nothing. For a few elongated seconds he swam in the baffling pain of his flesh being scorched from his body. He remembered that he had had a dying thought, but as with something that happens in a dream, he could not recall what it had been. Perhaps he had not even completed the thought before the change happened.

It was quick, the recovery. One moment he was in an incinerator; the next the flames peeled back from his body and seemed to evaporate. The structure, which had been twisting to the ground beneath the weight of impact, found legs. The wood flexed like muscle just awakened. The whole tower groaned with exertion. A second later it was upright. The heat vanished. Aliver’s flesh was intact. The men and women all around him rose back to their feet, bewildered.

He had answered their silent questions with what he knew to be the truth. As surprised as he was himself, he projected his words with confidence, as if he was stating something any tutored child would know. Theirs was a blessed cause, he’d said. The Santoth, though they were unseen, protected them. He had already given a speech arguing that they were all part of a mythic present. He reminded them of this and asked them to imagine the song future generations would sing about this army. They been drawn from all the reaches of the Known World and were protected by ancient sorcerers who wanted nothing more than to return to the world of the living and right old wrongs. This was too magnificent an endeavor to fail, he said.

He did not mention that the sorcerers had likely protected him personally-saving others because of their proximity to the prince. Nor did he reveal that they had only managed to do it so dramatically because the connection between them was fresh and new, the moment fortuitously timed. But a partial truth, he had learned, sometimes reached farther than the whole of the thing. He knew that the entire army would know of what happened within a few hours of the event. They would spin another tale of magic and prophecy around him. To them he was the magician. It was all his doing, they believed. Though he knew this to be false, he saw that it emboldened them. That, at least, was a worthy thing.

With the towers abandoned, the three siblings walked toward the front ranks of the army. The troops were still forming up, tightening their ranks and marching over the rise and down onto the long slope that led to the field of battle. As they walked a messenger sent by Oubadal found the siblings and uttered a message that Aliver could make no sense of. It had to do with the enemy’s deployment, something about them not taking the field. They were close enough to a vantage point that Aliver just brushed past him and strode forward to see for himself. What he saw stunned him.

Before him stretched row after row of his own soldiers, progressing down toward the established point of deployment. But beyond them the field was empty. Bare. A pale and dry expanse, dotted only with occasional shrubs and acacia trees. There was no massed army. Aliver yanked his spyglass from his chest pocket. In the distance the enemy camp sat quietly, dense with shapes and shadows he knew to be people. Fires sent plumes of smoke up here and there, straight lines that only gradually angled to the east. They were there, but they showed not the slightest sign that they intended to fight this day. Had there been a misunderstanding? Was the truce meant to last for more than two days?

“What are those?” Mena asked.

The moment she posed the question Aliver saw them. There were a few objects on the field, but at first they barely drew the eye. Compared to the host he had expected to see, these objects required a new focus, so much smaller were they in scale. At least, so they seemed until he studied them more carefully. There were four crates lined across where would have been the front ranks of the enemy army. They were built of wood and reinforced with an outward skeleton of thick metal beams. They stood as tall as two or three men and stretched about a hundred strides in length.

Within a moment or two of study Aliver felt his pulse ramping up toward higher speeds. There were things inside the crates. He could not see what, but he could feel them. He sensed motion inside, felt the bulk of some hidden life-form pressed tight against the cages-yes, they were cages-that held them. He worked his jaw as if in preparation to deliver an order. Nothing came yet.

Dariel said, “How kind of Maeander to leave us presents. A peace offering, perhaps?”

Aliver did not answer.

A half hour later they stood before the front ranks of their army, Oubadal’s Halaly warriors closest to them. They were always the first to muster for battle, proud race that they were. Behind them the entirety of their force stood at the ready. They were all in position now, looking like the same colorful array of diverse persons and garish garments that had presented themselves the first day. The crates stood but a hundred strides away. From this distance Aliver could see that a handful of men clustered around each container. Judging by the look of them they were not warriors. They wore simple leather garments of brown from head to toe, drab uniforms that blended with the sandy landscape. Some of them carried pikes with barbs at the ends. These were long, unwieldy weapons, not the type of thing intended for use on humans. Not one of them looked like a person of authority, nor was there any sign even of a Meinish officer, much less Maeander himself.

“Have we a plan?” Dariel asked.

As ever, there was a twist of ironic mirth in the question. Aliver liked this about his brother, but he did not get a chance to answer him. The near side of the four crates opened at the top corner and tilted forward. The handlers tugged them open with ropes. They jumped away as the sides slammed down to the ground, stirring up clouds of dust that billowed around the openings, hiding whatever shadowed inside. The handlers circled around to the sides of the structures. They snatched up their pikes and held them defensively before them.

Aliver swallowed, waited. He could think of nothing else to do, not until he knew what he faced. The clouds drifted away, and there was nothing but the dark geometry of square openings. He felt the held breath of his entire army.

“There,” Mena said, “the one at the eastern edge!”

Yes. There was movement. Just a highlight back in the shadows at first, but then a muzzle pressed out into the daylight. A flat snout with two flexing nostrils, it had a swinish character to it, with such a crosshatched confusion of barbed tusks that it was hard to say which belonged to the upper or lower jaw, just that these mouth parts hung higher than a man’s head and were longer than an entire boar’s body. It came forward slowly, as did the others, Aliver knew, though his eyes stayed fixed on the first.

The creature was massive. The distance did nothing to hide this fact. Its eyes sat close together above its snout, a hunter’s gaze, telescoping vision. Its forelegs were swinelike, shoulders joints of muscle and bone like nothing he had seen before. Its upper spine jutted up as if to push through its flesh. Ridges ran down its back toward a rear that sat much lower, with short, stout hind legs, bunched with fibrous bulges. They were a sprinter’s legs. It wore a natural armor plated across much of its torso, calloused lumps that looked like enormous warts that been sanded into calcified plates.

Aliver knew what he was looking at. The rumored beast. The weapon a few had named but nobody had reasonably described. An unnatural, garbled form of life, worse, by far, than any laryx. A creature of foul sorcery. He gave orders for the troops to back away. Perhaps there was no need to fight the beasts. They were hundreds of paces away. If the army just backed up and over the rise, quietly, slowly…

One of the creatures, the first to emerge, bellowed. The other three answered him. All four of them raised their heads, scented the air. They focused their eyes on the mass of humanity stacked before them on the slope, row after row. The sight excited them. The dun-colored keepers stood to the side and behind them, their pikes at the ready, but the creatures ignored them.

Aliver reissued the order to back away. Such a maneuver was not easily accomplished, though, not with so many people to coordinate. They had barely moved at all when the creatures-the antoks-began to approach them at a trot. The sight of them was enough to panic the army. Soldiers who had fought bravely the days before turned and ran. Some dropped their weapons and tried to climb over others to get away. All three of the Akarans shouted for calm. Aliver reversed the order to retreat and tried to get them to form up, turn around, and face these things with weapons ready. Some took up his call, but not all.

Thus the antoks arrived amid a grand confusion. They barreled right into and through the tight-packed humanity, their cloven feet beat the earth as if it were a skin drum, vibrating with each staccato impact. They squashed people underfoot, knocked them back, raked their jaws from side to side. They snapped people up from the ground and hurled them, bloody and screaming, into the air. The four each cut a different path of destruction. At times they went to their slaughter with such frenzy that they simply followed their nose on a course that could only be random, looking, strangely, like puppies in their boundless enthusiasm. On other occasions they worked together, with focused cunning, schooling their quarry like swordfish slicing through anchovies. They moved in bursts of speed entirely beyond the soldiers’ capacity to match or escape. They left scarred paths behind them, jumbled with the shattered bodies of the dead. The soldiers brave enough to face them with weapons drawn could do nothing. Arrows and spears skittered off their armor. Swordsmen could scarcely get within striking range without being trampled.

One of them passed so close to Aliver that spit from its muzzle splattered his face. By the time he had wiped the blood-tainted liquid from his eyes the creature was far away, raging. The prince’s gaze fell on a woman just a few strides away from him. She sat upright in a strange, broken-backed position. Her body had been smashed at her pelvis and pressed down into the ground. Tears rimmed her eyes and her lips moved, saying something he could not hear. Her arms tried to make sense of things, the lay of the land and her position in relation to it. The flat of her hands swept across the ground as if smoothing the wrinkles from a sheet. He had seen injuries in the previous days’ fighting, but the complete, pathetic frailty betrayed in her smashed form gripped him.

He scanned the field again. Dariel was nowhere in sight. Mena he caught a glimpse of in the distance. She was running, sprinting after one of the creatures, hunting it, though it paid her no mind at all, there being so many bodies to rip apart. In the space of a few minutes the antoks had killed hundreds. They showed no fatigue. No interest in pausing over the dead. No desire to eat, even. They simply wanted to kill. He watched one of the antoks pin a soldier’s lower body beneath its hoof. It contemplated the thrashing for a moment and then bit down. It ripped the man in half, shook the torso about as if it were a plaything, and flung it in the air.

Aliver knew he had to do something. The entire throng was gathered here in his name. He could not let them die. He pushed a steadying chant up and tried to hold the thought on his forehead. The Santoth. If he could reach them, they could provide protection. He could explain to them what was happening and they could work their sorcery to shrivel the beasts where they stood. He tried to contact them. Twice he felt his call unfurl from his body like great coils of rope tossed into the air, but both times the connection snapped. It was so hard to focus with shouts of horror buffeting him in waves.

He had just started to try a third time when Kelis shouted for him. “Look,” he said, pointing with his chin at something off to the northeast. “Others come.”

“What others?”

Following the Talayan’s direction, Aliver spotted a company of men nearing the northern edge of the battlefield. His first thought was that it was the enemy coming, though the direction of their approach was not from Maeander’s camp nor were they very numerous. In the half second it took him to lift the spyglass to his eye, he considered the tremulous possibility that it was the Santoth already answering their desperate need. He searched the enlarged, jittery view of the world through the spyglass and realized it was neither of those two possibilities.

What approached was a force of perhaps a hundred soldiers. They jogged across the plain directly toward the carnage. They were nearly naked, most of them brown-skinned and short of stature and slight. They carried no banner and wore no colors and were lightly armed with what looked like wooden training swords.

One of the antoks had spotted the arriving soldiers. It peeled away from the swathe of destruction it had been carving and ran at them with a burst of joyous speed. Aliver tried to steady his spyglass. The soldiers, seeing the beast coming, stopped. They spoke among themselves, frantic, debating, their eyes never leaving the antok for long. One of them, taller than the rest, touched something in Aliver. He was familiar in some way, but he could not pause to consider it.

For most of its sprint it looked like the antok would barrel right into the newcomers. But as it neared it slowed, slowed, and then broke its forward motion completely. It slid across the dry soil and skidded to a halt just before them. The soldiers held their wooden swords before them. Each stood still, unflinching, their torsos naked and brown and utterly defenseless. They were absurdly brave, and Aliver twisted with shame at what was about to happen to them.

But it did not happen. The antok did not attack at all. It moved in close to them, sniffed, tilted its head this way and that. It walked some distance along the line of them. It pawed the earth in what looked like confusion, studied them from several angles, found none of them satisfactory. Then it turned and began to trot back toward the main army.

Aliver-thankful, amazed, grateful-could not pull his eyes away from these newcomers. The antok had not touched them. Hadn’t harmed a hair on any of them! It had stood inches from their naked chests, before weapons that could not possibly have harmed it, and…and…what? There was a thought pressing against the back of his consciousness. It was almost painful knowing it was there, feeling the ridge of it trying to break through, something so very important. Something about the newcomers…and also about the handlers still standing beside the cages… It was the reason they were not being attacked.

He jerked his spyglass from the newcomers back to his army. The visual impact of this was all it took. He realized what it was. He only mulled it a moment. That was how long it took for him to become as sure of it as if he had trained the beasts himself. He whispered it to Kelis, and then lifted his voice to shout it to the others.