Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Mena had been pursuing the same antok for what already seemed like hours. There should have been guards beside her every step of the way, but she had bolted so quickly they lost her from the start. She had run across a field with the dead, slipping in their blood, at times tangled in entrails. She’d jumped over bodies and slammed through the screams and pleas of the injured. Drenched in sweat, her legs burning and chest heaving with the effort, she refused to stop. She tried not to hear or see anything but the creature she hunted, knowing that if she did, the horror of it all would be too much.

No matter how she chose her course she never managed to close on her prey. Nor did she know what she would do if she did, except that it involved channeling her anger through the steel edge of her sword. She felt no fear of the creature at all. Her hatred was too complete. Maeben lashed at her from the inside, trying to burst through and rip the beast apart with furious talons, cursing Mena’s feeble body: wingless, short legged, slight as it was. This made the princess even more angry.

She stopped long enough only to hear her brother’s instructions because a hand clamped on her shoulder. The pincer grip locked the joint to that particular spot in the world. The rest of her body had no choice but to snap to a halt. She spun, ready to lash whomever it was with her tongue. The face that met her was such a mask of creviced and fatigued stoicism-firm, soldierly, entreating, and irrefutable all at once-that her words evaporated.

“Princess,” Leeka Alain said, “stop all your running about.” A handful of guards clustered behind him, panting and sweat drenched. To her surprise, they used the pause to begin unbuckling their armor vests, tilting off helmets, cutting the orange bicep bands from their arms. The general said, “Tell me, what people go to war nearly naked, with wooden swords? A brown-skinned, black-haired people?”

The answer was out of her mouth before she had any grasp of why he would ask such a thing. “My people-Vumuans, I mean.”

Leeka grunted. “Yes, well, your people have come after you, Princess. Good thing, too, because they’ve shown Aliver the way.”

“The way to what?” Mena asked, distracted. Her eyes lifted and searched out the antok, its ridged back cutting through the masses like a shark’s fin jutting out of the sea.

“The way to calm the bloody hogs and then, perhaps, to kill them. To begin with you must strip.”

Her attention snapped back to him. “What?”

“Down to the skin.”

“Are you serious?”

The old soldier frowned. “It’s not that my eyes won’t welcome it, Princess, but the order comes from your brother. Strip and follow me. It’s a mad idea, but it may be the only way to survive the day. You won’t be alone in nakedness.”

He took off at a trot, ripping off his mail vest as he went. Mena followed, sheltered within the corps of disrobing soldiers protecting him, watching as the man yanked his undershirt over his head and tossed it away. He undid his sword belt, drew the blade, and let the scabbard fall. She was about to ask him what he could be thinking when he glanced back at her. He explained what had happened while she had been bent on her hunt. As she listened she took in the changing scene around her.

The antoks still rampaged, still sent soldiers fleeing, still tossed shattered bodies into the air, but everyone not directly facing the beasts had found a singular purpose. They were all shedding their clothing. They tore off garments, stamped themselves out of trousers and cut armbands free with daggers. People tossed the fabric from their bodies as if it scorched them with its touch. Only when they stood naked to the world did the army begin to regroup, not as the units they had been sectioned into. Instead they formed large, seething islands of humanity, standing shoulder to shoulder.

If Mena understood what Leeka was saying correctly, Aliver believed that bright colors attracted the animals. The handlers, the Vumuans: neither had been attacked because they wore a color-brown-that the antoks considered neutral. Perhaps it was natural to them, Leeka was saying. Maybe they’d been tamed by brown-skinned people. Or perhaps they had been trained this way so that their handlers did not come under attack. Acacian armies-even this one filled with so many Talayans-had always worn the bright orange of Akaran royalty, making them easy, flaming targets. Whatever the explanation, it was worth trying. Their clothing and armor did not protect them from those tusks and hooves and that fury anyway.

Mena, who had never been ashamed of her body on Vumu, was down to her skin in a few quick motions. As she rebuckled her scabbard she looked at herself. She was brown on the chest, arms, and legs, tanned a rich tone. Her upper thighs and pelvis were lighter. It made her wonder.

“I’m thinking the same thing,” Leeka said, studying her. His own naked chest and pelvis were pale from having long been covered. “What I wouldn’t give to have been born with Talayan skin right now. But come, let’s join the others. They’ll shield us.”

She understood what he meant a few moments later, when they joined with that amorphous body of humanity, sliding in, skin against skin, sweat lubricating the process. The Talayans of all tribes formed the outer wall. They pulled in the lighter-skinned Acacians and Candovians and Senivalians and Aushenians-anyone whose complexion was not dark brown. These they passed in from hand to hand, shoving them toward the center, shielding them. Mena had to fight to keep herself near the edge so that she could be involved in whatever was to happen. She lost contact with Leeka and his guards. She shouted to identify herself as the princess, smacked soldiers in the back of the head, elbowed, and jabbed.

Soon she had about her a guard of Bethuni soldiers. This helped, but for a frustratingly long period she could not see anything except the towering men around her. Eventually, she stepped upon a rock outcropping that provided her a vantage of the scene all around. The Bethuni pressed against her from all sides to hold her secure. She placed her hands on their shoulders, thanking them with her touch. The rest of her being focused on the scene before her.

The sea of humanity around them had taken on a collective uniformity of coloration. Not one of them bore any of the bright garments that had distinguished them before. Instead, they trod their clothes into the soil beneath their feet. The antoks were all contained within this ocean of people. They still ripped through the crowds, but not in the same way as before. They moved in fits and starts, hesitating, casting around for their next targets. Each time they spotted a swatch of color they surged forward again, as if desperate to pin somebody as the owner of it and punish him accordingly. They ignored persons they could have smashed as they ran down lanes of bodies that peeled open before them. They surged past naked breasts without the slightest interest. It was color that mattered.

One of them scooped up bodies from the ground and whirled them into the air. Another tore into a mound of discarded clothing and shredded the fabric. It spun inside a multicolored whirlwind of its own creation, stamping and fuming. And then it abruptly halted. Swatches of cloth floated down around it, draping its flanks and back and even falling around over its head and snout, snagging on its tusks. It panted, looked about, snuffed, and grunted. It was, Mena could see, confused. It was the lead antok and it bellowed to the others. Each of them answered in turn, a call that echoed the first’s frustration and unease. They did not draw any closer together, though. Each had become encircled by brownish, moving walls of humanity whose frailty they did not seem to recognize.

In the hush after the leader’s call, Mena realized how quiet the plain was. Thousands of soldiers stood all around the creatures, but nobody talked. Nobody shouted orders. No horns blew. There was a background noise of sorrow in the air, muffled sobs and occasional bursts of agony from the injured, but the silence was such that Mena could hear the antok’s footfalls and breathing. She even heard the closest one’s joints creak as it walked, slowly now, before the wall of people facing it. The humans were like children beside the huge beast. If it straightened its legs, it could have stepped over them and walked with ample clearance beneath its belly.

Watching it, Mena’s eyes found Aliver for the first time. He was not far away, just a way down in the wall of bodies facing her across the space left open for the creatures. He stood only a few strides away from the stiff-jointed antok. He was so like the Talayans in his carriage and musculature that her eyes must have passed over him several times before picking him out. He held the outer line, shoulder to shoulder with the Talayans around him. He was a shade lighter than they, but she could not deny that he, too, was brown. And she could not pretend that he was not in danger.

The beast was but a few of its strides from him. Its gaze focused on one man and then another and then another as it moved along the line, getting nearer to Aliver, searching for any excuse to kill. Its tusks were like the naked blades of so many curved swords. Mena placed a hand on her sword hilt and felt her pulse thrumming in her grip around the leather. She watched the antok step closer to her brother. She wanted to break free and dash toward him. Every muscle and fiber in her cried to leap the distance between them with her sword slicing the air before her. She was near enough that if she launched herself from the shoulders of the man in front of her she would land in the clear, pull her blade free and…

Aliver looked at her. His head did not move. His body did not change position in the slightest. But his eyes shifted and focused on her. He drilled his gaze into her, his look heavy with import, telling her something. But she did not know what. She shook her head just slightly. He rolled his eyes back to the antok, stared a moment, and then looked back at her. He repeated this three times. That was all the time he had.

The antok broke the visual contact between them as it moved past Aliver. Mena’s eyes bumped along the animal’s coarse-haired hide, over its plates and dried skin and wrinkled rump. When it cleared her brother and came into view again, Aliver’s attention was only on the beast. By the motion of his body, Mena knew a sound came from his throat. She did not hear it, but she saw his neck flex, his mouth in an oval, as if he had exhaled sharply. The swine swung its mighty head, causing the nearest group of soldiers to billow away, leaning back one on another on another. It doubled back. It closed the space between itself and its taunter, finding renewed interest in the prince. It studied him with a single, bulbous, veined eye, so close to Aliver’s face that it could have licked him. It looked up and down Aliver’s body.

Aliver gazed right back into the eye. He must have felt the creature’s breath on his face. Moisture-sweat and blood and foulness-sprayed him with each exhalation. Aliver stared at it, his visage stony, no emotion on it that she could read. It was just his face as it might look captured in stone. His lips moved again. Whatever he said registered on the faces of the Talayans around her. They all, in single motion, let their eyes drift upward.

What was he doing? Mena wondered. What did he want her to see? He must know something, she thought. How else could he look so calm? So perfectly in control, as if he owned the beast already. As much as she wanted to fly through the air propelled by Maeben’s rage, she also felt a lump at her center that housed her love for her brother and her pride and confidence in him, a faith that at that moment verged on hero worship. She knew he could prevail. Could, except that there was something he was trying to tell her that she did not understand. She looked all the harder to figure out what it was.

Aliver held the King’s Trust in his right hand and his dagger in the other. He must be planning to attack, Mena thought. And if he was planning to attack, he must have found a weakness. She looked at his face and gauged what his eyes were looking at on the far side of the antok. She searched out the same point on the side of the animal facing her. And then she saw it.

Between the plates on the creature’s shoulder, an area of hide rose and fell rhythmically. It throbbed. Throbbed. Throbbed. It bulged in a manner that could only mean an artery lay beneath the thick skin. She would never have noticed the spot if the animal had not been standing still. Without taking her eyes away, she leaned close to the nearest Bethuni and spoke into his ear. It took him only a moment to see it also.

She whispered, “Tell the others to watch and do as my brother does.”

A moment later she saw Leeka Alain’s head jut up above the crowd. He studied the antok for a long moment, then looked at her, nodded, and disappeared back into the crowd. Whispers fanned out from hushed mouth to hushed mouth.

She was not sure how much time passed between that and what happened next. It seemed no more than a few seconds. The animal, losing interest in the prince, began to turn away. Mena watched as Aliver dashed at the antok. He ran two strides and then leaped. He slammed the dagger to the hilt in the tissue of the foreleg and used it as an anchor to swing upward from. The next move was almost delicate, rendered in slowed motion. Aliver, straight armed above the planted dagger, touched the tip of the King’s Trust against the artery, and sank half its length home. He released the dagger, grasped the sword blade, and yanked downward. He dropped his full body weight onto the blade. It sliced through the flesh in a descending tear that severed the artery.

The antok snapped around in the direction of the wound, but Aliver kicked away from it, pulling the sword free as he did. He landed on his feet some distance away, out beyond the shower of blood. The pulsing fount sprayed out over the nearest soldiers. They shaded their eyes from the stuff, which looked black and thick as oil. It was a geyser that the beast spun and spun into, getting drenched, seemingly in search of its source.

Aliver stood away from the others, alone and nearest the monster, sword up and drawing circles in the air. The King’s Trust looked so very light in his hands, so slim that at times the blade all but disappeared. Aliver talked softly in words that Mena could not make out, waiting for the creature to remember him. Eventually the antok stopped its circular dance and spotted him. It squared off, staring, wobbling and drunken. It blinked rapidly, as if it were trying to clear its head. That was where it was hurt-in the decreased flow of blood to the brain. It blinked and blinked; it seemed to have trouble focusing. It shook its head and snuffed.

Aliver stooped down and peeled a piece of fabric away from the ground. He held it in one hand, snapped it until it flapped loose, spun it so that the unsoiled orange caught the sun. He said something else to the antok. He let the fabric drape over his chest.

This was an invitation the vile thing understood. It roared and ran forward, limping but intent now, looking as fierce as ever. Aliver waited until it was only strides away, and then he flung the fabric up into the air. The antok lifted its head to follow, jaws open, body rearing up. Aliver ducked beneath it. He jabbed his sword into the creature’s underbelly and sliced it open from chest to abdomen. He was out from under it by the time it began to collapse, spilling its insides around it in a flood of viscera.