The Sacred Band

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Aliver and Barad walked side by side on the cobblestone streets that led from the palace down through the various tiers of the city. The prince had asked Barad to accompany him to see off the transport that was to depart that morning, taking Kelis and the last of the soldiers on Acacia to Alecia. Aliver himself would climb aboard his dragon there at the docks. He would lift up and fly away from the island of his birth and from the children he had just parted with. Nothing had ever been harder in his life, but it had to be. And he had to speak a little with this man before parting. He had two questions he wished to ask. This would be the only occasion he had left to do so.

Walking beside the tall, stone-eyed man, Aliver beheld Acacia for what he knew would be the last time. He would never see this view again, never look down at the terraced levels dropping away beneath him. Never again watch the bustle of ships in the great harbor or see that man stepping out of his house or those faces peering from a window or those workmen pausing on that rooftop to watch him pass.

So much of life was now made of buts and nevers and cannots and other words that denied. Despite them, Aliver was not morbid. To every failure he could think of there was a rebuttal. To each thing he had not done in his life he could respond, Yes, but think of all I have seen. So much. Who is to say I deserve any more? To the time he would not have to spend with those he loved he could say, But if I hadn’t had the time I did with them, I would never know how special those moments were. To thoughts that it was unfair his life would be cut short again, he could reply, But I’ve had two lives, two chances. Who else has ever been as fortunate as that?

He faced his all too few remaining days with a tranquility he had never mastered when the future stretched before him. He would not have predicted that. How much of his life could he have predicted? Very little. He could not have anticipated that upon learning he had a daughter, he would have only one day of life with her. Nor that in that short span he would grow to love the girl. It amazed him how much he loved her. How much he felt that he knew her. Perhaps it was because his mother, Aleera, was behind the girl’s eyes, and that his father lived in the corners of her lips. Only hours together, but within them was all the lifetime of parenthood he would ever have. He could be bitter, but doing so would be unjust to what he had just learned. He would not die completely. His death was not his death, not when his daughter lived on.

The prince wore a tunic of black chain mail over a sleeveless vest and long, flowing trousers. The morning was chilly, but he wanted to display the tuvey band that rested snug above his bicep. It did not matter that the enemy was far away. He dressed for the crowds that had gathered to watch him pass. It was early, but the people knew he was to depart this day. Many called to him, bestowing blessings and the Giver’s speed on him. Others offered to join the army. An old man said he could not fight but he had once been a blacksmith. He could mend armor, sharpen weapons, and the like. A boy piped up, saying he could cook and tend a fire and carry water. “I’m strong!”

Aliver smiled his thanks to them and declined, telling them he would remember their offers always. He explained that they had gathered a great host already on the mainland and more were pouring in even yet. “Stay here,” he said, “and keep the island secure and proud. Do that for me.”

Many asked for news of the queen. Aliver had nothing new to offer them. “She has flown to destroy the Santoth. She will. She is your queen, and she swore to defeat them in your name.” The words sounded grandiose to his ears. Too simple a way to put a complex thing. Too buoyed by optimism he could not be entirely swayed by. He still projected the words with the grinning confidence he needed to, and each time he was amazed at the effect. People believed him, or they seemed to, at least. Both were gifts he-and they-needed.

“Barad,” Aliver said once they had pulled away a bit and could talk, “I love these people.”

“I know. They know it as well, which is what’s truly important. It almost softens me on the whole question of the monarchy.” He smiled. “Almost. If all monarchs were like you… if it were written into the laws that all monarchs must be just like Aliver Akaran in all important matters… But they’re not all like you, and such a law would not stand longer than it takes to wean a young tyrant from the breast. After you win this war-and after Corinn defeats the Santoth-you two will have to find a way to guide the nation into a different future. I don’t say it will be easy, or that you must change everything overnight, but you must put in place a system that lets people decide their own fates. You will do that, won’t you?”

Oh, Corinn and I won’t do that, Aliver thought. We’ll be dead. The people’s fate, for better and worse, will be in their own hands. He resisted the urge to confess to Barad, to unburden himself, and ask him to conceive of the fight going on without him and of the world after without him. He pressed it down beneath a clearing of his throat. It would not help anything. Telling anyone would be an indulgence that might do more harm than good. Though he could not have said whom he was beseeching, he thought, Just let me live long enough to finish this. Please.

Out loud, he said, “I wish we had more time to speak of such things, to plan. When the wars are over, will you help our young monarchs into that future?”

Barad did not seem to notice the peculiar wording. “In any way I can, I will.”

“Good,” Aliver said. “Then there is hope. Does this mean you’ve forgiven us?”

“I never needed to forgive you. Queen Corinn enslaved us both. For her, forgiveness is a long road. I’m yet only standing on the edge of it.”

The prince nodded his acceptance of this.

“I will admit that I do care about your family more than I imagined I could,” Barad said. “I still believe that no one family should rule the world, and I will not forget the things Corinn did to me and to the nation. But I cannot feel the anger I wish to.”

He paused as a child rushed up to Aliver, offering him a wristband woven from dyed leather. Aliver kneeled and let the girl slip it on.

Watching, Barad said, “I can’t imagine the people fighting a war without you. Before, I would have said that these adoring people are deluded by the vintage your sister gave them. That’s only part of it, though. Beneath that they see something in you. They need you right now. Without you I don’t know what would unite us enough to fight the Auldek. We could be scattered and running, hiding and thinking only of ourselves. Instead, all the people of the world seem content to put aside their differences until this war is over.”

They walked for a time, surrounded by well-wishers. Once through them, Aliver asked the first of his two questions. “So, Barad, visionary that you are-how do I defeat this enemy?”

“I’m not a warrior. You know better than I what your family has done in the past.” Barad made a fist and smashed it, with force but humor also, into his other palm. “You crush them. Don’t you? You kill enough of them so that they have no heart to fight on. You destroy their wealth, their happiness, their capacity to threaten you. You control where they live, how they live, and you take their resources so that they have to come to you for the very things necessary for their survival. You make a myth that explains the rightness of your victory and the wrongness that made the defeated into the defeated.” He inhaled a few breaths as if the catalog he had just spoken winded him. “All these things your Acacia has done, and yet none of it made you safe. The Meins came out of defeat a stronger enemy than before you conquered them. The Santoth roar back upon us all now, when we were not even thinking of them. The Auldek come against us because of what? Are they an old or new enemy? They have been devouring our children for generations. Now they want more.”

“I know the way things have been,” Aliver said. “I ask you to speak of a way things could be.”

Barad looked up as they passed through the gate into the lower town, watching the gentle sway of flags above it. Aliver did the same. “Tell me this: Is the world too small for the people that live in it?”

“No,” Aliver said.

“Is there too little water and air, wood and food and animals, stones to build with and ore to make tools with? Is there not enough? In the whole of the Known World I mean-not just as measured in any one place.”

“Of course there is enough.”

“Will any of us live forever?”

“No.”

“Need any of us fear death?”

Aliver let his eyes drift over the faces of the people they passed. Young and old, men and women, a child clinging to his mother’s leg, a crone with one eye closed as if she were winking at him. “No,” he said, “none of us need fear death.”

“If all that is as you say, war makes no sense.”

“I never said it did.”

“Then don’t make war.”

“I must.”

“No, make something different from war. Don’t allow your enemies to be enemies. Make them something else, because otherwise they have a power over you that they should not have. If you think in the same ways as the past, you will only get new versions of the past. Think differently. That’s what I’m saying.”

Exactly, Aliver thought. It was what he had already decided he needed to do. It helped to hear Barad’s deep voice expressing the same conclusion. Think differently. That’s what I’m learning to do again. Now that he was free inside himself, his visions of what the world could and should be spoke to him with growing urgency. He had been thinking differently when he and Corinn spoke of the souls trapped in the Auldek bodies and when they composed the documents he had in a sealed box already safe in Kohl’s saddlebag. He had been thinking differently earlier that day when he met with Delivegu. Aliver sent him on the task unlike any that Corinn had assigned him. The first and last mission Aliver would ever set him on.

A little later they stood on the dock at which the transport was moored. Kelis and Naamen were waiting on the boat. Kelis waved from the deck but did not descend to intrude upon them. Despite the bustling crowds and the din of patriotic songs and the incredible sight of the three dragons perched each on their own cleared section of pier they-and others-knew that the two men were conversing privately.

Aliver stood with a hand resting on a pylon. He and Barad watched the rippling green water below them, the barnacle-encrusted pier fading into the depths below their feet. Crabs worked at the their precise harvest, one large claw and one small, coordinated.

“What will you do now?” Aliver asked.

“Is that for me to say?”

Instead of answering, Aliver found a new question. “Barad, do you remember that I spoke to you when you were still in the mines of Kidnaban?”

The man’s stone eyes managed to convey surprise. “Of course. Hearing your voice changed my life, Aliver. You gave me purpose. Before I had the words to speak against tyranny, I borrowed yours and learned to speak by juggling them on my tongue. The queen almost took that away from me. Under her spell, I came to doubt that I had ever heard your voice. I came to doubt many things.”

“And I had forgotten it myself,” Aliver said, “but I have it all back now. I reached out to you because I knew you were the people’s conscience. I needed you then. It was good to know that you were there in the mines, among the people, saying all the brilliant, rebellious things you’ve always said. I still need you, but after what’s been done to you I have no right to ask anything of you. Go, if you have a mind to. Do and say what you will all across the world.”

A group of soldiers strode by. They bowed their heads to Aliver as they passed. Barad watched them until they began to climb the gangplank to the transport. “I don’t know where I would go or what I would say. I have my tongue back, but I am tired, Aliver. I don’t have it in me to harangue the masses anymore, not after the speeches I made for your sister. If I were younger, I would go with you. I’d listen to you speak.”

“I have a different idea,” Aliver said, nervous now as he approached the second question he wanted to ask Barad. “If you want to serve the nation without having to shout above masses or wield a sword… how about having a smaller group of pupils? You could stay here with Aaden and Shen.”

Barad pulled his head back, studying Aliver as if he needed to adjust his angle to see him clearly. “Aliver…”

“Educate them. Speak your mind and tell them every wise thing you know. Explain to them the world as you understand it, so that they can be rulers with their eyes open-and with their hearts and their consciences at the centers of their beings always. Or help them learn to be something other than rulers, if it comes to that.”

“Do you mean this?” Barad said after a moment.

“Teach them to think differently. Help them make a better future for themselves and Acacia.”

“Shouldn’t you do this yourself?”

With all my heart I want that, but I am dead and cannot do it. “If I had the time, I would love to, but I may not have that time. If I don’t, will you do it? I have already written a testament giving you complete power over their education.”

“And what of the mothers of these children? What would they think of their children being educated by a commoner, a mine worker, a rabble-rousing rebel, a man of-”

“They both approved. Corinn did before she left. Benabe you can ask yourself. Mena, I will tell with my own lips. And Dariel, he may not be of this world anymore. He would approve of this, though. You see? Nobody will stop what you begin.”

The man’s gaze drifted from Aliver. It seemed to lose itself somewhere in the middle distance of the green depths at their feet. “Corinn approved?” he asked, but Aliver knew it was not so much a question as a statement, one he needed to test out loud to believe. His eyes ground back to the prince’s. “I would not lie to them. Not about anything. If I teach, I will teach them that there is a better way than that of monarch and subject. I never believed in that system, Aliver. I still don’t.”

“I know,” Aliver said. “I know what you think about such things. Much of it we are of one mind about.”

Barad shook his head. He spoke with an almost angry edge to his voice, almost as if he had not heard Aliver. “You cannot ask this of me and then tie my tongue. I would swallow it first. If I am their tutor, I will dive with them into the royal records. I will show them what your line has done and how. There will be no secrets. If we find horrors, I will hold their hands and face those horrors with them, but I will not lie to them.”

“I know.”

“Do not tell me that they are only children. War happens to children. Slavery happens to children. The ravages of corruption happen to-”

“I know better than most that children deserve the truth of the world, explained as they can handle it, and reexamined as they grow. I would do the same with them myself. I swear I would. But our history is not all horrors. It’s still being written. If you show them what we have done, make sure to show them the things that will make them proud. Let them have that as well. And be kind to them. I know you will, but there is nothing harder for a monarch than to be asked to give back what he thought was his. This new world that you and I want so much, if it comes, it will not be easy for them. I had thought once that I would oversee changes myself. Now I see my work was not about me. It was about helping set the stage for them. I haven’t done it all that well, but I’m still trying. Here, please take this for me. Keep it safe.” He pulled a chain from around his neck and held it for Barad to take. A key dangled from it. “Keep it for the children, for Mena. When the time comes to offer it to them, you’ll know it.”

Barad closed his large hand over the chain. His expression deepened. It grew lined and grave even though his stone eyes remained still at the center of it. “You… you are not coming back. Aliver, there is a pall around you. Since the coronation, it’s been on you and the queen both. I thought it was just sadness, but it’s…”

“It’s the pall of war,” Aliver said. He forced his smile to look genuine. “I may as well be cautious. That’s all. I may as well leave the children in the hands of a tutor like you. That way, I know they will not face the future blind. You will do it?”

The instant he had the man’s affirmation, Aliver bid him farewell. He could look not a moment longer into Barad’s stone eyes. Aliver turned away as if his mind had moved on. It hadn’t, though. Moments later, though he was aboard the transport, talking with Kelis, shaking hands and patting backs and speaking to the crowd, he fought to contain the emotion of the arrangement he had just made.

And then, back on the pier, he took to the saddle on Kohl’s back and looked across at Ilabo on Tij, and at Dram on Thais a little farther away. Outfitted for war, they looked like characters of living myth. The dragons wore plates of armor kept in place by a snug lacework of cords. They went laden with packs and supplies, with swords and crossbows strapped into place. The riders wore chain mail tunics like Aliver. As a final touch they pulled snug helmets fashioned to replicate the heads of the mounts they rode. Aliver tugged on a black helm that flared behind his ears in imitation of Kohl’s crest feathers.

They all rose into the air at the same moment, propelled upward on the cheers of the onlookers. Kohl roared and Tij answered. Thais corkscrewed just above the heads of the crowd, a move that spurred them to even greater applause. For a few moments Aliver forgot the weight of responsibility and loss on him. The scene was too glorious not to fill him with pride. Surging into the air above a beauty of an island, climbing up the terraced levels of the city. Everywhere people waving and shouting for them. Over the palace itself, he saw Shen and Aaden at the balcony of the upper terraces, Rhrenna just behind them. He swooped past them with Kohl tilted to one side so that Aliver hung toward them in the saddle, one arm outstretched as if he were touching them over the distance.

For the first time in his second life, Prince Aliver Akaran went to war.