The Sacred Band (27 page)

Mena trod the sidelines, growing more dismayed the longer she watched. She was on the verge of calling a halt to the whole exercise. Haleeven commanded the day, but she had seen enough. Judging by the words she heard the old soldier shouting, so had he.

“What’s wrong with you?” Haleeven bellowed. “You look like drunken boys playing in the snow! Is this the best of Acacia’s army? Woe to the empire if it is. Now fight, you fools!” He dodged in among the troops, sword in one hand, mallet of a fist in the other. He smacked soldiers of either side on the head, jabbed with his sword, knocked them off their feet with his punch. He seemed to move on a different surface than the others, so loud and such a fury of motion that many stopped to gape at him.

“This is not going well,” Perrin muttered.

Haleeven kept up his harangue. The soldiers lowered their weapons, stood dejected. Even those face-to-face with the opposing side gave up the fight and watched the old Mein dance among them. He shouted about the pity of it, about how Meins used to drink ice instead of tea and pee crystals. “It never bothered us! A little snow?” He scooped a handful up in his free hand and lofted it at a soldier near him. “It’s like sugar to us. We flavored our cakes with it!”

“Go eat cake, then,” a soldier grumbled.

Haleeven stopped dead. His head turned back, his gaze locking on the offending soldier’s. He studied him as if he had never seen a creature so bizarre. He sheathed his sword, and then stooped and drove his gloved hands into the snow. “You say that to me? You, soldier, tell Haleeven Mein to eat cake?”

I should stop this, Mena thought. The old man is …

Haleeven roared, ran toward the man, and then hurled a ball of hand-packed snow at him. The snowball exploded on his shoulder, dusting his face white. Haleeven shouted something in Meinish. Pointing at the soldier, he said, “Did you understand that? I told him to eat sugar! You hear? Eat”—he ducked down again and hurled another clod of snow at a different soldier—“Meinish”—and still another—“sugar!”

One of the soldiers tossed snow back at Haleeven. With that, chaos erupted. A chaos of flying snow, shoving, kicking, insults, curses. Laughter. Both sides converged with an energy they had not possessed moments before. The tense atmosphere shifted, replaced by boisterous mirth.

“This will not help us against the Auldek,” Mena said. The next moment, she got pelted across the chest with a snowball. Who dared?

Haleeven himself. He kicked his way through the snow toward her. He looked like a madman. Stopping just before Mena, unsteady on his feet a moment, hair and beard splattered with snow, he said, “I say it will help us, Princess. I say it will. Next, I’ll teach you to make snow caves. Warmer than your tents. There’s so much to teach you, and I will do it!” He bounded off, scooping up fresh handfuls of snow and tossing them as he did.

Mena understood it then. The mock battle. The snow. The apparent futility of it. Yes, there was a lesson in all that, and she had learned it. But also there was a joy in life to be had, even in the face of absurd obstacles. Haleeven Mein had chosen to remind them of that.

Perrin said, “I’ll still be packing my tents when we march. Should I call for them to—”

Mena did not so much throw the handful of snow at him as spoon it on to his clean-shaven face. Stunned, he lost his balance and pinwheeled backward, feet stuck fast in the snow. Seeing the look first of surprise and then of mirth on his face, Mena burst into fits of laughter.

She was still laughing when the shouts reached her. The sound had an edge to it different from anything they had done that day. Casting about, she saw soldiers running with real alarm. Others stared at the sky, shading their eyes and pointing. The archers fumbled in their supplies. They were looking, she realized, for real arrows.

A shadow passed over her, and she knew just what had alarmed them all. She felt the presence rush into her mind so suddenly that it overwhelmed everything else. Elya! Spotting her lean, wide wingspan through eyes squinted against the glare, she shouted, “No! Don’t shoot at her! It’s Elya!”

Perrin picked up Mena’s order and spread it. When she was sure that the men were calm enough, Mena sent a welcome up to Elya. She envisioned her descending to the snowy battlefield, landing in a space cleared just in front of Mena. She saw her wings spread wide and beautiful, translucent with the sun’s light shining through them as she touched down as softly as a songbird landing on a branch, though infinitely more magnificent. She sent her the message that she could roll tight her wings and rest them from her long journey, and she showed her in images that Mena would rush to embrace her the moment she could.

That was exactly what happened. Met with a collective inhalation of breath from soldiers that had never seen her, Elya touched down. Mena buried her face in the creature’s soft plumage, inhaling the sweet scent of her. The citrus smell flooded her with memories of their first days together in Talay. Golden, warm days spent walking the wind-touched grassy hills, just the two of them falling in love with each other.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Mena whispered. “You shouldn’t be here.”

In answer, Elya’s breast hummed, a soft vibration that felt like nothing else in the world. Warmth and energy and life and love all captured in the thrum of the whole of her body. Mena gave herself over to it. She tried not to hear Perrin say that he had no idea Elya was so impressive a creature. She pressed her face deeper when Edell said that with this mount, the princess could own the sky and know exactly what the Auldek were doing without them ever being the wiser. She tightened her grip when Bledas mentioned that the Auldek may also have mounted riders, and squeezed with her fingers when Perrin came back with, “Yes, they
might
. But they won’t be like Elya. Did you see her wings?”

No, Mena thought, this is not for her. War is not for her.

I think I have names for the hounds,” Dariel said.

“What?” Birké lay beside him, the two of them staring at the stars, absurdly bright and numerous above them. “More colors? Flowers?”

Dariel nudged him with an elbow. He held a few of the odd, slimy plee-berries in his mouth, rolling them around on his tongue. He swallowed them and said, “When I was young, my father used to tell us stories. There was one about Bashar and Cashen.”

“The two cousins?”

“No, brothers. They were brothers.”

Birké made a skeptical noise low in his throat. “Bashar and Cashen were cousins. Bashar could throw lightning bolts, and Cashen was jealous of it. He roared every time Bashar showed off. He pounded on the earth and grumbled.”

Dariel said, “That’s not the way we tell it.”

“How does your way start?”

“Bashar and Cashen were two brothers. They had a great fight over power.”

“That would make more sense.”

“I always remembered that story. It scared me. I didn’t want to think of brothers fighting—not with the way I loved my brother. Anyway, later Aliver told me that the Santoth had explained that tale differently. He said Bashar and Cashen were not brothers. They were tribes, whole races of people. The friction between them was that of a world turning on itself. Once, though, they had been close. And they could be again. That’s what Aliver told me.”

Birké cleared his throat. “So Bashar and Cashen. Brothers or tribes or cousins … and now hounds?”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Better than Scarlet and Blue, or whatever colors you were thinking of naming them.” Dariel reached over and jabbed him in the ribs with a finger. The motion brought one pup’s attention. Cashen, the reddish one, scurried between them, plopped his butt down, and sat waiting for something interesting to happen.

“Tell me your tale,” Birké said.

“Which version?”

“Both. Tell me both. I’ll judge them for myself.”

Dariel did so as best he could, hearing his father’s voice and taking on the cadence of it. He told both stories, and did not mind losing sleep that night. Tomorrow they would reach the Sky Isle. He would finally meet Yoen and the elders. For some reason, he felt he needed to be awake for as long as he could. He needed to sort through all the things Nâ Gâmen had told him.

D
ariel, I’ve been waiting for you
, the Watcher said.
At first I thought it might be a short wait. I thought our sins could not go long without punishment. And then, later, I began to doubt that you would come. There was no Giver, after all. Why should there be justice? There isn’t, but all things do come to pass. Just never in the ways that we imagine
.

Yes
, Dariel thought. They sat side by side in a dark, rectangular room now. The wall in front of them was blank. The floor bare, smooth stone. A river of air rushed from one side of the room to the other. Had Dariel to name the purpose of the room, he would have failed. Had they needed to speak words, they would have had to yell. Because they spoke directly to each other’s minds they conversed despite the roar of the air and the flapping of their garments. Nâ Gâmen sat as if he did not notice it all. Dariel did the same, and it was almost true.

I want you to know how I came to be here. Why I waited for you. Look
.

A magnificent palace appeared on the wall before them. Dariel saw it from high above, dizzying, as if he were somehow a bird on the wing. It lay like a lace scarf draped in serpentine curves across the high reaches of one of the barrier islands. So it looked from a distance. Closer, it was a flowing, molten structure similar to the Sky Mount, only sumptuous and alive in a way the mount was not. Gardens of trees sculpted by the wind into fantastic, eerie shapes. Fishponds and waterfalls and dining terraces cut into improbable promontories, with views of the sea and the other barrier isles, many with similar estates.

See this? This was my home for several hundred years. I adored it. I built it from nothing, first by my own labor, soon by the labor of others. I made something of a rock that had never known human habitation. I was proud. And I was angry. I hated Tinhadin as fiercely as any among us. I jumped at the opportunity to punish his people. For many years it was I who sorted the spirits that eat death. Do you know what that means?

No
.

I chose which children would go into the soul catcher. Not all souls are strong enough for it. Some have a greater force within them than others. I learned to sense it. That became my work. I decided which children would give their lives in labor, and which would give their lives through the gift of the soul energy. I was good at this work, and I did horrible things because of it
.

The things he did Dariel saw and felt, though for a time he did not hear the Watcher’s voice in his head. It was not just that the children were scared seven- and eight-year-olds, who had been stolen from their homes and families and taken across a vast ocean to a foreign land. It was not just that he sorted through them and decided which ones would receive a fate worse than death. Wasn’t being fed to the soul catcher worse than death? They lost their bodies. Their identity. They became the life fuel of strangers. They died, yet were reborn more completely as slaves to others than any that labored in the thread fields or as builders or farmers or served as fodder for military slaughter.

Not just the fact that he was responsible for this. He went further. For a time, he chose the children he would reserve for himself. Not all Lothan Aklun took souls into themselves, but he did. In his youth this was because he hungered for years and years of life in which to punish Tinhadin’s people. He did not care that one who accepts a soul inside himself loses the ability to father children. That did not matter, not when he could go on forever. He set his hands on the shoulders of child after child. He smiled in their faces and looked through their eyes and into them. If he truly liked what he saw, he had only to nod, or gesture with his fingers, and the child was his.

There is more
.

With the passing of decades he aged. Physically, no, but still, he aged inside. His body stayed young, but as he passed the normal span of a long mortal life he began to forget his own childhood. The lack of it became a yawning chasm chasing him. His work grew harder. He felt different when he set his hands on children’s shoulders and looked into them. More and more often, his gaze lingered on their faces, on the small curves of their muscles and the lines of their collarbones. More and more, he found a beauty in their small, growing life.

One day, performing his duties as selector, he met a boy. Perhaps it would have happened with another boy or a girl. The next day or the week after or in a year’s time. It would have happened at some point, he now believed, but fate had it that it was this boy. Ebrahem, a Halaly boy from one of the tiny villages along the western coast of Talay. The boy gazed up at Nâ Gâmen’s face with timorous, hungry, desperate hope. He had seen this expression a thousand times. All the boy’s hopes were there on his face. All his dreams written in the lines of his lips and the bushy flares of his eyebrows and in the uneven circlets of his nostrils. All the things he had left behind, all that would not be for him—the loved ones lost, the home he would never see again.

Nâ Gâmen knew all these were there, things that he had always thought small, just punishments. Childish things that he recognized because in them he recognized himself. He had always understood them, and, understanding, he had found the strength to be cruel. But this time, written there … was nothing. Features like he had seen before, and yet this time he saw nothing but the boy himself.

Later that night, after telling both his stories, Dariel could not find sleep. Birké lay flat on his back, snoring. Bashar sat beside him, studying the night. Cashen walked the patrol he had set up from their boulder down to the hollow where the others were and back again.

Nothing but the boy himself, Dariel thought. He remembered the boy’s face as if he had seen it with his own eyes. That face began to change Nâ Gâmen from what he was into what he became. Dariel wondered if Val had seen the same thing on the night he found Dariel shivering and hopeless in a mountain shack in Senival. He had never considered the changes he created in his adopted father’s life. He had shied away from thoughts of himself. Perhaps he had changed Val. Maybe that was what he was telling him when he stayed behind to set the platforms ablaze.