Hanish knew what they would expect: him with head bowed to them, humble, grateful. They had always spoken to him in whispers that said he was nothing without them. He was simply the product of their labors. All his achievements were owned by the collective. No single man mattered compared to the force they embodied together. He had lived his life by just this credo, and it had not failed him. So why did his mind seem to buck against his old certainties now, when he was so close to finishing his work?
It troubled him to realize that it was Acacian heroes he most respected. Edifus might have been his equal. Tinhadin surely was. Had he warred with them, he was not at all sure that he would have prevailed. Edifus had fought so doggedly, without flagging, scrapping with any and all who stood against him. He had not been a man of guile or cunning, but he had fought in the front ranks of every major battle of his career. Tinhadin had been a different sort, all treachery and betrayal, a model for cutthroat duplicity, a man willing to embrace the horrors of a vision so broad few others would even have conceived it. It struck Hanish that he had learned from these founders of Acacia. In a way, he revered them, even though they had been his people’s greatest foes. He fell asleep wrapped around the comforting-and disappointing-thought that there were no men such as those two to face him now.
Later, his eyes snapped open on the creamy splash of stars painted on the night sky. He cast around a moment, his senses screaming alertness throughout his body. He spotted the guards standing at eight points around him and others sleeping on the ground, the horses nearby. Everything quiet, just as peaceful as when he had drifted off, the air filled with cricket calls. It was not anything happening around him that had woken him. He had been dreaming of an Akaran female, a woman who looked exactly like Corinn. But she was not Corinn, and it had not been an amorous encounter. It had to have been…Mena. Sword-wielding Mena. A wrathful goddess: that was how she had described herself in the dream. She had raised her weapon to show it to him. The blade was drenched in blood. It dripped the stuff as if the metal were a spring of red liquid. It was the sight of that weapon and her woman’s hands on the hilt that had thrust him up from slumber. But why dream of her? Wasn’t Aliver the one leading the rebellion? Why awake fearing someone who in daylight hours he still considered a girl?
He knew little of Mena except that she had killed Larken with his own sword, slain several Punisari afterward, and stirred the crew into revolt. The last part was probably the easiest. It was an unfortunate reality of imperial life that each Mein had to depend upon a host of conquered peoples to keep the world functioning, to man ships and cook meals and build roads. Still, it should not have been possible for petite Mena to so completely elude them.
Hanish decided that if the opportunity presented itself, he would sacrifice Mena during the ceremony. Better to have her out of the way. Perhaps Corinn would even manage to forgive him. Perhaps at the end of it all they could have a life together. Hanish rolled to one side, feeling the contours of the ground beneath him. He shut his eyes and tried to sleep and tried not to think of Corinn. He achieved neither.
The next day, sitting on a rise that provided a view of the winding path of the road through the Eilavan Woodlands, Hanish caught sight of the approaching caravan. Cavalry rode in the fore and off through the woods along the flanks. Then followed units of Punisari, marching in tight formation, hemmed in by the narrow lane. Beyond them stretched a snaking length of wagons and laborers and priests, ox-drawn contraptions loaded with hundreds of sarcophagi. In each, Hanish knew, resided one of his ancestors. He heard the crack of the drivers’ whips carried to him on the breeze. It was actually happening, he thought. It was really going to happen.
Riding closer, through the cavalry and foot soldiers and on toward the body of the procession, he could not imagine how they had managed to traverse the rutted, abused, and sodden tundra of the Mein Plateau. In summer it would have been a jolting journey through a fetid landscape of bog land spread thinly over a rocky underlayer, with so many opportunities to tip to either side and spill their loads, such mires to get stuck in. Perhaps they would not have been able to do it at all without the aid of Numrek technology. It was they who had taught the Meins how to make wagons of such size, with those enormous wheels and with flexible undercarriages that did not snap under pressure. Still, the thought of these great contraptions negotiating the steep, switchback trail down from the Rim set tingles of trepidation through him. He would have to question Haleeven about it later, after thanking him, congratulating him. It was a feat he would have a poet write a ballad about.
Hanish’s uncle grinned like a madman when he saw his nephew. The two men greeted each other by crashing their heads together. Forehead impacted against forehead. They pressed skin to skin, each with their hands wrapped around the other’s skull. It was an old greeting, reserved for close relatives and for times of great emotion. It was meant to hurt. But the pain of it was nothing compared to the impact of Haleeven’s appearance. Hanish had never seen a man so haggard, save the beggars that roamed the back alleys of Alecia: unkempt of clothes, speckled with grime, lips chapped from his tongue that darted, darted, darted out to moisten them. His eyes hid behind low-hanging brows, and the skin of his face sagged, as if the tissue itself had been fatigued by the recent weeks’ work. His hair was shockingly white. Hanish tried to remember if it had been so before, even a little. He did not think so. It stood up from his scalp as if each hair were a tendril of silver thread frozen by an icy breeze.
Pulling back from him, Hanish said, “You look well.”
The lie was out of his mouth before he realized it. Haleeven let him know what he thought of it with a frown but was merry again the next moment. “No, you look well. I-I’m not so well. This is some mission you sent me on, Nephew. Some task…”
“But you’ve done it.”
Haleeven studied him a moment, then nodded. “Come, let me show you everything.”
At Haleeven’s side, Hanish visited each of the ancestors. He climbed upon the great wagons, touching the sarcophagi with his hands, whispering his greetings, invoking old prayers of praise. He felt the life within the containers palpably. They pulsed with an undeniable, ferocious energy. It lashed at the world in muted silence, as if each of them were screaming bloody murder inside a sound- and motion-proof chamber. Hanish noted the fatigue and unease in the laborers’ every gesture. They were hollow eyed with fear, wrung more by the emotional toll of their duties than by the physical labor. Even the oxen, usually calm creatures, were skittish and needed to be tightly controlled.
Haleeven’s description of the journey was a long tale of hardship and setbacks, told through the afternoon and continued that evening over supper in camp. When he was finished, the two men sat in silence, the night settling around them. Hanish could not see the stars for the trees blocking them, the undersides of the foliage glowing with firelight. Haleeven lit a pipe full of hemp leaf and drew on it, a habit Hanish had not known he had taken to. He almost said something disparaging. But it wasn’t as if Haleeven were smoking mist. Perhaps he’d earned a vice. Hanish had just begun to think of Corinn again, when his uncle broke the silence.
“They are so impatient,” Haleeven said.
Hanish didn’t need to ask whom he meant. “I know.”