Val listened to all of this without interrupting. He just grunted every now and then, ate his lunch, and seemed to follow the movement of ships on the sea. Glancing up at him, Dariel stared for a moment at the flaring of his nostrils as he breathed, the hairs inside heavy with coal dust. For some reason he thought of how his father sometimes came into his room at night and kissed him on the cheek and forehead and mouth. Dariel never let on that he was awake, although he was a light sleeper and often opened his eyes just from the ruffle of movement as his father stepped into his room. Sometimes he had felt the man’s tears fall on his skin.
And then he felt bad for all the things he had just said. Why had he spoken any of those things? The truth was, he loved all his family so much it frightened him. His siblings were each in their own way versions of perfection that he adored. He feared the day that his father stopped lavishing him with affection, even though he also feared the unfathomable sadness that seemed to bring it on. He knew his mother had died, and he had no memory of her. If this could have happened already, something just as awful could happen again. He could lose somebody else, too terrible a thought. To change the subject he asked his friend to talk about when he used to be a raider.
Val seemed unsure if he should, but a moment later his memories got the best of him. He said that he had been born into a raiding family, the Verspines. Since his earliest memories he had lived a wandering life, mostly aboard the swift ships of their trade, sometimes camped on one of the Outer Isles, where they hid after successful raids. They raided up and down the ocean coast, from northern Candovia far down into Talay. They always struck at night, sneaking into cities or towns and waking the citizens into terror. They took what they liked and dealt harshly with any who opposed them. They traded their booty for any supplies they needed, and then they retired to the islands to live for months in tranquillity, fishing and lying about near the beach, drinking, fighting, enjoying life until the time came to raid again.
Dariel had started to really feel the cold now, the wind pressing at them from the northwest, but he did not want to admit it to Val. “Why are you not still a raider?”
Val shrugged. He mumbled that he had better get back to work and rose stiffly to his feet. Once at his full height he paused and took in the view of the sea for a little longer. “The truth is that I lost the heart for raiding,” he said. “Too many that I knew died the wrong way. When I was young, that didn’t bother me so. I believed that I deserved to have whatever I could take and that whoever I killed or hurt to get what I wanted was just in the way. You’ve got to understand that the world’s full of men who are little better than animals. I may joke about it now; you and I may sit here thinking on them times; but an animal is what I was for thirty odd years of my life. Problem is that a man is different from an animal. In the quiet afterward we know when we’ve done wrong. When I left them ways behind I came here to serve your father. You just think of me as Val, the feeder, who used to be a dead-hearted killer in some time long ago. Can you picture that?”
Dariel looked at the man’s craggy features, so large and wide spaced and blackened; his head perched atop a width of shoulders that might as well have been a mountain range for all the largeness of the shadow they cast over him. Despite all that Dariel could not imagine him as any sort of killer. As terrible and vivid as the man’s tales were and as eager as his boy’s mind was to hear them, he still could not believe that Val had ever done any man any harm. He was simply a laborer from the world beneath the palace, a sympathetic giant who had probably inherited his position from his father and who may never have ventured off the island, one who knew exactly the type of tales to tell a boy like Dariel and did so as a kindness.
CHAPTER
Leodan Akaran was a man at war with himself. He carried on silent conflicts inside his head, struggles that raged one day into the next without resolution. He knew it was a weakness in him, the fault of having a dreamer’s nature, a bit of the poet in him, a scholar, a humanist: hardly traits fit for a king. He enveloped his family in the luxurious culture of Acacia, even as he hid from them the abhorrent trade that funded it. He planned for his children never to experience violence firsthand, even though this privilege was bought with a blade at others’ necks. He hated that countless numbers throughout his lands were chained to a drug thatguaranteed their labor and submission, and yet he indulged in the same vice himself. He loved his children with a breathless passion that sometimes woke him in terror from dreams of some misfortune befalling them. But he knew that agents working in his name ripped other parents’ children from their arms, never to be seen again. It was monstrous, and in many ways he felt it was his fault.
He had not instigated any of these things himself; like his children he had been born into it. He had grown up on the same tales he was now sharing with his youngest. He had learned the same reverence for the early heroes of his nation. He had practiced the Forms, stared respectfully at dignitaries from around the empire, and believed uncritically that his father was the rightful ruler of the entire world.
When he first saw the mines of Kidnaban as a boy of nine-the gaping chasms carved into stone, masses of humanity naked but for loincloths, laboring like thousands of insects in human form-he simply did not understand it. He could not fathom why those men and boys would choose such a life, and he did not ask why the day left twisted knots of anxiety in his abdomen. But just after his fourteenth birthday he had learned in quick succession that those mine laborers were conscripted from each of the provinces, that the heads of the various nations that visited Acacia were the privileged few, the very ones entrusted with the suppression of the bulk of their people.
This was shocking enough, but it was learning of the Quota that prompted him to action. In the throes of righteous adolescence, he went to his father, full of reproach. He came fresh from the lesson that introduced him to it and broke in on his father at sword practice. Was it true, he asked, that since Tinhadin’s time they had provided a yearly quota of slaves to a nation across the Gray Slopes? Was it true that agents in the Akaran name collected hundreds of boys and girls from the provinces, children sold and never seen again? Was it true that no one even knew to what labor or fate those children were banished? Was it true that these foreigners-the Lothan Aklun-paid for the slaves with a vast supply of a drug that kept much of the empire addicted and dependent?
Gridulan broke off his fencing. He tipped the point of his naked sword into the mat at his feet and looked at his son over the upraised stretch of his nose. He was a tall man-Leodan would never reach his height-with a stiff, military bearing. His companions-thirteen men he had known since boyhood-dotted the training space, a few fencing, the bulk of them standing beside one of the pylons, conversing. “Those things are true, yes,” Gridulan said. “The Lothan Aklun also promised that they would never wage war against us. This is something we should be thankful for. Tinhadin wrote that they were each like serpents with a hundred heads. I am glad that you are learning the realities of rule, but I do not care for-”
The young Leodan had interrupted then, his voice low, venomous, altogether unusual for him. The notion of slavery seemed a personal insult to him, such a foul thing that he could not hold back his anger. “How can you permit such an abomination in your name? We should do away with it at once, even if it means war with these Lothans. This is the only honorable course. If you do not do it, then when I am-”
Leodan might have been able to respond to the king’s movement had it not been so unexpected. Gridulan switched his sword to his left hand, stepped forward, and slapped his son with an upsweeping force enough that the boy’s head tilted toward the roof. He fell back, stumbling. As Leodan placed a hand to the stinging heat of his cheek, his father railed at him. He hissed that everything they had came from this very thing. To do away with it not only endangered all their lives but also denigrated the memory of the entire Akaran line, all of whom had seen the Quota as just. Only a fool would value the freedom of a few over the welfare of an entire nation.