“I see. Are you likewise inclined to be thorough?”
“No, I will marry only once.”
They had reached the high balcony on the back of the King’s Rest. Corinn perched her fingertips on the stone balustrade and lifted her chin, pointing it out across the sweep of clear, greenish-blue sea before them. “So you say. You must have abundant beauties in your country-enough so that a man can wed more than one.”
“You are mistaken. Think of it just the other way around. Women have half the virtues they do in Acacia. Believe me…” The prince touched Corinn on the back of her hand. “Princess, the day you are kind enough to set foot in Aushenia, you will be hailed as the most beautiful woman in the country, and I will be chief among your admirers.”
The prince could not have conjured up a more effective statement to win Corinn’s pleasure. With that single sentence he complimented her, alluded to his enduring fidelity, and promised her universal admiration. She stood dumb for a few moments, her fingers tingling, imagining the possibility that she could spend her life a swan surrounded by ducks. She answered the prince coyly and carried on with the tour, but she decided to find out all she could about Aushenia. Perhaps she had just found her future husband. Everyone knew that Acacia and Aushenia longed to be allied together. Her marriage could be a political coup. She could be princess of one nation, queen of another. This was something to look forward to.
CHAPTER
Leeka Alain had not harbored delusions about his importance to the course of the empire’s history. Never in his forty-eight years-of which more than half had been spent in military service-had he imagined himself to have a destiny of particular note. He was just a soldier, one of many in a line that had marched in anonymity out of the haze of history. So he had believed until one particular occasion on which he opened his eyes and rose up out of an empty slumber. A simple act, done thousands of times throughout his life. But this time it was like being born anew. One moment there was nothing. The next his eyes fluttered creation into existence, a world previously unimagined, one that demanded things of him that he had never been warned were even possibilities.
At first this creation was simply a square of bright white above him, an irregular geometry, brilliance in an otherwise formless blackness. He struggled to sit upright and find purchase on the limbs he vaguely understood as hands, arms, legs, feet. He was stuck fast. He stared for some time without understanding, with no point of focus, no context. Only when a shape cut through the space-one quick flash that was there and gone in the same instant-did he stir again. He watched the square of light long enough to catch the motion once more. A bird. It was a bird, a stretch of wing viewed from the shadowed underneath. And beyond it, creation slid, a contoured softness that he recognized as a high-clouded, arctic sky. This last revelation was the greatest help yet. With it came understanding of the pressure all around him. He opened his nose and sucked in the foul cacophony of scent and knew what it meant. He knew where he was and how he had gotten there.
That first horned creature…the rider atop it…the many others that followed him out of the storm…It truly happened, he thought. I lost them all. I led them to…What had he lost them to? Who were those screaming, stomping, mirthful agents of carnage? He had never looked such malformed horror in the face before. Like the first rider, all of them had stepped into existence hungry for violence. Some among them carried spears that they hurled as they strode forward, heavy things against which Acacian armor was but a thin skin. The soldier standing beside him took one of these in the chest and flew away behind the force of it, hand one moment on the general’s shoulder, the next gone. Others of the enemy rode in on mounts that were like-what was the word for them? Those animals from Talay…rhinoceroses. They were some sort of domesticated rhinoceros, except hidden beneath a mass of matted grayish hair. They ran his soldiers over, sometimes pausing long enough in one spot to stomp a body into pulp.
The greatest shock had come when the sword- and ax-wielding mass of them hit the still huddled Acacians. They were enormous, long-limbed, and powerful. Leeka saw in their motions a joy at killing that he had never imagined possible. It was almost childish, the way they killed. As when one boy with a toy sword pretends to slice off his companion’s arms and legs and head, and then thrusts his fist in the air, grinning at the damage he imagines himself to have accomplished. So did these beings go about their real work, hacking off limbs with glee, spinning themselves into grandiose strokes that nonetheless found their targets, clapping each other on the backs. Behind their matted mass of long black hair they were pale hued, like the snow. Leeka wanted to look one in the eye from up close, but he never got the chance.
He tried to remember what orders he had given. As much as he tried to match the totality of the slaughter with some reasoned response, he could neither recall any such response nor imagine what he could possibly have said in the few moments the slaughter took. There was simply nothing to it other than the enemy pouncing on them and his soldiers dying, blood spray all around, limbs kicked across the sodden snow, bodies like cloth dolls strewn about in broken-backed postures impossible for the living. It never appeared for a moment that any of the enemy worried for their own lives. Nothing touched them. Nothing frightened them in the slightest, and the damage they inflicted upon Leeka’s soldiers was nothing to them but a grand amusement.
Leeka had seen an enemy spearman pin an Acacian soldier beneath his foot. The foul thing studied the woman with primitive curiosity, and then jabbed the pronged point of his weapon straight down into her face. This had galled Leeka like nothing ever had before. He roared. He directed his fury up from his abdomen and hurled a scream across the tundra. The spearman heard him, yanked free the weapon, and moved on him. If the being loosed his spear and missed, Leeka promised as he ran toward him, he would find himself gutted on Acacian steel the moment after. The spearman, though, threw with accuracy. The missile sped toward him in an elongated blur. Leeka would have died if not for the actions of one of his soldiers, a man whose name he did not know beforehand and did not learn after.
The soldier stepped between the spearman and the general. He caught the lance full in his chest. It pierced through him and emerged from the other side in a burst of blood and jagged shards of rib. The spear point shifted just enough to the side that it passed through the hollow between Leeka’s side and his arm. The soldier’s body smashed against his. The force of that impact flung them both backward. The man’s helmet cracked Leeka on the forehead and knocked him unconscious. The two must have fallen together in a jumble, one looking just as dead as the other.
That, he assumed, was why he was not more carefully dispatched and why he opened his eyes many hours later to find himself layered well down inside a mound of bodies. Before he had been felled, he had noticed that some of the enemy grabbed slain soldiers by the ankles and slung them into piles, clearing the ground as if careful that corpses not clutter their playground, so he understood that he had been tossed into one of these mounds. Others were then piled on and around him. Immobile, stuck fast within a mound of the deceased, the blood-smeared men and women of his army intertwined under and over him; he drifted into and out of consciousness.
In waking moments he came to understand existence as one of suffering and great heat. He was so packed in that for some time he thought the heat was a product of this alone. Later, he was engulfed within an incredible furnace beyond anything the stiffening bodies could have been responsible for. He felt the corpses around him flex and shiver with it, belching the awful scent of flesh aflame. It was not until he had sweltered through this state for hours on hours, drifting into and out of fitful, nightmare-laden sleep, that he awoke to the startled realization that heat raged inside him as well as without. A fever pulsed with life from the center of his forehead. A bug was imbedded there. He was sure of it. An insect dipped its curved beak into his skull, pumping him full of some venom, the round, bulbous bottom of it heaving with the effort. He struggled to reach it, but he could not move. He sweated from every pore of his body. Salt tinge stung his eyes. He licked the corners of his mouth, frightened by the crusted leather that was his lips. His teeth had changed also. They were canine incisors that cut into his tongue, filling his mouth with mercury that, try as he might, he could not expel. He gagged on it, lost consciousness, awoke gasping, remembered the heat and the insect within his skull and realized that the flesh had begun to slough off his frame, rotten meat. And then he would pass out. Dream. Wake. Writhe. And on and on.