Beyond this inner circle the Calathrock thronged with fighting men. Thousands of soldiers stood armored for battle, their weapons in hand or strapped on their backs, a good ten thousand pairs of blue-gray eyes. Each of them had flaxen hair that almost to a man they wore in the traditional, matted style of Meinish warriors. This was not a particularly unusual event, but it never failed to stir the blood of each and every man fortunate enough to watch. Hanish held his arms up in answer to their calls. He knew why they yelled so loudly, and he wished them to see that he foremost among them believed in the Maseret. A strong people deserved a strong leader, one not afraid to be tested. He asked himself to let slip his love of life, to let slip fear, to let slip desire. He released everything that made lesser men prey to errors so that he might function better and be blessed to remember these things later.
As the two men stepped to within striking distance, they moved in a slow, arcing dance, one stepping toward the other, then retreating, then slipping from side to side. To eyes that did not know the Maseret, the early portion of the dance would have seemed a slow tedium, almost effeminate. First Hanish and then his opponent offered the other a view of his profile, and then took it back. Legs crossed each other. A foot slid forward just a few inches. They rotated from the hips as if the lower and upper portions of their bodies were of different minds. Though neither man made undue show of it, they were each armed with a single weapon, a short dagger sheathed across the abdomen. The narrow blade was about six inches long. It was shaped like a knife for filleting river trout, although of an altogether higher quality of metal.
The chieftain had mastered the well-established moves so completely that a lower portion of his awareness oversaw them. He sought to present a faзade suggestive of tranquil amusement, kept empty of any indication of how or when or where he might strike. At the same time he searched his opponent for any weakness he could exploit. He willed into quickness the highest level of his consciousness. He freed it from the thousand irrelevant details of the world so that he could focus on the few things now important to his survival. His Maseret instructor had once told him to envision two cobras meeting on the jungle floor. They conduct a strange ballet, moving slowly for a time, neither making the least false move. And when it comes, the fatal blow happens in the blink of an eye. Though he had never seen a living cobra, Hanish never forgot this image. He had used it before, and each time his first strike had come as quickly as a spark between two flints, so immediate from conception to action that he realized what he had done only afterward.
The two men made first contact with their palms. They leaned toward each other and met with their necks pressed side by side, chins clamped atop the other’s shoulder, arms and fingers searching for purchase. They circled, pushing from the ankles through the legs and torso, measuring each other’s weight and strength. In terms of pure muscle mass and power Hanish was dwarfed, but within a few moves he knew that the other man favored his right leg. It might have borne an old wound, one that left the limb hesitant when the leg swung free from the knee. The man’s joints moved more smoothly when stepping forward than when retreating. He was not a creature who felt comfortable backing up. Despite his efforts to hide it, this man preferred to strike first. He hungered for the first moment to launch himself, especially a moment at which he would be stepping forward, with his right leg in the lead…
The chieftain broke the embrace, twirled away. With his chin pointing out toward the crowd he drew his dagger. The soldier did the same. Hanish was not surprised when his opponent bunched the muscles of his forward right leg, twisted from the torso, flipped his blade to a backhanded grip, and flung his arm in a sweeping diagonal with the full strength of his body. He had, indeed, hungered to strike first.
Alarm showed on the soldier’s face before he had even completed the motion. The moment came when he should have struck Hanish high on the right breast, but instead he touched nothing at all. Hanish had sunk low enough to avoid the strike. He spun around once, rose to full height, and slammed his dagger into the exposed center of the man’s upper back. He knew by the way the steel sunk in all the way to his balled fist that the blade had slipped between the man’s ribs without sticking in the bone. He angled the blade and yanked it in line with the narrow gap between the bones. He sliced a portion of the heart, through the back of a lung, and pulled the dagger through the dense tissue of the man’s back muscles.
The man dropped. The gathered soldiers erupted in cheers, and a deafening, reverberating cacophony set the snow on the roof vibrating. They chanted Hanish’s name. They beat their fists against their chests. A portion of the army surged forward like a wave rushing toward him, barely held back by the Punisari, who cracked men savagely over the head and jabbed them with the butts of their spears. Even as a child Hanish had had a tremendous effect on his people. They seemed to see in him a resurrection of heroes of old, underscored again by the sudden, deadly precision of his kill.
Hanish closed his eyes and silently asked the ancestors to accept this man for the worthy being that he was. Let him now be a warrior among you, he thought. He whispered inside himself the words he had been taught for such moments. Let his sword be the wind at night and his fist the hammer that pounds the earth to trembling. May his toes in stretching drive the seas before them and his seed fall from the heavens upon fair women’s bellies… Unbidden the man’s name sounded in his head and with it an image of the boy he had once been, a memory of laughter shared between them: these thoughts Hanish pressed back into their place.
Opening his eyes again, he turned to the priests. Both of the holy men reached up and drew their hoods back, revealing heads of ghastly golden hair, most of the strands plucked out so that pale scalp shone beneath. This quieted the soldiers to hushed whispers and sharp calls to silence. “So wills the Tunishnevre,” one of the priests said. He spoke softly, but his voice carried on the energized air. “May you not fail them, my lord, on the next occasion when you are tested.” With that, they bowed from the waist and withdrew, moving in their shuffling slide, their fur-lined slippers skating across the wood as if it were ice.
Hanish raised his arms again to the crowd, who resumed their enthusiasm of a moment before. He moved in near them, reaching out over his guards and grasping men by the arms, punching them playfully, reminding them of the great things to come and of the ageless power of the Tunishnevre. They were strong only together, he said. He was no different than they; they were no less than he. Any man among them could test him to verify the truth of this. No one life mattered unless it was committed to the whole of the Mein nation. In this-as in so many other ways-they were different from their Akaran enemies.
“We Meins live with the past,” he cried. “It breathes around us and cannot be denied. Is this not so?”
The crowd answered that it was so.
“And, in truth, we have done little that shames us. It is the Akarans who rewrite the past to suit them. It is they who wish to forget that Edifus had not one son but three. They cannot name them, but we can. Thalaran, the eldest; Praythos, the youngest, with Tinhadin between them.”