Except that this was not entirely true. He thought of those early days because of Thaddeus and all the things he had brought with him. Thaddeus, whom he loved and loathed in equal measure. The people of the village called him the Acacian. Aliver, when speaking to them in Talayan, used that name as well. It did not seem to occur to any of them that this was odd. Nor did it seem strange to him that he should feel so at home with-and challenged by-a people he had been raised to believe were inferior. But each afternoon that he sat down across from Thaddeus and spoke the language of his birth he knew he was not one of these people, not entirely, not as he wished he was. He was also the Acacian. And more, if Thaddeus was to be believed, he was a pivot on which the fate of the world was to turn.
Aliver and Kelis kept moving for the greater portion of the day, pausing only to drink and eat lightly, letting the food settle and then starting up again. They rested in the shade of an acacia tree through the afternoon’s burning hours, napped briefly, but then kicked dust right through twilight and for some time into the early evening. There were moments when Aliver, in a trancelike state, forgot the purpose of this journey and just ran, floating on the strength of his legs, aware of nothing but movement and of the visual panorama of the living world around him.
When they stopped to camp late that evening, however, he felt the weight of the responsibilities Thaddeus had pushed upon him. The two men made a small fire, just enough to remind the beasts that they were humans and better left alone. They carried nothing in the way of bedding with them. They dug two hollow spaces into the sand, side by side with their heads near the fire. The night could be chilly, but the ground retained enough heat to warm them through until morning. They ate a paste made from mixing their precious water with the pounded sedi grain they carried. It tasted like nothing at all, but it was nourishing. Aliver used a strip of dried beef as a utensil and ate it afterward. Kelis found the tuber the Talayans called knuckle root because of its shape. He sliced it clean at the joint, and the two of them sat sucking on their portions, the liquid inside it sweet and sharp, cleansing.
“Sometimes I feel like this is all madness,” Aliver said. “This cannot be real, what we are doing, what I am supposed to do. It’s a tale meant for children, a myth like those told to me as a boy.”
Kelis took the root from his mouth to say, “This is your story now. You are the myth.”
“So I’ve been told. Do you think us foolish,” he asked, “we Acacians? Hunting for banished magicians and all that? Are we a joke to you?”
“A joke?” The features of the man’s face were hard to read in the dim firelight, but his voice suggested no possibility of humor.
“Kelis, I have been sent to find five-hundred-year-old magicians and to convince them to help me regain the empire my father lost. Do you understand such a loss? There is nothing here, around us, which could possibly show you how much my father lost. He was the monarch who forfeited the world’s greatest empire. And now he speaks from the grave to ask me to win it all back. Is that not something to laugh at?”
A cacophony of jackal calls erupted in a wide semicircle around them. The canines saw the humor apparently. Kelis still acknowledged none. He tossed away his knuckle root and said, “Our storytellers teach of the God Talkers, too. They are of our legends as well as yours. You have heard these.”
“And you believe, then?”
Kelis did not answer, but Aliver knew what he would say if pressed. Of course he believed. To Talayans truth lived in spoken words. It did not matter that at times their legends were highly improbable or that they often contradicted one another. If they were spoken-if they had been handed down to them by those who came before-there was nothing to do for a Talayan but believe. There was no reason not to. Aliver had heard a great many of their legends over the years.
He knew that the God Talkers were supposed to have marched through Talay and into exile. They were enraged, the legend went, at their banishment. They had helped Tinhadin win the world, but now he-the greatest of them-had turned on them and forbade them from using their god speech. They cursed under their breath, quietly so that Tinhadin would not hear them. But even these whispered curses had power. They had torn swathes out of the land; they had tilted slabs of the earth’s crust; they had sparked fire with waves of their arms; they had touched their eyes on the beasts of the plains, corrupting them, twisting them into creatures like the laryx. They had done much damage, the legends went, but fortunately they walked on past the inhabited regions into the truly arid, baking flats to the south. According to myth, the Santoth still lived there. Nobody had ever ventured there to verify this. Why should they? Only one person would ever have reason to go in search of them-a prince of the Akaran line going to rescind their sentence.
“You want to hear someone else’s story instead of yours?” Kelis asked. “Listen to this one then. There was a young Talayan whose father was a very proud man, a warrior. He lived for war and he wished his son to do the same. His son, however, was a dreamer, one who predicts when the rains arrive, when children will be born healthy, one whose sleeping life is as vivid as the waking. The boy dreamed things before they happened. He spoke with creatures in his dreams and sometimes awoke, still remembering the animal’s language, for a few moments at least. The son wanted badly to learn more about his gift. The father, you might think, would have been proud his son was chosen for this. But he was not. When the father slept he was dead to life; only awake did he find meaning, only in war were all things clear to him.
“He forbade his son to dream. He did it with all the spite he could direct through his eyes. He did it through ridicule, with biting words and with scorn. He stood over his son when he slept. Whenever he saw the boy’s eyes move, the sign that he’d entered the dreamworld, he jabbed him with his spear shaft. He awoke him to pain again and again. Soon the boy feared sleep. Dreams sometimes came to him anyway, even in the light of day when he was otherwise awake. The father learned to recognize dreams in his son’s eyes, and he would slap him if he suspected the boy’s mind had wandered. None of it stopped the boy. He simply could not help being who he was. But the father found a way.”
Kelis paused to listen to a sound nearby, the scrape of sharp-clawed feet across the dry ground. They both listened for a moment, until the serrated trilling of a black-backed cricket cut through the faint sounds. The scraping was likely a lizard. Nothing that would bother them.
Aliver prompted, “The father found a way…”
Kelis continued. “He adopted a dead man’s son, and he put that dead man’s son before his own son. He called him firstborn, which meant that everything that was the father’s-his name, ancestors, belongings-would go to this adopted son. If the dreamer son wanted to live a prosperous life, he could do only one thing. He called the adopted one to the circle and killed him. He thrust his spear through his chest and watched his new brother drain of life. Instead of being angry, the father was pleased. It was just as he thought. His true firstborn son had a warrior within him, whether he liked it or not. The father got what he wanted. After that his son truly hated sleep. In sleep he still dreamed, but only ever of the same thing. He dreamed of that fight, of sinking his spear home, of the blood, of watching a man’s face as he dies. So the dreamer was squashed; only the warrior remained.”