Shadow of the Totanbeni

Vlad: I never did eat my boots, did I?

Vic: I am constantly amazed by you, brother dear. What you remember and what you don't remember from 64 years ago is quite extraordinary. Lenar would say it is about connections to you. You didn't recall this happened 64 years ago until you remembered when the turtle died and how long we had it. You couldn't guess our ages simply by subtracting 64 from our current years, but by remembered Lenar's age when we found the turtle and going from there.

I agree with Lenar when he says something about the turtle knocking you on the head made you closer to Seruvus.

For instance, shortly after we were put in the most comfortable prison cell in the land, we found that the turtle was missing.

"All this way, and they stole it," Vlad huffed. "Probably going to serve it to us for dinner."

"They are very hospitable," Lenar said. "I think that won't be the case."

"Do they understand the significance of killing a turtle before its time?"

Lenar hesitated. "Perhaps their own gods will protect them."

"Strike them all dead, that'd be better," Vlad mumbled to himself, and sank into sullen silence.

Perui had been good to his word. He and his team had brought down a bed, a two-person seat that he called a couch, a couple of small tables, and a large wooden case full of drawers. He removed that right away, laughing.

"It is not as though you have extra clothes," he had said.

My guess is, that's when they took the turtle.

Vlad: It doesn't matter when the turtle was taken. What matters is when we got it back.

The turtle was in its bucket when we were summoned "to be told all." The great hall in the building near the giant water mill was itself immense, seeming to enclose the entire sky. A raised dais at one end held the enormous throne of the governor, and slightly below that but higher than the floor were the chairs of the council. In less magnificent but certainly costly surrounds were the tiers for the audience, focused on a small, raised platform and a podium for speakers. Sound echoed in the hall to tremendous proportions, and even a whisper could be heard in every corner.

When Vic, Lenar and I were brought forth, the noise of a score of conversations was incredible. Vic held her ears, and Lenar seemed to want to hold his. I wanted to grab someone's wand and lay about me with magic.

More than a hundred Kalkorae were in here, maybe all of them at the time. Men and women alike jabbered, and, contrary to the silent shock seeing these three, giant pale-skinned people should have caused, if anything the conversations got louder. And the people weren't outraged. They were excited. Some of the conversations seemed to involve dissection, some people swore to get us alone and pick our brains, and a few revolved around speculations of our magical talents.

"By Seruvus, it's loud," Vic said.

Perui led us to a roped-off area near the podium. Grinning broadly at us and winking, he stepped to the podium, still wearing his goggles on his head.

"Greetings fellow brothers and sisters who are Kalkorae!" he roared, and silence gradually descended against the echoes of his voice. "Several days ago, I was honored to find those folk promised us in prophecy: the one with the mouth, the twin sister and the smart one."

"How come I never got a real name?" Vic whispered to me.

"Would you rather be the one with the mouth?" I asked.

"According to our prophecy, we must tell them all, and they must hear all," Perui continued more quietly. "So this council was convened."

Vic: What were we supposed to learn, Vlad? What was it they had to tell us?

Vlad: Who they were. What they were doing here. How their magic worked. The Seru had been chosen - because of some prophecy that identified Lenar, Vic and myself - to be the group who would first benefit from their teaching and technology.

Their council rose, and we found ourselves sitting through a new year's round of elders telling the history of the tribe all over again. Only this time, it was new. It was interesting. It was ... worth it.

The mede civilization is hundreds of years older than the Seru tribe. They are far more civilized, living in clean houses, with streets and sanitation. They have art, education, sports, theater - they have things that we could not comprehend when we were first told them. Most of what they had wouldn't translate. They had had the time and energy to improve their minds, while the Seru and tribes of the swamp had used most of their time and energy to survive.

And while the gist of the Kalkoraean invasion was to take over the land, the general populace would rather integrate than segregate.

The Totanbeni shot first, you see. Imagine how much more difficult their prophecy would have been to implement if us three had been Totanbeni.

Yet we were Seru, a generally friendly tribe. Everyone feared the Totanbeni, so most of the other tribes got along. Oh, there were moments of conquest, when one tribe rose above itself, but eventually those broke down and faded into history. We didn't know all of those, at the time. But Lenar's learned a lot about magic since then, and Seruvus has guided and taught us.

Eventually, the governor/engineer rose. The history was done. Vic nudged me awake. Lenar sat on the edge of his seat, leaning forward attentively. He never forgets, you know. Anything anyone has ever told him, he's memorized for life. He's the smartest guy out there, and now he had two cultures to be smart in.

The governor/engineer, whose name was Pumraui, told us their most important secret: How their magic works. After their battles with the Totanbeni, they researched how the natives' magic worked. They analyzed and built special tools and incited incidents to test their theories, and very quickly reached a conclusion that was as scary as their initial impressions seemed to be.

Vic: As civilized and powerful as the mede seemed to us, so we seemed to them.

They saw us as a culture that lived with its land instead of taming it, thus preserving the world around it. They saw us as a culture that could survive in incredibly harsh conditions - a sign of strength to the medes. The natives may have no writing system, but knowledge was passed on to everybody more assiduously than medes did to their children. The natives may have no permanent structures, but the flimsy ones they built were efficient and used the bare minimum of materials.

And then, there was magic.

To a mede, you see, the wints have a gigantic mobile advantage. We carry our magic with us in vast quantities. We don't have to maintain a weird dance. We don't have to build vast structures and lay conduits. A mede invasion into Totanbeni lands would be a massacre of medes. If a wint wants to defeat a mede, he lures his opponent away from home and cuts off the supply lines. If a mede wants to defeat a wint, he brings in powerful magical cannons and wind-powered generators and sets up a base near the wints, who can move out of the way or attack while the generator is being set up.

When they figured this out, the council decided it would be treason to tell any native how their magic worked. They had guessed, through observations, that we would not have their scientific and research skills.

The glitch, of course, was the prophecy.

Vlad: This was a new word. Divination was known to the Seru. The timely demise of a turtle had successfully prevented many a catastrophic event in our history.

But we had no prophecies. We had no idea how one could be created. And coming into this room, we knew someone had foretold our coming to these guys. They had to reverse the edict. No longer was telling how to use their magic treason.

All this we were told. All this was laid out in front of us. We heard all of it.

Vic: Ask us if we understood any of it.

Vlad: We didn't, of course. Lenar may have. Their history was vaguely similar to ours - there was a tale of a hundred heroes, for instance, and a giant flood- but it was bigger and longer and focused on people who created things. Our history focused on gods and magic. The physical aspects of our daily lives were not worth mentioning ahead of the spiritual ones.

Their magic was incomprehensible. Lenar has explained it a bit. We've mentioned the battle uses, mostly because the war and the purge are hard things to forget. They used magic daily, though. For the same reason we didn't write histories about physical heroes, they didn't write stories about magical ones.

Vic: All of that was moot, though, as Perui reminded us when he stood when all this was done, and everyone's face beamed pleasant, wise thoughts at us.

"You have been told all," he said gently, with a bubbly grin on his face. "And you have heard all. Now, we must pass sentence on you."

"For what?" Vlad exclaimed, after our mutual short, sharp intakes of breath.

"For destroying the wind fan."

"But we don't understand anything you said!" Vlad insisted. "What is refractive diodic resistance? What is your measurement for magical units again? What are magical units in the first place? We don't get it!"

Perui nodded, his smile fading briefly under the growing dark stares from the council. "It is not important that you understand what you have heard. The prophecy says nothing to this effect."

"You can't just tell us all of your history and your secrets and then murder us!"

Pumraui, the governor/engineer, raised his hand, and Vlad fell against me in pain again. Tears welled up in my eyes for the pain my brother was going through.

"Stop doing this to him!" I cried. "You can't punish him just because he doesn't understand!"

"He does not listen," Pumraui answered me. "To anyone who listens, it is easy to understand."

I shook my head, anger rising in me. "It is not easy to understand! It is like me telling you, you sedate a suckmud willow by pacifying one vine! Does that make sense to you?"

"If we knew what a suckmud willow was ..."

"Right! Or, moss grows on the north side of a tree!"

"This has nothing to do with anything." The governor grew more agitated.

"It does if you have to survive without magic," I growled.

Perui gestured to the mede capering near Vlad, who stopped, and Vlad passed out and slid gently to the ground.

"You will still be sentenced," the chiefwarrior/engineer said, in defiance of Pumraui's glare. "But it is true they do not understand how this process will work."

"You said we were to be told all," Lenar interrupted.

"Yes ..."

"You didn't tell us how your system of justice works." He said this flatly, coolly, as though possessed.

"It is trivial next to the major secrets of the Kalkorae," Pumraui said.

Lenar shook his head and stepped forward, gently brushing aside the guards. A faint amber light seemed to circle his head. Perui held still near me and Vlad.

Vlad: Vic insists I write this. She says something about my memory and the turtle.

I had fallen unconscious, briefly. The pain was no longer hair repetitively jerked out. It felt more like skin stripped from the body while hair was pulled out and brain ripped out of my head through my nose. It's not fun.

But I woke in Vic's arms and shivered, feeling defeated, and watched Lenar step forward. I saw the amber radiance about his head. I saw the turtle's head, poking out of the bucket. Somehow, it had crawled up the wall until it stood on its hind legs.

"Your system of justice allows the accused a chance to speak," Lenar said. "As evidenced in your histories concerning Mperpui, the second-generation wind fan warrior/engineer, and Kelrua, the first woman on the council."

"He is correct," Perui said, his usual joy returning. "He is very deductive."

Pumraui made a dismissive gesture. "If he knew, we had no reason to tell him."

"You have every reason to tell us everything," Lenar said. "Your prophecy says as much. We must be told all. We must hear all. It says nothing about us deducing anything."

The council members broke out in arguments. Pumraui glared down his nose at Lenar. Lenar held his ground next to the turtle, a sheen about him. Perui grinned mirthlessly and sidled over to us.

"He is most smart, is your friend, yes? Ah, but we never told him the end of the prophecy for a good reason, you know."

Vic: "The end of the prophecy?" I said.

"Oh yes," he said joyfully. "Telling you everything would make no sense if the smart one could not look at it and figure out how to save the Kalkorae."

"Save you?" I said, disbelieving.

"Indeed. You understand there are very few of us compared to your Totanbeni? Our tribe and your tribe together make up a tiny portion compared to the mass north of us. And they are very annoyed with us."

"Because you destroyed their shadelshifs."

"Yes, we killed the skull ships. We understand your magic, so we understand their magic. We understand our magic. We know they don't understand our magic, but they understand their magic."

"Their magic is powerful because there are so many of them."

"Very powerful. We see no way of stopping it. And when the next settlement group arrives, we must have more land pacified."

"So Lenar ..."

"The smart one can use our magic and your magic to defeat the Totanbeni."

"How?" It seemed impossible.

He grinned, and for a second it seemed as though insanity hid behind his eyes. "We don't know."

Vlad: Lenar stood before Pumraui and the council. The prophesized native savior held firm against the rulers of the Kalkorae. He demanded a voice in our trial for attacking the wind fan. A mede who destroyed a wind fan would be imprisoned for life but not killed. A native who destroyed a wind fan instigated a war with the medes.

Lenar stood not just for us, but for the Seru. For though the Kalkorae could not stand against the Totanbeni alone, they could easily destroy the Seru.

"You demand rights associated only with Kalkorae citizens," Pumraui said finally. "Your attack on the tower is an act of war between your tribe and us. You are prisoners of that war. We can do with you as we want."

"Tell us your rules concerning prisoners of war,"Lenar said, "in relation to Kukru, the two-faced traitor, and Pleurkui, general/inventor of the water mill insurrection, and Kmeukra, whose destruction of the experimental magical battery nearly destroyed all of your city of Myprena."

In all of those events, the Kalkoraean rules for prisoners of war had been used, and in each case, the person charged retained the right to speak in her defense. In the case of Kukru and Pleurkui, they were sentenced and hanged. Kmeukra, in the light of evidence relating to something called "insufficient buffer strength," was found not guilty and became a national hero.

Stunned by Lenar's memory of their history, Pumraui said weakly, "If all is in our history, then there is nothing left for us to tell you."

"We are beyond that now," Lenar answered. "Now I speak in defense of myself, Vic, Vlad and the Seru. Precedent has been set. You violate your own laws if you do not allow me a chance to speak."

The council turned their heads as one to the governor, who made eye contact with all of them. Pumraui took a deep breath and visibly relaxed himself.

Perui whispered to us, "We are a pacific people. Pumraui was chosen governor for a reason, however. But the council should balance him."

One by one, the council members stood and spoke in favor of Lenar speaking. For those who gave reasons, they were widely varied. Those who didn't give reasons stared at Perui, and Vic and I shared the thought that they would talk about the prophecy's ending if they could.

Thinking about that, I spoke up.

"Lenar, Perui says ..."

"Vlad, please remain quiet," Lenar said without looking around. "Seruvus knows what Perui says."

And I shut up, as the amber light around Lenar pulsated briefly. No one had commented on it. I wondered if they could see it.

"You have the opportunity to speak," Pumraui said. "For our records, Perui, will you restate the charges?"

Perui stepped forward. "The three natives known as Lenar, Vic and Vlad of the Seru tribe are charged with destruction of the defenses of the Kalkorae colony. This destruction, unwarrented and unprovoked, is defined as an act of war against the colony. The three are prisoners of war, and are to be treated as such."

"What evidence is there that the three Seru destroyed the tower?"

Perui recited the events almost letter perfect, referring to information gathered from he sentry device. The mechanic/historian Mreru stepped forward to corroborate the evidence.

"Lenar of the Seru, what would you say in your defense?"

Lenar: I'm not done with my work yet. I may never finish. But Vic grows insistent that I contribute to this account soon, and now seems as good a time as any. I reread what Vlad has just written, and it is true about his memory. Any instance involving the turtle in the past 64 years, he remembers to the letter every nuance. He seems to remember more than I, who have been granted a perfect memory for sounds. Vlad seems to remember emotions and reactions. About this argument, I remember that even as the governor/engineer would speak, the words he would say formed in my head in small intuitive leaps. Before he was done with his argument, I could see what I had to say to counter him. It's one thing, you understand, to remember everything. Everyone actually remembers everything. That has helped a lot in recreating the history of the Seru and the Kalkorae following the purge. It's another thing to call it back up again quickly. Most people can't remember they've remembered something. I know I've remembered it, and can call it up, but during our trial, it was in my mind without me having to think about it. This was because of Seruvus, who sent the turtle. The amber light around me? Just because I was the son of the priest doesn't mean any priest had even been possessed by the god.

Vic: Ooooh, he's getting the hang of it. Well done with the little drop off there, Lenar.

Vlad: Lenar said, in our defense, "The truth is, Vlad prayed to Marrish to strike us down if Seruvus sent the turtle."

"Who is Marrish?" a council member said.

"The father of the gods," Lenar said. "Lord of Wind and Fire."

"And who is Seruvus?"

"Patron deity of the Seru, our tribe. The Oathbinder and god of water."

"And how does this relate to the destruction of the tower?"

"Marrish missed," Lenar said simply.

The brief silence was followed by light laughter.

"I'm sorry," Pumraui said. "You certainly don't believe that a god presents a physical manifestation."

"And he missed," Perui said under his breath, grinning. "What kind of a god misses?"

Lenar straightened a little. "They may not do it all the time, but Seruvus did send the turtle. When I saw the turtle, I knew we needed to come into this region. Now I know why: because of your prophecy. If we were to fulfill it, we had to come here."

"Your defense is based on faith," Pumraui said.

"Your prophecy is based on faith," Lenar countered. "You believed in it. We believe in our gods. Enough that when one drops a turtle on our heads, we listen. Enough that when we ask for proof, we get it."

"If you had gotten it, you'd be dead," Perui said.

Lenar grinned slightly, the aura around him growing a bit. "No one ever said the gods get along. Seruvus and Marrish work well together, but Seruvus, I think, knows something Marrish does not."

"And that is?"

"That the Seru must help the Kalkorae when the Totanbeni attacks."

Uproar. The council rose to its feet. The governor held his chair, his knuckles turning white.

"How did he know?" Perui whispered to us.

Lenar looked over his shoulder and spoke clearly and loudly above the roar. "Seruvus hears all and sees all. Seruvus knows." His voice seemed to change, the aura grew brighter. "Perui explained this to Vic and Vlad, and so Seruvus was able to hear. And Seruvus told me."

"Gods don't manifest!" Pumraui said.

The amber light removed itself from Lenar and hovered near the turtle. More amber light spilled from the turtle. Amber light spilled from Vic. She gasped, and I looked around, and saw amber light drawn from me.

The light gathered, in the ensuing silence, and formed a figure between the council and Lenar.

"It is their magic," Pumraui said.

"There is no magic being used," Lenar said. "You know who sent you the prophecy, Pumraui."

"No," whispered the governor, disbelieving, his eyes locked on the figure in the light.

"Yes. I can read your mind. Who sent it to the Kalkorae? Why do you follow it?"

"It was a man. Not a glowing light." Pumraui hesitated. "But he looked like that."

"Why do you follow it?"

"Because we need someone to synthesize our magic with the natives' magic to defeat our biggest enemy."

Lenar nodded. "So it shall be. You cannot kill us for a mistake by Marrish. The boy Vlad may be mischievous, but his strengths will be as useful as mine some day." He smiled slightly. "If he learns to control his tongue."

The light pulsated, and the figure faded.

"We will find a way to help you," Lenar said quietly. "But you must forgive us for destroying the tower."

The council, shaken, spoke quickly. Everyone pronounced us not guilty. Pumraui sat in silence, pale-faced.

Perui clasped Lenar on the shoulder.

"I said it, right?" he said smiling. Lenar smiled back. "I said, there's a bright one, there. Going to shine too hot for us." He paused. "Our governor seems smitten. I think everyone's free to go."

Vic helped me up, and Lenar took the turtle in the bucket. We started for the door.

"Where are you going?" Perui said, catching up to us.

"Home," I said.

"But you cannot do that. You have to save us."

"Not right now," Vic said. "First we have to go home."

"The Seru and the Kalkorae will work together," Lenar said. "The Seru need to know about the Kalkorae before that can happen."

Perui nodded. "We will come with you." He brightened. "I will bring my wife and family! They will love it!"

Vic: It doesn't end there. The truth is, we didn't go home. We tried, but people kept asking Lenar questions, and Lenar kept having to learn a new thing that Perui showed him. Perui, in fact, was some kind of genius in manipulating Lenar. We didn't go home for more than three months, during which Lenar was half-educated as an engineer. Vlad quickly picked up architecture and mechanics. I labored through their histories and tried my hand at engineering as well.

This is, however, as good a place as any to stop for a while. The next thing you want to read about is the Totanbeni invasion. We're not going to bore you with every day's details between now and then, which happened years later, when Vlad and I were 23.

Copyright 2005-2007 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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