The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two

‘The wood is too wet,’ he said as he knelt over a pile of it that he had made. ‘There’s too little light coming through these damn clouds.’

‘Hmmph, you’ve gotten a fire out of your crystal before with as little light,’ Atara chided him. ‘I should think the test of it is at times such as these rather than in waiting for perfect conditions.’

‘I didn’t know I was being tested,’ Maram fired back.

‘Our whole journey is a test for all of us,’ Atara told him. ‘And all our lives may someday depend on your firestone.’

Her words cut deep into me and remained in my mind as I fell asleep that night. For I had a sword that I must learn to wield – and not by crossing blades with Kane every night during our fencing practice. Although Alkaladur might indeed be hard enough to slice through the hardest steel, it had more vital powers that I was only beginning to sense. It would take all my will, I thought, all my awareness and concentration of my lifefire to find myself in the silvery substance of the sword and it in me.

Morning brought with it a little sun, which lasted scarcely long enough for us to saddle the horses and break camp. It began to rain again, but much of its sting was taken away by the needles of the towering trees above us. Here were hemlocks and spruce two hundred feet high, and great King Firs perhaps even higher. They formed a vast shield of green protecting against wind and water, and sheltering the many squirrels, foxes and birds that lived here. I might have been content to ride through this lovely forest another month, for its smells of mosses and wildflowers pleased me greatly. Soon, however, the trees gave way to more farmland, cut with numerous streams running down from the mountains. In this more open country, the rain found us easy targets, and pelted us with icy drops that streaked down through the sky like silver arrows. It soaked our garments, making a misery of what should have been an easy ride. By late afternoon, with the ground rising steeply toward the mountains’ foothills, we were all of us considering knocking on the door of some stout farmhouse and asking refuge for the night.

‘But if we do that,’ I said to my friends as we stopped to water the horses by a stream, ‘these poor people will have to feed us, and they’ve nothing to spare.’

‘Perhaps we could feed them,’ Atara suggested. ‘We’ve plenty to spare.’

Liljana cast her a troubled look and said, ‘If travelers came through the Wendrush offering food to their hosts, what would they think?’

‘Ha,’ Kane said, ‘if travelers came through the Wendrush offering food to the Kurmak, they’d likely be put to the sword for the insult of it.’

Although Atara didn’t respond to this remark about her people, her grim face suggested it might be true.

‘I have an idea,’ Maram said. ‘It’s time we began inquiring if anyone hereabouts knows of a road through the mountains. If anyone happens also to offer us shelter and also has enough food, we’ll accept. Otherwise we’ll ride on.’

It was a good plan, I thought, and the others agreed. We spent the next few hours riding from farmhouse to farmhouse, even as the rain grew stronger. But none of the Surrapamers knew of the road we sought. Most of them did offer us lodgings for the night, even though their sunken faces and bony bodies told us that this was an act of pride and politesse they could ill afford. It amazed me that they were willing to succor us at all, for we were strangers from distant lands of which few had heard; we were girt for war and riding across their fields at a time when many of their kinsmen had been taken by war – and many more might soon be. I thanked our stars that all their knights and warriors had ridden off, and so left these brave people little more than goodwill, and faith in our goodwill, with which to face us.

But as the day faded toward a gray, rainy evening, it seemed that I had given my thanks too soon. Just after we had knocked on the door of yet another farmhouse, a company of armed men came thundering down the road from the east and turned onto the farm’s muddy lane. There were twenty of them, and they all wore rusted mail with no surcoat to cover it or identify their domains or houses. Shabby knights they seemed, and yet their lances appeared sharp enough and their swords ready at hand. Although they were quite as gaunt as the rest of their countrymen, they sat straight in their saddles and rode with good discipline.

‘Who are you?’ their leader called out to us as his large war horse kicked up clots of mud and came to a halt ten yards from us. He himself was a large man, with a thick gray beard and braided gray plaits hanging down from beneath his open-faced helmet. ‘What are you doing in our land?’

The door of the house having been shut behind us, I stood by Altaru as he stomped about and eyed this man’s horse ferociously. My companions had already mounted their horses; Atara was fingering her strung bow while Kane cast his black eyes on the men before us.

I gave the knight our names, and asked him his. He presented himself as Toman of Eastdale; he said that he and his men had been riding off to join King Kaiman at Azam.

‘We’d heard there were strange knights about,’ Toman said, studying my surcoat and other accouterments. ‘We were afraid you might be Hesperuk spies.’

‘Do we look like spies?’ I said to him.

‘No, you don’t,’ he admitted graciously. ‘But not everyone is who they seem. The Hesperuks haven’t won half our kingdom through force of arms alone.’

I pulled myself on top of Altaru and patted his neck to steady him. To Toman, I said, ‘We’re not Kallimun priests, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Perhaps not,’ he said, ‘but that is for the King to decide. I’m afraid you’ll have to lay down your arms and come with us.’

At a nod from him, four of his knights rode up by his side with their lances held ready. Toman looked from Atara to Maram and then back at me. ‘Please give me your sword, Sar Valashu.’

‘I’ll give you mine,’ Kane growled as his eyes flashed and his hand moved quick as a snake’s to draw his sword.

‘Kane!’ I said. With almost miraculous control, Kane caught himself in mid-motion and stared at me. ‘Kane, don’t draw on him!’

But all of Toman’s knights had now drawn their swords. Unlike their armor, they showed no spot of rust.

‘You must understand,’ Toman said to me, ‘that we can’t allow you to go armed about our land – not with the Hesperuks knocking on our doors, too.’

‘Very well,’ I said, ‘but we’ve no desire to go riding about Surrapam at all – only to find a way to leave it.’

I explained that we were journeying to the Library at Khaisham; I told him that we had made vows to seek the Lightstone along with a thousand others in King Kiritan’s hall in Tria.

‘We’ve heard of this quest,’ he said, pulling at his beard. ‘But how do we know that you have truly set out upon it?’

I nudged Altaru forward, then drew forth the medallion that King Kiritan had given me. At the sight of this circle of gold, Toman’s eyes held wonder but no greed. Then, at my bidding, my companions approached to show their medallions as well. Toman’s knights, gathering around us, suddenly put away their swords at his bidding.

‘We must honor the impulse behind this quest, even if we do not believe in it,’ Toman said. ‘If you truly oppose the Crucifier, you’d do better to come to battle with us.’

‘That appears to be the thought of most of your countrymen,’ I said. Then I told him of meeting Thaman at Duke Rezu’s castle in Anjo, and his plea to the Valari.

‘You know Thaman of Bear Lake?’ one of Toman’s men asked in surprise. He was scarcely eighteen years old, and proved to be Toman’s grandson.

‘It seems you do,’ I said to him.

‘He’s my betrothed’s cousin,’ the man said, ‘and a great warrior.’

Our acquaintance with Thaman finally decided Toman. He smiled grimly at us and said, ‘Very well, you’re free to go, then. But please leave our land before you frighten anyone else.’

‘We’d leave it faster if we knew of a road through the mountains.’

Toman pointed off through the rain and dense greenery surrounding the farm and said, ‘There is a road – it’s about ten miles southeast of here. I would show it to you, but we’ve another hour before it’s dark and must ride on. But my other grandson, Jaetan, will take you to it if you tell him of our meeting and my wishes.’

He proceeded to give us directions to his estate. Then he said, ‘Well, we’re off to the assembly at Iram. Are you sure you won’t join us?’

‘Thank you, no – we have our road, and it leads east.’

‘Then farewell, Sar Valashu. Perhaps we’ll meet in better times.’

And with that, he and his men turned their horses and rode off down the road to the west.

Toman’s ‘estate’, when we found it an hour later, proved to be nothing more than a rather large, fortified house overlooking a barn and fields surrounded by a high fence of sharpened wooden poles. As he had promised, his family provided us shelter for the night. Toman’s daughter and two grandsons were all that was left to him, his son having died in the battle of the Maron and two granddaughters taken by fever last winter. Toman’s second grandson, Jaetan, was a freckle-faced redhead about thirteen years old – too young to ride off with his brother to war. And yet, I thought, I had gone to war at that age. It gladdened my heart, even as I filled with not a little pride, that even in the hour of their greatest need, the Surrapamers were not so war-loving as we Valari.

After we had laid our sleeping furs on the dry straw in the barn, Jaetan’s mother, Kandra, insisted on calling us into the house for a meal, even as we had feared. But as they had nothing more than a few eggs, some blackberry jam and flour to be baked into bread, our dinner was a long time in coming. Kane solved the problem of our eating up Toman’s family’s reserves in the most spectacular manner: as he had with Meliadus, he grabbed up his bow and stole off into the darkening woods. A half hour later, he returned with a young buck slung across his broad shoulders. It was a great feat of hunting, Kandra exclaimed, especially so considering that the forest hereabouts had been nearly emptied of deer.

And so we had a feast that night and everyone was happy. Kandra kept the remains of the deer, which more than made up for the bread that she baked us. In the morning, we set out well fed, with Jaetan leading the way on a bony-looking old nag that was a little too big for him.

After a couple of hours of riding up a gradually ascending dirt road, we came to a notch between two hills where the road seemed to disappear into a great, green wall of vegetation. Jaetan pointed into it and told us, ‘This is the old East Road. It’s said to lead into Eanna. But no one really knows because no one goes that way anymore.’

‘Except us,’ Maram muttered nervously.

Jaetan looked at him and told him, ‘The road is good enough, I think. But you should be careful of the bears, Master Maram. It’s said that there are still many bears in the mountains.’

‘Oh, excellent,’ Maram said, staring into the woods. ‘Bears, is it now?’

We thanked Jaetan for his hospitality, and then he turned to Kane and asked, ‘If you ever come back this way, will you teach me to hunt, sir?’

‘That I will,’ Kane promised as he reached out to rumple the boy’s hair. ‘That I will.’

With a few backward glances, Jaetan then rode back toward his grandfather’s house and the warmth of the hearth that awaited him.

‘Well,’ Maram said, ‘if the old maps are right, we’ve sixty miles of mountains to cross before we reach Eanna. I suppose we’d better start out before the bears catch our scent.’

But we saw no sign of bears all that day, nor the next nor even the one following that. The woods about us, though, were thick enough to have hidden a hundred of them. As the hills to either side of us rose and swelled into mountains, the giant trees of western Surrapam gave way to many more silver firs and nobles. These graceful evergreens, while not so tall as their lowland cousins, grew more densely. If not for the road, we would have been hard pressed to fight our way through them. This narrow muddy track had been cut along a snakelike course. And it turned like a snake, now curving south, now north, but always making its way roughly east as it gradually gained elevation. And with every thousand feet higher upon the green, humped earth on which we stood, it seemed that the rain poured down harder and the air fell colder.

Making camp in these misty mountains was very much a misery. The needles of the conifers, the bushes, the mosses and ferns about our soaked sleeping furs – everything the eye and hand fell upon was dripping wet. That Maram failed yet again with his fire dispirited us even more. When the day’s first light fought its way through the almost solid grayness lying over the drenched earth each morning, we were glad to get moving again, if only because our exertions warmed our stiff bodies.

Three times the road failed us, vanishing into a mass of vegetation that seemed to swallow it completely. And three times Maram complained that we were lost and would never see the sun again, let alone Khaisham.

But each time, with an unerring sense, Atara struck off into the forest, leading us through the trees for a half mile or more until we found the road again. It was as if she could see much of the path that lay before us. It made me wonder if her powers of scrying were much greater than she let on.

On the fourth day of our mountain crossing, we had a stroke of luck. The rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the bright sun shone down upon us and warmed the world. The needles of the trees and the bushes’ leaves, still wet with rain, shimmered as if covered with millions of drops of melting diamonds. Two thousand feet above us, the trees were frosted with snow. For the first time, we had a good view of the great peaks around us. Snow and ice covered these spurs of rock, which pushed up into the blue sky to the north and south of us. Our little road led between them; the ground that we still had to cross, as we could see, was not really a gap in the mountains, but only a stretch where they rose less high. Although we had covered a good thirty miles, as the raven flies, we still had heights to climb and as many more miles before us.

We broke then for our midday meal in a sparkling glade by a little lake. Maram, who still had his talent with flint and steel, struck up a fire, which Liljana used to roast a rock goat that Atara had managed to shoot. After some days of cold cheese and battle biscuits, we were all looking forward to this feast. While the meat was cooking, Maram discovered a downed tree-trunk, hollowed and swarming with bees.

‘Ah, honeycomb,’ he said to me as he pointed at the trunk and licked his lips. ‘I can smell the honey in that hive.’

I watched from a safe distance as he built up another fire from wet twigs to smoke the bees out of their home. It took quite some time, and many blows of the axe, but he finally pulled out a huge, sticky mass of waxen comb dripping with golden honey. That he suffered only a dozen stings from his robbery amazed me.

‘You’re brave enough when you want to be,’ I said to him as he handed me a piece of comb. I licked a little honey from it. It was incredibly good, tasting of thousands of sun-drenched blossoms.

‘Ah, I’d take a thousand stings for honey,’ he said before cramming into his mouth a huge chunk of comb. ‘In all the world, there’s nothing sweeter except a woman.’

He rubbed some honey over the stings along his hands and face, and then we returned to the others to share this treasure.

We all gorged on the succulent goat meat and honey, Maram most of all. After he had finished stuffing his belly, he fell asleep on top of the dewed bracken near some thick bushes that Kane called pink spira. The rays of sun playing over his honey-smeared face showed a happy man.

We let him finish his nap while we broke our makeshift camp. After our waterbags had all been filled and the horses packed, we made ready to mount them and ride back to the road. And then, just as Liljana pointed out that it wouldn’t do to leave Maram sleeping, we heard him murmuring behind us as if dreaming: ‘Ah, Lailaiu, so soft, so sweet.’

I turned to go fetch him, but immediately stopped dead in my tracks. For what my eyes beheld then, my mind wouldn’t quite believe: There, across the glade, in a break in the bushes above Maram and bending over him, crouched a large, black she-bear. She had her long, shiny snout pressed down into Maram’s face as she licked his lips and beard with her long, pink tongue. She seemed rather content lapping up the smears of honey that the careless Maram had left clinging there. And all the while, Maram murmured in his half-sleep, ‘Lailaiu, ah, Lailaiu.’

I might have fallen down laughing at my friend’s very mistaken bliss. But bears, after all, were bears. I couldn’t imagine how this one had stolen out of the bushes upon Maram without either Kane or the horses taking notice. As it was midsummer, I feared that she had young cubs nearby.

Slowly and quietly, I reached out to tap on the elbow of Kane, who had his back to the bear as he tightened the cinch of his horse. When he turned to see what I was looking at, his black eyes lit up with many emotions at once: concern, hilarity, contempt, outrage and blood-lust. Quick as a wink, he drew forth his bow, strung it and fit an arrow to its string. This movement alerted the others as to Maram’s peril – and the horses, too. Altaru, facing the wind, finally turned to see the bear; he suddenly reared up as he let loose a tremendous whinny. Liljana’s gelding and Master Juwain’s sorrel, Iolo and Fire – all the horses added their voices to the great chorus of challenge and panic splitting the air. We had all we could do to keep hold of their reins and prevent them from running off. With Kane’s bay stamping about and threatening to split his skull with a flying hoof, he couldn’t get off a shot. And it was good that he didn’t. For just as Maram finally awakened and looked up with wide eyes into the hairy face of his new lover, the bear started at the sudden noise and peered across the glade as if seeing us for the first time. She seemed more astonished than we were. It took her only a moment to gather her legs beneath her and bound off into the bushes.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram called out upon realizing what had happened. He sprang up and raced to the lake’s edge, where he knelt to wash his face. Then he said, ‘Oh, my Lord – I was nearly eaten!’

Atara, keeping an eye out for the bear’s return, walked up to him and poked a finger into his big belly. ‘Hmmph, you’re half a bear yourself. I’ve never seen anyone eat honey the way that you do. But the next time, perhaps you should be more careful how you eat it.’

That day we climbed to the greatest heights of our mountain crossing. This was a broad saddle between two great peaks, where lush meadows alternated with spire-like conifers. Thousands of wildflowers in colors from blazing pink to indigo brightened the sides of the road. Marmots and pikas grazed there, and looked at us as if they had never seen our kind before. But as they fed upon the grasses and seeds they found among the flowers, they kept a close watch for the eagles and ravens who hunted them. We watched them, too. Maram wondered if the Great Beast could seize the souls of these circling birds and turn them into ghuls as he had the bear at the beginning of our journey.

‘Do you think he’s watching us, Val?’ Maram asked me. ‘Do you think he can see us?’

I stopped to draw my sword and watch it glow along the line to the east. Its fire was of a faint white. In the journey from Swan Island, I had noticed that other things beside the Lightstone caused it to shine. In the glint of the stars, its radiance was more silver, while the stillness of my soul seemed to produce a clearer and brighter light.

‘It’s strange,’ I said, ‘but ever since Lady Nimaiu gave me this blade, the Lord of Lies seems unable to see me, even in my dreams.’

I looked up at a great, golden eagle gliding along the mountain wind, and I said, ‘There’s no evil in these creatures, Maram. If they’re watching, it’s only because they’re afraid of us.’

My words seemed to reassure him, and we began our descent through the eastern half of the Crescent Range with good courage. For another three days, beneath the strong mountain sun, we rode on without incident. The road held true, taking us down the folded slopes and around the curve of lesser peaks. As we lost elevation and made our way east, the land grew drier, the forest more open. We crossed broad bands of white oak and ponderosa pine, interspersed with balsamroot and phlox and other smaller plants. Many of the birds and animals who lived here were strange to me. There was a chipmunk with yellow stripes and a bluejay who ate acorns. We saw four more bears, smaller and of a grayish hue to their fur that lent them great dignity. They must have wondered why we hurried through their domain when the glories of the earth in midsummer ripened all around us.

And then, on the first day of Soal, with most of the great Crescent Range at our backs, we came out of a cleft in the foothills to see a vast plain opening to the east. It was like a sea of grass, yellow-green, and colored with deeper green lines where trees grew along the winding watercourses. Another hour’s journey down some slopes of ponderosa pine and rocky ridges would take us down into it.

‘Eanna,’ Kane said, pointing down into this lovely land. ‘At least, this was once part of the ancient kingdom. But we’re far from Imatru, and I doubt if King Hanniban holds any sway here.’

What peoples or lords we might find in the realm below us, he didn’t know. But he admonished us to be wary, for out on the plain we would have no cover, either from men or the wolves and lions who hunted the antelope there.

‘Wolves!’ Maram exclaimed. ‘Lions! – I think I’d rather keep company with the bears.’

But all that first day of our journey across Eanna, neither his fears nor Kane’s took form to bring us harm. We left the road only a couple of miles from the mountains. It turned south, whether toward some lost city in this pretty country or toward nowhere, none of us could say. The Red Desert, Kane told us, lay not so very far in that direction, and its drifting vermilion sands and dunes had swallowed up more than one city over the millennia. We were lucky, he said, that Alkaladur seemed to point us along a path above this endless wasteland, for other than the fierce tribes of the Ravirii, no one could survive the desert’s murderous sun for very long.

As it was, we felt a whiff of its heat even hundreds of miles north of the heart of it. But after the freezing rains of the mountains, we welcomed this sudden warming of the air, for it was dry like the breath of the stars and clean, and did not smother us. It did not last long, either, giving way soon after noon to gentle breezes that swept through the swaying grasses and touched our faces with the scents of strange new plants and flowers. And at night, beneath the constellations that hung in the heavens like a brilliant, blazing tapestry, it fell quite cool – not so much that it chilled our bones, but rather that bracing crispness that sharpens all the senses and invites the marvel of the infinite.

We all slept quite well through that first dark out on the steppe – except during those hours when we were standing watch or simply gazing up at the stars from our beds on top of the long grass. The moon rose over the world like a gleaming half-shield; beneath it, from far out across the luminous earth, wolves howled and lions roared. I dreamed of these animals that night, and of eagles and falcons, and great silver swans that flew so high they caught the fire of the stars. When I awoke in the morning to a sky so blue that it seemed to go on forever, I felt this fire in me, warming my heart and calling me to journey forth toward the completion of our quest.

We rode hard all that day and the next, and the two following that. Although I worried we might press the horses too strenuously, they took great strength from the grass all around us, both in its sweet smell and in the bellyfuls they bit off and ate at midday and night. After many days of picking their way up and down steep mountain tracks studded with sharp rocks, they seemed glad for the feel of soft earth beneath their hooves. It was their pleasure to keep moving across the windy steppe, at a fast walk and sometimes at a canter or even a gallop. I felt my excitement flowing into Altaru and firing up his great heart, and his delight in running unbound across the wild and open steppe passing back into me. Sometimes he raced Iolo or Fire just for the sheer singing joy of it. And at such moments, I realized that our souls were free, and each of us knew this in the surging of our blood and our breaths upon the wind – and in the promises we made to ourselves.