The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two

So began our wild dash toward whatever safety the domain of Khaisham might afford us. Count Ulanu and his men were close now, and thundering closer with each passing minute. We rode as fast as we could considering the lameness of Maram’s horse and Atara’s injury. I felt the jolts of pain that shot through her body with every strike of her horse’s hooves; I felt her quickly weakening in her grip upon the reins as her vitality drained out of her. She was coughing up blood, I saw, not much but enough.

Kane pointed out a rent in the rocks ahead of us a little larger than the others. We rode straight toward it over the stony ground. Now, from behind us along the wind, came the high-pitched howling of the Blues; it chilled us more cruelly than had any rain or hail. It seemed to promise us a death beneath steel-bladed axes or even the gnashing teeth of enemies mad for revenge.

Death was everywhere about us. We felt it immediately as we found the opening to the Kul Moroth. As Kane had warned us, it seemed an evil place. Others, I knew, had died here in desperate battles before us. I could almost hear their cries of anguish echoing off the walls of rock rising up on either side of us. The pass was dark in its depths, and the sunlight had to fight its way down to its hard, scarred floor. And it was narrow indeed; ten horses would have had trouble riding through it side by side. We had trouble ourselves, for the ground was uneven and strewn with many rocks and boulders. Other boulders, and even greater sandstone pinnacles, seemed perched precariously along the pass’s walls and top as if ready to roll down upon us at the slightest jolt. Long ago, perhaps, some great cataclysm had cracked open this rent in the earth; I prayed that it wouldn’t close in upon us before we were free of it.

And that, it seemed as we drove the horses forward, we might never be. For just as we made a turning through this dark corridor and caught a glimpse of Khaisham’s rough terrain a half mile ahead of us through the pass, Atara let loose a gasp of pain and slumped forward, throwing her arms around Fire’s neck. She could go no farther. My first thought was that we would have to lash her to her horse if we were to ride the rest of the distance to the Librarians’ city.

But this was not to be. I dismounted quickly, and Master Juwain and Liljana did, too. We reached Atara’s side just as she slipped off her saddle and fell into our arms. We found a place where the fallen boulders provided some slight protection again Count Ulanu’s advancing army, and there we laid her down, against the cold stone.

‘There’s no time for this!’ Kane growled out as he gazed back through the pass. ‘No time, I say!’

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram said, coming down from his horse and looking at Atara. ‘Oh, my Lord!’

Now Alphanderry dismounted, too, and so did Kane. His dark eyes flashed toward Atara as he said, ‘We’ve got to put her back on her horse.’

Master Juwain, after examining Atara for a moment, looked up at Kane and said, ‘I’m afraid the arrow pierced her lights. I think it’s cut an artery, too. We can’t just lash her to her horse.’

‘So, what can we do?’

‘I’ve got to draw the arrow and staunch the bleeding somehow. If I don’t, she’ll die.’

‘So, if you do she’ll die anyway, I think.’

There was no time to argue. Atara was coughing up more blood now, and her face was very pale. Liljana used a clean white cloth to wipe the bright scarlet from her mouth.

‘Val,’ she whispered to me as the slightness of her breath moved over her blue lips. ‘Leave me here and save yourself.’

‘No,’ I told her.

‘Leave me – it’s the Sarni way.’

‘It’s not my way,’ I told her. ‘It’s not the way of the Valari.’

From the opening of the pass came the sound of many iron-shod hooves striking against stone and a terrible howling growing louder with each passing moment.

‘Go now, damn you!’

‘No, I won’t leave you,’ I told her.

I drew Alkaladur, then. The sight of its shimmering length cut straight through to my heart. I would kill a hundred of Count Ulanu’s men, I vowed, before I let anyone come close to her. I knew I could.

OWRRULLL!

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram said, taking out his red crystal. ‘Oh, my Lord!’

As Master Juwain brought forth his wooden chest and opened it to search inside among the clacking steel instruments of its lower drawer, Alphanderry laid his hand upon Atara’s head. He told her, ‘I’m sorry, but this is my fault. My singing –’

‘Your singing is all I wish to hear now,’ Atara said, forcing a smile. ‘Sing for me, now, will you? Please?’

Master Juwain found the two instruments that he was looking for: a razor-sharp knife and a long, spoonlike curve of steel with a little hole in the bowl near its end. Just then Alphanderry sang out:

Be ye songs of glory,Be ye songs of glory,That the light of the OneWill shine upon the world.

Maram, with tears in his eyes, stood above Atara as he tried to position his gelstei so that it caught what little light filtered down to the floor of the pass. He called out, to the rocks and the clouded sky above us, ‘I’ll burn them if they come close! Oh, my Lord, I will!’

The wild look in his eyes alarmed Kane. He drew out his black gelstei and stood looking between it and Maram’s stone.

‘Hold her!’ Master Juwain said to me sharply as he looked down at Atara.

I put aside my sword, sat and pulled Atara onto my lap. My hands found their way between her arms and sides as I hung on to her tightly. Liljana bent to help hold her, too.

Master Juwain cut open her leather armor and the softer shirt beneath. He grasped the arrow and tugged on it, gently. Atara gasped in agony, but the arrow didn’t move. Then Master Juwain nodded at me as if admonishing me not to let go of her. Sighing sadly, he used the knife to probe the opening that the arrow had made between her ribs and enlarge it, slightly. Now it took both Liljana and me to hold Atara still. Her body writhed with what little strength she had left. And still Master Juwain wasn’t done tormenting her. He took out his spoon and fit its tip to the red hole in Atara’s creamy white skin. Then he pushed his elongated spoon down along the arrow, slowly, feeling his way, deep into her. He twirled it about while Atara’s eyes leapt toward mine; from deep in her throat came a succession of strangled cries. At last Master Juwain smiled with relief. I understood that the hole at the spoon’s tip had snagged the tip of the arrow point; its curved flanges would now be wrapped around the point’s barbs, thus shielding Atara’s flesh from them so that they wouldn’t catch as Master Juwain drew the arrow. This he now did. It came out with surprising smoothness and ease.

And so did a great deal of blood. It truth, it ran out of her like a bright red stream, flowing across her chest and wetting my hands with its warmth.

And all the while, Alphanderry knelt by her and sang:

Be ye songs of glory,Be ye songs of glory,That the light of the OneWill shine upon the world.

‘Maram!’ I heard Kane call out behind me. ‘Watch what you’re doing with that crystal!’

The quick clopping of many horses’ hooves against stone came closer, as did the hideous howling, which filled the pass with an almost deafening sound: OWRRULLL!

Kane glanced down at Atara, who was fighting to breathe, much air now wheezing out of her chest along with a frothy red spray.

‘So,’ he said. ‘So.’

Master Juwain touched her chest just above the place where the archer’s arrow had ripped open her lungs. Everyone knew that such sucking wounds were mortal.

‘She’s bleeding to death!’ I said to Master Juwain. ‘We have to staunch it!’

He stared at her, almost frozen in his thoughts. He said, ‘The wound is too grievous, too deep. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid there’s no way.’

‘Yes, there is,’ I said. I reached my bloody hand into his pocket where he kept his green crystal. I took it out and gave it to him. ‘Use this, please.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know how.’

‘Please, sir,’ I said again to him. ‘Use the gelstei.’

He sighed as he gripped his healing stone. He held it above Atara’s wound. He closed his eyes as if looking inside himself for the spark with which to ignite it.

‘I’m afraid there’s nothing,’ he said.

Maram, breaking off his fumblings with his crystal, said, ‘Ah, perhaps you should read from your book. Or perhaps a period of meditation would –’

‘There is no time,’ Master Juwain said with uncharacteristic vehemence. ‘Never enough time.’

OWRULLLLLLL!

Through my hand, I felt Atara’s pulse weakening. I felt her life ready to blow out like a candle flame in an ice-cold wind. I didn’t care then if Count Ulanu’s men fell upon us and captured us. I wanted only for Atara to live another day, another minute, another moment. Where there was life, I thought, there was always hope and the possibility of escape.

‘Please, sir,’ I said to Master Juwain, ‘keep trying.’

Again, Master Juwain closed his eyes even as his hard little hand closed tightly around the gelstei. But soon he opened them and shook his head.

‘One more time,’ I said to him. ‘Please.’

‘But there is no rhyme or reason to using this stone!’ he said bitterly.

‘No reason of the mind,’ I said to him.

Atara began moving her lips as if she wanted to tell me something. But no words came out of them, only the faintest of whispers. The touch of her breath against my ear was so cold it burned like fire.

‘What is it, Atara?’ In her eyes was a look of faraway places and last things. I pressed my lips to her ear and whispered, ‘What do you see?’

And she told me, ‘I see you, Val, everywhere.’

In her clear blue eyes staring up at me, I saw my grandfather’s eyes and the dying face of my mother’s grandmother. I saw our children, Atara’s and mine, who were worse than dead because we had never breathed our life into them.

A door to a deep, dark dungeon opened beneath Atara then. I was not the only one to look upon it. Atara, who could always see so much, and sometimes everything, turned and whispered, ‘Alphanderry.’

Alphanderry stood up and smoothed the wrinkles out of his tunic, stained with sweat, rain and blood. He smiled as Atara said, ‘Alphanderry, sing, it’s time.’

Just as Count Ulanu and the knights of his hard-riding guard showed themselves down the pass’s dark turnings, Alphanderry began walking toward them. I didn’t know what he was doing.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram said above me. ‘Here they come!’

OWRRULLLL! sang the voices of the Blues riding behind Count Ulanu as they clanked their axes together.

And Alphanderry, with a much different voice, sang out, ‘La valaha eshama halla, lais arda alhalla …’

His music had a new quality to it, both sadder and sweeter than anything I had ever heard before. I knew that he was close to finding the words that he had so long sought and opening the heavens with their sound.

‘Valashu Elahad!’ Count Ulanu called out as he rode with his captains and crucifiers inexorably toward us. ‘Lay down your weapons and you will be spared!’

And then, as the Count reined in his horse and stopped dead in his tracks, Alphanderry began singing more strongly. The Count looked at him as if he were mad. So did his captains and the knights and Blues behind him. But then Alphanderry’s song built ever larger and deeper, and began soaring outward like a flock of swans beating their wings up toward the sky. So wondrous was the music that poured out of him that it seemed the Count and his men couldn’t move.

Something in it touched Master Juwain, too, as I could tell from the faraway look that haunted his eyes. He was staring into the past, I thought, and looking for an answer to Atara’s approaching death in the fleeting images of memory or in the verses of the Saganom Elu. But he would never find it there.

‘Look at her,’ I said to Master Juwain. I took his free hand and brought it over Atara’s and mine so that it covered both of them. ‘Please look, sir.’

There was nothing more I could say to him, no more urgings or pleadings. I no longer felt resentment that he had failed to heal Atara, only an overwhelming gratitude that he had tried. And for Atara, I felt everything there was to feel. Her weakening pulse beneath my fingers touched mine with a deeper beating, vaster and infinitely finer. The sweet hurt of it reminded me how great and good it was to be alive. There seemed no end to it; it swelled my heart like the sun, breaking me open. And as I looked at Master Juwain eye to eye and heart to heart, he found himself in this luminous thing.

‘I never knew, Val,’ he whispered. ‘Yes, I see, I see.’

And then Master Juwain, who turned back to Atara, did look and seemed suddenly to see her. He found the reason of his heart as his eyes grew moist with tears. He found his greatness, too. Then he smiled as if finally understanding something. He touched the wound in her chest. Then he held the varistei over it, the long axis of the stone exactly perpendicular to the opening that the arrow had made. He took a deep breath and then let it out to the sound of Atara’s own anguished gasp.

I was waiting to see the gelstei glow with its soft, healing light. Even Kane, despite his despair, was looking at the stone as if hoping it would begin shining like a magical emerald. What happened next, I thought, amazed us all. A rare fire suddenly leaped in Master Juwain’s eyes. And then viridian flames almost too bright to behold shot from both ends of the gelstei; they circled to meet each other beneath it before shooting like a stream of fire straight into Atara’s wound. She cried out as if struck again with a burning arrow. But the green fire kept filling up the hole in her chest, and soon her eyes warmed with the intense life of it. A few moments later, the last of the fire swirled about the opening of the wound as if stitching it shut with its numinous light. As it crackled and then faded along her pale skin, we blinked our eyes, not daring to believe what we saw. For Atara was now breathing easily, and her flesh had been made whole.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram sighed out from above us. ‘Oh, my Lord!’

It seemed that neither Count Ulanu nor his men witnessed this miracle, for Liljana’s and Master Juwain’s backs blocked their view of it. And before them unfolded a miracle of another sort. For now, at last, as Alphanderry stood in all his glory facing down the vanguard of an entire army, his tongue found the turnings of the language that he had sought all his life. Its sounds flowed out of him like golden drops of light. And words and music became as one, for now Alphanderry was singing the Song of the One. In its eternal harmonies and pure tones, it was impossible to lie, impossible to see the world other than as it was because every word was a thought’s or a thing’s true name.

And truth, I knew as I held Atara’s hand and listened to Alphanderry sing, was really just beauty – a terrible beauty almost impossible to bear. Nothing like it had been heard on Ea since the Star People first came to earth ages ago. With every passing moment, Alphanderry’s words became clearer, sweeter, brighter. They dissolved time as the sea does salt, and hatred, pride and bitterness. They called us to remember all that we had lost and might yet be regained; they reminded us who we really were. Tears filled my eyes, and I looked up astonished to see Kane weeping, too. The stony Blues had belted their axes for a moment so that they might cover their faces. Even Count Ulanu had fallen away from his disdain. His misting eyes gave sign that he was recalling his own original grace. It seemed that he might have a change of heart and renounce the Kallimun and Morjin, then and there with all the world witnessing his remaking.

In the magic of that moment in the Kul Moroth, all things seemed possible. Flick, near Alphanderry, was spinning wildly, beautifully, exultantly. The walls of stone around us echoed Alphanderry’s words and seemed to sing them themselves. High above the world, the clouds parted and a shaft of light drove down through the pass to touch Alphanderry’s head. I thought I saw a golden bowl floating above him and pouring out its radiance over him as from an infinite source.

And so Alphanderry sang with the angels. But he was, after all, only a man. One single line of the Galadin’s song was all that he could call forth in its true form. After a while, his voice began to falter and fail him. He nearly wept at losing the ancient, heavenly connection. And then the spell was broken.

Count Ulanu, still sitting on his war horse in his battle armor, shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had heard. It infuriated him to see what a dreadful sculpture he had made of himself from the sacred clay with which the One had provided him. His wrath now fell upon Alphanderry for showing him this. And for standing between him and the rest of us. A snarl of outrage returned to his face; he drew his sword as his knights pointed their lances at Alphanderry. The Blues, with unfeeling fingers, gripped their axes and readied themselves to advance upon him.

OWRRULLL! OWRRULLLLL!

At last, with the howls of the Blues drowning out the final echoes of Alphanderry’s music, I grabbed up my sword and leaped to my feet. Kane gripped his gelstei as his wild black eyes fell upon Maram’s red crystal.

‘I’ll burn them!’ Maram called out. ‘I will, I will!’

The clouds above the pass broke apart even more, and rays of light streamed down and touched Maram’s firestone. It began glowing bright crimson.

Alphanderry, who had marched many yards down the pass away from us, turned and looked up toward his right. Something seemed to catch his eye. For a moment, he recaptured his joy and something of the Star People’s lost language as he cried out: ‘Ahura Alarama!’

‘What?’ I shouted, gathering my strength to run to his side.

‘I see him!’

‘See who?’

‘The one you call Flick.’ He smiled like a child. ‘Oh, Val … the colors!’

Just then, even as Count Ulanu spurred his horse forward, Maram’s gelstei flared and burned his hands. He screamed, jerking the blazing crystal upwards. A great stream of fire poured out of it and blasted the boulders along the pass’s walls. Kane was now working urgently with his black crystal to damp the fury of the firestone. But it drew its power from the very sun and fed the fires of the earth. The ground around us began shaking violently; I went down to one knee to keep from falling altogether. Stones rained down like hail, and one of them pinged off my helmet. Then came a deafening roar of great boulders bounding down the pass’s walls. In only a few moments, the rockslide filled the defile to a height of twenty feet. A great mound stood between Alphanderry and the rest of the company, cutting off his escape. And keeping us from coming to his aid. We couldn’t even see him.

But we could still hear him. As the dust choked us and settled slowly down, from beyond the heaped-up rubble I heard him singing what I knew would be his death song. For I knew that Count Ulanu, who spared no mercy for himself, would find none for him.

My hand gripped the hilt of my sword so fiercely that my fingers hurt; my arm hurt even as I felt Count Ulanu’s arm pull back and his sword thrust downward. Alphanderry’s terrible cry easily pierced the rocks between us. It pierced the whole world; it pierced my heart. My sword fell from my hand, even as I clasped my chest and fell myself. A door opened before me, and I followed Alphanderry through it.

I walked with him through the dark, vacant spaces up toward the stars.

4

The city of Khaisham was built on a strong site where the plains of Yarkona come up against the curve of the White Mountains. Directly to its east was Mount Redruth, an upfolding of great blocks of red sandstone that looked like pieces of a rusted iron breastplate. Mount Salmas, to the east and north, was more gentle in its rise toward the sky and slightly higher, too. Its peak pushed its way above the treeline like a bald, rounded pate. Out from the gorge between these two mountains rushed a river: the Tearam. Its swift flow was diverted into little channels along either side of it in order to water the fields to the north and west of the city. The city itself was built wholly to the south of the river. A wall following its curves formed the city’s northern defenses. It rose up just above the Tearam’s banks and ran east into the notch between the mountains. There it turned south along the steep slopes of Mount Redruth for a mile before turning yet again west through some excellent pasture. The wall’s final turning took it back north toward the river. This stretch of mortared stone was the wall’s longest and its most vulnerable – and therefore the most heavily defended. Great round towers surmounted it along its length at five-hundred-foot intervals. The south wall was likewise protected.

The men and women of Khaisham had good reason to feel safe in their little stone houses behind this wall, for it had never been breached or their city taken. The Lords of Khaisham, though, desired even more protection for the great Library and the treasures it held. And so, long ago they had built a second, inner wall around the Library itself.

This striking edifice occupied the heights at Khaisham’s northeast corner, almost in the mouth of the gorge, and thus further protected by the Tearam and Mount Redruth. Unlike Khaisham’s other buildings, which had been raised up out of the sandstone common in the mountains to the east, the Library had been constructed of white marble. No one remembered whence this fine stone had come. It lent the Library much of its grandeur. Its gleaming faces, which caught and reflected the harsh Yarkonan sun, showed themselves to approaching pilgrims even far out on the pasturage to the west of the city. The centermost section of the Library was a great, white cube; four others, forming its various wings, adjoined it to the west, south, east and north so that its shape was that of a cross. Smaller cubes erupted out of each of these four, making for wings to the wings. The overall effect was that of a great crystal, like a snowflake, with points radiating at perfect angles from a common center.

We came to Khaisham from the Kul Moroth almost directly to the west. I was never to remember very much of this twenty-mile journey for I was conscious during only parts of it. It was I, not Atara, whom my companions had to lash to his horse. At times, when my eyes opened slightly, I was aware of the rocky green pastures through which we rode and the shepherds tending their flocks there. More than once, I listened as Kane seemed to sigh out the name of Alphanderry with his every breath. I watched as his eyes misted like mirrors and he clamped shut his jaws so tightly that I feared his teeth would break and the splinters drive into his gums. At other times, however, the darkness closed in upon me, and I saw nothing. Nothing of this world, that is. For the bright constellations I had longed to apprehend since my childhood were now all too near. I could see how their swirling patterns found their likeness in those of the mountains far below them – and in Flick’s fiery form, and in a man’s dreams, indeed, in all things. In truth, from the moment of Alphanderry’s death, I was like a man walking between two worlds and with my feet firmly planted in neither.

It was just as well, perhaps, that I couldn’t touch upon my companions’ grief. Can a cup hold an entire ocean? With the passing of Alphanderry from this world, it seemed that the spirit of the quest had left our company. It was as if a great blow had driven from each of us his very breath. I was dimly aware of Maram riding along on Alphanderry’s horse and muttering that instead of burning the Kul Moroth’s rocks, he should have directed his fire at Count Ulanu and his army. He voiced his doubt that we would ever leave Khaisham, now. The others were quieter though perhaps more disconsolate. Liljana seemed to have aged ten years in a moment, and her face was deeply creased with lines that all pointed toward death. Master Juwain was clearly appalled to have saved Atara only to lose Alphanderry so unexpectedly a few minutes later. He rode with his head bowed, not even caring to open his book and read a requiem or prayer. Atara, healed of her mortal wound, looked out upon the landscape of a terrible sadness it seemed that only she could see. And Kane, more than once, when he thought no one was listening, murmured to himself, ‘He’s gone – my little friend is gone.’