Читать книгу The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 7

On clear winter nights, I have stood on mountains just to be closer to the stars. Some say that these shimmering lights are the souls of warriors who have died in battle; some say that at the beginning of time, Arwe himself cast an infinite number of diamonds into the sky to shine forever and defeat the darkness of night. But I believe the stars are other suns like our own. They speak along the blood in fiery whisperings of ancient dreams and promises unfulfilled. From there long ago our people came to earth bearing the cup called the Lightstone; to there we would someday return as angels holding light in our hands.

My grandfather believed this, too. It was he who taught me the stories of the Great Bear, the Dragon, the Seven Sisters and the other constellations. It was he who named me after the bright Morning Star, Valashu. He always said that we were born to shine. A Valari warrior, he once told me, should polish first his soul and then his sword. For only then can he see his fate and accept it. Or fight against it if he is one of the few men marked out to make their own fate. Such a man is a glory and gift to the earth. Such a man was my grandfather. But the Ishkans killed him all the same.

Elkasar Elahad would have found it a strange fate indeed that on the same day King Kiritan’s messengers came from Alonia to announce a great quest for the Lightstone, a whole company of knights and nobles from Ishka rode into my father’s castle to negotiate for peace or call for war. It was the first of Ashte in the 2,812th year in that span of centuries that the historians had named the Age of the Dragon. In the warmth of one of the loveliest springs that anyone could remember, with the snows melting from the mountains and wildflowers everywhere abloom, the forests surrounding Silvassu teemed with boar and deer and other animals that might be killed for food. My father’s steward, upon counting the castle’s guests that day, grumbled that the kitchens would require much food if any feast were to be made. And so my brothers and I, along with other knights, were called to go out and hunt for it. After all, even the murderers of a king must eat.

Just after noon I rode down from the hills upon which our ancient city is built with my eldest brother, Lord Asaru. My friend, Maram, and one of my brother’s squires rode with us as well. We were a small hunting party, perhaps the smallest of the many to fill the woods that day. I was glad for such company, for I cared nothing for the sport of hounds yelping and men on snorting horses running down a fear-maddened pig. As for Asaru, he was like our father, King Shamesh: stern, serious and focused on his objective with an astonishing clarity of purpose. His soul had not only been polished but sharpened until it cut like the finest Godhran steel. He had said that we would take a deer, and for that we needed small numbers and stealth. Maram, who would have preferred the pageantry of hunting with the other knights, followed him anyway. In truth, he followed me. As he liked to say, he would never desert his best friend. As he didn’t like to say, he was a coward who had once seen what the razor-like tusks of a boar could do to a man’s groin. It was much safer to hunt a deer.

It was a warm day, and the air smelled of freshly turned earth and lilac blossoms. Every quarter of a mile or so, a stout farmhouse stood out among fields demarcated by lines of low stone walls. There was new barley in the ground, and the golden sun in the sky. As we passed farther into the Valley of the Swans, the farmland gave out onto miles of unbroken forest. At the edge of a field, where the ancient oaks rose up like a wall of green, we drew up and dismounted. Asaru handed the reins of his horse to his young squire, Joshu Kadar, who had the square face and stolid temperament of his father, Lord Kadar. Joshu didn’t like being left to tend the horses, and watched impatiently as Asaru drew out his great yew bow and strung it. For a moment I was tempted to give him my bow and let him hunt the deer while I waited in the sun. I hated hunting almost as much as I did war.

And then Asaru, tall and imperious in his flowing black cloak, handed me my bow and pointed at the forest. He said, ‘Why these woods, Val?’

‘Why not?’ I countered. Asaru, knowing how I felt about slaughtering innocent animals, had given me my choice of where to hunt that day. Although he had remained silent during our ride down from the castle, he must have known where I was leading him. ‘You know why,’ I said more gently, looking at him.

And he looked at me, fearless as all Valari would hope to be. His eyes were those of the Valari kings: deep and mysterious, as black as space and as bright as stars. He had the bold face bones and long hawk’s nose of our ancient line. His skin, burnt brown in the hot spring sun, was like weathered ivory, and he had a great shock of glossy black hair, long and thick and blowing wild in the wind. Although he was very much a man of blood and steel and other elements of the earth, there was something otherworldly about him, too. My father said that we looked enough alike to be twins. But of the seven sons of Shavashar Elahad, he was the firstborn and I was the last. And that made all the difference in the world.

He drew closer and stood silently regarding me. Where I insisted on wearing a leather hunting jacket and a homespun shirt and trousers of a deep forest green, he was resplendent in a cloak and a black tunic embroidered with the silver swan and the seven silver stars of the royal house of Mesh. He would never think to be seen in any other garments. He was the tallest of my brothers, taller than I by half an inch. He seemed to look down at me, and his bright black eyes fell like blazing suns on the scar cut into my forehead above my left eye. It was a unique scar, shaped like a lightning bolt. I think it reminded him of things that he would rather not know.

‘Why do you have to be so wild?’ he said in a quickly exhaled breath.

I stood beneath his gaze listening to the thunder of my heart, but said nothing.

‘Here, now!’ a loud voice boomed out. ‘What’s this? What are you talking about?’

Maram, upon seeing the silent communication flowing between us, came up clutching his bow and making nervous rumbling noises in his throat. Though not as tall as Asaru, he was a big man with a big belly that pushed out ahead of him as if to knock any obstacles or lesser men from his path.

‘What should I know about these woods?’ he asked me.

‘They’re full of deer,’ I said, smiling at him.

‘And other animals,’ Asaru added provocatively.

‘What animals?’ Maram asked. He licked his thick, sensuous lips. He rubbed his thick, brown beard where it curled across his blubbery cheeks.

‘The last time we entered these woods,’ Asaru said, ‘we could hardly move without stepping on a rabbit. And there were squirrels everywhere.’

‘Good, good,’ Maram said, ‘I like squirrels.’

‘So do the foxes,’ Asaru said. ‘So do the wolves.’

Maram coughed to clear his throat, and then swallowed a couple of times. ‘In my country, I’ve only ever seen red foxes – they’re not at all like these huge gray ones of yours that might as well be wolves. And as for our wolves, ah, well, we hunted out most of them long ago.’

Maram was not of Mesh, not even of the Nine Kingdoms of the Valari. Everything about him was an affront to a Valari’s sensibilities. His large brown eyes reminded one of the sugared coffee that the Delians drink, and were given to tears of rage or sentimentality as the situation might demand. He wore jeweled rings on each of the fingers of his hamlike hands; he wore the bright scarlet tunic and trousers of the Delian royalty. He liked red, of course, because it was an outward manifestation of the colors of his fiery heart. And even more he liked standing out and being seen, especially in a wood full of hungry men with bows and arrows. My brothers believed that he had been sent to the Brotherhood school in the mountains above Silvassu as a punishment for his cowardly ways. But the truth was he had been banished from court due to an indiscretion with his father’s favorite concubine.

‘Do not,’ Asaru warned him, ‘hunt wolves in Mesh. It’s bad luck.’

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said, twanging his bowstring, ‘I won’t hunt them if they won’t hunt me.’

‘Wolves don’t hunt men,’ Asaru assured him. ‘It’s the bears that you have to watch for.’

‘Bears?’

‘This time of year, especially the mothers with their cubs.’

‘I saw one of your bears last year,’ Maram said. ‘I hope I never see another.’

I rubbed my forehead as I caught the heat of Maram’s fear. Of course, Mesh is famed for the ferociousness of its huge, brown bears, which had driven the much gentler black bears into gentler lands such as Delu ages ago.

‘If the Brothers don’t expel you and you stay with us long enough,’ Asaru said, ‘you’ll see plenty of bears.’

‘But I thought the bears kept mostly to the mountains.’

‘Well, where do you think you are?’ Asaru said, sweeping his hand out toward the snow-capped peaks all around us.

In truth, we stood in the Valley of the Swans, largest and loveliest of Mesh’s valleys. Here the Kurash flowed through gentle terrain into Lake Waskaw. Here there were other lakes, too, where the swans came each spring to hatch their young and swim through clear blue waters.

But across the valley twenty miles due east, Mount Eluru stood like a vast pyramid of granite and ice. Beyond it were still greater peaks of the Culhadosh Range, which separates the kingdoms of Waas and Mesh. In the distance to the south forty-five miles as a raven flies, was the hazy wall of the Itarsu in whose narrow passes my ancestors had more than once slaughtered invading Sarni armies from the great gray plains beyond. Behind us above the hills from where we had ridden that day, just to the west of the bear-infested woods that we proposed to enter, were three of the greatest and most beautiful peaks of the Central Range: Telshar, Arakel and Vayu. These were the mountains of my soul; here, I thought, was the heart of the Morning Mountains and possibly of all Ea. As a boy I had played in their forests and sung songs to their silent, stony faces. They rose up like gods just beyond the houses and battlements of Silvassu: the shining Vayu a few miles to the south, Arakel west just across the swift Kurash river, and Telshar the Great on whose lower slopes my grandfather’s grandfathers had built the Elahad castle. Once I had climbed this luminous mountain. From the summit, looking north, I had seen Raaskel and Korukel glittering beyond the Diamond River, and beyond these guardian peaks, the cold white mountains of Ishka. But, of course, all my life I have tried not to look in that direction.

Now Maram followed the line of Asaru’s outstretched hand. He looked into the dark, waiting forest and muttered, ‘Ah, where am I, indeed? Lost, lost, truly lost.’

At that moment, as if in answer to some silent supplication of Maram’s, there came the slow clip-clop of a horse’s hooves. I turned to see a white-haired man leading a draft horse across the field straight toward us. He wore a patch over his right eye and walked with a severe limp as if his knee had been smashed with a mace or a flail. I knew that I had seen this old farmer before, but I couldn’t quite remember where.

‘Hello, lads,’ he said as he drew up to us. ‘It’s a fine day for hunting, isn’t it?’

Maram took in the farmer’s work-stained woolens, which smelled of horse manure and pigs. He wrinkled up his fat nose disdainfully. But Asaru, who had a keener eye, immediately saw the ring glittering on the farmer’s gnarled finger, and so did I. It was a plain silver ring set with four brilliant diamonds: the ring of a warrior and a lord at that.

‘Lord Harsha,’ Asaru said, finally recognizing him, ‘it’s been a long time.’

‘Yes, it has,’ Lord Harsha said. He looked at Asaru’s squire, and then at Maram and me. ‘Who are your friends?’

‘Excuse me,’ Asaru said. ‘May I present Joshu Kadar of Lashku?’

Lord Harsha nodded his head at my brother’s squire and told him, ‘Your father is a fine man. We fought against Waas together.’

Young Joshu bowed deeply as befit his rank, and then stood silently basking in Lord Harsha’s compliment.

‘And this,’ Asaru continued, ‘is Prince Maram Marshayk of Delu. He’s a student of the Brothers.’

Lord Harsha peered out at him with his single eye and said, ‘Isn’t it true that the Brothers don’t hunt animals?’

‘Ah, that is true,’ Maram said, gripping his bow, ‘we hunt knowledge. You see, I’ve come along only to protect my friend in case we run into any bears.’

Now Lord Harsha turned his attention toward me, and looked back and forth between me and my brother. The light of his eye bore into my forehead like the rays of the sun.

‘You must be Valashu Elahad,’ he said.

Just then Maram’s face reddened in anger on my behalf. I knew that he didn’t approve of the Valari system of honors and rank. It must have galled him that an old man of no noble blood, a mere farmer, could outrank a prince.

I looked down at the ring I wore around my finger. In it was set neither the four diamonds of a lord nor the three of a master – nor even the two sparkling stones of a full knight. A single diamond stood out against the silver: the ring of a simple warrior. In truth, I was lucky to have won it. If not for some skills with the sword and bow that my father had taught me, I never would have. What kind of warrior hates war? How is it that a Valari knight – or rather, a man who only dreamed of being a knight – should prefer playing the flute and writing poetry to trials of arms with his brothers and countrymen?

Lord Harsha smiled grimly at me and said, ‘It’s been a long time since you’ve come to these woods, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir, it has,’ I said.

‘Well, you should have paid your respects before trampling over my fields. Young people have no manners these days.’

‘My apologies, sir, but we were in a hurry. You see, we got a late start.’

I didn’t explain that our hunting expedition had been delayed for an hour while I searched the castle for Maram – only to find him in bed with one of my father’s chambermaids.

‘Yes, very late,’ Lord Harsha said, looking up at the sun. ‘The Ishkans have already been here before you.’

“Which Ishkans?’ I asked in alarm. I noticed that Asaru was now staring off into the woods intently.

‘They didn’t stop to present themselves either,’ Lord Harsha said. ‘But there were five of them – I heard them bragging they were going to take a bear.’

At this news, Maram gripped his bow even more tightly. Beads of sweat formed up among the brown curls of hair across his forehead. He said, ‘Well, then – I suppose we should leave these woods to them.’

But Asaru only smiled as if Maram had suggested abandoning all of Mesh to the enemy. He said, ‘The Ishkans like to hunt bears. Well, it’s a big wood, and they’ve had more than an hour to become lost in it.’

‘Please see to it that you don’t become lost as well,’ Lord Harsha said.

‘My brother,’ Asaru said, looking at me strangely, ‘is more at home in the woods than in his own castle. We won’t get lost.’

‘Good. Then good luck hunting.’ Lord Harsha nodded his head at me in a curt bow. ‘Are you after a bear this time, too?’

‘No, a deer,’ I said. ‘As we were the last time we came here.’

‘But you found a bear all the same.’

‘It might be more accurate to say the bear found us.’

Now Maram’s knuckles grew white around his bow, and he looked at me with wide-open eyes. ‘What do you mean a bear found you?’

Because I didn’t want to tell him the story, I stood there looking off into the woods in silence. And so Lord Harsha answered for me.

‘It was ten years ago,’ he said. ‘Lord Asaru had just received his knight’s ring, and Val must have been what – eleven? Ten?’

‘Ten,’ I told him.

‘That’s right,’ Lord Harsha said, nodding his head. ‘And so the lads went into the woods alone after their deer. And then the bear –’

‘Was it a large bear?’ Maram interrupted.

Lord Harsha’s single eye narrowed as he admonished Maram to silence as he might a child. And then he continued the story: ‘And so the bear attacked them. It broke Lord Asaru’s arm and some ribs. And mauled Valashu, as you can see.’

Here he paused to point his old finger at the scar on my forehead.

‘But you told me that you were born with that scar!’ Maram said, turning to me.

‘Yes,’ I said. That’s right.’

Truly, I had been. My mother’s labor in bringing me into the world was so hard and long that everyone had said I wanted to remain inside her in darkness. And so, finally, the midwife had had to use tongs to pull me out. The tongs had cut me, and the wound had healed raggedly, in the shape of a lightning bolt.

‘The bear,’ Asaru explained, ‘opened up the scar again and cut it deeper.’

‘He was lucky the bear didn’t break his skull,’ Lord Harsha said to Maram. ‘And both of them were lucky that my son, may he abide in peace, was walking through the woods that day. He found these lads half-dead in the moss and killed the bear with his spear before it could kill them.’

Andaru Harsha – I knew the name of my rescuer very well. At the Battle of Red Mountain, I had taken a wound in my thigh protecting him from the Waashians’ spears. And later, at the same battle, I had frozen up and been unable to kill one of our enemy who stood shieldless and helpless before me. Because of my hesitation, many still whispered that I was a coward. But Asaru never called me that.

‘Then your son saved their lives,’ Maram said to Lord Harsha.

‘He always said it was the best thing he ever did.’

Maram came up to me and grabbed my arm. ‘And you think to repay the courage of this man’s son by going back into these woods?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ he said, looking at me with his soft brown eyes. ‘I see.’

And he did see, which was why I loved him. Without being told, he understood that I had come back to these woods today not to seek vengeance by shooting arrows in some strange bear, but only because there are other monsters that must be faced.

‘Well, then,’ Lord Harsha said. ‘Enough of bear stories. Would you like a bite to eat before your hunt?’

Due to Maram’s peccadilloes, we had missed lunch and we were all of us hungry. Of course, that wouldn’t have dismayed Asaru, but rejecting Lord Harsha’s hospitality would. And so Asaru, speaking for all of us as if he were already king, bowed his head and said, ‘We’d be honored.’

While Lord Harsha opened his horse’s saddlebags, our horses stamped the earth impatiently and bent their heads to munch the sweet green grass growing between the field’s stone wall and the forest. I glanced off across the field to study Lord Asaru’s house. I liked its square lines and size and the cedar-shingled roof, which was almost as steeply gabled as the chalets you see higher in the mountains. It was built of oak and stone: austere, clean, quietly beautiful – very Valari. I remembered Andaru Harsha bringing me to this house, where I had lain in delirium for half a day while his father tended my wound.

‘Here, now,’ Lord Harsha said as he laid a cloth on the wall. ‘Sit with me, and let’s talk about the war.’

While we took our places along the wall, he set out two loaves of black, barley bread, a tub of goat cheese and some freshly pulled green onions. We cut the bread for sandwiches and ate them. I liked the tang of the onions against the saltiness of the cheese; I liked it even more when Lord Harsha drew out four silver goblets and filled them with brown beer that he poured from a small, wooden cask.

‘This was brewed last fall,’ Lord Harsha said. In turn, he handed goblets to Asaru, me and Joshu. Then he picked up his own goblet. ‘It was a good harvest, and a better brew. Shall we make a toast?’

I saw Maram licking his lips as if he’d been stricken dumb with grief, and I said, ‘Lord Harsha, you’ve forgotten Maram.’

‘Indeed,’ he said, smiling. ‘But you said he’s with the Brothers – hasn’t he taken vows?’

‘Ah, well, yes, I have,’ Maram admitted. ‘I’ve forsworn wine, women and war.’

‘Well, then?’

‘I never vowed not to drink beer.’

‘You quibble, Prince Maram.’

‘Yes, I do, don’t I? But only when vital matters are at stake.’

‘Such as the drinking of beer?’

‘Such as the drinking of Meshian beer, which is known to be the finest in all of Ea.’

This compliment proved too much for Lord Harsha, who laughed and magically produced another goblet from the saddlebags. He picked up the cask and poured forth a stream of beer.

‘Let’s drink to the King,’ he said, raising his goblet. ‘May he abide in the One and find the wisdom to decide on peace or war.’

We all clinked goblets and drank the frothy beer. It tasted of barley and hops and roasted nuts of the talaru tree that grows only in the forests near Mount Arakel. Maram, of course, was the first to finish his beer. He gulped it down like a hound does milk. Then he held out his goblet for Lord Harsha to fill it again and said, ‘Now I would like to propose a toast. To the lords and knights of Mesh who have fought faithfully for their King.’

‘Excellent,’ Lord Harsha said, once more filling Maram’s goblet. ‘Let’s drink to that indeed.’

Again Maram drained his cup. He licked the froth from his mustache. He held the empty cup out yet again and said, ‘And now, ah, to the courage and prowess of the warriors – how do you say it? To flawlessness and fearlessness.’

But Lord Harsha stoppered the cask with a cork, and said, ‘No, that’s enough if you’re going hunting today – we can’t have you young princes shooting arrows at each other, can we?’

‘But, Lord Harsha,’ Maram protested, ‘I was only going to suggest that the courage of your Meshian warriors is an inspiration to those of us who can only hope to –’

‘You’re quite the diplomat,’ Lord Harsha said, laughing as he cut Maram off. ‘Perhaps you should reason with the Ishkans. Perhaps you could talk them out of this war as easily as you talked me out of my beer.’

‘I don’t understand why there has to be a war at all,’ Maram said.

‘Well, there’s bad blood between us,’ Lord Harsha said simply.

‘But it’s the same blood, isn’t it? You’re all Valari, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, the same blood,’ Lord Harsha said, slowly sipping from his goblet. Then he looked at me sadly. ‘But the Ishkans shed it in ways shameful to any Valari. The way they killed Valashu’s grandfather.’

‘But he died in battle, didn’t he? Ah, the Battle of the Diamond River?’

Now Lord Harsha swallowed the last of his beer as if someone had forced him to drink blood. He tapped his eye-patch and said, ‘Yes, it was at the Diamond. Twelve years ago now. That’s where the Ishkans took this eye. That’s where the Ishkans sacrificed five companies just to close with King Elkamesh and kill him.’

‘But that’s war, isn’t it?’ Maram asked.

‘No, that’s dueling. The Ishkans hated King Elkamesh because when he was a young man such as yourself, he killed Lord Dorje in a duel. And so they used the battle as a duel to take their revenge.’

‘Lord Dorje,’ I explained, looking at Maram, ‘was King Hadaru’s oldest brother.’

‘I see,’ Maram said. ‘And this duel took place, ah, fifty years ago? You Valari wait a long time to take your revenge.’

I looked north toward the dark clouds moving in from Ishka’s mountains, and I lost myself in memories of wrongs and hurts that went back more than a hundred times fifty years.

‘Please do not say “we Valari,”’ Lord Harsha told Maram. He rubbed his broken knee and said, ‘Sar Lensu of Waas caught me here with his mace, and that’s war. There’s no vengeance to be taken. They understand that in Waas. They would never have tried to kill King Elkamesh as the Ishkans did.’

While Lord Harsha rose abruptly and shook out the cloth of its crumbs for the sparrows to eat, I clenched my teeth together. And then I said, ‘There was more to it than vengeance.’

At this, Asaru shot me a quick look as if warning me not to divulge family secrets in front of strangers. But I spoke not only for Maram’s benefit, but for Asaru’s and Lord Harsha’s and my own.

‘My grandfather,’ I said, ‘had a dream. He would have united all the Valari against Morjin.’

At the mention of this name, dreadful and ancient, Lord Harsha froze motionless while Joshu Kadar turned to stare at me. I felt fear fluttering in Maram’s belly like a blackbird’s wings. In the sky, the dark, distant clouds seemed to grow even darker.

And then Asaru’s voice grew as cold as steel as it always did when he was angry at me. ‘The Ishkans,’ he said, ‘don’t want the Valari united under our banner. No one does, Val.’

I looked up to see a few crows circling the field in search of carrion or other easy feasts. I said nothing.

‘You have to understand,’ Asaru continued, ‘there’s no need.’

‘No need?’ I half-shouted. ‘Morjin’s armies swallow up half the continent, and you say there’s no need?’

I looked west beyond the white diamond peak of Telshar as I tried to imagine the earthshaking events occurring far away. What little news of Morjin’s acquisitions that had arrived in our isolated country was very bad. From his fastness of Sakai in the White Mountains, this warlock and would-be Lord of Ea had sent armies to conquer Hesperu and lands with strange names such as Uskudar and Karabuk. The enslaved peoples of Acadu, of course, had long since marched beneath the banner of the Red Dragon, while in Surrapam and Yarkona, and even in Eanna, Morjin’s spies and assassins worked to undermine those realms from within. His terror had found its most recent success in Galda. The fall of this mighty kingdom, so near the Morning Mountains and Mesh, had shocked almost all of the free peoples from Delu to Thalu. But not the Meshians. Nor the Ishkans, the Kaashans, nor any of the other Valari.

‘Morjin will never conquer us,’ Asaru said proudly. ‘Never.’

‘He’ll never conquer us if we stand against him,’ I said.

‘No army has ever successfully invaded the Nine Kingdoms.’

‘Not successfully,’ I agreed. ‘But why should we invite an invasion at all?’

‘If anyone invades Mesh,’ Asaru said, ‘we’ll cut them to pieces. The way the Kaashans cut Morjin’s priests to pieces.’

He was referring to the grisly events that had occurred half a year before in Kaash, that most mountainous and rugged of all Valari kingdoms. When King Talanu discovered that two of his most trusted lords had entered Morjin’s secret order of assassin-priests, he had ordered them beheaded and quartered. The pieces of their bodies he had then sent to each of the Nine Kingdoms as a warning against traitors and others who would serve Morjin.

I shuddered as I remembered the day that King Talanu’s messenger had arrived with his grisly trophy in Silvassu. Something sharp stabbed into my chest as I thought of worse things. In Galda, thousands of men and women had been put to the sword. Some few survivors of the massacres there had found their way across the steppes to Mesh, only to be turned away at the passes. Their sufferings were grievous but not unique. The rattle of the chains of all those enslaved by Morjin would have shaken the mountains, if any had ears to hear it. On the Wendrush, it was said, the Sarni tribes were on the move again and roasting their captured enemies alive. From Karabuk had come stories of a terrible new plague and even a rumor that a city had been burned with a firestone. It seemed that all of Ea was going up in flames while here we sat by a small green field drinking beer and talking of yet another war with the Ishkans.

‘There’s more to the world than Mesh,’ I said. I listened to the twittering of the birds in the forest. ‘What of Eanna and Yarkona? What of Alonia? The Elyssu? And Delu?’

At the mention of his homeland, Maram stood up and grabbed his bow. Despite his renunciation of war, he shook it bravely and said, ‘Ah, my friend is right. We defeated Morjin once. And we can defeat him again.’

For a moment I held my breath against the beery vapors wafting out of Maram’s mouth. Defeating Morjin, of course, wasn’t what I had suggested. But uniting against him so that we wouldn’t have to fight at all was.

‘We should send an army of Valari against him,’ Maram bellowed.

I tried not to smile as I noted that in demanding that ‘we’ fight together against our enemy, Maram meant us: the Meshians and the other Valari.

I looked at him and asked, ‘And to where would you send this army that you’ve so bravely assembled in your mind?’

‘Why, to Sakai, of course. We should root out Morjin before he gains too much strength and then destroy him.’

At this Asaru’s face paled, as did Lord Harsha’s and, I imagined, my own. Once, long ago, a Valari army had crossed the Wendrush to join with the Alonians in an assault on Sakai. And at the Battle of Tarshid, Morjin had used firestones and treachery to defeat us utterly. It was said that he had crucified the thousand Valari survivors for twenty miles along the road leading to Sakai; his priests had pierced our warriors’ veins with knives and had drunk their blood. All the histories cited this as the beginning of the War of the Stones.

Of course, no one knew if the Morjin who now ruled in Sakai was the same man who had tortured my ancestors: Morjin, Lord of Lies, the Great Red Dragon, who had stolen the Lightstone and kept it locked away in his underground city of Argattha. Many said that the present Morjin was only a sorcerer or usurper who had taken on the most terrible name in history. But my grandfather had believed that these two Morjins were one and the same. And so did I.

Asaru stood staring at Maram, and said, ‘So then, you want to defeat Morjin – do you hope to recover the Lightstone as well?’

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said, his face falling red, ‘the Lightstone – now that’s a different matter. It’s been lost for three thousand years. Surely it’s been destroyed.’

‘Surely it has,’ Lord Harsha agreed. The Lightstone, the firestones, most of the other gelstei – they were all destroyed in the War of the Stones.’

‘Of course it was destroyed,’ Asaru said as if that ended the matter.

I wondered if it was possible to destroy the gold gelstei, greatest of all the stones of power, from which the Lightstone was wrought. I was silent as I watched the clouds move down the valley and cover up the sun. I couldn’t help noticing that despite the darkness of these monstrous gray shapes, some small amount of light fought its way through.

‘You don’t agree, do you?’ Asaru said to me.

‘No,’ I said. The Lightstone exists, somewhere.’

‘But three thousand years, Val.’

‘I know it exists – it can’t have been destroyed.’

‘If not destroyed, then lost forever.’

‘King Kiritan doesn’t think so. Otherwise he wouldn’t call a quest for knights to find it.’

Lord Harsha let loose a deep grumbling sound as he packed the uneaten food into his horse’s saddlebags. He turned to me, and his remaining eyed bore into me like a spear. ‘Who knows why foreign kings do what they do? But what would you do, Valashu Elahad, if you suddenly found the Lightstone in your hands?’

I looked north and east toward Anjo, Taron, Athar, Lagash and the other kingdoms of the Valari, and I said simply, ‘End war.’

Lord Harsha shook his head as if he hadn’t heard me correctly. He said, ‘End the wars?’

‘No, war,’ I said. ‘War itself.’

Now both Lord Harsha and Asaru – and Joshu Kadar as well – looked at me in amazement as if I had suggested ending the world itself.

‘Ha!’ Lord Harsha called out. ‘No one but a scryer can see the future, but let’s make this prediction anyway: when next the Ishkans and Meshians line up for battle, you’ll be there at the front of our army.’

I smelled moisture in the air and bloodlust in Lord Harsha’s fiery old heart, but I said nothing.

And then Asaru moved close to me and caught me with his brilliant eyes. He said quietly, ‘You’re too much like Grandfather: you’ve always loved this gold cup that doesn’t exist.’

Did the world itself exist? I wondered. Did the light I saw shining in my brother’s eyes?

‘If it came to it,’ he asked me, ‘would you fight for this Lightstone or would you fight for your people?’

Behind the sadness of his noble face lingered the unspoken question: Would you fight for me?

Just then, as the clouds built even higher overhead and the air grew heavy and still, I felt something warm and bright welling up inside him. How could I not fight for him? I remembered the outing seven years ago when I had broken through the thin spring ice of Lake Waskaw after insisting that we take this dangerous shortcut toward home. Hadn’t he, heedless of his own life, jumped into the black, churning waters to pull me out? How could I ever simply abandon this noble being and let him perish from the earth? Could I imagine the world without tall, straight oak trees or clear mountain streams? Could I imagine the world without the sun?

I looked at my brother, and felt this sun inside me. There were stars there, too. It was strange, I thought, that although he was firstborn and I was last, that although he wore four diamonds in his ring and I only one, it was he who always looked away from me, as he did now.

‘Asaru,’ I said, ‘listen to me.’

The Valari see a man as a diamond to be slowly cut, polished and perfected. Cut it right and you have a perfect jewel; cut it wrong, hit a flaw, and it shatters. Outwardly, Asaru was the hardest and strongest of men. But deep inside him ran a vein of innocence as pure and soft as gold. I always had to be gentle with him lest my words – or even a flicker in my eyes – find this flaw. I had to guard his heart with infinitely more care than I would my own.

‘It may be,’ I told him, ‘that in fighting for the Lightstone, we’d be fighting for our people. For all people. We would be, Asaru.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said, looking at me again.

Someday, I thought, he would be king and therefore the loneliest of men. And so he needed one other man whom he could trust absolutely.

‘At least,’ I said, ‘please consider that our grandfather might not have been a fool. All right?’

He slowly nodded his head and grasped my shoulder. ‘All right.’

‘Good,’ I said, smiling at him. I picked up my bow and nodded toward the woods. Then why don’t we go get your deer?’

After that we helped Lord Harsha put away the remains of our lunch. We slipped on our quivers full of hunting arrows. I said goodbye to Altaru, my fierce, black stallion, who reluctantly allowed Joshu Kadar to tend him in my absence. I thanked Lord Harsha for his hospitality, then turned and led the way into the woods.