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‘So, so.’
‘Only the Maitreya,’ I said, ‘can keep him from using the Lightstone. And I do not believe I will ever be allowed to lay eyes upon this Shining One if I use the valarda to slay.’
Then he smiled at me, a true smile, all warm and sweet like honey melting in the sun. ‘So, there will be no slaying tonight, let us hope. Peace, friend.’
He stepped back over to the breastwork and picked up his bow again. His smile grew only wider as his eyes filled with amusement, irony and a mystery that I would never quite be able to apprehend.
After that it grew dark, and then nearly as black as a moonless eve, for here at the bottom of the gorge, there was very little light. Its towering walls reduced the heavens to a strip of stars running east and west above us. But one of these stars, I saw, was bright Aras. After all the work of washing the dishes and settling into our camp was completed, with Atara singing Estrella to sleep and Kane standing watch over us, I lay back against my mother earth to keep a vigil upon this sparkling light. It blazed throughout the night like a great beacon, and I wondered how this star of beauty and bright shining hope could ever be put out.
6 (#ulink_a607f9c1-b515-5285-a953-148d7b4032ef)
Idid not welcome my awakening the next morning. My battle wounds – mostly bruises from edged weapons or maces that had failed to penetrate my mail – hurt. The cold wind funneling down the gorge set my stiff body to shivering, and that hurt even more. No ray of sun warmed the gorge directly for the first few hours of the day, as we ate our breakfast and broke camp with a slowness and heaviness of motion. All of us, except Kane, perhaps, were exhausted. It would have been good to remain there all day before a crackling fire, eating and resting, but we needed to gain as much distance as we could from the gorge’s entrance at the gateway to the Wendrush. And so we loaded our horses and drank one of Master Juwain’s teas to drive the weariness from our bodies. Then we set forth into the gorge, winding our way around walls of naked rock deeper into the Kul Kavaakurk’s shadows.
As we kicked our way over the rattling stones along the riverbank, I looked back behind us often and listened for any sign of pursuit. I sniffed at the cool air and reached out with a deeper sense, as well. I heard water rushing along its course and smelled spring leaves fluttering in the wind, but the only eyes upon us were those of the squirrels or the birds singing in the branches of the gorge’s many trees. No one, it seemed, followed us. Nothing sought to harm us. The only enemy we faced that morning, I thought, dwelled within. The horror of what lay behind us in the previous day’s butchery haunted all of us, even those who had not actually witnessed the battle. We feared what lay ahead in the vast unmapped reaches of the lower Nagarshath. Fear, in truth, was the worst of all our inner demons, for who among us did not gaze up at the sky and wonder if the Dark One could devour the very sun?
It was after dinner that evening when Maram finally let fear take hold of him. He rose up from the campfire to tend his horse’s bruised hoof, or so he said. But I followed him and found him in the stand of trees where the horses were tethered, rummaging through the saddlebags of Master Juwain’s remount. Quick as a weasel stealing eggs, he prized out a bottle of brandy and uncorked it. I ran over to him and slapped my hand upon his wrist with such force that I nearly knocked the bottle from his hand. And I shouted at him, ‘What of your vow?’
And he shouted back at me, ‘What of your vow, then?’
I clamped my fingers harder around his massive wrist as he struggled to bring the mouth of the bottle up to his fat lips. And I asked him, ‘What vow?’
‘Ah, what you said when we first met, that ours would be a lifelong friendship. What kind of friend keeps his friend from drinking away his pain?’
‘The kind who would keep him from a greater pain.’
‘You speak as if we have endless moments left to us.’
‘Our whole lives, Maram.’
‘Yes, our whole lives, as long as they will be. But how long will they be? Didn’t you hear anything of what was said last night? Months we have, until Morjin frees Angra Mainyu, perhaps only days. And so why not allow me what little joy I can find in this forsaken place?’
I let go his arm and stood facing him. ‘Drink then, if that is what you must do!’
‘I shall! I shall! Only, do not look at me like that!’
I continued staring through the twilight into his large, brown eyes.
‘Ah, damn you, Val!’ he said more softly. ‘I’ll do what I want, do you understand? What I choose. And what I choose now is not to drink after all. You’ve ruined the moment, too bad.’
So saying, he put the cork back in the bottle and sealed it with an angry slap of his hand. He tucked it back into Master Juwain’s saddlebag. Then he stood beneath the gorge’s towering wall staring at me.
Our shouts drew the others. They stood around us in a half-circle as Maram said, by way of explanation, ‘All that talk last night of Angra Mainyu and worlds ending in fire – it was too much!’
Kane eyed the poorly tied strings of the saddlebag but did not comment upon them. Then he said, ‘Perhaps it was.’
There was a kindness in his voice that I had heard only rarely. His black eyes held Maram in the light of compassion, and that was rarer still.
‘There are only six of us against Morjin and all his armies!’ Maram cried out. ‘Eight, if we count the children! How can we possibly keep the Dragon at bay while we find the Maitreya?’
‘We were one fewer,’ Kane said, ‘when we found our way into Argattha.’
‘But Morjin is stronger now, isn’t he? I saw this. So damn strong. And there is Angra Mainyu, too.’
Kane regarded him as a deep light played in his eyes. And then he snarled out, ‘Strong, you say? Ha, they are weak!’
His words astonished us. I stared at him as I shook my head. He was a man, I thought, who could hold within fierce contradictions, like two tigers in rut locked inside the same small cage.
‘So, weak they are,’ he growled out again. ‘Who are the strong, then, the truly powerful? They who follow the Law of the One, even though their faithfulness leads to their death. They who bring the design of the One into its fullest flowering, for in creation lies true life. But Morjin and his master create nothing. They fear everything, and their own feebleness most of all. So, fearing, thus they hate, and in hating chain themselves to all that is hateful and foul. Daj escaped from Argattha, Estrella, too, but how can the two Dragons ever break free from the hellhole that they have made for themselves with every nail they have pounded into flesh and every eye they have gouged out? From the very chains that they have forged to make themselves slaves? So. So. Knowing this, they would cloak their slave souls in royal robes and seek to conquer others, as proof of their power over life – and death. But the truly free can never be conquered, eh? At least not conquered in their souls. The stars can all die, their radiance, too, but not the light of the One. It is this that terrifies Angra Mainyu, and Morjin, too. And that is why, in the end, we’ll win.’
His words stunned Maram more than they soothed him. But for the moment, at least, they drove back the demons that impelled him to find solace in his brandy bottle. He stood proud and tall staring at Kane, transformed from a drunkard into a Valari knight. And he said, ‘Do you really think we can win?’
‘So, we must win – and so we will.’
Kane, I thought, understood the nature of evil better than any man. But it was the nature of evil, the truly horrible thing about it, that understanding alone would not keep evil from devouring a man alive.
‘We will win,’ Master Juwain affirmed, looking at Maram, ‘so long as we do not let down our guard. Have you been practicing the Light Meditations?’
‘Ah, perhaps not as often as I should,’ Maram said.
‘Well, what about the Way Rhymes, then? Memorizing them would be a better balm than brandy.’
‘Ah, I’m too tired, and it’s too late. My brain aches almost as much as my poor body.’
‘Then I’ll prepare you a tisane that will wake you up.’
‘Ah, what if I don’t want to wake up?’
Master Juwain rubbed the back of his shiny head as he regarded Maram. He seemed at a loss for words.
It was Liljana who came to his rescue. She waggled her finger at Maram, then poked it below his ribs as she said, ‘How many nights have I stayed up cooking and cleaning so that you might go to bed with a full belly? Master Juwain has asked you to memorize his verses, and so you should, for our sakes, if not your own.’
Everyone looked at Maram then, and he held up his hands in defeat – or in victory, depending on one’s point of view.
‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll learn these silly rhymes, if that’s what you all want. It will be easier than everyone nagging me all the time.’
Master Juwain’s smile lasted only as long as it took Maram to add, ‘I’ll begin tomorrow, then.’
Kane suddenly took a step closer to him and stood staring at him like a great cat tensing to spring. I knew that he was only testing Maram, and would never lay hands upon him. Maram, however, was not so sure of this.
‘All right, all right,’ he said again with a heavy sigh. He turned to Master Juwain. ‘What verses for tonight, then?’
At Master Juwain’s prompting, I heard Maram recite:
At gorge’s end, a wooded vale …
And so it went as we returned to our places around the fire and drank the spicy teas that Master Juwain made for us. It was much to his purpose that we should learn the Way Rhymes, too, and so we took turns intoning the verses and correcting each other when we made mistakes. We did not continue our practice quite as long as Master Juwain might have wished, for we all were quite tired. But when it came time to retire for the night, we took the words into sleep, and perhaps into our dreams. And that was a good thing, I thought, for the essence of the Way Rhymes was the promise that if a man took one step after another, in the right direction, he would always reach his journey’s end.
The next day dawned clear, as we could tell from the band of blue that slowly brightened above us. We continued our long walk through the gorge, over loose stone and through stands of cottonwood trees that gradually showed a sprinkling of elms and oaks the deeper we penetrated into the White Mountains. Twenty miles, at least, we had travelled since our battle with Morjin and his Red Knights. None of us knew the length of the Kul Kavaakurk, for Master Juwain’s rhymes did not tell of that. But here, deep in this cleft in the earth, where the wind whooshed as through a bellows’ funnel and tore at our hair and garments, the gorge seemed to go on and on forever.
And then, abruptly, as we rounded yet another bend in the stream, the gorge opened out into a broad valley. A forest covered its slopes, gentle and undulating to the north but still quite steep to the south of the river. For the first time in two days, we had all the sun we could hope for; its warm rays poured down upon rock, earth and leaf, and filled all the great bowl before us. Smaller mountains, cloaked in oak and birch with aspens and hemlock higher up, edged the rim of this bowl; beyond rose the great white peaks of the Nagarshath. The valley continued along the line of the gorge, toward the west, and it seemed that our course should be to follow the river straight through it. But there were other exits from the valley that we might choose: clefts and saddles between the slopes around us, through which smaller streams flowed down into the river. Any one of these, I thought, might lead us up toward the Brotherhood’s school, though the way would obviously be difficult and dangerous.
‘Well,’ Master Juwain said to Maram as we walked out into the valley, ‘what is our way?’
And Maram recited:
At gorge’s end, a wooded vale;
Its southern slopes show shell-strewn shale.
Toward setting sun the vale divides;
To left or right the seeker strides.
Recall the tale or go astray:
King Koru-Ki set sail this way.
Maram stood next to his horse licking his lips as he glanced to the left. He said, ‘Ah, who devised these rhymes, anyway? “Its southern slopes sow hell-strewn shale.” Now there’s a tongue-twister for you! I can hardly say it!’
‘But it’s not so hard!’ Daj said, laughing at him. Then quick as a twittering bird, he piped out perfectly:
Its southern slopes show shell-strewn shale.
Master Juwain beamed a smile at him and patted his head. And then he said to Maram, ‘The Rhymes aren’t supposed to be easy to say but to memorize – hence the rhythm and rhyme. The alliteration, too.’
‘Well, at least I did memorize it,’ Maram said. ‘Little good that it would do me if you weren’t here to interpret for us.’
The Way Rhymes, of course, might be meant to be easy to memorize, but they were designed so that only the Brotherhood’s adepts and masters might resolve them correctly. Thus did the Brotherhood guard its secrets.
‘Come, come,’ Master Juwain said to him. ‘These lines are as transparent as the air in front of your nose.’
Maram pointed at the turbulent water rushing past us and muttered, ‘You mean, as clear as river mud.’
‘What don’t you understand? Clearly, we’ve passed the Ass’s Ears and the Kul Kavaakurk, and have come out into this valley, as the verse tells. Look over there, at the rock! Surely that is shale, is it not?’
We all looked where he pointed, across the river at the nearly vertical slopes to the south of us. The rock there was dark, striated and crumbly, and certainly appeared to be shale.
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Maram said to him. ‘You know your stones. But does it bear shells? Who would want to cross the river to find out?’
Kane coughed out a deep curse then, and mounted his horse. He drove the big bay out into the river, which looked to be swift enough to sweep a man away but not so huge a beast. In a few mighty surges, his horse crossed to the other bank and soaked the stone there with water running off his flanks. Kane then rode up through the trees a hundred yards before dismounting and making his way up the steep slope on foot. We saw him disappear behind a great oak as he approached a slab of shale.
‘He’s as mad as Koru-Ki himself,’ Maram said, watching for him. ‘He’d cross an ocean just to see what was on the other side.’
A few moments later, Kane returned as he had gone, bearing a huge smile on his face.
‘Well?’ Maram said. ‘Did you see any of these shells-in-shale?’
‘Many,’ Kane told him as his smile grew wider.
‘I don’t believe you – you’re lying!’
‘Go see for yourself,’ Kane said, pointing across the river.
‘Do you think I won’t?’ Maram eyed the swift water that cut through the valley and shook his head. ‘Ah, perhaps I won’t, after all. It’s enough that one of us risked his life proving out those silly lines. You did see shells, didn’t you? She sells? I mean, sea shells?’
‘I’ve told you that I did. What more do you want of me?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t have hurt to bring back one of these shelled rocks, would it?’
Kane laughed at this and produced a flat, thick piece of slate as long as his hand. He gave it to Maram. All of us gathered around as Maram stared at the grayish slate and fingered the little, stone-like shells embedded within it.
‘Impossible!’ Maram said. ‘I saw shells like these on the shore of the Great Northern Sea!’
‘But then how did they get into this rock?’ Daj asked him.
Kane stood silently staring at the rock as the rest of us examined it more closely. Not even Master Juwain had an answer for him.
‘Perhaps,’ Atara said, ‘there really was once a great flood that drowned the whole world, as the legends tell.’
Kane’s black eyes bored into the rock, and he seemed lost in endless layers of time. He finally said to us, ‘So, the earth is stranger than we know. Stranger than we can know. Who will ever plumb all her mysteries?’
‘Well,’ Maram said, hefting the rock and then tucking it into his saddlebag, ‘this is one mystery I’ll keep for myself, if you don’t mind. If I ever return home, I can show this as proof that I found sea shells at the top of a mountain!’
I smiled at this because it was not Maram who had found the rock, nor had it quite been taken from a mountain’s top. It cheered me to know, however, that he still contemplated a homecoming. And so he held inside at least some hope.
‘Your way homeward,’ Master Juwain said to him, ‘lies through this valley. Are we agreed that we must traverse it?’
‘Toward the setting sun,’ Maram said, pointing to the west. ‘But I can’t see if the valley truly divides there.’
I stood with my hand shielding my eyes as I peered up the valley. It seemed to come to an end upon a great wedge of a mountain rising up to the west. But it was a good thirty miles distant, and the folds and fissures of the mountains along the valley’s rim blocked a clear line of sight.
‘Then let us go on,’ Atara said, ‘and we shall see what we shall see.’
A faint smile played upon her lips, and it gladdened my heart to know that she could joke about her blindness. Then she mounted her horse and said, ‘Come, Fire!’ She guided her mare along the strip of grass that paralleled the river, and it gladdened me even more to see that her second sight had mysteriously returned to her.
And so we followed the river into the west. It was a day of sunshine and warm spring breezes. Wildflowers in sprays of purple and white blanketed the earth around us where the trees gave way to acres of grass. It seemed that we were all alone here in this quiet, beautiful place. Our spirits rose along with the terrain, not so high, perhaps, as the great peaks shining in the distance, but high enough to hope that we might have at least a day or two of surcease from battle and travail.
And so it came to be. We made camp that first night in the valley on some good, grassy ground above the river. While Kane, Maram and I worked at fortifying it, and Liljana, Estrella and Daj set to preparing our dinner, Atara went off into the woods to hunt. Fortune smiled upon her, for she returned scarcely an hour later with a young deer slung across her shoulders. That night we made feast on roasted venison, along with our rushk cakes and basketfuls of raspberries that Estrella found growing on bushes in the woods. Master Juwain chanted the Way Rhymes to Maram, and later Kane brought out the mandolet that he had inherited from Alphanderry. It was a rare thing for him to play for us, and lovely and strange, but that night he plucked the mandolet’s strings and sang out songs in a deep and beautiful voice. He seemed almost happy, and that made me happy, too. Songs of glory he sang for us, tales of triumph and the exaltation of all things at the end of time. He held inside a great sadness, as deep and turbulent as oceans, and this came out in a mournful shading to his melodies. But there, too, in some secret chamber of his heart, dwelled a fire that was hotter and brighter than anything that Angra Mainyu could ever hope to wield. As he sang, this ineffable flame seemed to push his words out into the valley where they rang like silver bells, and then up above the snow-capped mountains through clear, cold air straight toward the brilliant stars.
With the making of this immortal music, Flick burst forth out of the darkness above the mandolet’s vibrating strings. At first this strange being appeared as a silvery meshwork, impossibly fine-spun, with millions of clear tiny jewels like uncut diamonds sewn into it. Strands of fire streamed from these manifold points throughout the lattice, making the whole of his form sparkle with a lovely light. The longer that Kane played, the brighter this light became. I watched with a deep joy as the radiance summoned out of neverness many colors: scarlet and gold, forest green and sky blue – and a deep and shimmering glorre. And still Kane sang, and now the colors scintillated and swirled, then mingled, deepened and coalesced into the form and face of Alphanderry. And then our lost companion stood by the fire before us. His brown skin and curly black hair seemed almost real, as did his fine features and straight white teeth, revealed by his wide and impulsive smile. Even more real was his rich laughter, which recalled the immortal parts of him: his beauty, gladness of life and grace. Once before, in Tria, this Alphanderry, as messenger of the Galadin, had come into being in order to warn me of a great danger.
‘Ahura Alarama,’ I said, whispering Flick’s true name. And then, ‘Alphanderry.’
‘Valashu Elahad,’ he replied. ‘Val.’
Kane stopped singing then, and put aside his mandolet to stare in amazement at his old friend.
‘He speaks!’ Daj cried out. ‘Like he did in King Kiritan’s hall!’
