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On the wall above the table hung a bright tapestry that Lord Harsha’s dead wife had once woven. He gazed at it with an obvious fondness, and he said, ‘Of course a man should come to love his wife. But it is best if marriage comes first, and so then a man does not let love sweep away his reason so that he loses sight of the more important things.’
‘But what could be more important than love?’ Maram asked.
And Lord Harsha told him, ‘Honor, above all else.’
‘But I had to honor my duty to Val, didn’t I?’
Lord Harsha nodded his head. ‘Certainly you did. But before you went off with him, you might have married my daughter and given her your name.’
‘But I –’
‘Too, you might have given her your estates, such as they are, and most important of all, a child.’
As the look of longing lighting up Behira’s face grew even brighter, Maram closed his mouth, for he seemed to have run out of objections. And then he said, ‘But our journeys were dangerous! You can’t imagine! I didn’t want to leave behind a fatherless child.’
Lord Harsha sighed at this, then said, ‘In our land, since the Great Battle, there are many fatherless children. And too few men to be husbands to all the widows and maidens.’
All my life, I had heard of the ancient Battle of the Sarburn referred to in this way, but it seemed strange for Lord Harsha to give the recent Battle of the Culhadosh Commons that name as well.
‘Sar Joshu himself,’ Lord Harsha continued, ‘lost his father and both his brothers there.’
Joshu looked straight at me then, and I felt in him the pain of a loss that was scarcely less than my own. I remembered that his mother had died giving him birth, while his two older sisters had been married off. Joshu had inherited his family’s rich farm lands only a few miles from here, and who could blame Lord Harsha for wanting to join estates and take this orphan into his own family?
‘Sar Joshu,’ I said, looking down the table. I studied the two diamonds set into the silver ring that encircled his finger. ‘Before the battle, my brother gave you your warrior’s ring. And now you wear that of a knight?’
Sar Joshu bowed his head at this, but seemed too modest to say anything. And so Lord Harsha told us of his deeds: ‘You came late, Lord Valashu, to the fight with the Ikurians, and so you did not witness Sar Joshu’s slaying of two knights in defense of Lord Asaru. Nor the lance wound through his lung that unhorsed him and nearly killed him. In reward for his valor, Lord Sharad, Lord Avijan and myself agreed that he should be knighted.’
Now I could only bow my head to Joshu. ‘Then Mesh has another fine knight to help make up for those who have fallen.’
‘Nothing,’ Joshu said, ‘can ever replace those who fell at the Great Battle.’
I thought of my father and my six brothers, and I said, ‘No, of course not. But as I have had to learn, life still must go on.’
‘And that,’ Lord Harsha said, ‘is exactly the point I have been trying to make. Morjin’s cursed armies cut down a whole forest of warriors and knights. It’s time new seeds were planted and new trees were grown.’
I considered this as I studied the way that Joshu looked at Behira. I sensed in him a burning passion – but not for her.
‘Sar Joshu,’ I asked, ‘have you ever been in love?’
He looked down at his hands, and he said simply, ‘Yes, Lord Valashu.’
As Behira took charge of finally passing around the roasted chickens, blueberry muffins, mashed potatoes and asparagus that she had prepared for dinner, it came out that Joshu had indeed known the kind of all-consuming love that makes the very stars weep – and he still did. It seemed that he had been smitten by a young woman named Sarai Garvar, of the Lake Country Garvars. But a great lord had married her instead.
‘My father was to have spoken with her father, Lord Garvar, after the battle,’ Joshu told us. Although he shrugged his shoulders, I felt his throat tighten with a great sadness. ‘But my father died, my brothers, too, and so it nearly was with me. And so I lost her to another. Everyone knows how bitter Lord Tanu was when the enemy killed his wife during the sack of the Elahad castle. So who can blame him for wanting to take a new wife? And who can blame Lord Garvar for wanting to make a match with one of Mesh’s greatest lords?’
Lord Tanu, of course, had been not only my father’s second-in-command but held large estates around Godhra, and his family owned many of the smithies there. As Joshu had said, who could blame any father for wanting to join fortunes with such a man?
‘But Lord Tanu is old!’ Behira suddenly called out as she banged a spoonful of potatoes against her plate. She seemed outraged less for Joshu’s sake than for Lord Tanu’s new wife. ‘And Sarai is only my age!’
‘Here, now!’ Lord Harsha said, laying his hand upon her arm. ‘Mind the crockery, will you? Your mother made it herself out of good clay before you were born!’
Behira looked down at the disk of plain earthenware before her, and she fell into a silence. And I said to Joshu, ‘Then if any man should appreciate Maram’s feelings in this matter, it is you.’
‘I do,’ he agreed, nodding his head sadly to Maram. ‘But Lord Harsha is right: how can any man’s feelings count at a time such as this?’
Although I sensed his sympathy for Maram, there was steel in him too, and great stubbornness. I knew that, having lost one prospective bride, he would not easily surrender what Lord Harsha had rightly deemed as a good match.
For a while we busied ourselves eating the hearty food that Behira had prepared us. For dessert, she brought out a cherry pie and cheese, and made us chicory tea as well. But Maram wanted something stronger than this – stronger even than the black beer that he had been swilling all through dinner. And so he announced that he had to retrieve a gift from the barn; he nudged my knee beneath the table to indicate that I should follow him.
We stepped out into a warm spring night full of chirping crickets and twinkling stars. We lit the lantern that Lord Harsha had given us, then went into the barn, with its smells of cattle and chicken droppings. We rummaged around in the saddlebags that we had placed on the straw near our horses’ stalls. And Maram said to me, ‘This is not the homecoming I had imagined.’
I nodded my head at this, then asked him: ‘But can you really blame Lord Harsha for wanting what is best for Behira?’
‘I am best for her!’ Maram half-bellowed. Then his voice softened as he said, ‘I love her – this time, I’m really sure that I do.’
I tried not to smile at this, and I said, ‘But you have put off the wedding, again and again. Some might take this as a sign that you don’t really want to marry her’
‘That doesn’t mean I’m ready to let that little squire take her!’
‘Sar Joshu,’ I told him, ‘is a full knight now, and a good man.’
‘I don’t care if he’s a damn angel! He doesn’t love Behira as I do, and she doesn’t love him! Will you help with this, Val?’
I thought about this for a while then said, ‘You’re my best friend, but what I won’t do is to help you make Behira into an old maid.’
‘But I will marry her, if I can, as soon as our business here is done – I swear I will!’
‘Will you?’
He found his sword resting upon a bale of hay, and drew it out of its scabbard. He laid his hand on the flat of the blade and said, ‘I swear by all that I honor that I will marry Behira!’
I gripped his wrist, and urged him to sheathe his sword. Then I pointed at the bottle of brandy that Maram had pulled out of his saddlebags and set on top of the hay, too. I took his hand and placed it on the bottle.
‘Swear by all that you love,’ I told him, ‘that you will marry her’
‘Ah, all right then – I do, I do!’
‘Swear by me, Maram,’ I said, looking at him.
In the lantern’s flickering light, Maram looked back at me, and finally said, ‘Sometimes I think you ask too much of me, but I do swear by you.’
‘All right then,’ I said, clapping him on the shoulder. I retrieved the lantern from its hook on one of the barn’s wooden supports. ‘I will do what I can. It may be that there is something that Sar Joshu desires much more than marriage.’
We went back into the house, and Maram presented the brandy to Lord Harsha as a gift. He told him, ‘It’s the last of the finest vintage I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve been saving this bottle for you for at least a thousand miles.’
‘Thank you,’ Lord Harsha said, holding up the bottle to the room’s candles. Then, with a wry smile, he asked, ‘Will you help me drink it?’
After Behira had retrieved some cups from the adjacent great room and Lord Harsha had poured a bit of brandy into each, I gave them presents, too. For Behira I had silk bags full of rare spices: anise, pepper, cardamom, clove. To Lord Harsha I gave a simple steel throwing knife. He hefted it in his rough hands and promised to add it to his collection of swords, knives, maces, halberds and other weapons mounted on the wall of his great room. When I told him the story behind the knife, he sat looking at me and shaking his head.
‘This was Kane’s, and he wanted you to have it,’ I said to him. ‘When we were made captive in King Arsu’s encampment, one of Morjin’s High Priests made Kane cast the knife at Estrella and split an apple placed on top of her head.’
Lord Harsha’s hand closed around the knife’s handle as he regarded Estrella in amazement – and concern.
But Estrella remained nearly motionless nibbling on a gooey cherry that she had plucked from a slice of pie. Her large, dark eyes filled with a strange light. In the past, she had suffered greater torments than that which the Kallimun priest, Arch Uttam, had inflicted on her. It was her grace, however, to dwell in the present, most of the time, and here and now she seemed to be happy just sitting safe and sound with those she loved.
‘Well, you have stories to tell,’ Lord Harsha called out, ‘and we must hear them. Let’s drink a toast to your safe return from wherever it was that the stars called you.’
So saying, he lifted up his cup, and we all joined him in drinking Maram’s brandy.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘it’s clear that you haven’t come home just to see Maram happily wed to my daughter’
It came time to give an account of our journey. I said that we had set forth into the wilds of Ea on a quest to find the Maitreya. Many parts of our story I could not relate, or did not want to. It wouldn’t do for Lord Harsha – or anyone – to learn the location of the Brotherhood’s school or of the greatest of the gelstei crystals that they kept there. Of the terrible darkness I had found within myself in our passage of the Skadarak I kept silent, although I did speak of the Black Jade buried in the earth there and how this evil thing called out to capture one’s soul. Likewise I did not want to have to explain to Behira that the round scars marking Maram’s cheek and body had been torn into him by the teeth of a monstrous woman called Jezi Yaga. Nothing, however, kept me from telling of our journey through the Red Desert and crossing of the hellish and uncrossable Tar Harath. Behira listened in wonderment to the story of the little people’s magic wood hidden in the burning sands of the world’s worst wasteland – and how this Vild, as we called it, had quickened Alphanderry’s being so that he could speak and dwell almost as a real man. She wanted to hear more of the Singing Caves of Senta than I could have related in a month of evenings. At last though, I had to move on to our nightmarish search through Hesperu: nearly the darkest and worst of all the Dragon kingdoms. It was there, I told Behira and her father, in a village called Jhamrul, that we had come across a healer named Bemossed.
‘With a laying on of his hand,’ I said to Lord Harsha, ‘he healed a wound to Maram’s chest that even Master Juwain could not heal. In Bemossed gathers all that is best and brightest in men. It is almost certain that he is the Maitreya.’
Lord Harsha sipped his brandy as he looked at me. He said, ‘Once before you believed another was the Maitreya.’
Truly I had: myself. And the lies that I had told myself – and others – had inexorably brought Morjin’s armies down upon my land and had nearly destroyed all that I loved.
‘Once,’ I said to Lord Harsha, ‘I was wrong. This time I am not’
Now Lord Harsha took an even longer pull at his brandy as his single eye fixed upon me. And he said to me, ‘Something has changed in you, Lord Elahad. The way you speak – I cannot doubt that you tell the truth.’
‘Then do not doubt this either: when it is safe, the Maitreya will come forth. The Free Kingdoms must be made ready for him. And our kingdom, before all others, must be set in order. It is why I have returned.’
‘To become king!’ he said as his eye gleamed. ‘I knew it! Valashu Elahad, crowned King of Mesh – well, lad, I can’t tell you how often I’ve wished that day would come!’
Then his face fell into a frown, and the light went out of him. ‘But after what’s happened, how can that day ever come?’
I noticed Joshu Kadar studying me intently, and I asked, ‘Then has another already been made king?’
‘What!’ Lord Harsha said. ‘Have you had no news at all?’
‘No – we entered Mesh in secret, and have spoken to no one.’
‘Likely, it’s good that you haven’t. There are those who would not want you to gain your father’s throne. I can’t think that they would resort to a knife in the back, but as I said, these are bad times.’
‘Bad times, indeed,’ I said, looking down the table at him, ‘if you would even speak of such a thing.’
‘Well, with your father having sired seven sons, I never thought I would live to see such a day: Mesh’s throne empty, and at least three lords vying to claim it.’
I let my hand rest on my sword’s hilt, and I said, ‘Lord Tomavar, certainly’
Lord Harsha nodded his head. ‘He is the greatest contender – and he has become your enemy. He blames you for what happened to his wife.’
I looked down at my sword’s great diamond pommel glimmering in the candlelight, and I thought of how Morjin’s men had carried off the beautiful Vareva – most likely to ravishment and death. How could I blame Lord Tomavar for being stricken to his soul when I already blamed myself?
‘Too many,’ Lord Harsha told me, ‘still believe that you abandoned the castle out of vainglory. And then told the baldest of lies.’
‘But that itself is a lie!’ Joshu Kadar called out. His hand pressed against his chest as if his brandy had stuck in his throat and burned him. ‘Everyone who knows Valashu Elahad knows this! I have spoken of this everywhere! Many of my friends have, as well. Lord Valashu, they say, led us to victory in the Great Battle and should have been made king.’
‘He should have,’ Lord Harsha agreed with a sigh. ‘But on the battlefield, five thousand warriors stood for Lord Valashu, and eight thousand against, and that is that.’
‘That is not that!’ Joshu half-shouted. It must have alarmed him, I sensed, to speak with such vehemence to a lord knight who might become his father-in-law. ‘If the warriors were to stand again, they would acclaim Lord Valashu – I know they would!’
Lord Harsha sighed again, and he poured both Joshu and himself more brandy. And he said, ‘If the warriors were free to gather and stand, it might be so. But we might as well hope that horses had wings so that we could just fly to battle.’
He told us then that Lord Tomavar had made many of the knights and warriors who followed him swear oaths of loyalty in support of his kingship. In order for them to stand for another, he would have to relieve them of their oaths. So it was with Lord Tanu and Lord Avijan, the two other major contenders for Mesh’s throne.
‘Lord Avijan!’ I called out, shaking my head. This young lord resided in his family’s castle near Mount Eluru just to the north of the Valley of the Swans. ‘My father was very fond of him and trusted no man more.’
‘And no man is more trustworthy,’ Lord Harsha said. ‘Of all Mesh’s lords, none has spoken more forcefully in favor of your becoming king. But when you went off with your friends and did not return, he thought you must be dead, as everyone did. He never wanted to put himself forward against Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu, but we persuaded him that he must’
‘We, Lord Harsha?’ I said to him.
I felt the blood and brandy heating up his rough, old face as he said, ‘Myself, yes, and Lord Sharad and Sar Jessu – and many others. Almost every warrior around Silvassu and the Valley of the Swans.’
‘Then have you taken oaths to support Lord Avijan?’
Lord Harsha rubbed at his face to hide his shame. ‘We had to. Otherwise we would have come under Lord Tomavar’s boot, or Lord Tanu’s. In any case …’
‘Yes?’
‘In any case, only one can become king, and we all agreed that no one deserves the throne more than Lord Avijan.’
I remained silent as I squeezed the hilt of my sword, and I felt Maram, Master Juwain and Liljana looking at me.
‘No one, of course,’ Lord Harsha went on, ‘except yourself. But we all thought you would never return.’
I gazed at him and said, ‘But I have returned.’
‘That you have, lad,’ he said. ‘And Lord Avijan would release us all from our oaths and be the first to stand for you. But Lord Tomavar commands six thousand warriors, and another four thousand follow Lord Tanu, and they will surely oppose you if you come forth.’
Although Atara, sitting near the middle of the table, kept her face still and stern, I could almost feel her heart beating in time with my own. I wondered if she had foreseen this moment in her scryer’s crystal sphere or what might befall next.
‘Will Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar,’ I asked Lord Harsha, ‘oppose me so far as to go to war?’
I would rather die, I thought, than see Meshians slay Meshians.
‘Who can say?’ Lord Harsha muttered. ‘These are bad times, very bad. And since the Great Battle, Mesh is weaker, much too weak. New trees we need to stand in the ranks and face our enemies, but we’ll be a whole generation growing them. Our enemies know this. Already, it’s said, the Waashians are looking for a way to attack us. And the Urtuk already have: they invaded through the Eshur pass last fall. They weren’t many, only a thousand, and they might have been just testing our strength – and so Lord Tomavar’s army threw them back easily enough. And then there is Anjo.’
‘Anjo!’ I said. ‘But Anjo has never threatened us.’
‘No, and that is exactly the point: Anjo hasn’t had a real king in two hundred years, and can threaten no one. Her dukes and barons still battle each other bloody. You will not have heard that only two months ago, the Ishkans annexed Adar and Natesh. And King Hadaru still looks for other of Anjo’s domains to bite off. Lord Tanu has vowed that this must never happen to Mesh.’
‘And it must not!’ I told him.
‘No – and so Lord Tanu has said that Mesh must have a new king, and soon, if we don’t want to wind up like Anjo. Lord Tomavar has said the same thing. They have each demanded that the other stand aside, and have made threats.’
