скачать книгу бесплатно
‘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.
2 (#ulink_7d7ad193-b7aa-5a71-8fa2-84442605d830)
As soon as we entered this stand of ancient trees, it grew cooler and darker. The forest that filled the Valley of the Swans was mostly of elm, maple and oak with a scattering of the occasional alder or birch. Their great canopies opened out a hundred feet above the forest floor, nearly blocking out the rays of the cloud-shrouded sun. The light was softened by the millions of fluttering leaves, and deepened to a primeval green. I could almost smell this marvelous color as I could the ferns and flowers, the animal droppings and the loamy earth. Through the still air came the tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker and the buzzing of bees; I heard a pair of bluebirds calling to each other and the whispering of my own breath.
We walked deeper into the woods across the valley almost due east toward the unseen Mount Eluru. I was as sure of this direction as I was of the beating of my heart. Once a sea captain from the Elyssu, on a visit to our castle, had shown me a little piece of iron called a lodestone that pointed always toward the north. In my wandering of Mesh’s forests and mountains, I had always found my way as if I had millions of tiny lodestones in my blood pointing always toward home. And now I moved steadily through the great trees toward something vast and deep that called to me from the forest farther within. What was calling me, however, I didn’t quite know.
I felt something else there that seemed as out of place as a snow tiger in a jungle or the setting of the sun in the east. The air, dark and heavy, almost screamed with a sense of wrongness that chilled me to the bone. I felt eyes watching me: those of the squirrels and the cawing crows and perhaps others as well. For some reason, I suddenly thought of the lines from The Death of Elahad – Elahad the Great, my distant ancestor, the fabled first king of the Valari who had brought the Lightstone to Ea long, long ago. I shuddered as I thought of how Elahad’s brother, Aryu, had killed Elahad in a dark wood very like this one, and then, ages before Morjin had ever conceived of such a crime, claimed the Lightstone for his own:
The stealing of the gold,The evil knife, the cold – The cold that freezes breath,The nothingness of death.
My breath steamed out into the coolness of the silent trees as I caught a faint, distant scent that disturbed me. The sense of wrongness pervading the woods grew stronger. Perhaps, I thought, I was only dwelling on the wrongness of Elahad’s murder. I couldn’t help it. Wasn’t all killing of men by men wrong? I asked myself.
And what of killing, itself? Men hunted animals, and that was the way the world was. I thought of this as the scar above my eye began to tingle with a burning coldness. I remembered that once, not far from here, I had tried to kill a bear; I remembered that sometimes bears went wrong in their hearts and hunted men just for the sport of it.
I gripped my bow tightly as I listened for a bear or other large animal crashing through the bushes and bracken all about us. I listened to Maram stepping close behind me and to Asaru following him. Maram, curiously, despite his size, could move quietly when he wanted to. And he could shoot straight enough, as the Delian royalty are taught. We Valari, of course, are taught three fundamental things: to wield a sword, to tell the truth, and to abide in the One. But we are also taught to shoot our long yew bows with deadly accuracy, and some of us, as my grandfather had taught me, to move across even broken terrain almost silently. I believe that if we had chanced upon a bear feasting upon wild newberries or honey, we might have stepped up close to him unheard and touched him before being discovered.
That is, we might have done this if not for Maram’s continual comments and complaints. Once, when I had bent low to examine the round, brown pellets left behind by a deer, he leaned up against a tree and grumbled, ‘How much farther do we have to go? Are you sure we’re not lost? Are you sure there are any deer in these wretched woods?’
Asaru’s voice hissed out in a whisper, ‘Shhh – if there are any deer about, you’ll scare them away.’
‘All right,’ Maram muttered as we moved off again. He belched, and a bloom of beer vapor obliterated the perfume of the wildflowers. ‘But don’t go so fast. And watch out for snakes. Any poison ivy.’
I smiled as I tugged gently on the sleeve of his red tunic to get him going again. But I didn’t watch for snakes, for the only deadly ones were the water dragons which hunted mostly along the streams. And the only poison ivy that was to be found in Mesh grew in the mountains beyond the Lower Raaswash near Ishka.
We walked for most of an hour while the clouds built into great black thunderheads high in the sky and seemed to press down through the trees with an almost palpable pressure. Still I felt something calling me, and I moved still deeper into the woods. I saw an old elm shagged with moss, a clear sign that we were approaching a place I remembered very well. And then, as Maram drew in a quick breath, I turned to see him pointing at the exposed, gnarly root of a great oak tree.
‘Look,’ he murmured. “What’s wrong with that squirrel?’
A squirrel, I saw, was lying flat on the root with its arms and legs splayed out. Its dark eye stared out at us but appeared not to see us. Its sides shook with quick, shallow breathing.
I closed my eyes for a moment, and I could feel the pain where something sharp had punctured the squirrel beneath the fur of its hind leg. It was the sharp, hot pain of infection, which burned up the leg and consumed the squirrel with its fire.
‘Val?’
Something dark and vast had its claws sunk into the squirrel’s fluttering heart, and I could feel this terrible pulling just as surely as I could Maram’s fear of death. This was my gift; this was my glory; this was my curse. What others feel, I feel as well. All my life I had suffered from this unwanted empathy. And I had told only one other person about its terrors and joys.
Asaru moved closer to Maram and pointed at the squirrel as he whispered, Val has always been able to talk to animals.’
It was not Asaru. Although he certainly knew of my love of animals and sometimes looked at me fearfully when I opened my heart to him, he sensed only that I was strange in ways that he could never quite understand. But my grandfather had known, for he had shared my gift; indeed, it was he who gave it to me. I thought that like the color of my eyes, it must have been passed along in my family’s blood – but skipping generations and touching brother and sister capriciously. I thought as well that my grandfather regarded it as truly a gift and not an affliction. But he had died before he could teach me how to bear it.
For a few moments I stared at the squirrel, touching eyes. I suddenly remembered other lines from The Death of Elahad; I remembered that Master Juwain, at the Brotherhood’s school, had never approved of this ancient song, because, as he said, it was full of dread and despair:
And down into the dark,
No eyes, no lips, no spark.
The dying of the light,
The neverness of night.
Maram asked softly, ‘Should we finish him?’
‘No,’ I said, holding up my hand. ‘It will be dead soon enough. Let it be.’
Let it be, I told myself, and so I tried. I closed myself to this dying animal then. To keep out the waves of pain nauseating me, by habit and instinct, I surrounded my heart with walls as high and thick as those of my father’s castle. After a while, even as I watched the light go out of the squirrel’s eye, I felt nothing.
Almost nothing. When I closed my eyes, I remembered for the thousandth time how much I had always hated living inside of castles. As much as fortresses keeping enemies out, they are prisons of cold stone keeping people within.
‘Let’s go,’ I said abruptly.
Where does the light go when the light goes out? I wondered.
Asaru, it seemed, had also tried to distance himself from this little death. He moved off slowly through the woods, and we followed him. Soon, near a patchwork of ferns growing close to the ground, we came upon a splintered elm that had once been struck by lightning. Although the wood of this fallen tree was now brown and crumbling with rot, once it had been white and hard and freshly scorched.
Once, in this very place, I had come upon the bear that Lord Harsha had spoken of. It had been a huge, brown bear, a great-grandfather of the forest. Upon beholding this great being, I had frozen up and been unable to shoot him. Instead, I had lain down my bow and walked up to touch him. I had known the bear wouldn’t hurt me: he had told me this in the rumbling of his well-filled belly and the playfulness of his eyes. But Asaru hadn’t known this. Upon seeing me apparently abandoning all sense, he had panicked, shooting the bear in the chest with an arrow. The astonished bear had then fallen on him with his mighty paws, breaking his arm and smashing his ribs. And I had fallen on the bear. In truth, I had jumped on his back, pulling at his thick, musky fur and stabbing him with my knife in a desperate attempt to keep him from killing Asaru. And then the bear had turned on me as I had turned on him; he had hammered my forehead with his sharp claws. And then I had known only blackness until I awoke to see Andaru Harsha pulling his great hunting spear out of the bear’s back.
Later that night, Asaru had told our father how I had saved his life. It was a story that became widely known – and widely disbelieved. To this day, everyone assumed that Asaru had embellished my role in the bear’s killing to save me from the shame of laying down my weapons in the face of the enemy.
‘Look, Val,’ Asaru whispered, pointing through the trees.
I turned to follow the line of his outstretched finger. Standing some thirty yards away, munching the leaves of a tender fern, was the deer that we had come for. He was a young buck, his new antlers fuzzy with velvet. Miraculously, he hadn’t yet seen us. He kept eating quietly even as we slipped arrows from our quivers and nocked them to our bowstrings.
Asaru, kneeling ten paces to my left, drew his bow along with me, as did Maram who stood slightly behind me and to my right. I felt their excitement heating up their quickly indrawn breaths. I felt my own excitement, too. My mouth watered in anticipation of the coming night’s feast. In truth, I loved the taste of meat as well as any man, even though very often I couldn’t do what I had to do to get it.
‘Abide in peace,’ I whispered.
At that moment, as I pulled back the arrow toward my ear, the buck looked up at me. And I looked at him. His deep, liquid eyes were as full of life as the squirrel’s had been of death. It was hard to kill so great an animal as a deer, much less that infinitely more complex being called man.
Valashu.
There was something about the buck’s sudden awareness of the nearness of death that opened me to the nearness of my own. The light of his eyes was like flame from a firestone melting the granite walls that I hid behind; his booming heart was a battering ram beating open the gates of my heart. More strongly than ever I heard the thunder of that deep and soundless voice that had called me to the woods that day. I heard as well another voice calling my name; it was a voice from the past and future, and it roared with malevolence and murder.
Valashu Elahad.
The buck looked past me suddenly, and his eyes flickered as he tried to tell me something. The wrongness I had sensed in the woods was now very close; I felt it eating into the flesh between my shoulder blades like a mass of twisting, red worms. Instinctively, I moved to escape this terrible sensation.
And then came the moment of death. Arrows flew. They sang from our bows, and burned through the air. Maram’s arrow hit the deer in the side even as I felt a sudden burning pain in my own side; my arrow missed altogether and buried itself in a tree. But Asaru’s arrow drove straight behind the buck’s shoulder into his heart. Although the buck gathered in all his strength for a last, desperate leap into life, I knew that he would be as good as dead before he struck the ground.
And down into the dark …
The fourth arrow, I saw, had nearly killed me. As the sky finally opened and thunderbolts lit up the forest, I looked down in astonishment to see a feathered shaft three feet long sticking out of the side of my torn jacket – its thick leather and the book of poetry in its pocket had entangled the arrow. I was reeling from the buck’s death and something worse, but I still had the good sense to wonder who had shot it.
Val, get down!’
And so did Asaru. Even as he shouted at me to protect myself, he whirled about to scan the forest. And there, more than a hundred yards farther into the forest, a dark, cloaked figure was running through the trees away from us. Asaru, ever the battle lord, tried to follow him, leaping across the bracken even as he drew another arrow from his quiver and nocked it. He got off a good shot, but my would-be murderer found cover behind a tree. And then he started running again with Asaru quickly closing the distance behind him.
Val, behind you!’ Maram called out.
I turned just in time to see another cloaked figure step out from behind a tree some eighty yards behind me. He was drawing back a black arrow aimed at my chest.
I tried to heed the urgency of the moment, but I found that I couldn’t move. The burning in my side from the first assassin’s arrow spread through my body like fire. But strangely, my hands, legs and feet – even my lips and eyes – felt cold.
The cold that freezes breath …
Maram, seeing my helplessness, cursed as he suddenly leaped from behind the tree where he had taken shelter. He cursed again as his fat arms and legs drove him puffing and crashing through the forest. He shot an arrow at the second assassin, but it missed. I heard the arrow skittering off through the leaves of a young oak tree. And then the assassin loosed his arrow, not at Maram, of course, but at me.
Again, just as the arrow was released, I felt in my chest the twisting of the man’s hate. It was my hate, I think, that gave me the strength to turn to the side and pull my shoulders backward. The arrow hissed like a wooden snake only inches from my chin. I felt it slice through the air even as I heard my assassin howl with frustration and rage. And then Maram fell upon him like a fury, and I knew I had to find the strength to move very fast or my fat friend would soon be dead.
