‘You see,’ I said. ‘She couldn’t possibly love me. No one could love another so soon.’
‘You think not? When you were born, did you need more than a moment to love the world?’
‘That’s different,’ I said.
‘No, my friend, it’s not. Love is. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing in the world that really is. And when a man and a woman meet, either they open themselves to this heavenly fire, or they do not.’
Again I looked at the stones of my ring shining in the bright morning light like two stars.
‘Aren’t you aware of the way Atara listens to you when you speak of even little things?’ Maram asked. ‘When you walk into a clearing, don’t you see the way her eyes light up as if you were the sun?’
‘No, no,’ I murmured, ‘it’s not possible.’
‘It is possible, damn it! She told me she was drawn to your kindness and that wild thing in your heart you always try to hide. She was really just saying that she loved you.’
‘No, it’s not possible,’ I said again.
‘Listen, my friend, and listen well!’ Here Maram grasped my arm as if his fingers might convince me of what his words could not. ‘You should tell her that you love her. Then ask her to marry you, before it’s too late.’
‘You say that?’ I couldn’t believe what I had heard. ‘How many women have you asked to marry you, then?’
‘Listen,’ he said again. ‘I may spend the rest of my life looking for the woman who was meant for me. But you, by rare good chance and the grace of the One – you’ve found the woman who was meant for you.’
We made camp that night off the side of the road in a little clearing where a great oak had fallen. A stream ran through the forest only fifty yards from our site; it was a place of good air and the clean scents of ferns and mosses. Maram and Master Juwain drifted off to sleep early while I insisted on staying awake to make the night’s first watch. In truth, with all that Maram had said to me, I could hardly sleep. I was sitting on a flat rock by the fire and looking out at the stars when Atara came over and sat beside me.
‘You should sleep, too,’ I told her. ‘The nights are growing shorter.’
Atara smiled as she shook her head at me. In her hands she held a couple of stones and a length of wood, which she intended to shape into a new arrow. ‘I promised myself I’d finish this,’ she said.
We spoke for a while of the Sarni’s deadly war arrows which could pierce armor and their great bows made of layers of horn and sinew laminated to a wooden frame. Atara talked of life on the Wendrush and its harsh, unforgiving ways. She told me about the harsh, unforgiving Sajagax, the great war chief of the Kurmak. But of her father, she said little. I gathered only that he disapproved of her decision to enter the Manslayer Society.
‘For a man to see his daughter take up arms,’ I said, ‘must come as a great shock.’
‘Hmmph,’ she said. ‘A warrior who has seen many die in battle shouldn’t complain about such shocks.’
‘Are you speaking of me or your father?’
‘I’m speaking of men,’ she said. ‘They claim they are brave and then almost faint at the sight of a woman with a bow in her hands or bleeding a little blood.’
‘That’s true,’ I said, smiling. ‘For me to see my mother or grandmother wounded would be almost unbearable.’
Atara’s tone softened as she looked at me and said, ‘You love them very much, don’t you?’
‘Yes, very much.’
‘Then you must be glad,’ she said, ‘that you Valari forbid women to become warriors.’
‘No, you don’t understand,’ I told her. ‘We don’t forbid women this. It’s just the opposite: all our women are warriors.’
I went on to say that the first Valari were meant to be warriors of the spirit only. But in an imperfect world, we Valari men had had to learn the arts of war in order to preserve our purity of purpose, which we saw as being realized in women. It was only the Valari women, I said, who had the freedom to embody our highest aspirations. Where men were caught up with the mechanisms of death, the women might further the glories of life. It was upon women to approach all the things of life – growing food, healing, birthing, raising children – with a warrior’s passion and devotion to flowingness, flawlessness and fearlessness.
‘Women,’ I said, ‘are the source of life, are they not? And thus it is taught that they are a perfect manifestation of the One.’
And thus, I said, among the Valari, it was also taught that women might more easily find serenity and joy in the One. Women were seen as more easily mastering the meditative arts, and were very often the instructors of men. Of the three things a Valari warrior is taught – to tell the truth; to wield a sword; to abide in the One – his mother was responsible for the first and the last.
I stopped talking then, and listened to the stream flowing through the forest and the wind rustling the leaves of the trees. Atara was quiet for a few moments while she regarded me in the fire’s soft light. And then she told me, ‘I’ve never known a man like you.’
I watched as she drew the length of wood between the two grooved pieces of sandstone that she held in her hand, smoothing and straightening the new arrow. Then I said, ‘Who has ever seen a woman like you? In the Morning Mountains, the women shoot different kinds of arrows into men’s hearts.’
She laughed at this in her spirited way, and then told me that healing, birthing, and raising children were indeed important and women were very good at them. But some women were also good at war, and this was a time when much killing needed to be done.
‘A time comes to cut wheat and harvest it,’ she said. ‘Now it’s time for the more bloody harvest of cutting men.’
She went on to say that for three long ages, men had ravaged the world, and now it was time for them to reap what they had sowed.
‘No, there must be another way,’ I told her. I drew my sword and watched the play of starlight on its long blade. ‘This isn’t the way the world was meant to be.’
‘Perhaps not,’ she said, staring at this length of steel. ‘But it’s the way the world will be until we make it differently.’
‘And how will we do that?’ I wondered.
She fell quiet for a long time as she sat looking at me. And then she said, ‘Sometimes, late at night or when I look into the waters of a still pool, I can see it. Almost see it. There is a woman there. She has incredible courage but incredible grace, too. There hasn’t been a true woman on Ea since the Age of the Mother. Maybe not even then. But this woman of the waters and wind – she has a terrible beauty like that of Ashtoreth herself. This is the beauty that the world was meant to bring into life. This is the beauty that every woman was born for. But that woman I will never be until men become what they were meant to be. And nothing will ever change men’s hearts except the Lightstone itself.’
‘Nothing?’ I asked, dropping my eyes toward her arrow.
Here she laughed nicely for a moment and then admitted, ‘I said before that I sought the Lightstone to unite all the Sarni. And that’s true. And yet, I would like to see all men united. All men and all women.’
‘That’s a lovely thought,’ I told her. ‘And you’re a lovely woman.’
‘Please don’t say that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Please don’t say that the way that you say that.’
‘My apologies,’ I said, looking down as she slid the arrow between her sanding stones.
Then she put down both her arrow and her stones and waved her hands at the darkened trees all about us. ‘It’s strange,’ she said, ‘here we are in the middle of a wood that has almost no end, far from either the Wendrush or any city. And yet, whenever I come near you, I feel like I’m returning home.’
‘It’s that way for me, too,’ I said.
‘But it shouldn’t be. It mustn’t be. This isn’t the time for anyone to be making homes together. Or anything else.’
‘Such as children?’
‘Children, yes.’
‘Then you’ve no wish ever to be a mother?’
‘Of course I have,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think there’s nothing I want more.’ She looked straight at me and continued, ‘But there are always choices, aren’t there? And I was given the choice between making babies or killing my enemies.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘if you kill enough bad men, the world will be a better place for babies?’
‘Yes,’ she said. That’s why I joined the Society and made my vow.’
‘Would you never consider breaking it then?’
‘As Maram breaks his?’
‘A hundred men,’ I said, staring off at the shadows between the trees. Not even Asaru or Karshur, I thought, had slain so many. No Valari warrior I knew had.
‘A vow is a vow,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m sorry, Val.’
I was sorry, too. I put away my sword then and took out my flute. The world about me was more peaceful than it had been since Mesh. The trees swayed gently beneath the starry sky while the wind blew cool and clean. On the other side of the fire, Maram snored happily and Master Juwain moved his lips in his sleep as if memorizing the lines from a book. And yet beneath this contentment was a sadness that seemed to touch all things, the ferns and the flowers no less than Atara and me. It was in recognition of the bittersweet taste of life that I began to play a song that my grandmother had taught me. The words formed up inside me like dried fruits stuck in my throat: Wishes are wishing you would wish them. What wish, I wondered, was waiting for me to give it life? Only that Atara and I might someday stand face to face, as man and woman, without the thunder of the war drums sounding in the distance.
And so I played, and each note was a step taking the music higher; my breath was the wind carrying this wish up into the sky. After a while, I played other songs even as Atara put away her arrow and looked at me. In her eyes danced the dark lights of the fire and much else. I couldn’t help thinking of the words that Maram had called out some days before: Her eyes are windows to the stars. He had forgotten the lines of his new poem even more quickly than he had Lord Shurador’s wife. But I hadn’t. Neither had I forgotten the verse that he had recited the night of the feast in my father’s hall:
Star of my soul, how you shimmer
Beyond the deep blue sky,
Whirling and whirling – you and I whisperlessly
Spinning sparks of joy into the night.
Even as the crackling fire sent its own sparks spinning into the darkness, I was overwhelmed with a strange sense that Atara and I had once come from this nameless star. In truth, whenever she looked at me it seemed that we returned there. As we did now. For an age, it seemed, we sat there on our rock beneath the ancient constellations as the world turned and the stars whirled. Almost forever, I looked into her eyes. What was there? Only light. How, I wondered, even if she should miraculously fulfill her vow, could I ever hold it? Could I drink in the sea and all the oceans of stars?
Wordlessly, she reached out her hand and grasped mine. Her touch was like lightning splitting me open. All of her incredible sadness came flooding into me; but all of her wild joy of life came, too. In the warmth of her fingers against mine there was no assurance of passion or marriage, but only a promise that we would always be kind to each other and that we wouldn’t fail each other. And that we would always remind each other where we had come from and who we were meant to be. It was the most sacred vow I had ever made, and I knew that both Atara and I would keep it.
It was good to be certain of at least one thing in a world where men tried to twist truth into lies. In the quiet of the night, we lost ourselves in each other’s eyes and breathed as one.
And so for a few hours, I was happier than I had ever been. But when a door to a closed room is finally opened, not only does light stream in, that which was confined in the darkness is free to leap howling out. In my soaring hope, in my great gladness of Atara’s company, I didn’t dare see that my heart was wide open to the greatest of terrors.
12
Early the next morning my nightmares began again. I came screaming out of sleep convinced that the ground beneath my sleeping furs had opened up and I was plunging into a black and bottomless abyss. My cries of terror awoke myself and everyone else. Master Juwain came over to where I lay by the fire’s glowing embers and rested his hand on my forehead.
‘Your fever has returned,’ he told me. ‘I’ll make you some tea.’
While he went off to fetch some water and prepare his bitter brew, Atara soaked a cloth in the cool water of the stream and returned to press it against my head. Her fingers – callused from years of pulling a bowstring – were incredibly gentle as she brushed back my sweat-soaked hair. She was quiet, her full lips pressed together with her concern.
‘Do you think his wound is infected?’ Maram said to Master Juwain. ‘I thought it was getting better.’
‘Let’s see,’ Master Juwain said as the water for the tea was heating. ‘Let’s get your mail off, Val.’
They helped strip me bare to the waist, and then Master Juwain removed my bandage to examine my wound. He probed it gently, and pronounced that it was healing again and looked clean enough. After bandaging my side and helping me dress, he sat by his pot of boiling water and looked at me in puzzlement.
‘Do you think it’s the kirax?’ Maram asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ Master Juwain said. ‘But it’s possible.’
‘And what,’ Atara asked, ‘is kirax?’
Master Juwain turned to me as if wondering how much he should tell her. In answer, I nodded my head.
‘It’s a poison,’ Master Juwain said. ‘A terrible poison.’
He went on to recount how an assassin’s arrow had wounded me in the woods outside Silvassu. He explained how the priests of the Kallimun sometimes used kirax to slay horribly at Morjin’s bidding.
‘Oh, but you make evil enemies, don’t you?’ Atara said to me.
‘It would seem so,’ I said. Then I smiled at Master Juwain, Maram and her. ‘But also the best of friends.’
Atara returned my smile then asked, ‘But why should Morjin wish you dead?’
That was one of the questions of my life I most wanted answered. Because I had nothing to say, I shrugged my shoulders and stared off at the glow of the dawn in the east.
‘Well, if he does wish you dead and this man Kane is the one he has sent after you, I have a present for him.’ So saying, Atara drew forth an arrow from her quiver and pointed it west, toward Argattha. ‘Morjin’s assassins aren’t the only ones who can shoot arrows, you know.’
After that I drank my tea and ate a little breakfast. Although my fever faded with the coming of the day, a dull headache remained to torment me. Some big, dark clouds moved over the land from the north, and I could almost feel the pressure of them smothering the forest. Before we could even put away our cooking pots and break camp, it started to rain: a steady drumming of cold drops that drove down through the trees and beat against my head. Master Juwain pointed out that we would stay drier in the woods than on the open road; he suggested remaining there another day in order to recover our strength.
‘No,’ I said. We can rest when we get to Tria.’
Master Juwain, who could sometimes be cunning, shook his head at me and said, ‘You’re tired, Val. So are the horses.’
In the end, it was the condition of the horses that decided me. We had pressed them hard for many miles, and they hadn’t had a good feed of grain since Duke Gorador’s castle. Although they had found grass along our way, this wasn’t enough to keep them fat and happy – especially Altaru, who needed some oats in his belly to keep his huge body driving forward. I realized that for a couple of days, he had been telling me that he was hungry, but I hadn’t been listening. And so I consented to Master Juwain’s suggestion. Against Maram’s protests, I fed him and the other horses most of the oats that we had been reserving for our morning porridge. As I reminded Maram, we still had some chee
se and nuts, and quite a few battle biscuits.
And so we remained there for the rest of the day. The rain seemed only to come down harder with each passing hour. We sat huddled beneath the meager shelter of the trees listening to its patter against the leaves. I was very grateful for the cloak that my mother had made for me; I kept it wrapped tightly about me, as I did the white, wool scarf my grandmother had knitted. To pass the time, I took out Jonathay’s chess set. I played some games with Maram and then Atara. It surprised me that she beat me every time, for I hadn’t known the Sarni studied such civilized games. I might have blamed my poor play on my throbbing head, but I didn’t want to diminish Atara’s victory.
‘Would you like to play me?’ Atara asked Maram after I had lost my fourth game. ‘You’ve been sitting out a while.’
‘No, thank you,’ Maram said. ‘It’s more fun watching Val lose.’
Atara began setting up the pieces for a new game as Maram shivered miserably beneath his red cloak and said, ‘I’m cold, I’m weary, I’m wet. But at least this rain should keep the bears holed up. There hasn’t been any sign of them – has there?’
‘No,’ I said to encourage him. ‘The bears don’t like rain.’
‘And there’s been no sign of Kane or anyone else – has anyone seen any sign?’
Both Master Juwain and Atara reassured him that, except for the rain, the woods had been as silent as they were wet. I wanted to reassure him as well. But I couldn’t – nor could I comfort myself. For ever since I had awakened from my nightmare, I’d had a gnawing sensation in my belly that some beast was hunting for me, sniffing at the air and trying to catch my scent through the pouring rain. As the grayness of the afternoon deepened, this sensation grew stronger. And so I resolved to break camp and travel hard at first light no matter rain or fever or the tiredness of the horses.
That night I had worse nightmares. My fever returned, and Master Juwain’s tea did little to cool it. But as I had promised myself, in the morning we set out on the road. It was grim work plodding over the drenched paving stones through the rain. The whole world narrowed to this tunnel of stone cutting east through the dark green woods and the even darker gray sky. Master Juwain said that in Alonia, it sometimes rained like this for days without end. Maram wondered aloud how it was that the sky could hold whole oceans among its cold currents of air. Atara said that on the Wendrush, it rained fiercely but rarely so steadily as this. Then, to cheer us, she began singing a song meant to charm the rain away.
The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Page 26