‘Too bad that we must bind you now,’ the man said. ‘But you understand the need for it, don’t you? You big people are so quick with your weapons.’
So saying, he whistled again, and several women came forward with braided cords to bind our hands behind our backs. When they were finished, the man said, ‘My name is Danali. We will take you to a place where you can rest.’
After presenting myself and each of the others in turn, I asked him, ‘What 15 this place? And what is the name of your people?’
‘This is the Forest,’ he said simply. ‘And we are the Lokilani.’
And with that he turned to lead us deeper into the woods.
14
We walked in line trailing our horses with the Lokilani swarming around us. With the abandon of children, they touched our garments and let out cries of surprise at Atara’s leather trousers, and most of all, at the steel links of my armor. I gathered that none of them had seen such substances before. They were all dressed as was Danali, in simple skirts of what appeared to be silk. Many wore emerald or ruby pendants dangling from their delicate necks; a few of the women also sported earrings but were otherwise unadorned. None of them wore shoes upon their leathery feet.
Danali led us beneath the great trees, which seemed to grow still greater with every mile we moved into them. Here, in the deep woods, elms and maples mingled with the oaks. In places, however, we passed through groves of much lesser trees that were scarcely any taller than those of Mesh. They appeared all to be fruit trees: apple and cherry, pear and plum. Many were in full flower with little white petals covering them like mounds of snow; many were laden with red, ripe apples or dark red cherries. That they should bear fruit in Ashte seemed a miracle, and not the only one of those lovely woods. It amazed me to see deer in great numbers walking through the apple groves as if they had nothing to fear from the many Lokilani with their bows and arrows.
When Maram suggested that Danali should shoot a couple of them to make a feast for dinner, he looked at him in horror and said, ‘Shoot arrows into an animal? Would I shoot my own mother, Hairface? Am I wolf, am I weasel, am I a bear that I should hunt animals for food?’
‘But what do you eat in these woods, then?’ Maram asked as he shuffled along with his hands bound behind his back.
‘We eat apples; we eat nuts – and much else. The trees give us everything we need.’
The Lokilani, as we found, wouldn’t even eat the eggs taken from birds’ nests or honey from the combs of the bees. Neither did they cultivate barley or wheat or any such vegetables as carrots, peas or beans. The only gardens they kept grew other glories from the earth: crystals such as clear quartz, amethyst and starstone as well as garnets, topaz, tourmaline and more precious gems. I marveled at these many-colored stones erupting from the forest floor like so many new shoots. They seemed always to be planted – if that was the right word – in colorful, concentric circles around trees like I had seen before only in my dreams. Though not very tall, these trees spread out like oaks, and their bark was silver like that of maples. But it was their leaves in all their splendor that made me gasp and wonder where they had come from; the leaves on these loveliest of trees shimmered like millions of golden shields and were etched with a webwork of deep green veins. Danali called them astors. I thought that the astors – and the bright gemstones growing around them – must be the greatest miracles of the Forest, but I was wrong.
By a circuitous route that seemed to follow no logic or path, Danali led us through the trees to the Lokilani’s village. This, however, was no simple assemblage of buildings and dwellings. Indeed, there were no buildings such as castles, temples or towers; neither were there streets, for the only dwellings the Lokilani had were spread out over many acres, each house being built beneath its own tree.
Danali escorted us toward one of these strange-looking houses. Its frame was of many long poles set into the ground in a circle and leaning up against each other so as to form a high cone. The poles were woven with long strips of white bark like that of birch. Around it grew many flowers: dahlias and daisies, marigolds and chrysanthemums – and other kinds for which I had no name. Someone had adorned the doorway with garlands of white and gold blossoms whose petals formed little, nine-pointed stars. It was an inviting entrance to a space that was to be home, hospital and prison for the next two days.
Inside we found a circular expanse of earth covered with golden astor leaves. A small firepit had been dug into the ground at the house’s center, but there was no furniture other than beds of fresh green leaves. Danali explained that this was a house of healing; here we would remain until our bodies and spirits were whole again.
After setting a guard around our house, Danali saw to our every need. He had food and drink brought to us; he had our clothes taken away to be mended and cleaned. That evening he led us under escort to a hot spring that bubbled up out of the ground near a grove of plum trees. Several of the Lokilani women climbed into the water with us and used handfuls of fragrant-smelling leaves to scrub us clean. One of them, a pretty woman named Iolana, immediately captured Maram’s eye. She had long brown hair and the green eyes of all her people, but she was almost as small as a child, standing no higher than the top of Maram’s belly. The difference in their sizes, however, did not discourage him. When I remarked the incongruity of a moose taking up with a roe deer, he told me, ‘Love will find a way, my friend. It always does. I’ll be as gentle with her as a leaf settling onto a pond. Don’t you find that there’s something about these little people that inspires gentleness?’
I had to admit that, their bows and arrows notwithstanding, the Lokilani were the least warlike people I had ever met. They laughed easily and often, and they liked to sing to the accompaniment of each other’s whistling or clapping of hands. They spoke with a light, lilting accent that was sometimes hard to understand, but they never spoke harshly or raised their voices, to one another or to us. Why they were so kind to us after nearly murdering us remained a mystery. Danali told us that all would be explained at a council to be held the next day, when we would be summoned to meet the Lokilani’s queen. In the meantime, he said, we must rest and restore ourselves.
Toward this end, he later sent a beautiful woman named Pualani into our house. She had long, flowing chestnut hair and eyes as clear and green as the emerald she wore around her neck. They gleamed with concern as Master Juwain showed her the wound that Salmelu had cut into my side. With great gentleness, she pressed her warm fingers into my skin all around the wound, both in front and where his sword had emerged from my back. Then she had me drink a sweetish tea that she made and told me to lie back against my bed of leaves.
Almost immediately, I fell asleep. But strangely, all night long I was aware that I was sleeping, and also aware of Pualani pressing pungent-smelling leaves against my side. I thought I felt as well the coolness of her emerald touching me. My whole body seemed to burn with a cool, green light. When I awoke the next morning, I was amazed to discover that my wound had completely healed. Not even a scar remained to mark my flesh and remind me of my sword fight.
‘It’s a miracle!’ Maram exclaimed when he saw what Pualani had done. In the soft light filtering through curving white walls, he ran his rough hand over my side. ‘This wood is full of magic and miracles.’
‘It would seem so,’ Master Juwain said as he too examined me. ‘It would seem that these people have much to teach us.’
As it happened, Master Juwain had much to teach them. When Pualani returned to check on me, she and Master Juwain began discussing herbs and various techniques of healing. She grew excited to discover that he knew of plants and potions of which she had never heard; then she invited him to walk among the trees so that she could show him the many medicinal mushrooms that grew in the Forest and nowhere else.
Later that day, after they had returned, Danali came to our house to escort us to a feast held in our honor. We all put on our best clothes: Maram found a fresh red tunic in the sadd
lebags of his pack horse while Master Juwain had only his newly cleaned green woolens. Atara, however, unpacked a yellow doeskin shirt embroidered with fine beadwork; it made a stark contrast with her dark leather trousers, but I liked it better than her studded armor. As for myself, I wore a simple black tunic emblazoned with the silver swan and seven stars of Mesh. Although I gladly left my mail suit in our house, I was more reluctant to abandon my sword. The Lokilani, however, wouldn’t allow weapons at their meals. And so Maram left his sword behind, too, and Atara her bow and arrows, and together we stepped out from our flower-covered doorway and followed Danali through the woods to the place of the feast.
The whole Lokilani village had assembled nearby in a stand of great astor trees. There must have been nearly five hundred of them: men, women and children sitting on the leaf-covered ground and gathered around many long mats woven of long, green leaves. I saw at once that these mats served as tables, for they were heaped with bowls of food. Danali invited us to sit at a table beneath the boughs of a spreading astor, along with his wife and five children. And then, just as we were taking our places, Pualani walked into the glade. Her hair was crowned with a garland of blue flowers, and she wore a silvery robe that covered her from neck to ankle. Although we had supposed her to be quite young, she was accompanied by her grown daughter, who turned out to be none other than Iolana. With them walked her own husband, a slender but well-muscled man whom Danali introduced as Elan. He surprised us all by telling us that Pualani was the Lokilani’s queen.
Pualani took the place of honor at the head of the table with Elan to her left. Master Juwain, Maram, Atara and I sat to one side of the table facing Danali and his family. Iolana knelt directly beside Maram, and they both seemed quite happy with this arrangement. She gazed at him much more openly than would any maid of Mesh.
Without fanfare, toasting or speeches, the meal began as Pualani reached out to pass a bowl of fruit to Elan. I saw that at the other tables surrounding us, the Lokilani were circulating similar hand-woven bowls. There was much food to heap on top of our plates, which were nothing more than single but very large leaves. As Danali had promised, all of our meal had come from trees or bushes in the Forest. Fruits predominated, and I had never seen so many served in one place: blackberries and raspberries, gooseberries, apples and plums. There were cherries, pears and strawberries, too, in great abundance, as well as a greenish, applelike thing that they called starfruit. And others. It was all quite ripe, and every piece I put into my mouth burst with fresh juices and sweetness. They made good use of the many seeds and nuts, which included not only familiar ones such as walnuts and hickories, but some very large brown nuts they called treemeats. Danali said that they were more sustaining than the flesh of animals; they tasted rich and earthy and seemed full of the Forest’s strength. The Lokilani cooked them into a thick stew, even as they baked a bread of bearseed and spread it with various nut butters and jams. As well, we were passed bowls of green shoots that I had thought only a squirrel could eat, and at least four kinds of edible flowers. For drink, we had cups of cool water and elderberry wine. Although it seemed this last was too sweet to drink in quantity, Maram proved me wrong. He let the Lokilani refill his cup again and again even more times than he refilled his own plate.
‘Ah, what a meal,’ he said as he reached for a pitcher of maple syrup to drizzle over his bread. ‘I’ve never eaten like this before.’
None of us had. The food was not only more delicious than any I had ever tasted, it was more alive. It seemed that the essence of the Forest was passing directly into our bodies as if breathed into our blood. By the time the feast ended, we all felt quite full but also light and animated, ready to dance or sing or tell stories according to the Lokilani’s wont. As we discovered, our hosts and captors were quite fond of such after-dinner celebrations. But first, Pualani and the others had many questions for us, as we did for them.
‘We should begin at the beginning,’ Pualani told us in a voice as rich as the wine she poured us. Her deeply set eyes caught up some of the color of the emerald necklace she wore, and I thought that she was not only beautiful but wise. ‘We would all like to know how you found your way into our wood, and why.’
Since I – or rather Altaru – had led our way here, Master Juwain, Maram and Atara all looked at me to answer her.
‘The “why” of it is easy enough to tell,’ I said. ‘We were fleeing our enemies, and our path took us here.’
I told her something of the Stonefaces who had been pursuing us for many miles through the wilds of Alonia. Of Kane I said nothing, nor did I relate my dream of Morjin.
‘Well, Sar Valashu, that is a beginning,’ Pualani said. ‘But only the very beginning of the beginning, yes? You’ve told us the circumstances of your flight into the Forest but not why you’ve come to us. But perhaps you don’t yet know. Too bad. And sad to say, neither do we.’
Maram, after taking yet another pull of his wine, looked at her and slurred out, ‘Not everything has a purpose, my Lady.’
‘But of course, all things do,’ she told him. ‘We just have to look for it.’
‘You might as well look for the reason that birds sing or men drink wine.’
She smiled at him and said, ‘Birds sing because they’re glad to be alive, and men drink wine because they’re not.’
‘Perhaps that’s true,’ Maram said, squeezing his cup. ‘But it tells us nothing of the purpose of my drinking this excellent wine of yours.’
‘Perhaps the purpose is to teach you the value of sobriety.’
‘Perhaps,’ he muttered, licking the wine from his mustache.
Pualani turned toward me and said, ‘Why don’t we put aside the purpose of your coming here and try to understand just how you entered our woods.’
‘Well, we walked into them,’ I told her.
‘Yes, of course – but how did you do this? No one just walks into the Forest.’
She explained that just as some peoples built walls of stone to protect their kingdoms, the Lokilani had constructed a different kind of barrier around their woods. She told us very little of how they did this. She hinted at the power of the great trees to keep strangers away and at a secret that the Lokilani shared with each other but not with us.
‘Here the power of the earth is very great,’ she said. ‘It repels most people. Even many of the bears, wolves and higher beasts. A man walking in our direction would find that he doesn’t want to walk this way. His path would take him in a great circle around the Forest or away from it.’
‘Perhaps it would,’ I said, remembering the sensations I had felt the day before. ‘But if he came close enough, he would see the great trees.’
‘Men come close to many things they never see,’ Pualani said as she smiled mysteriously. ‘Looking toward the Forest from the outside, most men would see only trees.’
‘But what if they were looking for the Forest?’
‘Men look for many things they never find,’ she said. ‘And who knows even to look? Even a Lokilani, upon leaving our woods, can forget what real trees are like and have a hard time finding his way back in.’
‘Our coming must have been a wild chance, then.’
‘No one comes here by chance, Sar Valashu. Few come at all.’
I pointed off toward a tree a hundred yards away where a young woman stood with a strung bow and arrow. I said, ‘Your people don’t hunt animals – what do they hunt, then?’
Pualani’s face clouded for a moment as she exchanged dark looks with Elan and Danali. Then she said, ‘For many years, the Earthkiller has sent his men to try to find our Forest. A few have come close, and these we’ve had to send back to the stars.’
‘Who is this Earthkiller, then?’
The Earthkiller is the Earthkiller,’ she said simply. ‘This is known from the ancient of days: he cuts trees to burn in his forges. He cuts wounds in the earth to steal its fire. By forge and fire he seeks the making of that which can never be made.’
/> Her words sounded familiar to me, as they must have to Master Juwain. I nodded at him as he pulled out his Saganom Elu and read from the Book of Fire:
He hates the flowers, soft and white,
The grass, the forest’s gentle breath,
For all that lives and leaps with light
Recalls the bitterness of death.
With axe and pick and poison flame
He wreaks his spite upon the land;
His armies burn and hack and maim
The ferns and flowers, soil and sand.
And down through rocky vein and bore
With evil eye and sorcery
He plumbs the earth for golden ore
In search of immortality.
Thus wounding earth to steal her fire
And feeding trees to forge and flame,
He turns upon himself his ire
And burns his soul with bitter blame.
For golden cups that blaze too bright
Make hateful, mortal men afraid,
And that which makes the stellar light,
In love, cannot itself be made.
When he had finished, Pualani sighed deeply and said, ‘It would seem that your people know of the Earthkiller, too.’
‘We call him the Red Dragon,’ Master Juwain said.
‘You have named him well, then,’ Pualani said. Then she pointed at his book and asked, ‘But what is this animal skin encasing the white leaves crawling with bugs?’
We were all astonished that Pualani had never seen a book. Just as it astonished her and all the Lokilani when Master Juwain explained how the sounds of language could be represented by letters and read out loud.
‘Your people bring marvels into our woods,’ she said. ‘And you bring great mysteries, too.’
She took a sip of wine and slowly swallowed it. Then she smiled at me and continued, ‘When you approached the Forest, we thought the Earthkiller must have sent you. And so we sent Danali and the others to greet you. We couldn’t have known that you would be wearing the mark of the Ellama.’
The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Page 31