The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom

by David Zindell

  ‘Ah, shouldn’t you do something?’ Maram asked me.

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Swim after her!’

  I watched Liljana pulling and kicking at the water, and I slowly shook my head. In truth, I was a poor swimmer. It took all my courage even to jump into a mountain lake.

  ‘But she’ll drown!’ Maram said.

  Atara came up and smiled at him. ‘Drown, hmmph! She seems as likely to drown as a fish.’

  ‘But the ocean is dangerous,’ Maram said. ‘Even for strong swimmers.’

  ‘Then perhaps you should go after her.’

  ‘I? I? Are you mad? I can’t swim!’

  ‘Neither can I,’ Atara admitted.

  And neither could any of us, I thought, swim as Liljana did. We all watched from the beach as she made her way far out past the line of the white-crested breakers.

  And then Maram’s puffy, mosquito-bitten face went as white as if another monster had drained him of blood. He pointed toward Liljana as two grayish fins suddenly cut the water near her, and he cried out, ‘Sharks! Sharks! Oh, my Lord, she’ll be eaten by sharks!’

  In only a few more moments, as I drew in a deep breath and felt the hearts of my companions beating as quickly as mine, another ten or twelve fins appeared in a circle around Liljana. They were closing on her quickly, like a noose around a neck.

  And then, without warning, a bluish shape leaped straight out of the water only a few yards from Liljana and fell back in with a terrific splash. Two more broached the surface and blew out their breaths in steamy blasts while others raised their heads out of the water and began talking in a high-pitched, squeaking language stranger even than the songs that Alphanderry sang for us. They had long, pointed snouts that seemed cast in perpetual smiles, and Master Juwain called them dolphins. He said that once they had been the most numerous, if the least powerful, of the Sea People.

  For a long time, the dolphins swam near Liljana. They jumped out of the water, doing flips seemingly just for the fun of it. They nudged her with their noses and buoyed her up with their sleek, beautiful bodies. And all the while, they never stopped whistling and clicking and speaking to her. But what words of wisdom they imparted to her, none of us could tell.

  After perhaps half an hour of such frolic, Liljana turned back toward the land. Two dolphins, one on either side of her, swam with her as far as the line of the breakers. They appeared to watch as she caught herself up in a gathering wave and let it carry her a good way toward the beach. As Liljana stood up suddenly in the shallows and streams of water dripped from her olive skin and dark brown hair, the dolphins gathered offshore as if holding a council of their own.

  ‘How did you know the Sea People were here?’ Maram asked Liljana after she dressed herself and rejoined us. ‘Did you really smell them?’

  ‘Yes, doubtful Prince,’ she said, ‘in a way, I did.’

  She cast a quick look at the squeaking dolphins, and so did we.

  ‘Did they speak to you?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes, they did,’ she said. Her hazel eyes fell sad and dreamy. Then she continued, ‘But I’m afraid I didn’t understand them.’

  ‘So it’s been for thousands of years,’ Kane said. ‘No one can speak to the Sea People anymore.’

  Liljana looked out to where Flick spun like a silver wheel over the water in the direction of the dolphins. Then she said, ‘They want to speak with us. I know they do.’

  ‘Ha – why should the Sea People speak with us?’ Kane asked. ‘It’s said that ever since the Age of Swords, men have hunted them like fishes.’

  “We have much to tell each other,’ Liljana said wistfully. ‘I know we do.’

  We stood on the beach for quite a while staring out at the immense barrier of water that separated us from the whales. Then Alphanderry suddenly stuck out his arm and said, ‘Look, they’re swimming away!’

  Indeed, the whole dolphin tribe was now swimming slowly parallel to the shore toward the west. Liljana slowly nodded her head, watching them. And then she said, They want us to follow them.’

  ‘But how do you know?’ I asked her.

  ‘I just know,’ she told me.

  ‘But where are they leading us, then?’

  ‘Wherever they will,’ she said, looking at me sternly. My doubt seemed to wound her, and she said, ‘Have I asked you, young Prince, where you’ve been leading us all these long days?’

  ‘But it’s been clear that we’ve been heading toward the Bay of Whales.’

  ‘And now we’re here,’ she said. She kept her voice calm and controlled, but I could feel a great excitement inside her. ‘Will you help me discover what these people want from us?’

  Her soft, searching eyes called to mind all the kindnesses she had done for me on our journey and suggested that I would be churlish to refuse her. Without waiting for me to answer, she began walking quickly down the beach, all the while keeping her gaze fixed upon the dolphins. It was left to me to gather up the others and break camp as quickly as we could.

  We caught up with her about three miles down the beach. While Maram and Master Juwain took charge of the pack horses and Liljana’s gelding, Alphanderry and I raced our horses with Kane’s and Atara’s along the water’s edge. After the clutching vegetation of the Vardaloon, it was good to move over open country again. Altaru snorted and shook with a joyous power as I gave him his head. His hooves pounded against the wet, hard-packed sand leaving great holes in it. But although he was the strongest of the horses and faster than even Atara’s very fast Fire, he could not quite keep up with Alphanderry as he sang to Iolo and urged his white Tervolan forward. What the dolphins made of us as we galloped clear past Liljana before wheeling about was impossible to say. For they just kept swimming a few hundred yards offshore as if they had all the time in the world to lead us toward some secret place.

  ‘Perhaps they know where the Lightstone is,’ Maram said as he and Master Juwain also caught up with Liljana. He handed Liljana the reins of her horse. ‘Perhaps Sartan Odinan fled north from Argattha with the Gelstei and was stopped here by the ocean. Perhaps he died on this forsaken shore, and all knowledge of the Lightstone with him.’

  What Maram had suggested seemed unlikely – but no more so than any other speculation as to the Lightstone’s fate. We grew silent after that, each of us holding inside the image of this sacred golden cup. Our hopes fairly floated in the air like the puffy white clouds above the Bay. We were all a little excited, and we rode our horses at a bone-jarring trot as we tried to keep pace with the dolphins.

  For hours, as the sun crossed the sky to the south, we made our way along the beach. The dunes gradually gave way to a headland of water-eaten limestone while the beach narrowed to a ribbon of rocky sand scarcely twenty yards wide. The horses hurt their hooves on this rough shingle. If we pressed them much harder, I thought, they would pull up lame. As it was, they were still weak from what the Vardaloon had taken from them and could not continue this way for long.

  And then, just as I feared the beach would vanish to nothing between the headland to our left and the crashing surf, we came upon a cove cut into the stark, white cliffs. Great rocks broke from the shallows and the sand. There was little beach there, and most of it was covered with driftwood, pebbles and great heaps of shells. I did not think we could take the horses across it, not even if we dismounted and led them on foot. It seemed that we could follow the dolphins no further. And then I saw Liljana looking out to sea, and I looked, too. The dolphins had ceased their tireless swimming and were now gathered together in the rippling water. They whistled and clicked at us with great urgency. And all of their long, smiling faces were pointed straight toward the cove.

  Liljana, of course, needed no further encouragement to dismount and begin searching along the beach. And neither did the rest of us. After we had tied the horses to a couple of great logs, we walked among the piles of shells, crunching them with our boots. Here and there, upon catching a glimpse of a pretty pebble or a
golden shell, we would pause and drop to our knees as we dug at the beach. With every passing moment, as our breaths rushed in and out and the surf pounded wildly, it seemed more and more likely that Sartan Odinan had died here after all. Time and the relentless wash of the waves, we supposed, had buried his bones beneath layers of shells and sand. If we dug in the right place, we might find his remains – and the Lightstone.

  All that long afternoon we searched there. Twice I thought I’d caught a glimpse of it. But we found no golden cup nor any other thing made by the hand of man – or the angels. We might have given up if the dolphins had swum away. And then at last, with the sun falling down toward the ocean like a flaming arrow, Liljana let out a little cry. She bent down and plucked something from the carpet of shells. She held it up in the slanting light for us all to see.

  ‘What is it?’ Maram asked, stepping over to her. ‘It looks like glass.’

  ‘Driftglass,’ Master Juwain said, looking at it. ‘I used to collect such things when I was a boy.’

  The driftglass, if that it truly was, was deep blue in color and about the size of Liljana’s thumb. It was old and chipped and scoured smooth by the sea.

  ‘It looks like a whale,’ Maram said. ‘Don’t you think?’

  As Liljana turned it over and over in her tapering fingers, we saw that it was cast into a little figurine shaped like a whale. What it had been used for or how it had come here, no one could say.

  And then Liljana suddenly made a fist around the glass and pressed it against the side of her head. Her eyes glazed as they stared out at the dolphins and then closed altogether.

  ‘Liljana,’ Master Juwain said to her, ‘are you all right?’

  But she didn’t answer him. She just stood there utterly still facing the sea.

  Strangely, the dolphins also fell silent. The only sounds about us were the cries of the seagulls along the cliffs and the ocean’s long, dark roar. We were all concerned for Liljana, but we knew not to speak lest the spell be broken. And so we gathered around her, breathing in the smells of seaweed and the salty spray thrown up by the crash of the water against the rocks.

  At last Liljana opened her eyes and smiled as she nodded her head. She looked down at the figurine gleaming dark blue in the palm of her hand. And then she said, ‘This is no driftglass.’

  Master Juwain bent his bald head down to get a better look at the figurine. He asked, ‘May I see it?’

  Liljana rather reluctantly gave it to him, and he turned it beneath his sparkling gray eyes.

  ‘It’s a gelstei,’ Liljana said. ‘Surely it is a gelstei.’

  Master Juwain’s bushy eyebrows pulled together as he looked at the figurine more closely.

  ‘I spoke with the Sea People,’ Liljana said. ‘I could hear their words inside me.’

  The blue gelstei, I recalled as I looked at the figurine, were the stones of truthsaying, languages and dreams. In certain gifted people, they also quickened the power of speaking mind to mind.

  ‘I see, I see,’ Master Juwain said, giving back the figurine. ‘I believe it is a blue gelstei.’

  We all crowded close to Liljana to get a better look at the stone. Kane’s eyes shone with a deep light and for a moment seemed as blue as the sea.

  ‘I didn’t know you had the power of mindspeaking,’ he said to Liljana as he looked at her strangely. ‘It’s very rare these days, eh?’

  ‘I didn’t know myself,’ Liljana told him. ‘I’ve never been good at much more than cooking and sniffing out poisons.’

  She spoke with modesty, and there was little pride in her bearing. Yet something in her quiet composure gave me to suspect that finding the blue figurine and speaking with the dolphins had confirmed a secret sense she had of herself.

  ‘Well,’ Maram called out to her, ‘what did the Sea People say, then? Did they tell of the Lightstone? Is it here?’

  He looked farther down the beach at the shells piled up against a jutting black rock. He looked at the driftwood, at the cliffs, and his face was lit up with hope.

  ‘No, they know nothing of the Lightstone,’ Liljana said. ‘They don’t even understand what such a thing might be.’

  ‘Ah, I hardly understand myself,’ Maram said. ‘But surely if they knew about your gelstei, they would have known about the Lightstone.’

  ‘You’re thinking like a man,’ she said to him. ‘But the Sea People don’t think like we do.’

  ‘Then they can’t help us, can they?’

  ‘Don’t you give up so easily, my dear,’ she scolded him. ‘The Sea People are kind creatures, and they like puzzles as much as play. They’ve called others of their kind to come and talk with me.’

  ‘Other dolphins?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. They called them the Old Ones.’

  We looked out away from the land where the dolphins still swam in lazy circles around each other. Now the sun had disappeared into the ocean, and the blueness had left the water as if suddenly sucked away. Long, dark waves moved upon the darker deeps as the light slowly bled from the horizon. In the dusky sea, the dolphins waited, as did we. We stood on the windy beach looking out at the edge of the world where the evening’s first stars blazed out of the immense, blue-black sky. They cast their silver rays upon the onstreaming waters and the great, gray shapes rising up from them. There, in the cold ocean, in that strange time that is neither day nor night, six immense whales suddenly broke the surface and blew their spray high into the air. Master Juwain, who knew about such things, named their kind as the Mysticeti. But I thought of them as Liljana did, and called them simply the Old Ones.

  For a while, they spoke with one another in their long, mournful songs that were more like moans than music. Their great voices seemed to still the whole world. And then, as Liljana again pressed the blue gelstei against her head, they too fell silent. The stars filled the heavens and slowly turned above the shimmering sea.

  This time, Liljana did not open her eyes. She stood nearly motionless on the shell-strewn beach. If not for the slow rise and fall of her breath, we would have thought that she had turned to stone.

  ‘Master Juwain,’ Maram said softly after some minutes had passed, ‘what shall we do?’

  ‘Do? What is there to do but wait?’ Master Juwain said. Then he sighed and told him, ‘I’m afraid the blestei are dangerous stones. I’ve always believed that the knowledge to use them has long been lost.’

  But this was not good enough for Atara. She came up to Liljana and brushed the wind-whipped hair away from her face.

  ‘We shouldn’t just leave her like this,’ she said, nodding at me. ‘Horses can stand all night, but not a woman. Val, will you help me?’

  I was afraid to touch Liljana just then, but together Atara and I, with Maram’s help, managed to sit her down against a large rock facing the sea. Atara joined her there on the sand. She sat holding Liljana’s free hand while Liljana continued holding the gelstei tightly to her head.

  ‘Now we can wait,’ Atara said. She looked out at the starlit sphere that was the world.

  And wait we did. At first, none of us thought that Liljana would sit there entranced all night. We kept looking for some sign that she might open her eyes or the whales grow tired and swim away. But as a yellow half-moon rose in the east and the hours passed, we resigned ourselves to watching over Liljana for as long as it took. Maram got a fire out of some driftwood that he piled up nearby while Master Juwain managed to make us a meal of steamed clams and hotcakes. It was midnight by the time Alphanderry and Kane washed the dishes by the water’s edge, and still Liljana did not move.

  ‘I’m afraid for her,’ Maram said to me as the fire burned lower. It cast its flickering light over Liljana’s stricken face. ‘You met minds with Morjin in your dreams, and it nearly drove you mad. What must it be like to speak this way with a whale?’

  ‘Here, now,’ Master Juwain said crabbily. He knelt in front of Liljana testing the pulse in her wrist. ‘I’ve told you a hundred times no
t to name the Lord of Lies. And to name him in the same breath as the Old Ones – well, that is madness.’

  He went on to say that the Sea People had never been known to make war or take their vengeance upon men, not even when men put their harpoons into them. Indeed the Sea People, through many long ages, had often rescued shipwrecked sailors from drowning, swimming up beneath them so that they could breathe and taking them toward land.

  ‘That is true,’ Kane said in a faraway voice. ‘I’ve seen it myself.’

  I thought about this as I sat on the cool sand and watched the great whales floating on the luminous surface of the sea. How was it, I wondered, that the Sea People had forsworn war where men had not? Had the Galadin sent them from the stars before even Elahad and Aryu and the stealing of the Lightstone? What would it be like to talk to such beings who obeyed the Law of the One so faithfully?

  I waited there on the dark beach for Liljana to look at me and answer these questions. The wind blew across the water, from what source no one knew. The waves continued pounding against the shore like the beating of a vast and immortal heart. And the stars rose and fell into the blackness beyond the world and made me wonder if they were really distant suns or some kind of light-giving crystals created every night anew.

  It was nearly dawn when Liljana opened her eyes and looked at us. As if saying goodbye, the whales sang their unfathomable songs and struck the water with their great tails. Then, along with the dolphins, they dove into the sea and swam away.

  ‘Well,’ Master Juwain said, as he knelt near Liljana, ‘did you understand them? What did they tell you?’

  But Atara, still sitting by Liljana, held up her hand protectively and said, ‘Give her a moment, please.’

  Liljana slowly stood up and walked back and forth along the water’s edge. And then she turned and said, ‘They told me many things.’

  It was impossible for her to recount all that had passed between her and the Old Ones in their hours of conversation together. Nor, it seemed, did she wish to. She liked keeping secrets to herself almost as much as she delighted in bestowing upon others her cooking and her care. But she did admit that the Sea People were very doubtful of men.