‘They said we were free,’ she told us. They said that we were free but didn’t know it. And not knowing this, that we weren’t. They said we made chains – this is my word – out of our harpoons and ships and swords, and everything else. They said that wanting to master the world, we are made slaves of it. And so thinking ourselves cursed, we are. A cursed people bring death to themselves, and to the world. And worse, we bring forgetfulness of who we really are.’
She grew silent as the ocean sent its waves breaking against the shore. And then Master Juwain said. They must hate us very much.’
‘No, my dear, it is just the opposite,’ she said. ‘Once, in the Age of the Mother, there was a great love between our kinds. They gave us their songs and we gave them ours. But at the end of the age, the Aryans came. Their wars destroyed all that. They hunted down all the sisters who could speak mind to mind to oppose them. Then they gathered up the blue gelstei and cast them into the sea.’
The Aryans, of course, had brought their swords to Tria – and the Age of Swords to all of Ea. They had prepared the way for the rise of Morjin, who hated the Sea People because he could find no way to make them serve him.
‘It was the Red Dragon,’ she said, ‘who first began the hunting of the whales. The Old Ones told me that it had something to do with blood.’
‘So,’ Kane said in his grimmest voice, ‘I’ve seen whale blood, too bad. It’s darker than ours, redder and richer. To the Kallimun priests, it must be like gold.’
‘To the Sea People,’ Liljana said, ‘our hunting of them is as much an abomination as if we hunted and ate our own kind. They think we’ve fallen mad.’
‘Perhaps we have,’ I said as I touched the hilt of my broken sword.
‘So, it’s a dark time,’ Kane said. ‘A dark age. But there will be others to come.’
Liljana scooped up a handful of wet sand and held it to the side of her face as if to ease a burning there. Then she said, ‘The Old Ones spoke of that. They remember a time before we came to Ea. And they’ve told of a time when we will leave again, too.’
I stood a few yards from the crashing waves as I thought about this. I remembered what Master Juwain had once taught me about the beginning of the Age of Law. In those years, all of Ea had been sickened by the slaughter of the preceding age, and the peoples of all lands wanted only to return to their birthplace in the stars. But in the year 461, the great remembrancer, Sansu Medelin, had recalled the long-forgotten Elahad and his purpose in coming to earth. Sansu said that men and women must follow the Law of the One and create a new civilization before returning to their source. All who listened to him – they called themselves the Followers – fell out violently with the Returnists who wanted immediately to set out on ships and sail the cold seas of space. The War of the Two Stars, a great war lasting a hundred years, had been fought over these two different paths for humankind. Perhaps, I thought, in ages yet to come, other such wars would be fought as well.
‘This must be the time,’ Master Juwain said, giving voice to the old dream of the Brotherhoods – and many others besides. ‘The earth has entered the Golden Band, this we know. Somewhere on Ea, the Maitreya has been born. It may be he who will lead the return to the stars.’
‘Return?’ Liljana said. ‘What have we made here on earth? Ashes. The Red Dragon has burned all that was best of Ea to the ground. Should we return to the Star People bearing ashes in our hands?’
‘What would you do, then, sow them into the soil and hope for gardens to grow?’
‘From the ashes of its funeral pyre,’ she said, ‘the silver swan is reborn. There was a time when we built the Gardens of the Earth and the Temples of Life. And there will be a time when we will build them again.’
‘But what of our leaving Ea that your Old Ones have told of?’
‘We will leave someday, they say. They say we will leave either in glory or death. The Old Ones are waiting to see which it will be.’
She paused a moment, then said, They are waiting for us – waiting to welcome the Ardun to the higher orders.’
The Ardun, she explained, was her word for what the whales called the earth people. I turned toward the ocean to see if I could catch one last sight of them. But the waters were empty.
‘Well, I’ll choose glory, then,’ Maram put in. ‘It’s what man was born for, isn’t it?’
‘And for what were women born?’ Liljana asked. ‘Being locked inside their houses while men burn down their cities and spill each other’s blood?’
At this Kane came forward and glared at Maram. Then he turned his gaze on Liljana and said, ‘Whether the next age is one of darkness or light won’t be decided just by men and women. All beings, I think, will play a part in what’s to come. Maybe even the whales.’
Now he, too, looked out over the ocean. But aside from the ebbing of the tide, the only movement in that direction came from Flick as he darted and whirled among the sparkling waves.
I said to Liljana, ‘Did you ask them about the Lightstone?’
Everyone, even Flick, moved a little closer to Liljana. And she said, ‘Of course I did. I think it amuses them that we’re seeking a thing, true gold or not, however powerful it might be.’
‘And what do they seek, then?’ I asked.
‘Just life, my dear. The wisdom to live life as it should be.’
And that, I thought, as I looked at the golden cup that I saw gleaming from the rocks of the cliff, was truly a great dream. But how, I wondered, could life be lived at all if a darkness that had no end fell upon the earth like a cold winter night?
‘Do the Old Ones know where the Lightstone is?’ I asked.
‘They know where something is,’ she said. ‘They told me of a stone that gives much light.’
‘Many stones give light,’ Master Juwain said. ‘Even the glowstones and the lesser gelstei.’
‘This is no glowstone, I think,’ she said. ‘The Old Ones told of an island to the west where there is a great crystal. It’s the most powerful gelstei they’ve ever sensed.’
‘Yes, but is it the Gelstei?’
‘I wish I knew,’ she said to him.
Master Juwain held out a trembling finger to touch the figurine that Liljana was now staring at. Then he asked, ‘Did the Old Ones tell what island this is?’
We all awaited the answer to this question as we held our breaths and looked at Liljana.
‘Almost, they did,’ she said. ‘But their words are not our words. Understanding their names is like trying to grab hold of water.’
‘I see,’ Master Juwain said. ‘But did they say where this island is, then?’
‘It must be west of here – they said the evening sun sets upon it.’
‘Very good, but how would anyone get to it? The whales must know.’
‘Of course they do,’ she said. ‘But they don’t steer by the stars, as we do. I think they… make pictures of the land and sea with sounds. With their words. When they speak to each other, they see these maps of the world. But I couldn’t.’
‘You couldn’t see anything, then?’
‘Only the shape of the island. It looked something like a seahorse.’
At this news, Master Juwain grew silent as his luminous eyes looked out toward the ocean.
Maram, still the student of the Brotherhood despite his failings, said, ‘Nedu and Thalu lie to the west of here. And so do ten thousand other islands. Who would ever know if any of them were shaped like a seahorse?’
As it happened, Master Juwain did. The knowledge that he had gained from old books always astonished me. As did his memory.
‘When I was a novice,’ he told us, ‘I read of a little island off Thalu where great flocks of swans gathered each spring. It was called the Island of the Swans, though it was said to be shaped like a seahorse.’
Now I, too, stared out at the ocean to the west. The sun was rising behind me; in the touch of its golden rays upon the world, I saw the Lightstone gleaming beyond the wild blue waters.
‘We must go there, then,’ I said.
I looked at Atara and Kane; I looked at Maram, Master Juwain, Alphanderry and Liljana. I couldn’t hear the words of affirmation they spoke to themselves. But I didn’t need a blue gelstei to know that their thoughts were mine.
‘But, Val,’ Master Juwain said to me, ‘the account of this island that I read was old. There have been great wars since then. The firestones opened up the earth, you know. And the earth took back its own, in cataclysm and in fire. Many of the islands off Nedu and Thalu were blasted into rocks, utterly destroyed. Now the sea covers them.’
‘The Old Ones told of this island,’ I said. ‘So it must still exist.’
A troubled look came over Liljana’s face, and I asked her, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘The Old Ones told of this island, yes,’ she said. ‘But I think they don’t see time as we do. For them, what has been still is – and always will be.’
‘They sound like scryers,’ Maram said, smiling at Atara.
Atara smiled back at him. ‘No, a scryer would say what will be always was. And never quite is.’
‘And what does this scryer say?’ I asked, smiling at her, too.
‘Why, that we should search for this island. Of course we should.’
We decided to celebrate our passage of the Vardaloon and Liljana’s great feat of speaking with the Sea People. We filled our cups with brandy, clinked them together, and drank to our resolve to find the Island of the Swans. As the fiery liquor warmed my throat and the sun warmed the world, I looked down at the silver swan shining from my surcoat. The Old Ones’ revelation about the island, I sensed, was a great, good omen. For the swan was not only sacred to the Valari but a sign of bright things to come.
25
We traveled all that day toward the west. After retreating a few miles back down the beach, we found a path that led up along the headland overlooking the sea. This we followed for many more miles along the coast. It was rough terrain, broken by many cliffs and coves, and we found that we could best traverse it by keeping inland where the ground was somewhat level and covered with elderleaf and pepperbush and other such shrubs. We saw some seals on a rocky beach below us and many birds: cormorants and peregrine falcons and merlins splitting the air with their high-pitched cries. But the entire country seemed empty of people. Where we might find there fishermen or mariners with ships to take us over the ocean, none of us knew. Even so, we rode on in high spirits buoyed up by the bracing wind and our renewed hopes.
‘It must be two hundred and fifty miles to Eanna’s border,’ Kane said as he cast his eyes west toward that old and distant kingdom. ‘And again as much to Ivalo. There are galliots and whalers there, if I remember. And smaller ships. One of them would likely take us to this Island of the Swans.’
‘Five hundred miles!’ Maram complained. ‘Well, we’ve come farther than that since Mesh. If we can cross the Vardaloon, we can cross this desolate country – and the sea.’
It was unlike him to be so cheerful, but the salty air and the brilliant waters below us seemed to work a magic upon him. He sat astride his sorrel humming to himself and quite pleased at having abundant sun with which to fill his firestone. More than once, along that windy and open track, he let loose a bolt of fire that incinerated a cluster of goldenrod or fused a patch of sand into glass. He might have aimed his crystal at the sea itself and tried to boil it away if Kane hadn’t kept close to him with his black gelstei at the ready and his even blacker eyes watching him like an eagle.
Because we were all still tired, we didn’t get very far that day. The horses were nearly spent, and none of us had the heart to push them – or ourselves. And so late in the afternoon, when the ground grew lower and we came upon a mead fairly rippling with long, green grass, we decided to make camp. We picketed the horses along the mead so that they could eat their fill, then spread out our furs on the beach just below it.
After piling up a good deal of driftwood for our fire and doing our other chores, we bathed in the ocean along with the anemones that floated in the shallows, and the sea lettuce and rockweed and other plants that Master Juwain named. We gathered up whelks and mussels, and sat around our fire pulling them out of their shells to make our evening meal. The gulls watched us closely even as we watched the sandpipers skipping along and making their peetweet cries. Out above the sea, the ospreys glided and swooped and grabbed up fish in their gray talons.
And then, like a cloud that had been building for most of a day, a casual comment cast a shadow on our bright mood.
‘I wish we had some of those tomcods,’ Liljana said, pointing at a wriggling length of silver that an osprey held. ‘I know everyone would like a little fish for dinner.’
‘Ah, but how did you know that?’ Maram asked. ‘None of us spoke of eating fish.’
He studied the blue figurine that she held in her hand, and then eyed her suspiciously.
‘Well, you didn’t have to. I saw the way you looked at them.’
‘You did, did you? Ah, but did you by chance happen to look into our minds?’
Liljana’s round, pleasant face reddened as if she had been slapped. ‘No, Prince Maram Marshayk, I did not!’
It was strange, I thought, that although my friends rather welcomed my being able to sense their emotions, none of them wanted Liljana listening to their thoughts. And neither did I.
‘Are you sure you couldn’t hear what I was thinking?’ Maram asked.
I stood up and walked around the fire past Kane before sitting down between Liljana and Maram. Then I told him, ‘If Liljana says that she wasn’t listening to your thoughts, you shouldn’t doubt her.’
‘Oh, shouldn’t he?’ Liljana said to me. ‘And why shouldn’t he, young Prince, since you doubt me yourself?’
‘Did you hear me say anything about doubting you?’ I asked.
‘You didn’t have to,’ Liljana told me. ‘Since your eyes say it all.’
Maram cracked opened a whelk with a sudden slap of a rock. ‘Do you see, Val, she can hear your thoughts! It’s that damn stone of hers.’
Liljana held up her blue gelstei and said, ‘I don’t need this for that when I have my eyes and nose.’
She turned toward me and said, ‘What have I done to make you doubt me so? Do you think I haven’t learned from bitter necessity to read the motives of powerful men, Valashu Elahad?’ She squeezed the whale-shaped figurine. ‘Before I ever dreamed of finding this, I knew that your thoughts were turning in one direction.’
‘And which direction is that?’
‘From the hate in your voice, I would guess toward the Lord of Lies.’
I saw Kane, Atara and Master Juwain looking at me, and I said, ‘Yes, this is true.’
‘He’s found you in your dreams again, hasn’t he?’ Liljana asked.
‘In my dreams, yes.’
‘And this makes you furious, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘it does.’
‘And you’re afraid of this terrible fury of yours, aren’t you? You think about ways of not being afraid, don’t you?’
‘That’s true,’ I said, staring out away from the beach.
‘And so you think about the Lightstone – all the time.’
In truth, most of my waking hours – and many of my dreams – were spent in looking for the golden glow of the Lightstone inside myself. As I now looked for it above the streaming waters of the sea.
Liljana touched my hand and reassured me, ‘I don’t think I can go inside anyone’s mind unless they let me. I don’t think I could hear their thoughts unless they spoke them to me.’
‘No, you don’t have that power,’ I said, looking at her. ‘Not yet.’
I thought of the dream that Morjin had sent me. And then Kane, who was no mind-reader that I knew, pointed at Liljana’s figurine and said, ‘It’s almost certain that Morjin has a blue gelstei, eh? He’s always taken the deepest interest in the witches’ stones.’
I notice
d the puzzled looks on Atara’s and Alphanderry’s faces, and so I asked, ‘Why do you call it that?’
But Kane clamped his jaws shut as he stared at the gelstei, and so Master Juwain answered for him: The blue gelstei are known to be both difficult and dangerous to use. You see, it’s very dangerous to enter another’s mind; few are born with the talent, and fewer still can do so without becoming lost or even maddened.’
He went on to recount something of the history of the blue gelstei, or blestei, as he called these crystals. He said that in the Age of the Mother, a physic made from the blue juice of the kirque plant had been found to aid the power of mindspeaking. But the kiriol, as it was called, was harsh on the body and shortened life. And so the alchemists of the Order of Brothers and Sisters of the Earth, inspired by the green gelstei, had tried to fabricate a blue crystal that would retain and magnify the mind-opening properties of the kiriol without its more deleterious effects.
‘It took the alchemists a hundred years,’ Master Juwain told us. ‘Chule Ataru fabricated the first one – it was the first of the great gelstei made on Ea. He gave it to Rihana Hatar, who used it to speak with other Sisters in other lands – and the Sea People as well. That was the beginning of the great years of the Age of the Mother.’
Over the next century and a half, other such crystals had been made. Those who could use them – as with the scryers, these were mostly women – grew very powerful. But many were maddened by what they saw in others’ minds, and men began to fear them. They covered their heads with their cloaks as they muttered protective charms and hurried past them. When the Aryans conquered most of Ea’s free lands, they feared these mindspeaking Sisters, too, and called them witches. As many as they could find, they put to the sword. Their gelstei they buried or cast into the sea.
‘In 2210 of that age,’ Master Juwain said, ‘a great conclave was held in Tria. Navsa Adami, foremost of the Brothers, favored arming any who would take up swords and using the blue gelstei to speak with others of like minds in other lands. He called for a rebellion that would cast off the Aryan yoke, almost in a night. But Janin Soli, and many of the Sisters, disagreed with him. She suggested opposing the Aryans by trying to grab hold of their minds and manipulating them from within.’
The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Page 57