Diamond Warriors

by David Zindell

  Then the kings and chieftains who had fought that day, as if called to the top of the Owl's Hill rode out away from their armies to the foot of Bemossed's cross, where I stood with Estrella and my friends. King Angand of Sunguru, his bloody blue surcoat showing a reddened white heart with wings, kept pace next to King Thaddeu. Hesperu's new sovereign had succeeded King Arsu, killed when the elephant he had been riding fell upon him. No king came forth from the nearby Yarkonans, for none would claim Count Ulanu's illicit crown. But King Orunjan, one of the greatest of the Dragon Kings, approached the cross to speak for Uskudar. He had reddish-brown skin and a nose as straight as a ruler; he stood tall, straight and proud. The chieftains of the Sarni tribes who had fought for Morjin made their way up the hill too, but not Gorgorak, for Sajagax had sought him out during the battle, and had put an arrow through his heart.

  It gladdened my heart to see that the great Sajagax, by a miracle, had survived the battle. He rode up to the cross with five broken arrows sticking out of various parts of him: two through his shoulder and one through each thigh while a fifth had embedded itself in his neck. I did not know how he managed to climb down off his horse and to stand next to Vishakan and Bajorak and the other Sarni chieftains who had followed him here. I did not know - then - that during the battle the warriors of the Janjii tribe in the east and the Siofok in the west had gone over to Sajagax, and that all the Sarni would soon be persuaded to make him their Great Chief, as Tulamar had been before him long ago.

  Of the Valari kings, all came forth save for King Sandarkan and King Hadaru, who had died trying save one of his knights from the axes of the Blues. Prince Issur had immediately taken command of the Ishkans as their new lord. A pike had pierced King Mohan's arm and a saber added yet another wound to King Kurshan's fearsome face, but the two of them stood side by side on the hill looking up at me in anticipation. So it was with King Viromar, King Waray and King Danashu.

  Others mounted the hill as well: King Hanniban and King Tal and King Aryaman of Thalu, who would be known hereafter as Aryaman Bloodaxe for the terrible deeds that he had done at the Detheshaloon that day. Great warriors who were not sovereigns stood with them: Thaman of Surrapam and Vareva Tomavar and Ymiru, whose white fur the ferocious combat with the Hesperuks and Yarkonan phalanxes had soaked almost completely red. And perhaps the greatest of warriors, and of all those who had fought upon the battlefield: Sar Maram Marshayk. For he had slain a dragon.

  I watched my best friend slowly make his way through the parting Kaashan and Sakayan lines from the Hill of Fire. There, the great body of Yormungand lay where it had fallen, broken and burned. Maram himself had been burned, and badly, for Yormungand's flames had singed off his eyebrows and incinerated his beard and blistered much of his face a bright red. His left arm hung encased in charred leather and diamonds, and he could not use his blackened left hand. But in his right hand, he still clutched his bright red gelstei. As he drew closer to me, he held the great firestone high above his head as if showing me the sun itself.

  'We're alive!' he cried out to me. 'O Lord! blessedly and beautifully alive! And dragonslayers, now, the both of us!'

  He looked down at Morjin's hacked body, near the cross. So did Zahur Tey and King Angand, and many others. All seemed disgusted to perceive Morjin's true face: old and withered and ugly beyond anything they had ever imagined. And yet I thought that perhaps they could see in him, too, a terrible beauty for having finally found peace in death. The sight of the great Red Dragon lying so still I sensed, shocked everyone gathered at the top of the hill into waking up, as from a bad dream.

  'I was a fool,' Zahur Tey called out, 'for thinking that Morjin could have been the Maitreya.'

  He turned his gaze from Morjin's body to look up at Estrella, standing beneath the cross, and so did thousands of others.

  'We were all fools,' King Orunjan said.

  Then King Angand, like a hawk alert to the shifting of the wind, called out: 'We followed Morjin because we thought he could unite Ea. But we were wrong.'

  King Angand, a cunning and calculating man did not speak the whole truth, for men had mostly gathered to the Red Dragon's standard because Morjin had terrorized them. But it didn't matter. King Angand, and others, seemed finally freed from Morjin's spell, and that was a very great thing.

  'Many of us were wrong about many matters,' King Mohan called out. This fierce warrior had matched swords with King Angand's Sunguruns that day, and he gazed at King Angand in a silent understanding. Then he spoke of his hope for Ea, and his new dream shone forth in words that astonished me: 'I have fought in battles nearly every year since I was seventeen. I am tired of war. I long for peace. Once, in the time of Godavanni the Glorious in the Age of Law, Ea had a High King - and peace reigned across the world.'

  Kane, standing next to him, drew his sword and raised it up toward me. In his rich, powerful voice, he called out: 'King of Ea! Let us recognize Valashu Elahad as Ea's rightful High King!'

  Then he stepped foward to lay his sword at my feet, for he would never wield steel in war again.

  'King of Ea!' King Mohan shouted, drawing his sword. 'King Valamesh! King of Kings!'

  'King Valamesh!' King Viromar called out, also raising up his kalama to me. Then all the remaining Valari kings drew their swords, and added their voices to his:

  'King Valamesh shall be our king!'

  'Valamesh, High King!' King Angand acclaimed me. 'Let all who stand here now make it so!'

  His will to see Ea united under one banner persuaded King Orunjan and King Thaddeu of Hesperu and others who had followed the Red Dragon. King Hanniban and the Free Kings likewise seemed swept away by the magic of that moment. They knelt before me, and set their swords on the ground at my feet. And they cried out with one voice:

  'King Valamesh! King of Ea!'

  Bajorak, however, although my friend, would not call me his king, for no Sarni chieftain would ever call any man king. But he, like Vishakan and most of the other Sarni chiefs - even Gorgorak's son, Artamax, the new leader of the Marituk - clearly saw that no Sarni tribe could now stand alone. Even as no alliance of tribes could stand against Sajagax and the High King of more than twenty kingdoms. And so, then and there, at the top of the Owl's Hill, the Sarni chieftains made Sajagax their Great Chief. And then Sajagax, with arrows sticking out of him like a porcupine's quills, came up to me.

  'There will be a High King for Ea!' he called out in a voice that shook the earth like thunder. 'And a new law for Ea, that is just the Law of the One! Let none oppose it, or else be prepared to oppose all the Sarni! And let all the Sarni, who kneel to no man, even a king, honor one who must be a lord to even the greatest of kings!'

  So saying, with a great struggle and will to overcome pain, he dropped down to one knee on the slope beneath me. Then he looked up and cried out, 'Lord of Light!'

  At first I thought that he must have forgotten that I could not be the Maitreya; then I realized that he was looking past me, up at Estrella, who stood behind me holding high the Lightstone. Her face shone with a lovely radiance as the voices of kings and Sarni chieftains - and many others - rang out into the air: 'Lord of Light!'

  Then I, too, turned and knelt before Estrella: a twelve-year-old girl holding a plain golden cup in her hands. I pressed my sword to the bloodstained grass beneath her feet as I added my voice to the multitudes crying out: 'Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!'

  At last, when Estrella could bear this acclaim no longer, she motioned for me, and everyone else, to stand back up. She set her hand upon my hand and gently urged me to slide my sword back into its sheath. Her face lit up with the brightest of smiles. Then she fell against me weeping, hugging my hard armor close to her, kissing my palms and fingers and then standing up on tiptoes to press her lips against my lips, my face and my hot, hurting eyes.

  The war, I thought, weeping too, was finally over.

  Chapter 25

  Then Estrella set her hand over my heart, and the pain that pierced
me there went away. She touched the wound that Morjin had torn into my cheek; she turned to lay her hands on Maram's charred hand and upon Atara's bloody shoulder and her face. After that, Estrella went among the wounded, touching men's pierced bellies, hacked limbs and smashed heads. Many of these found their wounds suddenly healed; many of the dying, she kept from going over to the land of the dead. But she could not, it seemed, bring anyone back from that mysterious place, as she had me. Even a Maitreya, I thought, could work only so many miracles. And with tens of thousands of men and women lying upon the grass, it must have broken her heart that she had the power to help only a very few of them.

  We began the burials that day. With such a great death coming upon the steppe, the sky above the battlefield filled with clouds of carrion birds. I had to ask Sajagax to set his warriors driving off the lions, wolves and jackals that would have taken away those who had fallen. The Sarni, of course, preferred such a fate and found great honor that their bodies should nourish other living things. But even the Sarni saw that too many of their warriors had died and could not be disposed of in such a way. And so they worked as hard as anyone, from the Dragon's army or my own, digging down through the steppe's tough sod. We arrayed the graves in ever widening rings of mounded earth and stone that spread out down the gentle slopes of the Owl's Hill. Near the top, we buried Morjin where he had died. And at the very top, after we had taken down the cross and wrapped Bemossed's body in a shroud that Liljana made, we set our friend deep into the earth. Maram used his red gelstei against the rocks of the Detheshaloon to cut a great stone in the shape of a cross. We mounted it over the head of Bemossed's grave to mark what happened here. Because I thought both Bemossed and I, in the end, had found the same truth, I asked Maram to burn into the stone the same words that the battle had burned into my soul:

  With his eye of compassion

  He saw his enemy

  Like unto himself;

  And he knew love -

  And his enemy

  Was vanquished.

  A great many animals - mostly horses and elephants - had perished along with the men who had ridden them here, but these we did not bury. No one wanted to dig a grave large enough to accommodate an elephant. Then, too, Morjin had driven his vast army hundreds of miles across the Wendrush far from his base and easy supply, and it seemed that his men had gone to short rations and had nearly starved. They reluctantly butchered the mounts that had carried them into battle. I overheard one of my men say with great bitterness that if Morjin's followers could drink a man's blood, then surely they could eat a horse's flesh.

  One beast we could not bury, nor could anyone think of how we might cut up the corpse and dispose of it. In truth, the dragons that had come to earth from Charoth could hardly be considered animals, and Yormungand had proved as cunning as many men. A terrible enemy he might have been, poison-hearted and vengeful, but I did not want to see this huge being rot inside his iron-hard scales beneath the hot sun.

  And so Kane, now recalling long-forgotten lore, instructed Ymiru in some of the deeper properties of the purple gelstei that Ymiru had inherited from his father. Ymiru then used the lilastei against the dragon's body as Jezi Yaga had with the purple crystals set into her eye hollows: to turn flesh into stone. For ages to come, travelers and pilgrims would espy from afar a great dragon rock at the top of the Hill of Fire.

  On the evening of the day following the battle, Lord Harsha brought me a report of the dead. A final count of those slain of the Dragon army had not yet been made, but Lord Harsha., with a face as heavy as stone, informed me that Ishka had lost 3.000 of her 15,000 warriors, while the Atharians had suffered nearly as grievously. As for the Meshians, Lord Harsha said, we who had sacrificed so much to cut a hole in the Hesperuk and Sakayan phalanxes, the casualty list was even longer. He told me of the thousands killed in Lord Tomavar's battalions alone, and I held up my hand to stop him, saying, 'Bring me not numbers but names!'

  Lord Harsha did, and the names of those Meshians who had died beneath the Detheshaloon's rocks would forever burn in my mind: Sar Kanshar; Lord Ramjay; Shakadar Eldru; Juvalad the Fair... There seemed almost no end to them. Lord Sharad had fallen in a heroic attempt to keep the Red Knights from cutting off our rear guard, and it saddened me to hear of Lord Tanu's death, beneath the Sakayan's spears. This crabby old man had challenged me for Mesh's kingship and had been hard to like, but easy to respect, for he had been a great warrior who had given everything for Mesh. Many wept at his demise, and surprisingly, Sar Jonavar was one of these, though he could not say why. With Lord Tanu in mind, I ordered more stones cut from the mound of the Detheshaloon. On the slabs set above the graves of the men of the Nine Kingdoms, I ordered names inscribed, and these words: Here lies a Valari warrior. Then, upon gazing up at the Owl's Hill and all the graves of the soldiers who had fought for Morjin, I ordered the names of our former enemy to be inscribed on their headstones, too.

  It finally came time to decide the fate of those who had followed Morjin. Many of my warriors, Lord Tomavar foremost among them, still saw the men of the Dragon army as our enemy. At the least, they held them to account for unleashing a terrible war upon Ea and committing countless atrocities. Atara agreed with him. On the second night after the battle, she said to those gathered above the river to advise me: 'Many of Morjin's captains are murderers. And the kings who swore oaths to him have much blood upon them. How can we just send them back to their lands?'

  'I am a murderer, too,' I said to Atara. I pointed out at the thousands of white stones marking the graves dug out of the Wendrush's yellowed grass. 'And upon my hands, there is an ocean of blood.'

  'But, Val,' she said to me. 'It is not the same. You never ordered a child crucified! Or a man mutilated for refusing to acclaim you as the Maitreya. Or ... a thousand other crimes. And so how can you suffer the criminals to live?'

  I looked across the starlit steppe at the thousands of campfires to the men from Hesperu, Sunguru, Sakai and the others who had worn the Dragon's colors. And I said to Atara, and to my other friends: 'I am less concerned with punishing the guilty than with protecting the innocent.'

  I told her that any campaign to root out the worst of Morjin's torturers and executioners would only ignite the war anew and tear apart the former Dragon Kingdoms.

  'King Angand and the others,' I said, 'did not surrender to me as criminals to a magistrate but offered their allegiance as kings to a High King. I will hold them to their oaths.'

  'They should have surrendered!' Sajagax called out hoarsely. A great white scarf bound his wounded neck. 'We would have won the battle! It was the arrows that made the difference.'

  He nodded his head at the one-eyed Lord Harsha, and thanked him for keeping his Sarni well-supplied with the long range arrows that his warriors had used to gain advantage over the Marituk, Zayak, Mansurii and Janjii tribes in the east and the other enemy Sarni tribes in the west. Then he went on to say that his warriors surely would have turned both the enemy's flanks, while the timely arrival of Vareva Tomavar and her thousand Meshian women shored up our army's center.

  'And so our enemy,' Sajagax went on, 'should be treated as vanquished. Too many of them, I think, care not for their kings' oaths - and care nothing for the Law of the One!'

  At this, I laid hold of the sword strapped to my side. And I told Sajagax: 'They will come to care. I will hold everyone to the Law.'

  I went on to say that, in the time to come, I would require all of Ea's kings to stand before their people as I had. The wicked ones, along with their captains and counselors, would be cast down. And new kings would be chosen.

  Ymiru, who had lost three hundred of his five hundred warriors in the the gap torn into the Hesperuk phalanx, sadly shook his head at this. 'But, Val, what of Morjin's blood-drinking priests? They are unhroly!'

  Kane, standing up straight and tall next to Ymiru, looked at him with eyes as old as time. He nodded his head as he rested his hand on Ymiru's great, furry arm. 'The Red Priests are
that, and worse. And so the evil that they have done will not be undone overnight.'

  No, I thought, the new age that Atara had dreamed of but never quite believed in would not come upon Ea fully realized in a year, or even a hundred years. But it would surely come, I said, even as a great and irreversible change had befallen the world and those who lived upon it.

  It was to explain the new way for Ea that I called a council of kings and chiefs the next day. We met in my pavilion, and I stood to address King Angand and King Orunjan, King Mohan and King Aryaman and Vishakan and Bajorak and all the others. And this is what I told them:

  'For all the ages of recorded history and the Lost Ages before them, there has been discord on Ea - ever since my ancestor, Aryu, slew Elahad and stole the Lightstone. How many lives had to be paid to atone for this murder? Millions. How many more men, women and children shall suffer death due to the evil of a world that was not of their making? Not a single one, I swear, if I can help it.'

  For the Lightstone, I said, had at last been delivered into the hands of the great Maitreya, and the terrible chance that the Galadin had taken in sending the Lightstone to Ea had been redeemed. We could at last begin building the great civilization that the Star People had been sent to earth to create. Toward this end all the kings in every land and all Ea's peoples must direct their efforts. All who had fought upon the plains below the Detheshaloon, even those who had followed Morjin, must pledge their swords to fulfilling the Law of the One.