The Lightstone

by David Zindell

  'Your gift is very rare, Val, but not unique. I read about it in a book years ago. I'm sure that there must be other books that could instruct you in its development and use.'

  'Does one learn to play the flute from a book?' I asked him. I shook my head and smiled sadly. 'No, unless there is another who shares my affliction, there is only one thing that can help me.'

  'You mean the Lights'tone, don't you?'

  'Yes, the Lightstone - it's said to be the cup of healing.'

  If I could feel the fires that burned wide others and touch them with my own, then surely that meant there was a wound in my soul that allowed these sacred and very private flames to pass back and forth. This one time, perhaps, they had touched Atara and brought her back from the darkness. But what if the next time, through rage or hate, whatever was inside me flashed like real lightning and struck her dead?

  Maram, who always understood so much without being told, came up to me and placed his hand above my heart. 'I think that this gift of yours must be like living with a hole in your chest. But Pualani healed you of the wound that Salmelu made.

  Perhaps she can heal this wound, too.'

  Later that day, I went to Pualani's house to ask her about this. And there, inside a long door garlanded with white and purple flowers, she took my hand and told me,

  'In the world, there are many sights that are hard to bear. Would you wish to be healed of the holes in your eyes so that you didn't have to see them?'

  She went on to say that my wound, as I thought of it, was surely the gift of the Ellama. I must learn to use it, she said, as I would my eyes, my ears, my nose or any other part of me. If finding the Lightstone would help me in this, then I should seek it with all my heart.

  That night in our house, I told Maram and Master Juwain that I must leave for Tria the next day.

  'There will be knights from all the free kingdoms there,' I explained. 'Scryers and minstrels, too. One of them might tell of a crucial clue that would lead to the Lightstone.'

  'I agree,' Atara said. 'In any case, King Kiritan will call all the questers to make vows together, and we should be there to receive his blessings.'

  Master Juwain saw the sense of both these arguments, and agreed that we should all continue on to Tria together. Maram, when he saw that our minds were made up, reluctantly said that he would come with us as well.

  'If you go without me,' he said, 'I'll never find either the strength or courage to leave these woods.' 'But what about Iolana?' I asked him. 'Don't you love her?' 'Ah, of course I do,' he said. 'I love the wine that the Lokilani serve, too. But there are many fine wines in the world, if you know what I mean.'

  Maram's fickleness obviously vexed Atara, who said, 'I know little of wines. But there can't be another fruit on all of Ea like the timana.'

  'And that is my point exactly,' Maram said. 'When I find the one wine that is to lesser vintages as the timana is to the more common fruits, I shall drink it and no other.'

  The next morning I put on my cold armor and told Pualani that we would be leaving.

  After we had burdened the pack horses with a good load of fruit and freshly baked nutbread that the Lokilani provided us, we saddled Altaru and our other mounts.

  And then there, in the apple grove where they were tethered, the whole Lokilani village turned out to bid us farewell.

  'It's sad to say goodbye,' Pualani told us. She stood beneath a blossom-laden bough with Elan, Danali and Iolana, who was weeping. Around them stood hundreds of men, women and children, and around all the Lokilani - everywhere in the grove -

  flickered the forms of the Timpum. 'And yet maybe some day you'll return to us as we all hope you will.'

  From the pocket of her skirt, she removed a green jewel about the size of a child's finger. She pressed it into Master Juwain's gnarly old hand and said, 'You're a Master Healer of your Brotherhood. And emeralds are the stones of healing; they have power over all the growing things of the earth. If you should take wounds or illness, from the Earthkillers or any others, please use this emerald to heal yourselves.'

  Master Juwain looked down at the gleaming emerald as if mystified Then Pualani touched him lightly on his chest and said, 'There's no book that tells of this. To use it, you must open your heart. It has no resonance with the head.'

  Master Juwain's bald head gleamed like a huge nut as he bowed and thanked her for her gift. Then she kissed him goodbye, and all the Lokilani, one by one, filed past us to touch our hands and kiss us as well.

  'Farewell,' Pualani told us. 'May the light of the Ellama shine always upon you.'

  Danali, with twenty or so of the Lokilani, had prepared an escort for us. As before, they each carried bows and arrows, but this time no one spoke of binding our hands. Because I thought it would be unseemly to mount our horses and sit so high above them when we already towered over them merely as we stood, we agreed to walk our horses through the Forest. Danali and the Lokilani led off while I followed holding Altaru's reins in my hand. Master Juwain and Maram came next, trailing both their sorrels and the pack horses. Atara walked next to Tanar in the rear.

  It was a lovely morning, and the canopies of the astors shone above us like a dome of gold. The air smelled of fruits and flowers and the leaf-covered earth. Many birds were singing; their music seemed to pipe out in perfect time with the tinkling of the little stream that Danali followed. I thought that he was leading us west, but in the Forest I found my sense of direction dulled as if I had drunk too much wine.

  We walked as quietly as we could in the silence of the great trees. No one spoke, not even to make little conversation or remark the beauty of some butterflies fluttering around a blackberry bush with their many-colored wings. An air of sadness hung over the woods, and we breathed its bittersweet fragrance with every step we took away from its center. The Timpum, so brilliant in their swirls of silver and scarlet, seemed less bright as we passed from the stands of astors into the giant oaks. There were fewer of them, too. We all knew that the Timpum could not live - if that was the right word - outside of the Forest. But to see them diminishing in splendor and numbers was a sorrowful thing.

  Around noon, Danali left the stream and led us by secret paths through more thickly growing woods. Here the predominance of the oaks gave way to elms, maples and chestnuts, which, though still very tall, seemed stunted next to the giants of the deeper Forest. We walked along the winding paths for quite a few miles. The sun, crossing the sky somewhere above us, was invisible through the thick, green shrouds of leaves. I couldn't tell west from east or north from south.

  After some hours, Danali finally broke his silence. He gave us to understand that the Forest could be almost as difficult to leave as it was to enter. Unless the Lokilani pointed themselves along certain, fixed paths out of it, they would find themselves wandering among the shimmering trees and being drawn back always toward its center.

  'But it has been many years since any us has left the Forest,' he said. 'And many more since anyone, having.left, found his way back in.'

  Another couple of miles brought us to a place beyond which Danali and his people wouldn't go. Here, in a stand of oaks sprinkled with a few birch trees, we felt a barrier hanging over the Forest like an invisible curtain. There were only a few Timpum about, lingering among the oaks

  and shining weakly. It was hard to look beyond them into the dense green swaths of woods. For, only a few hundred yards from us, we could see nothing - only leaves and bark and ferns and other such things.

  'We'll say goodbye here,' Danali said. He pointed down the narrow path cutting through the trees. 'Follow this, and do not look back. It will take you into your forest.'

  The Lokilani embraced each of us in turn. After Danali had pressed his slender form against Maram's belly, he smiled at him and said, 'Take care, Hairface. I'm glad, so very glad, that we didn't have to kill you.'

  And with that, the Lokilani stepped off into the trees to allow us to pass. I continued walking Altaru down the path, wi
th Maram and the others following me. I listened as my horse's hooves struck deep into the soft loam of the forest floor. It was good to move without the pain in my side that had bothered me all the way from Ishka; but it was bad to have to leave friends behind, and as we made our way down the winding path, we tried not to look back at them.

  After only a few hundred yards, the air lying over the woods grew heavier and moister. The leaves of the trees suddenly lost their luster as if some clouds had darkened the sky above them. Everything looked duller. The colors seemed to have drained from the woods and flattened out into various shades of gray. Even the birds had stopped singing.

  The path ended suddenly about half a mile farther on. Despite Danali's warning, we turned to look back along it. We knew well enough that it should lead back into the Forest. But the scraggy scratch in the earth, crowded with bushes and vine-twisted trees, seemed to lead nowhere. In gazing through the thick greenery behind us, I felt repelled by a strong sensation pushing at my chest. It was as if I should proceed in any other direction but that one. And so I did. I walked Altaru through the woods toward what I thought to be the northwest After a few hundred yards, the path vanished behind the walls of trees. A mile farther on, where the trees opened up a little and some dead elms lay down like slain giants, I would have been hard pressed to say exactly where the unseen Forest lay.

  'We're lost, aren't we?' Maram said when we had' paused to take our bearings. He turned this way and that toward the dark woods surrounding us, and the look on his face was that of a frightened beast 'Oh, why did we ever leave the Forest? No more sweet wine for Maram. Not an astor to be seen here. Nor any-Timpum.'

  But this last proved to be not quite true. Even as Maram stood pulling nervously at his beard, a little light flashed in the air above us. It seemed to appear out of nowhere. Suddenly, framed against the leaves of some arrowwood, the little Timpum that had attached itself to me floated in the air and spun about in its swirls of silver sparks. We all saw it as clearly as we could the leaves on the trees.

  'Look!' Maram said to me. 'How did it come here?'

  Atara took a step closer to if., all the while fixing the little lights with her wide blue eyes, 'Oh, look at it!' she said. 'Look how it flickers!'

  Maram, inspired by her words., took this opportunity to give a name to the Timpum.

  'Well, then, little Flick,' he said to him, 'look around you and you won't, see any of your kind. Sad to say, you're all alone in these dreary woods.'

  Master Juwain pointed toward Flick, as I now couldn't help thinking of him. He said,

  'Pualani was quite clear on this matter, the Timpum can't live outside of the Forest.'

  'Nevertheless,' I said, looking at Flick, 'here he is, and here he lives.'

  'Yes - but for how long?'

  Master Juwain's question alarmed me, and I suddenly let go Altaru's reins to step forward toward the shimmering Timpum.

  'Go back!' I said, waving my hands at Flick as if to shoo him away. 'Go back to your starflowers and astor trees!'

  But Flick just floated in front of my eyes spinning out sparks at me.

  'Maybe he's lost, as we are,' Maram said. 'Maybe he followed you here and can't find his way back.'

  He proposed that we should return to the Forest in order to rescue Flick and spend at least one more night drinking wine and singing songs with the Lokilani.

  'No, we must go on,' Atara said to him. 'If we did return to the Forest, even if we found our way back in, there's no certainty that Flick would follow us. And if he did, there's no reason why he wouldn't just follow us out again.'

  Her argument made sense to everyone, even to Maram. But it sad-dened me. For I was sure that as soon as we struck off into these lesser woods that covered the earth before us. Flick would either die or slowly fade away.

  'Do you think he might come with us a little farther?' Maram asked. 'Do you he might follow us toward Tria?'

  'We'll see,' I said as I planted my boot in Altaru's stirrup and pulled myself up onto his back.

  'But where is Tria? Val - do you know?'

  'Yes,' I said, pointing off northwest into the woods. 'It's that way.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'Yes,' I said. I smiled with relief because my sense of direction had returned to me.

  'But what about the Stonefaces?' he asked me. 'What if they find us here and follow us, too?'

  I closed my eyes as I listened to the sounds of the woods and felt for anyone watching us. But other than a badger and a few deer, the only I being that seemed aware of us was Flick.

  'The Stonefaces must surely have lost us when we entered the Forest,' I told Maram.

  'Now let's ride while we still have some day left.'

  For a few hours more, we rode at a fast walk through the thick woods. No paths cut through the trees here, and in many places we had to force our way through dense undergrowth. But toward dusk, the trees opened again and the going was much easier. Our first concern was that we should keep to our course, bearing more north than west. And our second was this little array of lights that Maram had named Flick.

  'Do you see?' he said when we had stopped by a stream to water the horses. He pointed at Flick, who hovered above the stream's bank like a bright bird watching for fish. 'He still follows us.'

  'Yes,' I said. 'And he still shimmers, as before. This is hard to understand.'

  'Well, we're still close to the Forest,' Master Juwain said. 'Perhaps he still takes his substance and strength from it.'

  We decided to make camp there by the stream. It was our first night outside the Forest since our flight from the Stonefaces. As before, we took turns keeping watch.

  But no one came through the blackened trees to attack us. Nor did any dark dreams come to disturb our sleep. Even so, it was a hard night and a lonely one. Without the Lokilani's evening songs and the company of the Timpum, the hours passed slowly.

  During my watch, I listened to the crickets chirping and the wind rustling the leaves of the trees above us. I counted the beats of my heart even as I looked for Flick in the dying flames of the fire or above me in the darkness, twinkling like a lone constellation of stars. I didn't know whether to resent or rejoice in his presence. For he was a very poignant reminder of a brighter place, where the great trees connected the earth to the sky and I had felt fully and truly alive.

  During our next day's journey, we all suffered the sadness of leaving the Forest. As Pualani had warned us, the woods here seemed almost dead. And that was strange, because they were nearly the same woods through which I had walked as a child in Mesh and had loved. The maples still showed their three-pointed leaves, and the same gray squirrels ran up and down them clicking their claws against the silver-gray bark. The horned owls who hunted them were familiar to me, as were the robins singing their rising and falling song: cheery-up, cheery-me. Perhaps everything - the birds and the badgers, the thistles and the flowers - were too familiar. Against my memory of the Forest's splendor, the trees here were ashen and stunted, and the animals all moved about in their same pointless patterns, dully and Listlessly, as if drained of blood.

  As we rode through the long day, we, too, began moving with a measured heaviness.

  It grew cloudy, and then rained for a while. The constant drumming of the large drops against our heads did little to lift our spirits. The whole world seemed wet and gray, and it smelled of the iron with which my armor had been made. The trees went on mile after mile, unbroken by any path and oppressive in their thick swaths of grayish-green that blocked out the sun.

  Our camp that night was cheerless and cold. It rained so hard for a while that not even Maram could get a fire going. We all huddled beneath our cloaks, trying in our turns to sleep against our shivering. During my watch, I waited in vain for the sky to clear and the stars to come out. I looked for Flick, too. But in the dark, dripping woods, I couldn't find the faintest glint of light. By the time I fell off to sleep, I was sure that he was dead.

  When dawn c
ame, however, Atara espied him nestled down in my hair. It was the only brightness that any of us could find in that cool, gray morning. After a quick meal of some soggy nutbread and blackberries rimed with newly-grown mold, we set out into the rainy woods. The horses' hooves made rhythmic sucking sounds against the sodden forest floor. We listened for the more cheery piping of the bluebirds or even the whistles of the thrushes, but the trees were empty of any song.

  The woods seemed endless, as if we might ride all that day and for ten thousand days all the way around the world and never see the end of them. We all knew in our heads that if our course were true, we must eventually cut the Nar Road. But our hearts told us that we were lost, moving in circles. We each began to worry that our food would run out or some disaster befall us long before we reached the road.

  That afternoon the rain stopped, and the sun made a brief appearance. But it brought only a little thin light and no joy. As the day deepened toward dusk, even this glimmer began to weaken and fade. And so did our spirits weaken. Maram told us that he would have been better off letting Lord Harsha run him through with his sword, thus saving him from death by starvation in a trackless -wilderness. Master Juwain sat astride his swaying horse staring at his book as if he couldn't decide which passage to read. Atara, whose courage never flagged, sang songs to cheer herself and us. But in the gloom of the woods, the notes she struck sounded hollow and false. I sensed her anger at herself for failing to uplift us: it was cold, hard and black as an iron arrowpoint. Compassion for other beings she might have in abundance, but for herself she spared no pity.

  My despair was possibly the deepest for having the least excuse: I knew that we were moving in the right direction but allowed myself to doubt whether we would ever see the Nar Road or Tria. In my openness to my friends' forebodings, I allowed their doubts to become my own.

  What is despair, really? It is a dark night of the soul and the remembrance of brighter things. It is a silent calling out to them. But the call comes from the darkest of places and is often heard by dark things instead.