That night as we camped beneath an old elm tree, we had dreams of dreadful things.
Creatures of the dark came to devour us: we felt worms eating at our insides, bats biting us open and mosquitoes smothering us in thick black clouds and sucking out our blood. Gray shapes that looked like corpses torn from graves came to take our hands and pull us down into the ground. Even Master Juwain moaned in a tormented sleep, his meditations and allies having finally failed him. When morning came, all misty and gray, we spoke of our nightmares and discovered that they were very much the same.
'It's the Stonefaces, isn't it?' Maram said. 'They've found us again.'
'Yes,' I said, giving voice to what we all knew to be true. 'But have they found us in the flesh or only in our dreams?'
'You tell us, Val.'
I stood up from my bearskin and pulled my cloak around me. The woods in every direction seemed all the same. The oaks and elms were shagged with mosses, and a heavy mist lay over them - and over the dogwood and ferns and lesser vegetation as well. Everything smelled moist: of mushrooms and rotting wood. I had an unsettling sense that men were smelling me as from many miles away. I couldn't tell, however, how far they might be or whether they stalked the woods to the east or west north or south. I knew only that they were hunting me and that their shapes were as gray as stone.
'We can't be far from the Nar Road,' I said. 'If we ride hard for it, we should reach it by dusk.'
'You're guessing, my friend, aren't you?'
In truth, I was guessing, but I thought it to be a good one. I was almost certain that the road couldn't lie much more than a day's journey to the north, or possibly two.
'What if the Stonefaces are waiting for us on the road?' Maram asked.
'No - they left the road to follow us through the forest Probably they're as lost as you seem to think that we are.'
'Probably? Would you bet our lives on probably?'
'We can't wander these woods forever,' I said. 'Sooner or later, we'll have to return to the road.'
'We could return to the Forest, couldn't we?'
'Yes,' I said, 'if we could find it again. But likely the Stonefaces would find us first.'
Over the embers of the fire that had burned through the night, we held council as to what we should do. Atara said that all paths before us were perilous; since we couldn't see the safest, we should choose the one that led directly to Tria, which meant making straight for the Nar Road.
'In any case,' she said, 'none of us set out on this journey with the end of dying peacefully in our sleep. We should decide whether it's the Lightstone or safety that we seek.'
She pointed out that we must be nearing the civilized parts of Alonia; if we did reach the road, she said, likely we would find it patrolled by King Kiritan's men.
'We must have come as far west as Suma,' she said. 'The Stonefaces, whoever they are, would have to be very daring to ride openly against us there. It's said that King Kiritan hangs brigands and outlaws.'
Maram grumbled that, for a warrior of the Kurmak, she seemed to know a lot about Alonia. He doubted that King Kiritan kept his roads as safe as she said. But in the end, he agreed that we should strike for the road, and so he set to breaking camp with a resigned weariness.
We were all tired that morning as we rode through the woods. As well, we all had headaches, which grew worse with the constant pounding of the horses' hooves.
Twice, I changed our course, to the east and due west through some elderberry thickets, to see if that might blunt the attack against us. But both times, my sense of someone hunting us did not diminish, and neither did our suffering. It was as if the sky, heavily laden with clouds, was slowly pressing at us and crushing our skulls against the earth.
By noon, however, the clouds burned away, and the sun came out. We all hoped to take a little cheer from its unexpected radiance. But the blazing orb drove arrows of fire into the forest, and it grew stifling hot The sultry air choked us; gray vapors steamed up from the sodden earth. In the flatness of the land here, we could find no brook or stream, and so we had to content ourselves with the warm water in our canteens to slake our raging thirsts.
As we made our way north, the woods in many places broke upon abandoned fields on which grew highbush blackberry, sumac and other shrubs. Twice we found the remains of houses rotting among the meadow flowers. I took this as a sign that we were indeed approaching the civilized parts of Alonia that Atara had told of. We all hoped to find the Nar Road just a little farther on, after perhaps only a few more miles. And so we rode hard all that afternoon through forest and fields burning in the hot Soldru sun.
We came upon the road without warning just before dusk. As we were riding through a copse of mulberry, the trees suddenly gave out onto a broad band of stone. The road, as I could see, ran very straight here east and west through the flat fewest. From the emptiness of this country, I guessed that Suma must lie to our east which meant that we had bypassed this great city by quite a few miles. After some miles more - perhaps as few as eighty - we would find Tria down the road to the west.
'We're saved, then!' Maram cried out. He climbed down from his horse, and collapsed to his knees as he kissed the road's stones in relief. 'Shall we ride on until we find a village or town?' I dismounted Altaru and stood beside him along the curb of the road. The day was dying quickly, and for the first night in many nights, we had a clear view of the sky. Already Valura, the evening star, shone in the blue-black dome to the west. In the east, the moon was rising: a full moon, as we could all see from its almost perfect circle of silver. The last time 1 had stood beneath a moon so bright had been in the Black Bog. I couldn't look upon it now without recalling that time of terror when 1 had feared that I was losing my mind.
Even as I now feared that men were attacking my mind. With the coming of night, the pain in all our heads grew suddenly worse. It seemed that the Stonefaces, whatever they were, took their greatest strength and boldness from the dark.
'If we ride,' I said, 'It would be very bad if the Stonefaces were waiting on the road to ambush us.'
I looked at Master Juwain slumped on his horse and at Atara forcing a smile to her worn-out face. We were all exhausted, I thought, and growing weaker by the hour. I doubted whether we could ride half the night to the next village.
'Wouldn't it be worse if they ambushed us here?' Maram asked. 'No,' I said, pointing behind us. 'We passed a meadow less than half a mile back. We could make camp there and fortify it against attack.' 'All right,' Maram said wearily. 'I'm too tired to argue.' We mounted our horses again, and made our way back to the meadow. It was a broad, grassy expanse perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. Copses of mulberry and oak surrounded it. We hauled some deadfall from these woods to the center of the meadow where we built up around our camp a sort of circular fence. It took many trips back and forth to gather enough wood to construct such rudimentary fortifications. But when we were finished, we felt very glad to go inside it and lay out our bearskins.
It was full night by the time we finished our dinner. The moon had climbed above the meadow and silvered it with its cold light. Long, grayish grasses swayed in the gentle wind blowing in from the east. In the eerie sheen of the earth, the many rocks about us seemed as big as boulders. We had a clear line of sight fifty yards in any direction toward the rim of dark trees that surrounded us. Unless it grew very cloudy, no one could steal upon us unseen. And if anyone attacked us openly, we would kill them with arrows. Toward this end, Maram unpacked my arrows and bow and kept them close at hand. We checked our swords as well. Atara stood up against the breastwork of the fence as she practiced drawing her great, horn bow and aiming arrows over the top of it. She seemed satisfied that we had done all we could. After bidding us goodnight, she slipped down to the ground to sleep holding her bow as child might a blanket.
I took the first watch while the others slept fitfully. I knew they must be having evil dreams: Maram sweated and rolled about, while Master Juwain's small body tw
itched and started whenever he let out a low moan. Several times Atara murmured,
'No, no, no,' before falling into the ragged rhythms of her breathing.
When it came my turn to sleep, I couldn't bear the thought of closing my eyes. It was selfish of me, but I couldn't bring myself to wake up Master Juwain, either. And so I walked in a slow circle behind the fence looking out across the meadow. The horses, tethered outside the fence, were silently sleeping. So still did they stand that they looked like statues. As did the trees of the surrounding woods. In their dark shadows, I could see nothing. I listened for any telltale that men might be coming to attack us, but the only sounds were the crickets in the meadow and the distant howling of some wolves. Wherever these great, gray beasts stood, I thought, they must be looking upon the same moon as did I. I watched this pale disk climb the starry heavens inch by inch. I might have measured out the moments of its rise and fall by the painful beating of my heart., but the night seemed to deepen into a timelessness that had no end.
I let Maram sleep as well in place of standing his watch. And Atara, too. Despite the pain in my head, which drove through my eyes like nails, I was wide awake. The night was very warm, and I sweated beneath my armor. My legs shook with the effort of remaining standing. Even so, for many hours, I stared out across the meadow, listening and waiting I walked around and around our camp trying to catch the sense of whoever might be hunting us.
Near dawn, without warning, Atara started out of her sleep and rose to stand by my side. When she saw the angle of the moon, she chided me for staying awake nearly all night. Then she sniffed the wind as might a tawny lioness and said, 'They're close, aren't they?' 'Yes,' I said, 'they are.'
'Then you should gotten some sleep to face them.'
'Sleep,' I said, shaking my head.
For a while we spoke of little things such as the direction of the wind and the grimness of the gray face of the moon. And then I looked at her and asked, 'Are you afraid to die?'
She thought about this for a long moment before saying, 'Death is like going to sleep. Should I be afraid of sleeping, then?'
I looked at Master Juwain as he lay against the ground moaning softly. I almost told Atara that death is cold, death is dark, death is an evil dream full of empty black nothing. But I kept myself from voicing such despair.
Even so, she seemed to sense my doubts. She smiled at me bravely and said, 'We take our being from the One. How can the One ever stop being? How can we?'
Because I had no answer for her, I looked up at the black spaces between the stars.
I felt her hand touch my face, and I turned to look at her as she asked me, 'Are you afraid?'
'Yes,' I told her. 'But most afraid for you.'
She smiled at me in the silent understanding that had flowed between us almost from our first moment together. Then her face fell serious as she said a strange thing: 'I can see them, you know.' 'See who, Atara?'
'The men,' she said. 'The gray men.'
'You mean, you saw them in your dreams?'
'Yes, that of course. But I can see them here, now.'
I looked at the gray trees standing in a circle all about us with their leafy arms raised toward the sky, but I saw no men standing with them.
Then Atara pointed out across the moonlit meadow and said, 'I can see them walking toward us with their knives.'
If the Stonefaces came to attack us, I thought, then surely they would stand behind the trees shooting arrows at us or charge us on horses with their swords drawn.
'Once, when I was a child,' she said, 'I saw a spider weaving a web in a corner of my father's house a month before she actually did. I can see the gray men the same way.'
I continued looking out around the meadow; other than the wind-rippled grasses, nothing moved. The moon seemed like a silver nail pinning still the sky. In between the soughs of Atara's breaths, I could almost feel each beat of her heart as it hung in the air like a boom of a great red drum.
And then Altaru came violently awake and let out a tremendous whinny, and I saw them, too. They suddenly appeared next to the trees as if the dark shadows had given them birth. Tall men they were, with hooded, grayish cloaks covering them from head to knee. As Atara had said, there were at least nine of them. Although we couldn't see their faces, they stood around the circle of trees watching us and waiting for something.
I quickly drew my sword.
Again, Altaru whinnied and stomped the earth as he pulled and rattled the fence. His noise shook Master Juwain and Maram awake.
'What is it?' Maram grumbled as he struggled to his feet rubbing his eyes. Then he looked across the meadow and cried out, 'Oh, no! Oh, my Lord - it's them!'
When pressed, Maram could move very quickly, big belly or no. It took only a moment for him to grab up his bow and join Atara and me by the fence.
'Don't shoot them!' Master Juwain pleaded as he stepped forward, too. By now, both Maram and Atara had arrows nocked to their bowstring as they began to pull and sight on the gray men. 'We should try to talk to them first.'
Yes, we should, I thought. And so I called out, 'Who are you? What do you want of us?'
But their only answer was a silence that came with the sudden dying of the wind. .
'Go away!' Maram called to them. 'Go away or we'll shoot you!'
But still the gray men didn't move, and the silence in the meadow grew only deeper.
'I'm going to give them a warning,' Maram said, squeezing his arrow between his fingers. 'I'm going to shoot this into a tree.'
Without waiting for me to say yea or nay, he quickly drew his bow. But his hands and arms suddenly started trembling; the arrow, when it came whining off his string, buried itself in the ground only forty feet
from the fence.
'Hmmph - shooting at moles again,' Atara said. Then she too fired off a shot. But at the moment she released her arrow, her bow arm buckled as if broken at the elbow. Her arrow drove into the ground after covering even less distance than had Maram's.
Something moved then in the shadows of the trees. Twigs cracked and even from fifty yards away, we could hear the rustling of leaves. A very tall man stepped forward into the moonlight He was dressed as the others in gray trousers and a hooded cloak that covered his face He had an air of command about him. When he turned his unseen face toward us and stood as if scenting us or staring intently into our souls, the others did too.
'Go away!' Maram cried again. 'Go away now, please!'
The gray men seemed not to hear him. Following their leader, they all drew forth long, gray knives and began walking across the meadow toward us, even as Atara had foreseen.
Atara and Maram fired more arrows at them, but they flew wild. The men advanced slowly as if taking care not to stumble over any branch or rock. Their gray-steel knives glinted dully in the moon's eerie light. When they had covered perhaps half the distance toward our camp, I caught a glimpse of their leader staring at me from beneath his cloak's gray hood. His face was long and flat, without expression and as gray as slate. There seemed to be something stuck to the middle of his forehead, where it was said one's third eye lies: it looked like a leech or some kind of flat, black stone.
'Go away,' I whispered. 'Go away, or one of us will have to die.'
Just then a swirl of little lights appeared as of stars dropping down from the heavens.
It was Flick, spinning about furiously as he streaked back and forth in front of the gray men. It seemed that he was trying to warn them away or perhaps weaving a fence of light through which they couldn't pass. But the men took no notice of his presence. They walked slowly forward as if nothing stood between them and us.
In their disbelief at missing such easy marks, the urge to flee overcame Maram and Atara all at once. They began backing away from the gray men, all the while shooting arrows at the men as I joined them in edging up near the rear of the fence. Master Juwain pressed up close to us. and then the gray men's leader stood very still. The black stone on his f
orehead caught the moonlight, and gleamed darkly. At that moment a crushing heaviness fell across my whole body. I dropped my sword and my friends let go of their bows. My arms and legs were so weak that it seemed something had drained the blood from them. I wanted desperately to run, to will myself to move, but I could not. A terrible coldness spread quickly through me and froze me motionless like a fish caught in ice. I couldn't even open my mouth to scream.
And neither could my friends. But I sensed them screaming inside for the gray men to go away and I knew that they could hear the screams of the horses, even as I could .The gray men's leader dispatched two of his confederates toward them. All of the -horses- were now whinnying and rearing and kicking the ground. Altaru aimed a mighty kick at the fence. It splintered the wood and he pulled free from it, along with the two sorrels and Tanar, who immediately ran off into the woods. Altaru charged straight for the two men closest to the fence. But then they showed him their knives and something worse, and he suddenly changed course, galloping off into the woods, too. Although he was the bravest of beings, something about the gray men sent him into a panic.
The two men now closed on the remaining horses. They seemed bothered by their screaming and the beating of their hooves; it was as if the gray men sought silence in the outer world so that they could hear the voices of the inner. And so, moving with great care, they used their long knives to slash open the horses' throats.
No, I cried out in my voice of my mind, no, no, no!
The other gray men began pulling at the branches and logs of the fence, dismantling it and making an opening wide enough for all of them to pass. And still I stood with the others at the rear of the fence,. watching them but unable to move.
And then the gray men's leader stepped forward and threw bark his hood. The black stone on his forehead was a dark moon crushing us to the earth. The flesh of his face was gray as that of a dead fish. As Atara had told us, he had no eyes like any man I had ever seen. They were all of one hue and substance: a solid and translucent gray that covered them like dark glass. I couldn't guess how they let in any light; they let forth no light either, no hint of humanity or soul. They seemed utterly without pity, utterly empty, utterly cold. This cold struck straight into my heart like a lance of ice. It filled me with a wild fear. A steely voice spoke inside me then and told me that I couldn't move. I was nothing, it said to me; I was nothing more than an empty husk of flesh to be used as the gray men wished. I was one with the dead, and would take a long, long time in dying.
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