There must be a way that she could stand beneath this brilliant, inner sun and return in all her beauty beajing its light in her hands.
'Atara,' I whispered.
I knew that for me, too, there was a way that the valarda could not only open others'
hearts to me, but mine to them.
'Atara,' I said again.
What is it to love a woman? It is just love, as all love is: warm and soft as the down of a quilt yet hard and flawless like a diamond whose sheen can never be dimmed. It is sweeter than honey, more quenching of thirst than the coolest mountain stream.
But it is also a song of praise and exaltation of all the wild joy of life. It makes a man want to fight to the death protecting his beloved just so this one bit of brightness and beauty, like a perfect rose, will remain among the living when he has gone on.
Through the hands and eyes it sings, calling and calling - calling her to open up the bright petals of her soul and be a glory to the earth.
I touched the tears gathering at the corner of Atara's eye and then wiped away my own. I looked at her a long time as she looked at me. She grasped my hand and pressed it against her wet cheek. At last she smiled and said, 'Thank you.'
Then she took the white gelstei out of her pocket She held it so that its polished curves caught the faint light raining down from the sky. Inside it were stars, an infinitude of stars. For a moment, her eyes were full of them as they seemed to grow almost as big as her crystal sphere. And then she disappeared into it as if plunging through an icy lake into a deeper world.
I waited there on the cold snow for her to return to me; I waited a long time. The constellations wheeled slowly about the heavens. The wind fell down from the sky with a keening that cut right through me. It sent icy shivers along my veins and set my heart to beating like a great red drum.
'Atara,' I whispered, but she didn't hear me.
Somewhere behind me, Maram snored and one of the horses nickered softly. These sounds of the earth seemed a million miles away.
'Atara,' I said again, 'please come back'
And at last she did. With a great effort, she ripped her eyes from her crystal to stare at me. There was death all over her beautiful face, now tightening with a sudden, deep anguish. Something worse than death haunted her eyes and set her whole body to trembling. She shook so badly that her fingers opened and the gelstei fell down into the snow.
'Oh, Val!' she sobbed out.
Then she fell weeping against me and I had to hold her up to keep her from collapsing altogether. I was afraid that I would have to carry her back to our camp.
But she was Atara Ars Narmada of the Manslayer Society, after all, and it wasn't in her to allow herself such weakness for very long. After a few moments, she gathered up her dignity and stood away from me. She dried her tears with the edge of her cloak. Then she bent to retrieve her scryer's sphere from the snow.
I waited for her to tell me what she had beheld inside it. But all she said was, 'Do you see? Do you see?'
I saw only that she had been stricken by some terrible vision and was afraid that she was now mutilated in her soul. Whatever this affliction was, I wanted to share it with her.
'Tell me what you saw, then.'
'No ... I never will.'
'But you must.'
'No, I must not.'
'Please, tell me.'
She stared out at the snow-white contours of the mountains around us. Then she looked at me and said, 'It's so hard to make you understand. To make you see. Just talking about this one thing can change . everything. There are so many paths, so many futures. But only one that can ever be. We can choose which one. In the end, we always choose. I can, Val. That's what makes this seeing so hard. I blink my eyes just one time, and the world isn't the same. Master Juwain once said that if he had a lever long enough and a place to stand, he could move the world. Well, I've been given this gift, this incredible lever of mine. Shouldn't I want to use it to preserve what is most precious to me and save your life? And yet, how should I use it if in saving you, you are lost? And the world along with you?'
She had told me almost too much; more than this I did not wish to hear. And so I gave voice to what my soul whispered to be true: 'There must be a way.'
'A way,' she said, her voice dying into the bitterness of the wind.
If there was a way she would never tell it to me for fear of what might befall. And yet, I knew that she had found some gleam of hope in the dragon-blackened tree inside her. Her eyes screamed this to me; her pounding heart could not deny it. But it was a terrible hope that was tearing her apart.
'Do you see?' she asked me. 'Do you see why scryers are stoned and driven off to live in the ruins of ancient towers?'
'That is not what I see, Atara.'
She stood before me with a new awareness of life: prouder, deeper, fiercer, more tender, more passionate and devoted to truth - and this was a beauty of a wholly different order. This was her grace, to transform the terrible into a splendor that shone forth from deep inside her. And she, who could see so much, could not see this. And so I showed it to her. With my eyes and with my heart, which was like a mirror wrought of the purest silustria, I showed her this beautiful woman.
'Valashu,' she said to me.
What is it to love a woman? It is this: that if she hurts, you hurt even more to see her in pain. It is your heart stripped of protective tissues and utterly exposed: soft, raw, impossibly tender; if a feather brushed against it, it would be the greatest of agonies.
And yet also the greatest of joys, for this, too, it love: that through its fiery alchemy, what was once two miraculously becomes one.
We gazed at each other through the darkness, locking as we called to each other -
calling and calling. My heart fed with fire. swelled like the sun. Suddenly it broke open in a blaze of light. It broke her open, too. She called to me, and we closed the distance between ourselves like two warriors rushing to battle. She flew into my arms, and I into hers. Our mouths met in a fury to breathe in and taste each other's souls; in our haste and artlessness we bruised our lips with our teeth, bit, drew blood. We were like wild animals, clawing and pulling at each other, and yet like angels, too. In the heat of her body was a fierce desire that I tear her open to reveal the beautiful woman she really was. And that I should join her in that secret place inside her. She called me to fill her with light, with love, with burning raindrops of life. Only then could she feel all of the One's glory pouring itself out through her, as well. Only then could we both drive back death.
Valashu.
I felt her hand against my chest, pressing the cold rings of my armor against my heart. She suddenly pulled her lips away from mine. She fought herself away from me, and stood hack a few paces, trembling and sweating and gasping for breath.
'No!' she suddenly sobbed out. 'This can't be!'
I teetered on top of the snow, sweating and trembling too, stunned to find myself suddenly standing alone. There was a terrible pressure inside me that made me want to scream.
'Don't you see?' she said to me as her hands covered her belly. Her eyes, fixed on the emptiness of the night, suddenly found mine. 'Our son, our beautiful son - I can't see him!'
I didn't know what she meant; I didn't want to know what she meant.
'I'm sorry,' she said, taking my hands in hers. 'But this can't be, not yet. Maybe not ever.'
The wind falling down from the sky, chilled my inflamed body. The stars in the blackness above me told me that I must be patient.
'I know that there is hope,' I said to her. 'I know that there is a way.'
She drew herself up to her full height and gazed at me as from far away. Then she asked me. 'And how do you know this?'
'Because,' I said, 'I love you.'
It was a foolish thing to say. What did love have to do with overcoming the world's evil and making things come out all right? My wild words were sheer foolishness, and we both knew this But it made her weep all t
he same.
'If there is a way,' she said, pressing her hand against the side of her face, 'you'll have to find it. I'm sorry, Val.'
She leaned forward then and kissed me, once, on my lips with great tenderness. And then she turned to walk back toward our camp, leaving me alone beneath the stars.
I didn't sleep the rest of the night - and not because the Lord of Lies sent evil dreams to torment me. The remembrance of the terrible hope that I had seen in Atara's eyes was torment enough. So was the taste of her lips that seemed to linger on mine.
In the morning we made our way down from the saddle between the two mountains into a long, narrow valley. It was a lovely place and heavily wooded, with blue spruce and feather fir and other trees. A sparkling river ran down its center. Its undulating forests hid many birds and animals: bear, marten, elk and deer. Although we were deep in the White Mountains and it was rather cool, the air held none of the bitterness of the high terrain we had just crossed. And so we decided to make tamp by the river and rest that day. The horses' hooves needed tending and so did our sorely worked bodies. Despite our worry about the Frost Giants, Atara went off by herself to hunt, hoping to take a little venison to replace our dwindling stores.
Although we needed the meat badly enough, 1 knew that she mostly just wanted to be alone.
I was not the only one to notice this new inwardness that had come over her. Later that afternoon, as I sat with Maram and Liljana on the rocks by the river washing our clothes, Maram said to me, 'How she looks at you now! How she looks at herself!
What happened between you two last night?'
'That is hard to say,' I told him.
'Well, whatever it is, she's a new woman. Ah, the power of love! As soon as this quest of ours is over, my friend, I'd advise you to marry her.'
And with that he stood up, gathered up his wet clothes and pointed at some dry, high ground above us where he had built up a good fire. 'Well I'm going to take a nap. Please keep an eye out for the Frost Giants. And bears. I don't want to be eaten in my sleep.'
After he had ambled off, I looked at Liljana and said, 'Here we are in the middle of the wildest country on earth and he thinks of marriage.'
Liljana's big breasts swayed beneath her tunic as she beat our soiled garments upon the rocks. She looked up from her work and smiled at me, saying, 'I think you do, too.'
'No,' I said, looking toward the forest to the south where Atara had disappeared,
'this is no time to think of that.'
'With a woman like Atara, how could you think otherwise?'
'No,' I said, 'she's a scryer, and scryers never marry. And she's a warrior who must
-'
'She's a woman,' Liljana said to me as she wrung out one of Master Juwain's small tunics. 'Don't you ever forget that my dear.'
Then she sighed and lowered her voice as if confiding in me a great secret. 'A woman,' she said, 'plays many roles: princess, weaver, mother, warrior, wife. But what she really wishes for, deep in her heart, is to be someone's beloved.'
She looked at me kindly and smiled. Then she, too, gathered up her clothes and left me sitting by the river.
Later that night, over a fine feast of roasted venison, we all sat around the fire discussing the long journey that still lay ahead of us. None of us had forgotten what had happened in the Kul Moroth or in Khaisham. But the meat we devoured filled us with a new life. And something in the gleam of Atara's eyes communicated to us a new hope, as terrible as it might be.
'It's strange,' Maram said, 'that we've come this far and seen no sign of these Frost Giants. Perhaps they don't really exist.'
'Ha!' Kane laughed out, wiping the meat's bloody juices from his chin. 'You might as well hope that bears don't exist.'
'I'd rather meet a bear here than a Frost Giant,' Maram admitted. 'One of the Librarians told me that they use men's skin for their water bags and make a pudding from our blood. And that they grind our bones to make their bread.'
'Perhaps they do - so what? Do you think they're not made of flesh and blood? Do you think steel won't cut them or arrows kill them?'
While Kane and Maram sat debating the terrors of these mysterious creatures, Master Juwain suddenly looked up from the book he was reading. 'If they do exist, then perhaps they make their dwellings only in the higher mountains. Why else would they be called Frost Giants?'
Here he pointed toward the white peaks of the great massif rising up to the east of the valley.
'Well, then,' Maram said, looking about nervously, 'we should keep to the valleys, shouldn't we?'
But, of course, we couldn't do that. The cast of the mountains here was mostly from north to south, with the ridgelines of the peaks and the valleys between them running in those directions. To journey east, as we did, was to have to cut across these great folds in the earth wherever we might find a pass or an unexpected break. And that made a hard journey a nearly impossible one.
The next morning we gathered over a breakfast of venison and porridge to study the lay of this long valley in which we had camped.
We could see no end to it either to the north or south. We had to turn one way or the other, however, for just to the east rose a great jagged wall of peaks that not even a rock goat could have crossed.
'I say we should turn south,' Maram said, looking off into the white haze in that direction. 'That way, it grows warmer, not colder.'
We all looked at Atara, but her eyes held no eagerness to set out in any direction.
She said nothing, staring off toward the sky,
'Perhaps we should go north,' Master Juwain said. 'We wouldn't want to stray too far from the line of the Nagarshath when we come out onto Sakai's plateau.'
'If we go too far north,' Kane said, 'we'll find the country of the Blues.'
'Better they than the Frost Giants,' Maram said.
'I thought you wanted to go south, eh?'
'I don't want to go anywhere,' Maram said. 'Not anywhere but home. Why is it that we have to go to Argattha to find the Lightstone?'
'Because,' I said, 'it must be done, and it is upon us to do it.'
I drew my sword, pointing it east and slightly south as I watched it glow in the cool, clear air. Then I said, 'We've go south.'
And so we did. We packed the horses and rode along the river through the sweet-smelling forest. The trees here were not so high or thick that we couldn't catch glimpses of the great range to the east of us. We rode all that day for twenty miles across gradually ascending ground until we came to a little lake at the bottom of a bowl with mountains all around us. And there, just to the south of these blue waters, was the break in the mountain wall that I had been hoping for. It was only a quarter mile wide and narrowed quickly as its rocky slopes rose toward ridgelines to either side of it But it seemed like a pass, or at least an opening onto other valleys beyond it.
As it was too late to begin our ascent, we made camp by the lake and settled in early for a night of good rest. We ate more venison, sweetened with some pine nuts that Liljana shook out of their cones. We watched the beavers that made their mounded homes on the lake and the geese that swam there, too.
We set out very early, almost at first light. The climb toward the pass was a steep one, with our route following a little stream that wound down from the heights, here cutting through a ravine, there spilling in clear cascades over granite escarpments.
We walked the horses higher and higher, leading them by their halters and taking care that they had good footing on the rocky terrain. By late morning, we had climbed beyond the treeline. There the slope leveled out a little but there was no end of it in sight. To our right was a vast wall of mountain, sharp as the blade of a knife. To our left, a huge pyramid of ice and granite - one of the highest that I had ever seen - turned its stark, uncaring face toward us. These great, jagged peaks seemed to bite the sky itself and tear open the entrails of heaven.
Early that afternoon, we reached the snowline, and there it grew much colder.
> Clouds came up and blocked out the sun. The wind rose, too, and drove little particles of ice against the horses' flanks - and into our faces. It was so frigid that it set us to gasping and nearly stole our breath away. We gathered our cloaks around us, and all of us wished for the warmer clothing of which Kane had spoken a few nights before.
'I'm tired and I'm cold,' Maram grumbled as he led Iolo through the snow behind me. Atara and Fire followed him, and then Master Juwain and Liljana with their horses, and finally Kane and his bay. 'I can't see our way out of this miserable pass -
can you?'
I listened to the sound of my boots breaking through the crusts of snow, and the horses' hooves crunching ice against rode I peered off through the clouds of spindrift whipping through the pass. It seemed to give out onto lower ground only a half mile ahead of us.
'It can't be much farther,' I said, turning back to look at Maram.
'It better not be,' he said, as he flicked the ice from his mustache. 'My feet are getting numb. And so are my fingers.'
But when we had covered this slight distance, made much longer and nearly unbearable by the thin and bitter air, we found that our way turned along the back side of the sharp ridgeline on our right. And there another long, white slope lay before us. It led up between two crests to an even higher part of the pass.
'It's too high!' Maram called out when he saw this. 'We'll have to turn back!'
Atara came up to us then, and so did the others. We all stood staring up at this distant doorway through the mountains. Liljana, who could calculate distances as readily as the nuances of people's faces, rubbed her wind-reddened hands together and said, 'We can be through it by midafternoon.'
'Perhaps,' Master Juwain said. 'But what will we find on the other side?'
He turned to Atara in hope that she might answer this question. But her eyes flashed, and I knew that she was growing weary of everyone always looking to her to read the terrain of the future. And so she smiled at him and said, 'Likely we'll find the other side of the mountain.'
'But what if we can't easily get down from there?' Maram said. 'Or what if this is really no pass at all? I don't want to spend a night this high up.'
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